Miller's Chapel Summary

Ben Bradshaw and his teenage friends come upon a run-down, overgrown graveyard deep in the New Jersey backwoods. In the moonlight they can barely make out the names and dates of the dead, but Ben spies initials, "MC" carved into one headstone, bottom left. They could be those of the girl who lies below, "Molly Childress," or the name of the graveyard, "Miller’s Chapel."

Now Ben is in Chicago. He’s older. He’s getting a divorce. Small wonder. He has an unusual hobby, almost an obsession. He takes a wax paper "kit" and makes impressions of headstones. He has hundreds of them. But on this rainy day, with a security guard on his heels, he plows headfirst into the grave of a young girl. "MC" appears on the headstone. He can’t remember the name of the girl in New Jersey.

Jake is a large black man. He comes into Ben’s low-rent apartment building looking angrily for Ben’s neighbor, a beautiful mulatto girl, Angela Monroe. Ben’s a bit of a wimp, and he knows it, but Jake is big and mean.

Jake leaves. Angela comes up the steps. Ben and Angela find another set of initials in Ben’s archives. Next day, Ben goes to the graveyard to get a better impression of the initials. Angela tags along warily until she realizes where they’re going.

A mysterious old man watches them in the cemetery and stalks them, stealing Angels’a insurance information from her glove compartment.

Ben goes to jail. A black guard helps him contact Angela. Angela talks Jake into bailing Ben out. Ben goes to the grave of the second young girl. Shots are fired at Angela. Angela rages against Ben’s absurd activities. She could get killed by this guy.

A smart-alec veteran detective tells Ben to "stay out of them graveyards."

Angela borrows some more money from Jake and buys tickets to New Jersey. They see the grave of Molly Childress, almost completely sunken into the ground now. They find out that Miller’s Chapel is a "colored" grave. "They’s only coloreds there," say the locals.

There are also some interesting patterns developing here. For instance, the detective in Chicago has the same name as a young police officer in New Jersey who first spotted the bloody body of the NJ girl twenty years ago. "Dennis Wilson," a fairly common name, but still, a coincidence? It turns out that "MC" doesn’t stand for "Molly Childress," or "Miller’s Chapel." It stands for "Mongrel Colored." There’s a reason this person is killing those girls, and now he’s in Chicago.

A car chase and a crash through the gates of Fed Ex at O’Hare reveal the killer. Jake drives the crash car. The lady guard plugs the bad guy.

Angela and Ben return to Miller’s Chapel a year later. They put flowers on Molly’s Grave. Angela cries. "We’ve got to do something about this place" Ben wraps his arm around her, "Yes, we will."