Page 106 of Homecoming for Beginners

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 manlistento 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 itfeltlike 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.

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