There are many people on KW who haven’t yet read these books, so I am adding this spoiler warning. Already in Chapter 2, there are things that thump the reader in the chest with surprise.
In Chapter 1, we met Brew in the present moment. In between the events of Chapter 2, his inescapable memories are telling us how he got there. You will remember Ginny came to tell Brew that his niece Alathea is missing. She drags him home from the bar. Brew is “half blind with dread” about Alathea, and between Alathea and the bender he has been on for days, he isn’t capable of taking care of himself. All six foot five and two hundred forty pounds of him is at Ginny’s irritable mercy.
Ginny goes through the whole process of sobering Brew up. SRD spares us the most horrible physical details, but Brew’s humiliation and helplessness are there intact. It’s enough to scare off any borderline drinker, and this isn’t even the worst, as we see later.
There is the vicious circle Brew is caught up in. The way SRD tells it, it’s not only vicious and self-disgusting, it’s tragic.Brew wrote:...having Ginny there, having her see me like this, made me ashamed on top of all the other remorse and responsibility. And there aren’t many cures for it. Sometimes work is one of them. But the only one you can actually count on is alcohol.
In the morning Brew isn’t recovered, but he’s determined to start anyway. Because Alathea, his niece, actually likes him. Ginny and Brew go to the house of Brew’s widowed sister-in-law Lona.
Lona hates him, but, as we see, she isn’t as hard on him as Brew is on himself. Seeing Lona forces Brew to relive, and tell us about, the death of his brother Richard. Five years ago Brew was drinking in a bar, trying to decide whether to ask Ginny to marry him. This was when they were full partners in the detective agency. He spied a man running away from a bank, shooting at the policeman pursuing him. Brew shot at the fleeing man. Mildly drunk, he missed, and hit the policeman instead. His brother. He has been in disgrace, hated, ever since. Hated most of all by himself.Brew wrote:...the door shut behind us, and my retreat was cut off. I felt like I’d made a fatal mistake. The voice in my head started to shout, You need a drink! It sounded desperate.
Brew has come a long way down, from then to where he is now, sitting in his sister-in-law’s living room adding her silent accusations to his own and shivering in withdrawal. They learn the details of Alathea’s disappearance and Lona’s fruitless efforts to get police help. (Somewhat surprising the police won't help, considering how eager Richard’s policeman friends were to avenge his death.) They also learn Lona got a note written by Alathea, saying she would be away for a while.
Now we learn the worst of Brew’s fears, which I won't tell you, but it makes me hurt for him. It turns out not only is the note a fake, but another girl Alathea’s age ran away a few months ago, and turned up suspiciously dead.
We are first introduced to Brew’s intuition here. By the end of the chapter Brew is recovered enough from this bout of withdrawal to face Ginny down.
From their confrontation Brew understands that Ginny thinks this case may too much for Brew’s mental balance.Brew wrote:Her face has more than one kind of blank, and this wasn’t the right kind.
Does this seem to echo another Donaldson character we know?Brew wrote:”Don’t do me any favors.”
The chapter ends with Brew turning his back on the resolutely lower-middle-class neighborhood where Lona and Alathea live, where greenery and peace hide sorrow and anxiety.
In creating a character, SRD has an eye for the target that equals Deadeye Dick. In these chapters he is still creating his characters, and dart after dart pierces his readers in the center of our sense of truth.Brew wrote:It still looked like the kind of place where nothing ever happened. It was too tidy, and there was too much sunshine.
I see you got the book, W.B. I was hoping you wouldn't have to reserve it.
