47 pages • 1 hour read
Stone Maidens
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Prologue-Chapter 8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Prologue Summary
Content Warning: This section of the novel contains depictions of violence and gore.
In the height of summer, an unnamed teenage boy (later revealed to be Earl Avery) is baling hay when he sees the daughter of a neighboring farmer walking by in a flowered sundress. He stops his work and begins to follow her from a distance as she walks into a nearby cornfield. He feels compelled to follow her, as if she is leading him on a leash. After several minutes, he begins to feel intoxicated by her presence and falls to the ground. He loses consciousness for a few moments. When he awakes, he is filled with a new, unnamed craving.
Chapter 1 Summary
Missy Hooper is disappointed to learn that her friend Glenna can’t meet her at an amusement park, as they had planned. When a handsome stranger offers to win her a carnival prize to cheer her up, she reluctantly accepts. The young man introduces himself as Jasper and offers to drive her home. On the drive, he suggests they take a detour to a nearby swimming hole. Flattered by his attention and believing that they went to high school together, she agrees. When they arrive at an isolated ravine, Jasper begins a game of hide and seek, and Missy runs deeper into the forest, still delighted by his attention. Jasper sneaks up on her wearing a feathered mask, and she begins to think something is wrong. She is injured running up the ravine, and Jasper corners her. Hooper realizes he is not who she thought he was.
Chapter 2 Summary
Christine Prusik, chief forensic anthropologist of the FBI’s Midwest Forensic Sciences Laboratory, pours over photographs of a crime scene in her Chicago office. The photos instigate a panic attack, and she surreptitiously takes a Xanax and waits for it to pass. The day before, the body of a young woman (implied to be Missy Hooper) was discovered in a deep ravine near Blackie, Indiana. The crime scene photos match those of the murder of Betsy Ryan, a young woman whose body was found near Lake Michigan in Gary, Indiana. In both cases, the bodies were found with a large, precise cut on the abdomen and all the internal organs removed. As she prepares to brief her team on the new findings, Prusik is stopped by her boss, Managing Director Roger Thorne, with whom she had a brief affair. Thorne warns Prusik that the FBI is worried she can’t handle the case and tells her to check in with a man named Bruce Howard. Prusik assures him that she can handle it alone.
Chapter 3 Summary
Prusik assembles her team—lead technician Brian Eisen, DNA expert Leeds Hughes, entomologist Leroy Burgess, fiber expert Pernell Wyckoff, and computer sleuth Paul Higgins—to discuss the case. Their examination of the crime scene photos suggests that the body had been decomposing for at least three weeks before it was discovered and that the abdominal incision was made with a carbon steel blade. They determine that the killer is likely the same one responsible for the death of Betsy Ryan. Prusik shares her current profile of the murderer as a young man, likely a transient laborer, who takes pleasure in seducing and then chasing his victims. She speculates that the organ removal is ritualistic for the killer but has no idea what the ritual involves. Prusik reminds the team that they are under intense pressure from FBI officials and that they must act soon to prevent another murder. As the meeting ends, she receives a call from Bruce Howard.
Chapter 4 Summary
In Weaversville, Indiana, a young man named David Claremont visits his doctor, Irwin Walstein to discuss refilling his prescriptions. Claremont complains that the sleeping pills he has been prescribed are too powerful. Dr. Walstein adjusts his dosage but urges him to continue taking his antidepressants. When Dr. Walstein asks about Claremont’s daydreams, he is reluctant to share. Three weeks earlier, Claremont was working in his parents’ garden when he had a vivid hallucination of a woman’s face coming out of the dirt in a wet, muddy ravine. As he remembers the vision, he experiences it again. Dr. Walstein urges him to remember that daydreams are normal. While Dr. Walstein talks, Claremont indulges in another daydream about his neighbor Bonnie, whom he has always liked and who recently waved to him on the street. Dr. Walstein ends the session abruptly and urges Claremont to call him if necessary.
Chapter 5 Summary
Fourteen-year-old Julie Heath walks home from her friend’s house in Crosshaven, Indiana. She briefly considers taking a shortcut through a nearby ravine, then thinks better of it. Julie sees a young man in paint-splattered coveralls crouching next to an old truck and cradling something in his hands. When she approaches him, she sees that he is holding a turtle. The man explains that he rescued the turtle from being hit by a car. He hands the turtle to Julie and suggests they return it to the creek. Julie agrees, and the man leads the way. Julie grows increasingly nervous as they climb down the ravine, and panics when she realizes she can no longer see the man. He appears suddenly, wearing a feathered mask, and attacks her. An hour later, a young boy named Joey Templeton sees the man stuffing something into his truck. He panics and reports the strange man to his grandfather, who dismisses his fears.
Chapter 6 Summary
Bruce Howard, a new field agent, explains to Prusik via phone that the Blackie crime scene has provided very little forensic evidence. Howard is short with Prusik, spurring her anger, and he suggests that she come to the scene herself to investigate. Prusik hangs up, frustrated with Howard’s lack of respect. Brian Eisen reveals that he believes he has identified the crime scene for Betsy Ryan, whose body was found swept into Lake Michigan. A glass jar found at the scene contains a full male fingerprint and Ryan’s DNA. Eisen’s description of the crime scene recalls another frightening memory for Prusik, and she begins to panic.
Meanwhile, in Crosshaven, Julie Heath’s mother reports her missing, and police begin a search. When Joey Templeton hears about the disappearance, he insists that the man he saw must be connected, and his grandfather contacts the Sheriff.
Chapter 7 Summary
Sheriff Joe McFaron drives to the diner where Joey Templeton is having dinner with his brother and grandfather. Sheriff McFaron urges the diner patrons to keep an eye out for Julie and to report anything suspicious. Joey tells Sheriff McFaron that he saw a creepy man in a beat-up truck on Old Shed Road, the same street Julie would have used to walk home from her friend’s house. He describes the man and the truck in detail and begins to cry describing a tarp splattered with what he thought was paint but now believes was Julie’s blood. Sheriff McFaron thanks him for his help but privately wonders if Joey’s recent trauma—his parents were killed in a train accident—has made him more anxious and excitable than usual. Still, he calls the police department and asks for information about day laborers working at the houses on Old Shed Road.
Chapter 8 Summary
Prusik arrives in Blackie, Indiana, and drives directly to the Hooper crime scene. A field agent, Stuart Brewster, urges her to hike down into the ravine before incoming rain makes the crime scene unusable. She looks down into the ravine and observes Bruce Howard directing agents at the scene. She waits for him to approach her. Howard’s attitude is tense and short once again, but he reveals that a strange feather was found near the scene. Prusik and Howard agree that the feather is unlikely to have come from any bird native to Indiana. The sight of the feather triggers another panic attack in Prusik, and she takes another Xanax.
Meanwhile, Claremont takes a break from stone-carving to have dinner with his parents. As they drive into Weaversville, Claremont begins to have a panic attack. In the restaurant, he hallucinates a girl screaming in a ravine and imagines another diner is eating human organs, then passes out.
Prologue-Chapter 8 Analysis
In the early chapters of Stone Maidens, Richards builds suspense through a narrative structure that toggles back and forth between protagonist Christine Prusik and the suspected serial killer she’s chasing. The first chapter follows a man as he kills a young woman named Missy Hooper. Chapters 2 and 3 take place several weeks later, and center on Prusik’s attempts to find the murderer of a young woman. Richards slowly reveals that the “Jane Doe” found in Blackie is Missy Hooper. In these same chapters, the reader’s prior knowledge of the Hooper’s death (depicted in Chapter 1) confirms Prusik’s speculations about the murderer’s methods. Through this narrative structure, Richards gives the reader access to information Prusik is actively seeking to uncover, adding early suspense to the narrative.
Richards creates a disconnect between his characterization of Prusik as smart, intuitive, and competent and the ways in which she is consistently underestimated and disregarded by her male colleagues at the FBI, introducing the novel’s thematic interest in Gendered Prejudice in Law Enforcement. Richards’s unique narrative structure toggles between the protagonist and the killer, slowly dropping hints that their stories are connected. Giving the reader access to the minds of both the killer and the investigator allows Richards to validate Prusik’s theories about the case despite the ways she’s overlooked by Managing Director Thorne and the other male agents.
Richards positions Claremont as a red herring—a literary device in which the author intentionally leads the reader toward a false conclusion— to build dramatic tension and create a sense of surprise around the climactic reveal. In Chapter 4, for example, Richards notes that Claremont had his most recent daydream around the time of the murder of Missy Hooper. Claremont reports daydreaming about “a ravine filled with oaks and the nutty smell of last year’s leaves” (42). His description recalls Missy’s description in Chapter 1 of “the nutty smells of the forest” where she died, suggesting that Claremont (posing as “Jasper”) was the one who killed her. In Chapter 5, Prusik’s suspicion that Hooper’s murderer is a serial killer is confirmed when an unnamed man kills a girl named Julie Heath in Crosshaven wearing a mask of “quivering feathers” similar to the “elaborate feathered mask” that Jasper wore in the first chapter (50, 17). Later, in Chapter 8, Claremont refers offhandedly to taking a “run to Crosshaven,” reinforcing suspicion that he is the killer. The slow revelation of details across these chapters helps to build suspense early in the novel.
In addition to these large-scale techniques, Richards builds suspense on a smaller level with subtle moments that rely on the reader’s knowledge of the killer’s methods. For example, in Chapter 5, a young girl named Julie Heath considers taking a shortcut home “through the woods […] at the bottom of the ravine” (46). Based on previous chapters, the reader knows that Julie is a match for the killer’s typical victim and that he tends to kill near water, creating anticipation that Julie is the killer’s next target. Richards breaks the tension momentarily when Heath “reconsider[s] and crosse[s] back to the sidewalk, content to walk along the road” (46). However, the reprieve is short-lived as Heath encounters her killer moments later as she walks down the road. Small moments like this build on the sense of suspense Richards establishes in the earlier chapters.
Richards draws parallels between the novel’s protagonist, FBI agent Prusik, and suspected killer Claremont that emphasize the novel’s thematic interest in The Lasting Effects of Traumatic Events. Both characters suffer from panic attacks and extreme anxiety that they struggle to manage with medication. Prusik is repeatedly triggered by the gruesome images she encounters over the course of the investigation, which Richards signals with a physical tic—a tight, painful “fist” (21, 38, 56, 76, 96). Prusik attempts to treat her anxiety with Xanax but acknowledges that she has been “relying more heavily on her Xanax ever since the discovery of the first victim’s body” (77). Similarly, Claremont has repeated panic attacks that end in unconsciousness—blackouts that position him as an unreliable narrator of his own life, increasing the likelihood that he is the killer. Like Prusik, Claremont attempts to treat his anxiety with “prescription pills” given to him by a psychiatrist (82). The fact that both Prusik and Claremont suffer from debilitating panic attacks and attempt to treat them with medication unites the novel’s central protagonist and the antagonist of these early chapters.
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