Summary

Chapter 15 is titled “Lies and the Tree.” Faith takes her father's papers and notebooks from the snake's cage. No one is looking for her because “Exhaustion was the natural, the ladylike response” (150) to the events. Faith goes through other items, until she comes to the notebook her father was using the night he had the yellow eyes. It opens with “A Study of the Alleged Virtues of the 'Mendacity' Tree” (151). He describes encountering a man named Hector Winterbourne who told him about the Mendacity Tree, which thrived in the darkness and bore fruit only when someone fed it lies. The person had to tell the lie to the tree, then pass off the lie among other people. The tree produced bigger fruit in response to more important lies that were widely believed. The person who eats the fruit is “granted knowledge of a...