53 pages • 1 hour read
Chris WhitakerWe Begin at the End
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2020A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 31-40Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 31 Summary
Duchess is surprised when Thomas bikes to her foster home. He misses her, but Duchess only says that she needs to get back to Cape Haven. Tenderly the two kiss. Echoing her mother, Duchess asks Thomas whether there is such a thing as a genuinely “selfless act” (248). After Thomas departs, Duchess checks in with Robin only to find he had a bad dream and has wet his bed.
Walk meanwhile sees that the neighbor, a butcher named Milton, who talked with Darke the night of Star’s murder, is key. But Milton is on a hunting vacation, so Walk drives to Milton’s hunting lodge. He breaks into the locked house and finds blood in the kitchen. Maybe an animal? He calls the police. He drives back to Milton’s home in Cape Haven and there finds in an upstairs bedroom a telescope trained on Star’s bedroom across the street and a suitcase full of photos of her under the bed.
Chapter 32 Summary
Martha agrees to accompany Walk to a long-term health care facility to which Darke has been sending regular payments. Walk figures the facility is laundering money for Darke. However, it turns out Darke is supporting a daughter Walk did not know he had. The girl, a 14-year-old named Madeline, has been on a life support system since a traffic accident on a wintry night that killed her mother when she was 5.
Chapter 33 Summary
Robin is nervous on the day he and Duchess are to meet a Wyoming couple interested in adopting them. The meeting goes well, and Robin hopes this will work out. That night, Duchess prays for the first time in a long time.
Chapter 34 Summary
Fishermen pull up the bloated body of Milton. The coroner rules it an accident, a drowning. The trial is only weeks away, and Walk has too many questions still. Did Darke kill him as well? Walk is sure Darke will go back to finish Duchess, although he is not sure why. As Walk and Martha work through the case she will present, the two renew their love.
Chapter 35 Summary
The trial approaches. Walk is getting little sleep and begins to feel the symptoms of Parkinson’s, but he commits himself to Vincent’s defense. Martha is concerned. He tells her, “We endure. That’s what we do for those we love” (278).
Duchess awaits word about their adoption. When Robin wets his bed again, the Price kids mock him until Duchess says she did it. Then in a surprise twist, she claims she did it to prevent their father from molesting her again. When one girl, angered by the bogus accusation, charges her, Duchess drops her with one punch. The Prices decide they will not keep the two anymore, and Duchess and Robin are dispatched to a group home.
Chapter 36 Summary
The placement agent for the adoption service tells Robin and Duchess that a couple in Wyoming has agreed to adopt Robin but not Duchess—she is too much of a risk. The agent does not like splitting up siblings. Robin is furious that his sister is breaking them up: “She was a bad sister. She was a bad person” (286). That night, as Robin sleeps, Duchess comes to terms with her abrasive personality and how she will be nothing more than a “footnote” (287) in her brother’s life. She knows this will require a selfless act: “He needs a better sister than me” (290).
Chapter 37 Summary
Vincent’s trial begins. The DA is sharp and on point. Although no gun was ever found, she shows that Vincent had a registered .357 Magnum, the gun most likely responsible for Star’s death. Vincent says nothing through 8 days of testimony against him. Martha calls a doctor, a ballistics expert, and finally, Walk. Walk provides the backstory to Milton (Martha hopes the butcher, given his gun collection and his obsession with Star and his apparent suicide, might create reasonable doubt).
When Walk sees a discrepancy in Darke’s phone records the night Hal was shot—Darke got a call from the sheriff’s office—Walk confronts his secretary, whose husband was involved in Darke’s real estate scheme. She admits she called him that night to tell him that, with Vincent unwilling to sell his home and Darke unable to prove he had no hand in torching his bar, the entire development project was doomed. Certain Vincent is innocent, Walk pledges to free him “even if it cost him his soul” (301). It will.
Chapter 38 Summary
The next day, Walk returns to testify. He produces a police report almost 20 years old that reveals that Vincent’s gun had been stolen in a burglary. The DA is suspicious over how conveniently the document was found, but Walk keeps to his claim, hoping no one would scrutinize the hand-written report too closely and see the tell-tale effects of palsy. He had forged the document himself. The trial wraps up that afternoon.
In Montana, Duchess watches in disgust as the television coverage announces that Vincent has been acquitted. When Vincent’s face flashes across the screen, Robin bolts up and says that was the face of the man in his home the night their mother was shot. Determined to administer her own justice, Duchess quietly packs a bag, kisses her brother goodbye, and heads out.
Chapter 39 Summary
The night he is acquitted, Walk follows Vincent through the streets of Cape Haven. Vincent stuffs something in a tree before moving on. Walk checks the hole and finds a gun.
Chapter 40 Summary
Duchess stops long enough to say goodbye to Thomas. She stops at the funeral home to claim her grandfather’s ashes. His bitter assessment of Vincent—that he is cancer of their family—haunts Duchess. She stops at the ranch long enough to select two guns from Hal’s collection. Putting her cowboy hat on, she scatters Hal’s ashes along the river they fished and heads to California.
Chapters 31-40 Analysis
The centerpiece of this section of the novel is the trial of Vincent for a murder he confessed to having committed. Despite the absence of a weapon and, at best, conjecture over a motive (maybe jealousy? maybe anger over unrequited love? maybe a grudge from the hit-and-run accident? maybe payback for her father’s interference in his prison sentence?), as the trial begins, the good folks of Cape Haven believe this is an open-and-shut case. In a whodunnit, the trial scenes are opportunities to at last establish some clarity, to clear up the mystery that has sustained the novel. It is time for a little law and order. It is time for a verdict.
That tidiness, that sense of closure, cannot be sustained here. The novel educates its two primary characters—Walk the Sheriff and Duchess the Outlaw, both embodiments of caricatures of old Westerns—into the darker realities of a real-time world not defined by the happy stories from the Old West of Good Guys with White Hats and Bad Guys with Black Hats. The centerpiece scene in this section is Sheriff Walk’s explosive testimony, which ultimately sways the jury to acquit a man who has confessed to the murder.
In a traditional whodunnit, Walk’s decision to mock-up a 20-year-old police report to create sufficient reasonable doubt to acquit Vincent would be easy to understand. Like Duchess’ entirely bogus charge against the potential adoptive father that is motivated by her desperate need to protect her brother from the merciless mocking of the parents’ other kids, Walk does something very wrong for a very noble reason. In any conventional murder mystery, Walk’s performance at trial is contemptible. Another rogue cop takes the law into his own hands (ironic given that the palsy from Parkinson’s might give him away), creating another instance where the justice system fails and a bad cop manipulates a verdict. In offering fake evidence under oath, Walk betrays his office, makes a joke out of the justice system, and far worse, allows a confessed killer to go free.
Yet the novel resists simplification. This is no conventional whodunnit. Walk’s actions become more problematic in this wonderland world (reminiscent of Hollywood’s Golden Era film noirs about cops and criminals). Troubled by 30 years of contemplating how his best friend’s life was ruined by that same justice system—who sends a 15-year-old to state prison for an accident, a terrible accident, yes, but an accident)? Without that injustice, the prison fight that added 20 years to Vincent’s sentence would never have happened. As Duchess observes, “Freedom? Losing that is losing everything” (222).
Walk is determined to make the justice system work by perpetrating a massive injustice and making the law work by breaking the law. That is the kind of logic Duchess, edging into adulthood, will come to embrace. It is a world where logic is skewered, common sense is anything but common, and the best people do the worst things with the worst/best intentions.
These chapters implicate the reader in this contradictory world. How are we to feel when a sheriff fabricates evidence to acquit a confessed killer? Maybe we are comforted by the long-shot chance that Milton the butcher, given his obsession with Star, might be the killer. After all, his bloated body is recovered from his favorite fishing lake, and both Walk and Martha suspect suicide in regret over killing the object of his affections (that “explanation” yet another trip into wonderland—Milton, apparently, killed the only person he loved as an expression of that devotion). Remember, Vincent’s actual innocence is not revealed for weeks after the verdict when forensic analysis of the weapon Walk recovers from the tree reveals a child’s fingerprints. For now, we are uneasy. An officer of the court lies to secure an outcome (Vincent’s exoneration) that is as misdirected as it is misinformed as it is noble as it is criminal. Her anger seething, Duchess sees Vincent walk free and decides that she must act if the justice system cannot.
And as we find out later, Walk made this noble gesture based on a faulty assumption. He assumes Darke is the killer even as he finds out in these chapters that Darke is motivated by his fierce love of a daughter left brain-dead by a car accident. So even as the sheriff muddies the morality of his actions with his lies, even as Duchess, who, after a soul-searching night, sees that her anger is her problem, decides nevertheless to steal guns and go after Vincent, the novel offers a perception of the world antithetical to crime fiction with its special faith in clarity of vision and tidiness of endings. We move into the novel’s climactic chapters anticipating what is about to happen: executing a killer exonerated by a jury fed bogus testimony in a gesture of vigilante justice.
Only as the novel moves toward the final showdown between Duchess and Vincent do we begin to see how thoroughly enmeshed we have become in that world of simplifications. The more we see, the less we understand.
