The Westing Game: Chapter 15 Summary & Analysis

On Friday, Theo, Doug, and Turtle all return to school. The coffee shop is full, but Shin Hoo’s is empty. Ford goes to work and Sandy mans the door. Flora spends her day at the broker’s office charting stocks—at the end of the day, she tells Turtle they’ve lost $3,000 in a week. Turtle insists that they’ll soon regain their losses, but Flora is not so sure that Turtle is following the right plan.

Turtle, Sandy, Doug, Theo, and Otis stand outside Sunset Towers looking at the Westing manor—no smoke has come from its chimney in weeks. They wonder whether Westing was truly murdered—and if he was, how the murderer got away with killing Westing in his bed. The members of the group exchange increasingly opaque, improbable theories, and Sandy offers particularly strange tales about deaths in ancient Rome and Greece.

Doug teases Turtle about being the murderer, since she was the one who found Westing’s corpse. He pulls her braid and runs away. Sandy restrains her from chasing and kicking him. Otis pedals away, insisting that there is no murderer—Westing was simply insane. Theo asks Sandy if anyone else came out of the building on Halloween night other than Turtle and Doug. Sandy says he saw Crow and Otis leaving together. Theo hurries off to check his clues. Turtle asks Sandy to tell her another ridiculous tall tale about death, and he obliges her.

Jake comes home to find his apartment empty. He decides to go to Shin Hoo’s and give them some business. He finds Grace working at the desk. She sits down with him at his table but insists she’s already eaten. Jake asks about all the presents on the table in the apartment—Grace reminds him that Angela’s bridal shower is tomorrow. Mr. Hoo brings Jake an order of spareribs and sits down at the table. Grace asks Jake to help her and Hoo settle a debate: she thinks the restaurant needs a catchier new name, like “Hoo’s On First.” Jake likes the name, but Hoo thinks it is stupid. He takes Jake’s order away again before he’s finished eating.

Ford returns to Sunset Towers and makes a plan with Sandy to interrogate George and Hoo separately. They plan on ordering from the café tonight and from Hoo’s tomorrow. They are disappointed when Theo delivers their order, and, instead of questioning him decide to go through the files from the private detective—they are files on the Westing family. Sandy has been asking tenants about their connections to the Westing family and has learned that only Flora met Violet. He himself saw the mysterious Mrs. Westing, whose face is always obscured in pictures, once or twice, and he remembers her having a mole. Judge Ford, who remembers very little about Mrs. Westing, recalls only that she was pale.

As Sandy and Ford puzzle over the picture, Sandy wonders what the connection is between Angela, who looks like Violet, and Theo, who looks like George (a man who was once seen in the society pages dancing with Violet before her engagement to a hack politician). Sandy reminds Ford of the rumor that Violet’s death was a suicide—and that she wanted to die rather than marry someone other than George. Ford asks if Angela and Theo are seeing each other in secret. Sandy says that if Westing is trying to replay the terrible event of his daughter’s death, it would mean Angela must die.