Brew isn’t handling his sensation of uselessness well, and his temper is getting the better of him. So is Ginny’s, in response. But they are on their way to the School Board again, where they plan to aim their ire at Julian Kirke. Or rather, Brew’s ire. Ginny is still being practical. The idea is, Kirke’s employees pretty much hate him. Ginny figures, once she gets Kirke out of the way, Brew can get one of the secretaries to talk.I knew that Ginny and I were headed for a showdown. I wasn’t looking forward to it.
Here is Brew trying to get through the halls at between-class time.
Brew gets lucky and catches Sondra, the secretary Kirke humiliated last time they were here. With Kirke in Ginny’s grasp out in the parking lot, Brew talks Sondra into having coffee with him. Sondra has made up her mind to get a little of her own back on Julian Kirke, office sadist. It’s wobbly courage, but real. Anything Brew wants to know, she wants to tell him, because Kirke will hate it....The whole time I had to fight this crazy impulse to stop what I was doing and just go hunting for Alathea. Seeing so many young girls made me feel more desperate than ever.
It is an odd meeting in the cafeteria. Brew is trying to be charming but doesn’t feel he is succeeding. It takes him a while to realize he doesn’t need to be charming, Sondra is already willing to like him. Sondra is ruled out as a suspect, so Brew asks her everything he can think of about how the files are handled. Just like that, Brew narrows down the suspects to five people. Good work for a man who is fighting the sickening cafeteria coffee at the same time.
Here’s Sondra’s description of one of the secretaries. Very reminiscent of Brew/SRD:
Brew encourages Sondra by telling her”She works here because she likes hating it. If she had a husband, she wouldn’t need the job, she could hate him instead.”
But when they get back to the office, all it takes for Kirke to terrorize her is to stand next to her and look at her."...Give me a call if Kirke hassles you about talking to me. I’ll make a pretzel out of him.”
Kirke is seriously ticked at being forced to talk to Ginny – a woman! – and he is taking it out on everyone he can. Brew can’t do a thing about Kirke’s tactics. You can imagine how he feels about that.his chainsaw mouth was gripped tight.
Their next stop is the office of Board Member Astin Greenling. Ginny and Brew have forgotten anything about fighting between themselves. They are in perfect harmony here. They already know from Dr. Sandoval (previous chapter) that Greenling’s wife is dying of leukemia, leaving him miserable and, presumably, buried in medical bills. P.I. Smithsonian will check the bills, Ginny just wants to put pressure on him and see what happens.
What happens is that the ineffectual-seeming Greenling kicks them out of his office at first mention of his wife. But not before Ginny has seen that he has, on his desk, the kind of paper on which the girls’ notes were written.