The attack on Mattie’s party and Mattie’s death

The attack on Mattie’s party and Mattie’s death is a turning point in the custody conflict’s violence: gunmen open fire outside Mattie’s trailer, George Kennedy returns fire and crashes their car, and Mattie dies after urging Michael Noonan to protect Kyra. The scene transforms a gathering into a fatal assault, while its aftermath makes personal loss inseparable from the danger surrounding Kyra and the history of racial hostility tied to the lake community.

The gathering becomes an ambush

Michael has just checked on Kyra, who is asleep, and is moving toward the living room when gunfire erupts outside. He recognizes it as automatic fire rather than thunder or a car backfiring. Mattie screams; John Storrow is hurt, and George Kennedy calls for everyone to get down. Bullets strike the trailer and shatter a salad bowl that had just been brought inside. The ordinary details of a party—food, guests, a child asleep in the house—are abruptly overtaken by an attack.

Michael runs outside and finds the barbecue overturned, its coals igniting patches of grass. Rommie Bissonette is wounded, Mattie is on her hands and knees near the barbecue, and John staggers toward Michael with an injured arm. The attacker’s car, a nondescript sedan with a joke sticker, has first driven past and then returned. A masked shooter leans from the front passenger window with a weapon; the driver is masked as well. The car pulls away as George advances toward it despite being wounded himself.

George Kennedy stops the attackers

George does not hurry after the departing Ford. He steadies his pistol with both hands and fires five deliberate shots. The first two hit the trunk; another strikes the rear window, and a later shot blows out a rear tire. The car veers off the road and rolls into a ditch below Mattie’s trailer, where its rear catches fire. The shooter struggles to escape through the passenger window. George’s measured response ends the immediate pursuit, but it cannot undo the damage already inflicted at the party.

The narration identifies the vehicle as a stolen 1987 Ford registered to Mrs. Sonia Belliveau of Auburn and reported stolen the previous day. Its details make the attack concrete without identifying, in these passages, who ordered it or who the masked men are. The car’s flight, George’s return fire, and the crash form the scene’s reversal: the assailants arrive with the advantage of surprise, but their attempted escape ends in the ditch.

Mattie’s final concern

Mattie is gravely wounded. Michael kneels beside her and holds her as she struggles toward him, still trying to reach and protect Kyra. Her repeated effort to tell him to get Kyra away gives the scene its clearest statement of what matters to her in its final moments. Her attention remains fixed on her daughter, even as Michael tries to keep her close and comfort her.

The storm continues overhead as Michael rocks Mattie in the grass. At Grace Baptist Church, a minister is reading Psalm 139 at Royce Merrill’s service, a distant religious ceremony that runs alongside the emergency at the trailer. Lightning flashes, and Mattie trembles in Michael’s arms; she reaches toward the back of his neck, then her hand falls away. She trembles once more and becomes still. Her death is immediate and personal, witnessed by Michael rather than reported at a distance.

The older violence at Tidwell’s Meadow

The attack unfolds against a community history in which belonging was conditional. At the turn of the twentieth century, more than forty Black settlers, many related and many musicians, established themselves at what became Tidwell’s Meadow. Son Tidwell bought the land on behalf of his extended family after the group had saved money over ten years. Their settlement provoked an uproar and a protest meeting; instead of the shantytown locals expected, the family built neat white cabins around a larger structure that may have served as a meeting or rehearsal place.

Sara Tidwell and the Red-Tops played across western Maine for more than a year, perhaps nearly two, and were popular on the regional circuit. Yet the terms of local acceptance remained narrow: residents described Black neighbors as keeping to themselves and emphasized that they did not take charity. The clan eventually left after playing county fairs in the late summer of 1901. Their cabins became summer rentals for the Day family and burned in the 1933 fires. This history does not identify the attackers at Mattie’s party, but it frames the larger story’s violence within a place shaped by racial exclusion, selective accommodation, and silence about the past.

A personal catastrophe within a longer silence

Michael’s account of the attack is marked by the knowledge that he had expected something to happen, though he had expected ghosts rather than gunfire. The mismatch between supernatural expectation and ordinary armed violence is a fatal lapse in his judgment, not an explanation for who carried out the attack. After Mattie dies, he says he is mostly in the zone, with only brief returns to ordinary awareness. The party’s sudden destruction thus leads directly into a changed narrative state, while Mattie’s last appeal leaves Kyra’s safety at the center of what follows.

The earlier history also complicates any easy account of the lake community as peaceful simply because open conflict subsided. Contemporary descriptions of Sara and the Red-Tops praised them in openly racialized terms, and the settlement’s apparent accommodation existed alongside exclusion and a demand for separation. In the later conversation about Jo’s research, Bill Dean distinguishes the local past, which remains sensitive and connected beneath the surface, from the story of Sara and the other newcomers, whom he calls wanderers from elsewhere. The attack on Mattie is not equated with that earlier racial persecution; rather, its placement beside this history underscores how violence and silence recur in a community that has learned to treat unresolved harm as something best left unspoken.