Create a List. List Name Save. Rename this List. Rename this list. List Name Delete from selected List. Save to. Save to:. Save Create a List. Create a list. Winterbottom notes and has stocked the freezer with food. Phoebe is angry and hurt because her mother has abandoned her. Phoebe acts like an "ornery donkey. Eventually, Phoebe's mother does return to the house with a young man who, she tells the family, is a son she had put up for adoption before she married Mr.
Creech leads readers to believe that Mrs. Winterbottom will be staying home and that major changes will take place in the Winterbottom household.
At the same time Mrs. Winterbottom leaves, anonymous messages are left on the Winterbottom's front porch. Phoebe is convinced a "lunatic" has left the messages. Sal and Phoebe spend time investigating the disappearance of Phoebe's mother and the mystery messages. Phoebe believes the "lunatic" is a young man who came to the door one day — the young man turns out to be her half brother, and the "lunatic" who was leaving the messages, turns out to be Mrs.
Partridge, Margaret's blind mother. After everything is more or less settled with Phoebe's family, Sal's grandparents, Gram and Gramps Hiddle, suggest they take a road trip from Ohio to Idaho to see Sal's mother's grave. They take the same route that Sal's mother took when she left home on the bus. Throughout the trip, Sal tells her grandparents about Phoebe, the disappearance of Phoebe's mother, the "lunatic," and Sal's budding romance with Ben.
In Illinois they stop and put their feet in Lake Michigan. Sal understands that when Gram says, "Huzza, huzza! Her grandmother dances with Indians in Wisconsin and gets bitten by a poisonous snake in South Dakota, forcing her to spend the night in the hospital.
They see Mount Rushmore and Old Faithful. They drive directly to the hospital and Gram is admitted.
The doctors tell Sal and Gramps that Gram has had a stroke; Gram dies early the next morning. Sal is not at the hospital when Gram dies, because she drove Gramps' car to Lewiston to see the site of her mother's accident. She then spends time in the cemetery at her mother's grave, in an attempt to memorize every detail. Sal is able to put closure on her mother's abandonment of her and can accept her mother's death.
As they ride the bus together, Sal, who is sitting next to Ben, enjoys feeling Ben's arm press up against hers. At the university, the two girls, feeling absurdly out of place, timidly ask for Mike Bickle's room number at the front desk of his dormitory. The man promptly gives them the number, but the two girls panic and run outside. Outside, however, they find the lunatic himself sitting on a bench with Mrs. Text and story do not always, as Mr. Birkway would have us believe, lead to experiment with other perspectives and gain greater personal understanding.
Phoebe repeatedly demonstrates how texts can be willfully misinterpreted and can lead one further from the truth instead of closer to it when she melodramatically interprets the messages on her doorstep as clues about Mrs. Winterbottom's "kidnapping" or "murder. Birkway reveals part of Margaret Cadaver's story to her and Phoebe, and Sal later finds herself identifying with Margaret's grief and horror.
The revelation of Margaret's past has a double significance to the narrative: first, it plays a role in Phoebe's search for Mrs. Winterbottom, closing off one "potential" explanation for her disappearance. Secondly, Mrs. Cadaver's experience affects Sal's own narrative: she can no longer so easily dismiss, belittle, and ignore Margaret.
In fact, that night, she finds herself living through Mrs. Cadaver's life-shattering experience, showing the way in which taking on another person's perspective allows us to better understand and sympathize with them.
Sal and Phoebe's actions expose their lack of vision and contribute to the unlikely twists of the plot. The girls cling at straws and follow the most preposterous but most easily accessible leads to mystery of Mrs.
Winterbottom's disappearance. They suspect Mrs. Cadaver because of her name, her missing husband, and her "suspicious" actions in the back yard. When they discover that the lunatic is connected to Sergeant Bickle, they are determined to track him down, convinced that he has information about Mrs.
Although the girls' logic is preposterous, in the end, it leads them to the information they want. They find Mrs.
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