The Night She Disappeared

Scarlett’s paintings recur throughout the story. At times, they symbolize the inner lives of the artists who made them or their owners. Moreover, they often contain information that helps solve the mystery of Zach and Tallulah’s disappearances.

In her self-portrait, Scarlett includes many symbolic objects: a gun, a still-beating heart, a knife with blood dripping from it, and phone chargers. This painting denotes many aspects of Scarlett’s troubled character. Traumatized by her earlier rape and Liam’s murder of the rapist, she is haunted by images of life on the verge of death—the bloody knife, the heart. Executed in shades of pink, green, and gray, with “shocking splashes and spots of red” (100), the painting features chaotic dissonance that suggests the complexity of her character: She is at once sweet and childlike, but also someone who has a very dark side.

In another painting that hangs in Liam’s room, Scarlett depicts the most secret and evil part of Dark Place: the hidden tunnel that becomes the repository of the corpses of Guy Croft and Zach. For Liam, this painting represents the way he has thrown away his ambitions, desires, and potential to be at Scarlett’s beck and call. He knows about the tunnel because he is the one who murdered Guy and dumped his body there.