Not a Happy Family

If a family as malignant as the Mertons can be said to have sustained a tragic figure, it would be the middle sibling Dan. Dan dutifully does what his father expects him to do: He earns a master’s degree in business, joins the family’s robotics company, and works his way up assuming he will inherit the business. However, Dan is shown to be poor with money; for a ruthless and vindictive businessman like Fred Merton, that alone is incentive enough to spite his son. Fred decides to sell the family business, stating a lack of trust in Dan’s abilities, and Dan spirals into depression and smoldering rage.

Dan is initially the primary suspect. Between the loss of the business and his job, a lack of prospects, and Rose Cutter cheating him out of his money, Dan is in dire financial straits. His penchant for driving at night, which often leads to sitting outside homes and watching people, speaks of “classic serial killer behavior” (346). Dan grows paranoid as the detectives seem to close in on him, to the point where he will do anything to prove his innocence—even turn on his siblings.

Dan’s tipping point comes during the funeral service. Dan stands up and testifies to his father’s emotional abuse, but denies any involvement in their murders. A victim coming forth is often a heroic or tender moment in literature; Dan’s speech, however, shows him as desperate and “unhinged.” His family is mortified, the congregation is shocked, and the detectives grow more suspicious. Dan follows up by publicly accusing Jenna’s boyfriend of faking an alibi for her, which furthers the overall perception of his guilt.

Like Ted to Catherine, Lisa is Dan’s counterpart. She tries to remain calm, and to calm him in turn. She offers to be Dan’s alibi, though the detectives catch their lie eventually. Like Ted, she grows ever more doubtful of Dan’s innocence; this doubt grows exponentially once detectives find Dan’s disposable coveralls, eliminating Lisa’s one solid form of proof of Dan’s innocence—his lack of bloody clothes.

Dan and Lisa are last seen with Catherine, confronting Jenna about the murders. Rose’s arrest ensures that Dan will get his proper inheritance; however, he is less than enthused, certain that everyone believes him a murderer. Jenna implicates Dan just as she does Catherine; combined with Dan’s tendency to spiral and Lisa’s pre-existing doubts, this implies that Dan and Lisa will be forever haunted by her words.

Jenna Merton is the “outlier” (5). At the age of 12, Jenna pushed Dan off the backyard slide—she was disappointed she only broke his arm. Two years later she gave Catherine a concussion by beating her with a wiffle ball bat. Her parents punished her but did not involve any outside help, and Jenna developed into a pot-smoking, promiscuous wild child who flaunts all the conventional expectations of her upper-class parents. She sculpts female genitalia and brings Jake, her heavily-tattooed boyfriend, to Easter dinner purely to infuriate her parents. She is rebellious and violent, with a “dark” mind and an extreme lack of empathy.

Fred, who prides himself on not allowing love to affect his treatment of his children, believes Jenna lacks the commitment to succeed in the Manhattan art scene. He repeatedly threatens to cut off her living allowance. For Jenna, the final straw is his declaration that he will change his will and give half of his fortune to his sister, greatly diminishing his children’s inheritance. Jenna is somewhat driven by greed, but mostly, the murder is vicious retaliation. Ironically, she judges Catherine and Dan for their habits—Catherine’s theft and Dan’s stalking—despite being a merciless murderer herself.

The novel traces Jenna’s predilection for violence to her genetic makeup—she is, after all, the daughter of a man who killed his own father when he was a teenager. The night she kills her parents, she recalls being in a “murderous mood” (342). She executes the killings with a cold precision, each step methodically planned: “Something in her takes over” (344), and she goes about acquiring her brother’s coveralls and stealing the housekeeper’s car. She feels nothing as she strangles her mother and then slaughters her father, save exhaustion over the exertion. She feels only “a sense of satisfaction” (345) after she discards the evidence, and once she knows no one will be able to prove her guilt, she smirks, pleased. Jenna literally gets away with murder—at least for the time being—and she celebrates by throwing doubt at her siblings, refusing to confess even to them.

At first, Jake seems willing to support Jenna just as Ted and Lisa do for their spouses. He lies for her, even to the detectives. However, even the potential for hush money cannot prompt him into continuously covering her tracks. As soon as the police seem to close in on Jenna, he breaks off contact with her. Jenna, for her part, had already sensed his growing greed, and she cares little for strong emotional bonds. The novel ends with the implication that Jenna’s freedom won’t last; her Aunt Audrey, whom Jenna poisoned partway through the story, buys the building where Jenna’s evidence is buried, which hints that her secrets are soon to be exposed.

Audrey Stancik comes across as an annoying, paranoid, obsessive amateur detective who vows to ferret out the truth of her brother’s killing herself—not out of a need for justice, but out of rage and bitterness at the loss of her promised fortune. Fred is murdered before he can change the will to benefit her, and Audrey, certain that one of the Merton children killed him, is determined to find the culprit.

Audrey driven by The Pull of Greed. She believes the adjustment to the will in her favor is long overdue; that Fred knew he owed her for keeping secret the fact that he had murdered their father as a teenager. Audrey and the Merton siblings are highly antagonistic; the siblings take pleasure in foiling Audrey, while Audrey vindictively reveals family secrets to the detectives and the media. Audrey acts as a foil to the detectives—Reyes and Barr are bound by legality, and they are required to follow the evidence, even if they have their own opinions. Audrey is free to conduct her own investigation, and she does so with the intention of specifically proving the Merton children’s guilt. She hunts for evidence and follows the siblings, to the point where those around her begin to doubt her mental stability; when she is poisoned, several characters wonder if she did it to herself.

Still, her efforts bear fruit. Audrey is the one who, the novel implies, will ultimately catch Jenna. The detectives, lacking concrete evidence of Jenna’s guilt, have no choice but to let the case grow cold and move on to other things. Audrey has no such obligations; she patiently tracks Jenna’s moves, and is the only one to discover the farm, where Jenna hid the evidence from the murders. A year later, after Audrey receives her inheritance—a mere million dollars, far less than half of Fred’s estate—she makes an offer to buy the farm, most likely to dig up the evidence and re-open the case.