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Chapter 20. Catching: The Escape
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Catching Teller Crow, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Trauma and Grief
Abuse of Power, Racism, and the Law
Storytelling and Truth
Time
Female Friendship
Summary
Analysis
When Catching finishes, Beth realizes that the story has taken all day and all night—it’s morning. Beth feels as though the story has altered her worldview, and Michael looks as bad as he did after Beth died. When he tells Catching how he’s sorry, she tells him again that he was “too late” to help and that “it” is about 100 steps “west.” Beth asks what that means, but neither Catching nor Michael explains.
When Michael looks as bad after hearing Catching’s story as he did after Beth died, it shows that he has moved past his obsessive grief sufficiently to care about injustices unrelated to her death—a good sign for his healing. Catching again says that Michael was “too late” to help her; given the story she just told about defeating the Feed, she seems to mean that he was “too late” because she and Crow already saved themselves by working together.
Themes
Michael stands up, looking “hard” and “clear”—the way he did before Beth died, the way he will when he’s healed from his grief. When Michael tells Beth that they need to leave, Beth looks to Catching. Catching, with unexpected “lightness,” smiles and tells Beth that they’ll see each other again and that Beth will understand eventually. In the car, Michael calls Allie and asks her to come to the children’s home. Then he stops the car and tells Beth that soon he’s going to travel somewhere that he doesn’t want Beth entering. He doesn’t restart the car until Beth promises that she won’t follow him in.
Michael’s “hard,” “clear” appearance indicates that the righteous anger at the injustices perpetrated against Catching have overcome his grief, making him want to reengage with the world around him to make it a better place. Catching’s “lightness” after finishing her story illustrates that sharing one’s story with others can help lighten the heavy burden of terrible past experiences—even if, like Catching, someone has already overcome their trauma.
Themes
At the home, Michael finds Allie, who has brought two flashlights at his request. When she asks him whether he thinks they’ll find anything new, given that a search was already conducted, Michael asks whether Derek oversaw the first search. When Allie says he did, Michael suggests that that would make a difference. He walks to the burned-down house, turns west, and begins walking, counting his steps. When he reaches 80, the wind picks up; Beth wonders whether it comes from Crow, the way it did in Catching’s story, but she doesn’t see Crow anywhere.
When Michael says he thinks it makes a difference that Derek oversaw the first search, he is implying that Derek was a corrupt enough police officer to hide evidence of Catching’s kidnapping, captivity, and abuse. Here, Beth makes explicit the possible link between mysterious gusts of wind in the real world and the wind Crow summoned in Catching’s story. If real, this link suggests that some fantastical parts of Catching’s story were literally true, even if the Feeds were allegories of human monstrousness.
Themes
When Michael reaches 100 steps, he stops, looks around, and then sprints off—through trees, into a clearing, where he finds an open hatch, half-hidden in shadows under a rock, with a ladder leading down inside. When Allie asks what it is, Michael suggests that apocalypse-obsessed Oscar Sholt had a bunker constructed. Allie notices dried blood on the hatch and yells into the bunker. When she receives no response, she tells Michael that a wounded person might be in there and starts climbing down the ladder. When Michael gives Beth a look, she calls to him that she’s staying put. He nods and follows Allie.
Allie is willing to climb into a blood-spattered apocalypse bunker with only Michael for backup because someone inside might be hurt. Her bravery and concern for others makes clear that some police officers are moral and well-intentioned people, even as others—such as Derek—abuse the power that the legal system gives them.
Themes
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Beth sits on a log in the clearing. After a while, she spots a pair of glasses nearby in the clearing. Suddenly, many facts become clear to her. She sees that the rock over the bunker looks like “an egg lying on its side” and that the glasses are “mirror-eyes.” She realizes that the Fetchers held Catching captive in the bunker, the caged birds were the kids in the home, and Alexander Sholt was one of the Feeds. She also realizes who killed Alexander, whose body is the unidentified one found in the burned home.
With a little new evidence, Beth can decode Catching’s allegory and match real-world objects to Catching’s fantastical descriptions: since Catching described the tunnels as near a rock like “an egg lying on its side” in the first segment of her story, Beth can identify the bunker as the tunnels’ real-world correlate. She realizes that bespectacled Alexander was the Feed with “mirror-eyes” in the same way. The identification of the caged birds with the kids in the children’s home suggests that Alexander may have funded a government-approved facility for foster children to gain access to a larger victim pool.
Themes
Allie climbs out of the bunker and vomits. Michael follows, looking nauseated. They discuss what they saw: many girls were kept captive in the bunker—and Derek’s jacket was in the bunker too. Beth realizes that Derek must have been the second Feed. Michael suggests to Allie that Derek and Alexander were running the bunker, while Cavanagh and Flint were being paid to keep quiet about it—and perhaps to supply Derek and Alexander with victims from the children’s home. Allie demands to know how anyone could do that for money. Michael hypothesizes that Cavanagh and Flint had “no moral core” and enjoyed feeling powerful as well as getting money.
Derek was the second Feed—not simply a corrupt local officer who showed favoritism to his rich friend from high school, but someone who used his status as a police officer to hide his own violent crimes against girls. Michael’s further speculations about the bunker illuminate other aspects of Catching’s allegorical story: Cavanagh and Flint were monsters called “Fetchers” because they fetched victims for Alexander and Derek from the home. The Fetchers’ facelessness beneath their humanoid masks represented their lack of “moral core.”
Themes
When Allie says that they should immediately put out a warrant for Alexander’s arrest, Michael says that he believes Alexander is the corpse that was found in the children’s home. Gently, he tells Allie that Alexander and Derek had probably been committing these crimes since high school: if police officers search the area, they will probably find many dead victims, including the initial victim—whom Michael believes was killed 20 years ago. Allie, realizing what Michael means, vehemently insists that Sarah is alive and that Allie will find her. Michael apologizes softly and says that they’re going to find Sarah’s body.
Here Michael seems to assume that the “explosion” at the end of Catching’s story represented not only the fire at the children’s home but Catching and Crow’s final vengeance against Alexander. His assumption that all the disturbing events in the town are connected—that Sarah Blue was Alexander and Derek’s initial victim—shows that he is connecting correlated events the way a detective would, not the way a scientist would, to arrive at what he believes to be the truth. Allie’s kneejerk refusal to believe that Sarah is dead shows both the strength of their childhood friendship and Allie’s own repressed grief.
Themes
Allie staggers and sits on a log, shrinking into herself. She says that they need to bring in outside police to search the area, not local police “too dumb to see what their boss really is.” When Michael starts speaking, Allie interrupts, refusing comfort: she believes she should have known about Derek because she was Sarah’s friend and a police officer. Michael snaps back that she should act like a police officer, then: they need to figure out whether other kids went missing from the home and whether anyone else covered up the crimes—for example, Gerry Bell or Charles Sholt. Allie is stunned by the possibility that Gerry intentionally botched the investigation into Sarah’s disappearance.
Allie now knows what fellow police officer and boss Derek “really is”—that is, a serial killer who abused his legal authority to hide his own crimes. Yet this revelation doesn’t alter her positive opinion of police officers: she assumes that other police officers won’t be “dumb,” criticizes herself for failing to notice Derek’s evil despite being an officer herself and is shocked at the possibility that retired police chief Gerry Bell could have been corrupt. When Michael tells Allie to act like an officer, he too is expressing an implicitly positive view of police officers. Thus, while the novel may view Australia’s government, laws, and police with some suspicion, the novel’s two good-guy police officer characters, Allie and Michael, don’t see the existence of individual corrupt, power-abusing police officers as a reason to distrust law enforcement as an institution or an ideal. Meanwhile, Allie’s claim that she should have known what happened to Sarah because they were friends suggests that she has an almost magical view of the power of her and Sarah’s friendship.
Themes
Allie wonders whether Derek was involved with Cavanagh and Flint’s deaths, though Derek’s subsequent murder is confusing. Michael says that the same weapon likely killed all three. He spins a hypothesis: Alexander and Derek fight, Derek kills Alexander, and an accidental fire burns the house down, causing confusion. Somehow, Derek convinces Charles Sholt to help cover up Alexander’s death. Then Derek kills Cavanagh and Flint because, without Alexander’s money to buy their silence, he fears what they’ll say. Finally, Charles Sholt becomes suspicious about Alexander’s death and pays someone to kill Derek with the same murder weapon. Beth, eavesdropping, knows that Michael is spinning a false story to hide the truth—but Allie seems to believe it.
Throughout the novel, Michael has told hypothetical stories about the case, based on incomplete available evidence, as a way of testing which stories could be true. Thus, normally, detective storytelling in the novel brings characters a little closer to the truth. In this scene, however, Michael spins a convincing story from the facts that Allie knows to fool her—either because he doesn’t want to implicate Catching and Crow in Alexander’s murder or because he thinks Allie won’t believe the truth. This scene is a reminder that even if many stories help people see the truth, some stories are false or misleading.
Themes
Michael tells Allie that he may have the story wrong, but regardless, they’ll have to work hard to get justice for Derek and Alexander’s victims. He asks whether she can do that. Allie, with determination, says she can. Beth realizes that Allie will stay resilient so long as she can pursue justice for others. Michael says he’ll call his fellow police officers from the city. He asks Allie to go wait for them at the home, so that she can lead them to the bunker when they arrive. As Allie leaves, the wind starts playing with her hair—and she seems to find it comforting.
Allie, grieving for Sarah, derives strength from the responsibility she feels to all Derek and Alexander’s victims—which suggests that committing to others’ well-being and pursuing justice can be psychologically healthy and healing. Wind in the novel is associated with Crow; when the wind comforts Allie, it implies that Crow—who claimed to have been in the bunker since the Feeds began preying on girls—may be the ghost of the initial victim, Allie’s friend Sarah.
Themes
Michael asks Beth whether she has comprehended the whole situation. When Beth says yes, he gives her a gentle look and tells her that Catching is dead. Beth protests that Catching is a patient in the hospital. Yet when Michael asks Beth whether she remembers meeting Catching, Beth recalls that she saw another girl she thought was the witness right before Catching spoke to them. She asks whether Michael thinks the first girl was the witness. Michael nods, saying that he thinks the first girl really did escape rehab, while Catching really did get caught in a storm with her mom like she said. Cavanagh and Flint probably found Catching wandering away from the accident, and Derek hid evidence of the crash.
Michael is still working to decode Catching’s allegorical story. He interprets Catching’s initial meeting with the Fetchers as a representation of an accidental encounter with Cavanagh and Flint, which seems very likely to be correct. Yet his assumption that Catching died is an odd one, as Catching didn’t seem to narrate an allegorical account of her own death as part of her fantastical story.
Themes
Beth protests that Michael can see Catching. Michael points out that he can see Beth too. Beth acknowledges that it may be possible for Michael to see ghosts besides hers—but Catching’s story makes Beth believe that Catching survived, though she isn’t sure why. Michael says that he couldn’t save Catching because he and Beth arrived after “it was all over [. . .] at the end.” This statement doesn’t sit right with Beth. Suddenly, a voice speaks from behind her, saying that while Beth and Michael are at the end, the beginning “hasn’t happened yet.”
Catching’s story seemed to make fairly clear that Michael was “too late” to save her and Crow because they had already saved themselves—yet Michael is still interpreting the phrase “too late” to mean that Catching was murdered. His stubbornly pessimistic interpretation suggests that while he is healing from his grief, his guilt over failing to save Beth still influences how he understands Catching’s story. His claim that they came “at the end” implies that he views time and stories as linear, progressing inexorably from beginning to end. By contrast, the sudden voice’s claim that the end has come but the beginning “hasn’t happened yet” suggests that stories might be cyclical and multiple—lives contain many ends and beginnings, not just one each, and a new beginning is about to arrive.
Themes
