Homecoming for Beginners

Chapter 21

TY HAD never been to the town hall before, so he didn’t know what to expect. It turned out to be a low, modern-looking building with an atrium, a library on one side, and about half as much parking as it needed. Ty parked down the block and prepared to hoof it.

Ollie met him at the door. By the look of him, he’d been pacing a trough in the concrete. “Where have you— minor emergency?”

“Long story,” Ty said. “Should we go in?”

“Is that blood on your shirt ?”

“Hi, Dad,” said Theo.

“I’m going to go in,” Ty said, and he pulled open the door.

Ollie scrambled in after him.

A bespectacled receptionist stood when they entered, her expression alarmed. She took in Ty’s appearance and paled. Then her eyes went to Ollie. “We know the way,” he assured her as he jogged to get in front of Ty. “Uh, are you sure you don’t want to change?”

“Pretty sure,” Ty said confidently. “This the place?” Without waiting for an answer, he pushed inside.

If beige was an aesthetic, the Suffolk town hall meeting room fit it perfectly. At the far end of the room stood a long beige oval table with five beige chairs, all facing the door. The beige walls had been adorned with photographs of past and present mayors and council people, who apart from a few exceptions, were also beige. Beige curtains framed a window that looked out onto the beige interior courtyard. In one corner stood a pole with the American and Connecticut State flags.

Ty hadn’t expected the room to be so full of people. Fifty or sixty mostly beige Concerned Citizens turned to look as he came in. Many of them were wearing some kind of blue sticker on their shirts. Maybe he was supposed to stop and sign in and get a badge or something. Oh well. No time now—the door at the back of the room had opened, and the town council filed in—the mayor, the deputy mayor, Alan Chiu, and two other council members Ty didn’t know.

Alan Chiu was not the mayor, but that didn’t stop him from taking the spot at the center of the table.

He did a double take when he saw Ty had managed to arrive on time and was so surprised he made his first mistake. “Mr. Morris—you’re here.”

Right into the microphone. “Oh yeah,” Ty said cheerfully, aware of all the eyes on him. “Baseball game ended early.”

He let them make whatever they wanted of that.

The mayor looked sideways at Chiu before and then whacked a little wooden mallet on the table. Ty thought only judges used those. “This meeting of the Suffolk town council will come to order. Before we begin, I would like to remind those present that we are not a court of law and this is not a legal proceeding.”

It’s just supposed to make me feel like I’m on trial , Ty thought acidly.

Alan Chiu cleared his throat. “Mr. Morris, we’ve prepared a table with a microphone to the side of the room here so that all those gathered present can hear your responses to our questions.”

Yep. There it was. A tiny little desk off to the side with its own little mic on a stand. Ty sauntered over and sat down at it. Ollie turned to speak to the people directly behind the table, one of whom moved over a seat so Ollie and Theo could sit close.

Ty leaned forward and said into the microphone, “So this isn’t the defendant’s chair.”

The room behind him tittered. Ty blinked, disconcerted; he hadn’t expected them to appreciate the joke.

Chiu waited for the laughter to die down and then continued. “Thank you, Mr. Morris.” He made it sound like die in the gutter, wretch . “I would like to state for the record that the matter this query pertains to is the sudden death of Eileen Sanford at Hilliard’s Grocery on the twenty-seventh day of April of this year. We have asked Mr. Morris, who was present at the scene, while not on call as a paramedic nor currently employed by the Orford Township emergency services, to give an account of his actions.”

If he didn’t regret giving Ty a microphone already, he would soon. “Was my police report deemed deficient in some way? ”

“Your report was thorough. This query is merely to address any outstanding concerns that may be held by members of the community.”

Oh, so he was going to turn over the microphone and let the people who hated Ty grill him. Super.

“We will also be hearing accounts from others who were present at the incident.”

For a moment Ty had an unbidden flash of Alan Chiu calling upon Mrs. Sanford to give her testimony by Ouija board, but then he gestured to the other side of the room and Ty recognized Jake and Brent, one of the EMTs who’d been on duty, as well as the store manager.

Weird choices, Ty thought. The store manager had thanked him profusely. Jake had a crush on him. Brent had been trying to convince Ty to apply for a job with Orford Township EMS.

Chiu started the discussion by having Jake, who’d been with Mrs. Sanford in the grocery aisle when she collapsed, give his account. When it was Ty’s turn, Ollie tapped his shoulder and handed him a sheet of paper.

It was a copy of Ty’s police statement.

Ty dutifully read it out loud, trying not to smirk when he noticed Chiu’s eyes following a sheet of paper he had in front of himself. Obviously he had his own copy of Ty’s statement and had been hoping to catch Ty contradicting himself.

Asshole.

Chiu scowled.

Point for Ollie and Ty.

After Ty, Christie, the store manager, and Brent, the EMT, gave abbreviated accounts: I got him the defibrillator. He used it but it didn’t help. When we arrived the patient was DOA. It looked like someone had attempted CPR and electrical defibrillation without success.

Short and to the point. Ty appreciated that. He’d worded his report the same way. Nothing subjective; nothing someone could pick apart in court.

Someone had attended the same professional CYA seminar Ty had .

“Thank you, Mr. Patrick. If you could just remain at the microphone for a moment. When you arrived on the scene, what did you note about the patient’s condition?”

Brent paused. “Um, not to be indelicate, but do you mean apart from the fact that she was dead?”

Chiu’s eye twitched. “What was the state of her attire? Was she bleeding? Were all of her apparent injuries addressed?”

So that was his angle.

“She wasn’t bleeding because her heart had stopped beating. Her shirt was open because a defibrillator has to make contact with the skin.”

“And was Mrs. Sanford’s head wound addressed?”

“If you mean did it look like anyone attempted to stop the bleeding, no.”

Finally Chiu seemed triumphant. “Thank you—”

“There wouldn’t have been much point, as her heart was not pumping any blood.”

The microphone picked up the sound of Chiu’s teeth grinding. “You may be seated, Mr. Patrick. Mr. Morris?”

Ty leaned forward. “Present.”

A few of the assembled crowd giggled again.

“Mr. Morris, is Mrs. Sanford’s death amusing to you?”

No, but this waste of time sure was. “I apologize, Councilor.”

“Could you explain the nature of your relationship with the deceased?”

This, unfortunately, was a little trickier. “We didn’t have one.”

“When you say you didn’t have a relationship… you mean you didn’t know Mrs. Sanford?”

“I knew her,” Ty said. “She didn’t like me very much, so we didn’t have a relationship.”

“And why didn’t she like you?” Chiu glanced around the room. “Did you do something previously that would cause someone to develop a negative opinion of you?”

Ty’s heart sank. He could either put it in his own words or let Chiu bring it up, but either way, this was going there. “I threw up in her flowerbed once. And….” He wasn’t proud of this. “I, uh. I urinated on her husband’s grave, by accident. I was drunk.”

“You were drunk and you accidentally urinated on someone’s grave. ”

“No, the urinating on someone’s grave was on purpose. I thought it was the placeholder for my dad. I had been drinking by my mother’s grave. His plot was reserved right next door. Like I said, I was drunk.”

“But you don’t think that Mrs. Sanford’s dislike of you constituted a conflict of interest?”

“A conflict of…?” Ty could guess where that was going, but he wasn’t going to steer the conversation that way. If Chiu wanted to go there, he could hit the gas himself. “Could you please explain?”

Chiu’s cheeks darkened and his eyes flashed with anger. “It’s been suggested that you might not have tried your best to save the life of a woman who didn’t care for you.”

Suggested by whom? “If I wanted her to die, I could’ve left the store. Why would I bother trying?”

“By inserting yourself into the situation, you had the opportunity to rob Mrs. Sanford of her dignity in the last moments of her life.”

Ty went cold all over. Did this man listen to himself? “Mr. Chiu, I have been present at several deaths in my job as a paramedic, and I can tell you one thing for certain. Either everyone dies with dignity or no one does. Mrs. Sanford did not have a visible medic alert bracelet indicating she had a DNR. I tried to save her life because that’s what I do, even when I’m not on duty.”

He didn’t see his misstep until a crazed kind of light came into Mr. Chiu’s eyes. “But you aren’t on duty, Mr. Morris. In fact, I’m given to understand that you’re on administrative leave from your job at the Chicago Fire Department.”

“That’s correct,” Ty began, because that was what bereavement leave was classified under.

But Chiu had finally gotten a clue, because there was a brief electronic pulse and then Ty’s microphone went dead.

At that point it seemed ludicrous to shout.

“Thank you, Mr. Morris. Now that we have established the facts, we will move on to the questions submitted to this council—”

“I have a question.”

The interruption gave Ty whiplash. On the other side of the room, where Brent and Christie had given their accounts, a woman Ty recognized from the grocery store incident was standing at the microphone .

Chiu looked to the mayor as though expecting her to bang the gavel and crush the woman into silence, but she didn’t.

“How long did it take the paramedics to reach the grocery store after the 911 call? Because it felt like forever.”

The question clearly wasn’t being addressed to Ty, so he didn’t try to answer it. Chiu’s mouth moved soundlessly like a fish’s. “I don’t have that report in front of me—”

“I do,” said Brent. His voice rang out confidently; like Ty, he was used to projecting to be heard over a crowd. “Right here. Brought the official printout.” He held it over his head and waved it for the assembly. “Says here seventeen minutes, including the ninety-one seconds it took Dispatch to connect to our station.”

“That seems like a long time,” said the grocery store lady. “Is there, like, a benchmark we can compare it to, or…?”

“Excuse me,” Chiu attempted to interrupt, but even with the microphone, he couldn’t compete with Brent.

“There is, actually!” he said brightly. “Statewide, emergency response times are somewhere around the nine-minute mark. A little bit longer for rural towns, a little bit shorter for everybody else.”

Grocery Store Lady’s eyes went comically round. Ty would have bet half his fortune she’d done community theater and loved it. “Wow, so we’re almost twice as slow?”

Someone had fucking scripted this, Ty thought. And he had an idea who.

“Yeah. A year or two ago we would’ve gotten there faster, but that was before that sinkhole opened in Road 22. Now we have to go the long way around.”

Chiu sputtered. “There was no money in the budget—”

A murmur of disapproval rumbled through the room.

“Now wait a minute,” said a balding man Ty didn’t recognize, standing up in the middle row. “We’ve been talking for years about getting a fire station here in town. I have a heart condition too! You’re telling me I’m just shit out of luck if my heart stops?”

That—that actually didn’t sound scripted. Unless this guy deserved an Oscar.

Ty wished he had popcorn.

“Council voted 3–2 against the proposed new station— ”

Behind Ty, Ollie stood up.

Ty didn’t turn around. He didn’t see it. But he could feel it happening, could feel Ollie pulling attention from everyone in the room.

Ollie didn’t call for attention very often. But he had the kind of bearing that people automatically paid attention to when he did. Maybe it was his military experience. Maybe it was the fact that he was the kind of handsome TV ads used to sell razors.

“Actually, Councilor, those votes are a matter of public record, so we know that you have voted against building the proposed new fire station at 17 Main Street.”

The rumbling went through the assembled townsfolk like a wave this time.

“What I’d like to know,” Ollie continued in his clear, calm tenor, “is why you didn’t recuse yourself from the vote, Councilor, seeing as you are the sole proprietor of the numbered company that owns the adjacent land parcel. Some people might question your impartiality.”

Now Ty did turn around—he had to. Ollie was having a whole hero moment, and Ty wanted to savor that even more than he wanted to watch Chiu’s bluster and confidence crumble into chalk dust.

Ollie looked good . Ty had been too distracted to notice before, but he’d gone shopping. He’d picked out a nice pair of well-fitted dark-wash jeans and a crisp dark green polo that brought out his eyes. He looked like the kind of guy you asked advice from at Home Depot. He looked like he could jump-start a car. He looked like a guy who’d aced his SATs.

He looked like he knew something Chiu didn’t want him to know, and damn if that wasn’t extremely sexy.

Ollie’s pronouncement had several members of the assembly room—which had filled completely while Ty was busy answering stupid questions and was now probably breaking some kind of fire code—jumping to their feet, shouting for Chiu to answer the allegation.

Mayor Atkins looked like she wanted some of Ty’s hypothetical popcorn. This time she did reach for her little mallet, and she whacked it on its stand several times until the volume returned to normal decibel levels. “This meeting will take a brief recess,” she announced into the microphone. Then she flipped it off, but Ty heard her say to Chiu, “Councilor, I’d like to see you in my office. I’ll be inviting Mr. Kent. I’d like to hear what he has to say.”

Ty turned toward Ollie, fully aware that he had hearts in his eyes. “Please tell me I can come too. And that I have time to get snacks first. ”

Ollie smiled indulgently and picked up a leather shoulder bag that presumably held all the receipts. “You can be bitch-eating-crackers at home. Come on.” He caught his mother’s eye over Ty’s shoulder. Ty hadn’t even seen her approach. “Theo needs some Grandma time.”

OLLIE WOULD not have said his time in the military focused much on planning strategy. That sort of thing was mostly above his pay grade. But he must have been exposed to enough of it to pick up a few things, because so far his plan had gone off without a hitch.

Alan Chiu was going to regret the day he decided to mess with Ollie’s man.

Mayor Atkins held the door to her office and allowed them all to precede her inside. Chiu was still red-faced and steaming mad, which didn’t flatter him at all. Ollie probably looked smug as fuck.

Atkins took the seat behind her desk and turned her cool gaze on Chiu. “Explain yourself.”

Chiu damn near exploded. “My interest in the property at 19 Main is not relevant —”

“Except that you wanted to turn it into luxury lofts,” Ollie interrupted cheerfully. He withdrew a folder from his bag and handed the top few sheets, stapled, to the mayor. “Obviously the plans have not been filed or submitted to the town for approval yet, but they have existed for several years, as you can see from the date of the commission of this drawing.”

He didn’t really believe Mayor Atkins knew nothing about it. He figured all the council members had to be complicit on some level, whether via taking bribes to look the other way or through some kind of mutual back-scratching agreement. Probably none of them understood the scope of his scheming, though.

“That’s—those documents are proprietary —”

“Confidential between you and your business partners,” Ollie agreed. He wished he’d worn suspenders so he could hook his thumbs in them. He was rocking back on his heels, almost giddy.

His mother would probably say that the way he felt right now was unchristian. But she’d say it while feeling the exact same way, so Ollie was taking that criticism from his subconscious with a healthy heap of salt .

“I admit, I probably shouldn’t have seen them,” he went on.

Then he put his hand on Ty’s shoulder and continued, “But I think your business partner will forgive me just this once.”

Ty blinked at him. “ What ?”

Ollie said gently, “You inherited your father’s shares, Ty.”

“I’m in business with this asshole?”

“Not as much as you used to be.” Ollie pulled out the next set of documents. “See, some of the business partnerships they entered together had shotgun clauses. Either your dad or Mr. Chiu could offer to buy the other out at any time, but the flip side was the other could buy out their share at the same price plus one dollar. Kind of a stalemate. Until your dad got dementia.”

Chiu was sputtering again. “That’s absurd.” He turned to Atkins as though she were some kind of authority who would stop Ollie from hanging out all his dirty laundry. “How was I supposed to know how bad the dementia had gotten?”

“You paid ten grand to take full ownership of a business that was started with fifty grand of seed money two decades ago and had tripled in size first.” Ollie paused. “And which fired me this week, by the way. I take that personally. But I’m going to guess that you wouldn’t have sold your shares for ten thousand dollars.”

Atkins leaned back in her chair, looking back and forth between Ollie and Chiu. “I’m going to give you three the room,” she said after a moment. “Try not to burn the place down. I hear the firefighters are fifteen minutes out.”

Ollie gave in to the urge and offered her a fist on her way out. She tapped it with her own.

Then the door closed and Chiu crossed his arms. “What do you want?”

Ah, yes. The art of the trade. Ollie looked at Ty. “You’re up, babe.”

“Me?” Ty shook his head, half laughing. “You did all the work. You didn’t get this far?”

Ollie shrugged blithely. “It’s your money. I have a few starting suggestions, if you’re stuck.”

“No, no.” Ty shook his head. “You keep your hands clean. Mine are already….” He looked down at his hands and paused. For the first time Ollie noticed the blood under his fingernails.

He really must have had a weird day .

“Mr. Chiu,” Ty said when he looked up again, “you’re going to resign your position as councilor immediately. You’re going to sell me that plot of land you own on Main Street for what you paid for it, plus say five percent inflation. And for that I’ll forget about you screwing my father out of potentially millions of dollars and leave your reputation intact. Well. Somewhat.”

Chiu balked. “That’s it?”

Ollie fucking hoped not. He’d worked way too hard to let Chiu off that easy.

“No.” Ty straightened his shoulders. “We’re going to have an independent forensic audit done on all the assets you and my father both have an interest in. And then we are going to sell them all. You can buy me out if you want, but I won’t remain in business with you.”

Ah. He was just waiting to hit Chiu where it really hurt—his wallet. “Those businesses are worth millions. There’s no way I can come up with that kind of capital—”

“Then we’ll sell them. Or we can sell some of them and you can use your share to buy me out of the rest. Or you can find another business partner to buy me out. Either way, we will never be in business together.”

Vindictiveness looked good on him. Ollie would have to tell him so later.

“Fine,” Chiu snapped. “Anything else you want while you’re at it? Maybe a kidney?”

“No.” Ty paused, winced, then said, “Actually, wait. Sit down for a second.”

For the first time since before the meeting, Ollie looked at the blood stain on the front of Ty’s shirt.

Frowning, Chiu crossed his arms. “What are you trying to pull?”

Ty huffed. “When’s the last time you checked your cell phone?”

“I always turn it off during business hours. No personal calls.” He cast a sideways glance at Ollie as if to make a point.

Ollie resisted the urge to flip him off.

“You have a kid !”

“Yes, and I also have a wife.”

God, Ollie hated this guy so much .

“Who can’t reach you right now to let you know that your kid is in the hospital.”

Ah.

Chiu took a step back and collapsed into the chair. All the color had drained from his face. “My—Peter?”

“He took a line drive to the throat that collapsed his trachea. He’s fine. Field surgery.” Ty gave a tight smile. “Even though the EMTs took forever to arrive.”

Jesus. Ollie could guess what that had looked like. And the fact that someone could have died— again —if Ty hadn’t been in the right place at the right time made him absolutely furious.

Chiu’s mouth worked soundlessly for the second time that day. Then he managed, “You…?”

“Me,” Ty agreed. “Because that’s what I do, Mr. Chiu. Don’t forget that. And so the last thing you’re going to do as part of this agreement? You’re going to go see your son in the hospital.” He leaned down. “And you’re never going to miss another one of his games. You’re going to be at every extracurricular event that kid has for the rest of his life—sports, concerts, plays, blood drives, bake sales, fundraiser car washes. All of it, Mr. Chiu. You’re going to do that for me because my dad didn’t. Understand?”

Chiu licked his lips and reached out for Ty’s hand. “Yes. I—thank you. Yes.”

Blinking, Ty shook it.

Suddenly Chiu seemed very small and very tired. Ollie cleared his throat and figured, what the hell . “Would you like a ride to the hospital?”