45 pages • 1 hour read
Gordon KormanChasing the Falconers
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2003A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 16-20Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 16 Summary
Aiden has never driven before, but with Miguel still in a state of shock, he takes the wheel of the Tahoe. They buy gas with Freddy’s money and purchase a map. Nine hours later, during a torrential rainstorm, they arrive in Colchester, Vermont, and stop at a motel. Meg pays for the room with cash, convincing the clerk to give her a key even though she is far too young to rent a room on her own.
Miguel is back to his old self in the morning, but they wake up just in time to see the police surrounding the Tahoe. They narrowly escape through the bathroom window—another instance of Meg’s quick thinking—and run through the rain to the nearby woods, the police in pursuit. The children fall down a steep slope and land on a road near Lake Champlain. Aiden and Meg follow Miguel into the cabin of a sailboat moored at a nearby dock. Inside, Aiden announces that he saw their lake house.
Chapter 17 Summary
Agent Harris locates the Falconers in Colchester by searching the FBI database. The weather forces him to take a military helicopter to upstate New York; from there, he rents a car and drives around Lake Champlain to Colchester, not knowing if the Falconers will even still be there.
Meg, Aiden, and Miguel wait out the entire day in the sailboat, which becomes suffocatingly hot. They are hungry and seasick from the storm. They can hear the police at the marina but are not discovered. At nightfall, they creep out. Aiden points out their vacation home, and Miguel opens an unlocked window. Aiden is “mesmerized” by how familiar it all seems, while Miguel thinks that it’s a dump. Aiden and Meg go upstairs and find the cigar box he hid nine years earlier. Among pictures of their parents, which gives Aiden a wave of nostalgia, they find the photo they have been looking for all along: that of Uncle Frank.
Chapter 18 Summary
Downstairs, Miguel searches for something to steal but finds only a copy of one of John Falconer’s crime novels. He hears a noise and turns to face a pale, bald man in the house. The stranger grips Miguel’s neck and squeezes; Miguel almost immediately realizes that the man knows exactly what he’s doing and that he aims to kill. Miguel manages to smack the man in the head with John’s novel, scaping strangulation, but the man quickly attacks again. Miguel calls out for help but isn’t sure what the “pampered” siblings can even do.
Aiden and Meg hear Miguel yelling downstairs and assume that the police have him. They sneak out the window, intending to leave him to his fate, but Aiden stops when he notices that there aren’t any police cars. Through the window, they overhear the stranger ask Miguel where his sister is, and Aiden realizes that the man thinks Miguel is him. Then, they hear a gunshot. Aiden impulsively runs through the front door only to crash into the stranger, who drops his gun in the confusion. The pale, bald stranger punches Aiden, knocking him against a mounted fish hanging on the wall. Meg yells for Aiden to grab the gun, but the stranger is already reaching for it. Aiden braces for the worst.
Chapter 19 Summary
Aiden rips the fish off the wall and slams it into the stranger’s head, knocking the intruder unconscious; Aiden briefly remembers how useless his mother thought that object was. Meg and Aiden find Miguel covered in blood from a gunshot wound in the shoulder. Miguel calls the intruder “Hairless Joe” and says that he doesn’t seem to be a cop. He says to the siblings, “Somebody wants you dead. Both of you” (143). They resolve to get Miguel to the hospital, but he urges them to take Hairless Joe’s gun in case he wakes up. Aiden throws it into the lake. Seeing headlights, he flags down a passing car.
Agent Harris arrives in Colchester after a journey that has taken much longer than expected. A pale, bald man runs in front of his car, hits the hood, and then sprints off. An ambulance draws the agent’s attention, and he follows it to a parked car up the road, pulling up just as Miguel is being loaded in. Harris demands to know where the Falconers are. Miguel refuses to betray them. Harris excoriates himself for not having arrived sooner and then reflects on the strangeness of his investment in the children. He admits to himself that he has long suspected that the wrong people are incarcerated. He calls for reinforcements, assuming that Meg and Aiden will not get far in the storm.
Chapter 20 Summary
Aiden and Meg ride an ATV through forests and fields. Aiden is shocked to realize that he didn’t question the necessity of stealing it and worries about the new development in their predicament. After several hours, they find an abandoned barn and hide inside, shivering from the cold rain. They wonder who wants to kill them, and they hope that Miguel will be okay. Aiden reflects that, though he once hated Miguel, he now sees him as a brother—a brother who got caught and who, most likely, is headed for a much more adult prison. Aiden pulls out the picture of Uncle Frank, though he is no longer sure why he thought it would be so valuable. He and Meg, however, notice a life preserver in the corner of the image. It bears the name of a hotel: Red Jacket Beach Motor Lodge in Mallet’s Bay, Vermont. Since hotels keep records of visitors, the photograph really is a clue, albeit a small one. Aiden muses that he and his sister are still fugitives, but they are running toward—rather than away from—justice. They vow to find Frank.
Chapters 16-20 Analysis
The final chapters bring Aiden, Meg, and Miguel—along with Agent Harris and the mysterious, violent “Hairless Joe”—to the shores of Lake Champlain and the Falconers’ summer rental house. Their shared Resilience and Ingenuity of Youth keeps them just ahead of the authorities. With Miguel still suffering from the interaction with his brother and his wish to be back in New Jersey, the Falconer siblings have to step up. Aiden teaches himself to drive on the fly and delivers all three of them safely to Colchester, Vermont, during a heavy downpour. Meg once again uses her charm and acting skills to convince a skeptical motel clerk to rent her a room without having to speak with her “father,” and when the police descend on the motel the next morning, she’s the one who leads them out the bathroom window to safety in a moored boat. Later, when Hairless Joe incapacitates Miguel, thinking he is Aiden, the Falconers come to his rescue, with Aiden making quick use of an old mounted fish to knock the intruder unconscious. As Miguel continues to bleed out, Aiden manages to flag down a car to make sure that his friend gets medical attention before fleeing with Meg to avoid the authorities. Aiden’s care for Miguel recalls his concern for the farm animals during the fire at Sunnydale, suggesting that one source of Aiden’s resilience is his compassion.
Though Miguel is no longer able to travel with them, the skills he imparted will keep Aiden and Meg safe on their journey. After they lose Miguel, Aiden says, “I feel like I’ve lost a brother” (151), demonstrating that The Power of Family Bonds now exceeds blood relations. The siblings somberly reflect on the extent of the sacrifice Miguel has made; by calling an ambulance, they have saved his life, but they have also sent him back into the hands of the government: “Both knew what ‘back into the system’ represented for Miguel. Not another place like Sunnydale, but real jail, with bars and armed guards and inmates who could teach Miguel the true meaning of tough” (151). The stakes for Miguel contrast with the novel’s opening lines about Sunnydale: “It wasn’t a prison. Not technically, anyways. No bars, cells, electrified fencing, guard towers, or razor wire” (1). Still, Miguel remains loyal to the end, refusing to reveal the Falconers’ whereabouts to Agent Harris.
For his part, Agent Harris takes up the theme of Innocence and Criminality that the children have resolved for themselves. His superiors think that he should leave well enough alone and simply accept the accolades for having put traitors behind bars, but Harris isn’t convinced that justice has been served. He understands that the media frenzy forced the government to act quickly when dealing with the Falconers and that his own zeal for a conviction might have clouded his judgment. As a result, he reflects, “Two innocent children might be fugitives because of the government’s haste to bring someone—anyone—to justice” (148). By this point, however, it is difficult to see either Aiden or Meg as entirely innocent, both because of what has been done to them and because of what they have decided to do in response. Harris underestimates their ingenuity, which allows them to put much more distance between themselves and their pursuers. Though Harris’s instincts toward them are protective, he nonetheless represents the danger of a governmental “system” that has repeatedly failed them and cannot be trusted not to do so again.
Significantly, then, the novel’s cliffhanger ending depicts Aiden and Meg once again on their own, examining the photograph of Frank Lindenauer as they shelter in a barn. Aiden now understands himself to be exceptional in a different way. It is no longer a question of his outraged innocence but of a newfound relationship to justice: He and Meg are not running away from anything, but they are “running towards it” (153). Whether that means that they are still running away from Agent Harris remains a question unanswered in this first installment of the series.
Related Titles
By Gordon Korman
