Rhoda Penmark - Character History (novel)

Character History (novel)

Rhoda drowns her classmate, Claude Daigle, who won a penmanship award she feels she deserved, after beating him with her tap shoes. While no one initially suspects Rhoda, Christine notices that she seems startlingly untroubled by the other child's death. Christine, who has always vaguely sensed something wrong with her daughter, is troubled, but dismisses any possibility that Rhoda was actually involved in the boy's death.

The only adults who see through Rhoda are Leroy, the somewhat addled janitor, and, to a lesser extent, her teacher Miss Fern, who observes that she is a poor loser and rather selfish. Leroy spies on Rhoda and repeatedly threatens to "tell on her." Rhoda says no one would believe him, but begins to make plans to get rid of him.

Christine tries to relieve her fears by talking abstractly about the murder with her adopted father and Mrs. Breedlove, a neighbor who dabbles in psychiatric theories about personality. During the conversation, she recovers a long-repressed memory of her real mother, "the incomparable Bessie Denker", a serial poisoner who died in the electric chair. That night, Claude's mother arrives, drunk, at Christine's home stating that there is "something funny about this whole thing" and asks Christine to ask Rhoda about her last few moments with the boy. While Christine is locating Rhoda's necklace, which Mrs. Breedlove is having engraved for the child, Christine finds the Penmanship Medal in Rhoda's treasure chest. She confronts Rhoda, who initially denies having done anything wrong, but confesses after Christine finds the bloodied shoes Rhoda had beaten Claude with before drowning him. Christine is horrified, but Rhoda doesn't seem to understand what the fuss is about; after all, she says, "it was Claude Daigle who drowned, not me."

While Christine grapples with what to do, Rhoda silences Leroy by locking him in a furnace room and setting it on fire. When she learns what her daughter has done, Christine makes a gut-wrenching decision: she must kill Rhoda to keep her from killing again. She gives her a lethal dose of sleeping pills, hoping she will die without pain, and then commits suicide by shooting herself in the head.

Rhoda survives when a neighbor hears the shot and takes her to the hospital. Nobody is the wiser as to what Rhoda has done, and she is free to kill again.