Sharp Objects: Chapter 5 Summary & Analysis

The next morning, Camille joins Alan and Adora at the breakfast table, and they call for their housekeeper, Gayla, to bring Camille some breakfast. Camille only wants coffee, but Adora insists she eat. Alan and Adora apologize to Camille for Amma’s outburst the night before. Camille replies that the tantrum was “scary” to behold, and Adora retorts that Camille herself was not “placid” at that age. Camille isn’t sure whether Adora is referring to her cutting, her crying jags over Marian’s death, or the “overactive sex life” she’d embarked on, but she simply nods.

Amma comes downstairs and apologizes rather overzealously to Camille for her tantrum. She explains that she’s just “going through a stage” before turning to Adora and asking if Adora will love Camille more than her now that Camille is back. Adora quietly answers “no.” Gayla brings Amma a plate of ham, and Amma pours honey on it before shoving mouthfuls of it into her face. She blithely states that she wishes she herself would be murdered—“when you die,” she explains, “you become perfect.” Adora reminds Amma that she is beloved by her family and popular in school, and warns her not to get “greedy.”

Amma swishes around in her dress and explains that she has fashioned for herself a maiden cloak—she is going into the forest later with her friends to play Joan of Arc. Adora forbids Amma from going into the forest, and Amma stabs at her ham. Adora pointedly asks Camille how much longer she’s planning on staying, but offers to come visit Chicago sometime later in the year. Camille remarks that all three of them would love the museums at the lake, but Adora fatalistically replies that after Ann’s death in the creek, she can’t enjoy “any kind of water anymore.” Adora explains that she knew, and was fond of, both girls. Amma stands up with a little shriek and runs upstairs.

Camille asks Adora just how she knew the little girls, but Adora deflects her questions, accusing Camille of “attack[ing]” her rather than comforting her, and quickly leaves the room. Camille reflects on how dramatic Adora is, and how personally the woman takes “every tragedy that happens in the world.” After Marian died, Adora didn’t come out of her luxurious, ivory-tiled bedroom for a year—and she forbid Camille from ever coming inside.

Up in her room, Camille—with only two days left before Curry’s deadline—tries to assemble what she has learned so far. The two murders, though undoubtedly committed by the same person, don’t seem to make sense. She wonders why Natalie was taken in broad daylight, and whether James Capisi could have invented an image of an old woman after glimpsing a feminine-looking man in the woods. Camille muses that “women [don’t] kill this way.”

Frustrated by her inability to make sense of any of the clues and loose threads she’s encountered, Camille decides to head out and find Richard Willis, hoping that his rational outsider’s way of thinking about the murders will help calm her own mind.

Camille finds Richard at a diner, eating waffles and perusing a high stack of folders. He explains that he’s conducting a criminal history of Wind Gap, examining significant crimes and murders from its past. Camille begs him for some help—on the record or off—in getting a sense of objectivity about Ann and Natalie’s murders. Richard proposes a deal: he will help Camille—and give her an official comment she can use on the record here and there—if she will use her insider knowledge of Wind Gap’s secrets and lies in order to fill in the town’s backstories for him.

Even though it’s not “the straightest of deals,” Camille accepts and asks Richard—on the record—whether he really believes Ann and Natalie’s murders were committed by an outsider. Richard answers that his investigation has “not ruled anyone out.” Off-the-record, however, Richard and Camille both concur that the murders don’t seem like outsider crimes. Camille asks Richard if he has any “real suspects,” and in response, he asks to take her for a drink later that week so that she can “spill everything […] about everyone in Wind Gap.”

Camille reflects on her own personal history in Wind Gap—a place she feels little allegiance to. She was born out of wedlock—her father was “some boy from Kentucky” who impregnated Adora when she was just seventeen. Camille’s grandparents “grew angry twin tumors” at the news of Adora’s pregnancy, and died within a year of Camille’s birth. Alan, the son of Adora’s parents’ friends in Tennessee, began wooing Adora when Camille was still an infant, and they were married before Camille could talk. Though Camille was publicly considered Alan’s child, she feels no personal connection to him—she sees him as being “as smooth and shallow as glass.” Camille never took Alan’s last name, and she believes that Adora actually prefers for Camille and Alan to feel like strangers—she wants “all relationships in the house to run through her.”

Alan fathered Camille’s sister Marian when Camille was just a few years old, and Marian was a sick baby from infancy, often enduring regular trips to the emergency room twenty-five miles away. Marian was on feeding tubes for most of her childhood, and when Marian finally died, Camille was “grateful in a way”—she felt that the frail Marian was not quite ready for the world. Adora, meanwhile, has turned her grief, over the years, into a “hobby.”

Camille decides to drive around town. At the end of Main Street, a makeshift “shrine” to Natalie has cropped up—as Camille passes it, she can see Amma and her three blonde friends “sifting” through the balloons, flowers, and gifts at the foot of the shrine and loading them into Amma’s purse. When Amma sees Camille coming, she and her friends link arms and begin skipping towards her. Camille notices how different Amma seems from the tantrum-throwing “doll” of the previous evening—she is dressed in a miniskirt and a tube top.

Amma asks Camille why she’s writing a story about “two dead girls who no one noticed to begin with.” Camille recognizes that Amma is trying to provoke her, but she can’t help feeling raw anyway. Amma wonders out loud if “he” is “killing all the freaks”—when Camille asks who “he” is, Amma replies, “Natalie’s brother.” One of the other girls, Jodes, adds that John Keene has “a little-girl thing.” The girls saunter off, bumping past Camille, who senses in Amma a desperation to prevent the two dead girls from getting more attention than her.

That night, Camille phones Curry at home and apologizes for not being able to make much headway. Curry tells Camille to persist—but then steers the conversation towards asking Camille if she’s taking care of herself. Camille admits that she feels “wrong.” She tells Curry that Wind Gap “does bad things to [her].” Curry urges her to keep it together, congratulating her on doing a good job so far—but reminds her that if she needs to get out, he will get her out.