My Kind of Town
>> Queen's Medical Center Lies don’t fly
As he knocked softly on the door of his nephew Lance's room, HPD Sgt. Mits Ah Sun was still kicking himself for lying so badly to his son Quinn.
"Come in," Mits heard his brother Sheets call.
Mits opened the door, was glad to see just Sheets and Lance, who lay unconscious with tubes and wires running into and out of his head. What a helluva a way to meet your nephew for the first time -- because Lance was born after the brothers quit speaking 21 years ago.
"We have a problem," Mits said. He wanted to get this over with before his sister-in-law Grace returned. "Lily and Quinn are up to no good."
"I knew it."
"Apparently Lily went to the State Library, made a bunch of photocopies of old newspaper stories, all of them about the Ah Sun family."
Sheets swore under his breath.
"Remember my plan to keep them apart?" Mits continued. "It worked, mostly. I asked a girl from dispatch who has the hots for Quinn to visit him during her lunch. She was there when Lily walked in. Lily got jealous and threw the stack of papers across the room. Gwen retrieved them and gave them to me -- except one that landed under a chair."
Sheets remembered too well the stories that were printed 21 years ago. "Which one?"
That's when the door flung open. Grace hurried in.
"The kids know," she said, her voice shaky. "They know about Bobo."
Mits nodded solemnly. "The story about Bobo's disappearance."
Sheets swore again.
"And you," Grace said accusingly, leveling an angry stare at her brother-in-law, "just made it worse."
"I know."
"How?" Sheets said.
"When Quinn showed me the story," Grace said, "he asked me who Bobo was. I just said he was a cousin, and that shortly after that story, Dave Donnelly mentioned getting a postcard from Bobo in the Caribbean. End of story. Then Quinn says, 'But, Auntie, if that's all there is to it, how come my Pops said he had no idea who Bobo is?'"
"I can smooth it out," Mits protested. "I'll just tell Quinn that he caught me off guard." Which was true. "I'll tell him that Bobo owed me money over gambling debts." Which was also true. But it had absolutely nothing to do with why Bobo had allegedly disappeared.
"Lily and Quinn aren't kids any more," Grace said sharply. "The lies you told them years ago won't fly now, especially if they're working together."
But the parents had no way of knowing their children were no longer speaking. Feuds ran in the family.
Don Chapman is editor of MidWeek.
His serialized novel runs daily in the Star-Bulletin
with weekly summaries on Sunday.
He can be emailed at dchapman@midweek.com