Ms. Simon Says (28 page)

“Hm.”

“If you want to talk about all this, it’s okay with me.” She edged her leg over his and pressed the rest of her body harder against him. “I just want to hold you,” she said. “Are you okay?”

“I’m better than I’ve been in a long, long time,” he said.

He could feel her lips curl into a smile against his shoulder just before she said, “I’m here if you want to talk about it more.”

“Maybe tomorrow,” he said as he was thinking
probably never
. All that misery and pain seemed truly behind him now.

The next morning Shelby woke before Mick. The pillar candles were still flickering and she was still in his arms, as she had been all night long. No wonder she’d slept so well.

Asleep, he looked so peaceful and relaxed. For a moment it seemed that their roles were reversed, and that she was protecting him. It was a good thing Julie was dead, Shelby thought, because otherwise she’d have to hunt the woman down and strangle her for the hurt she’d inflicted on Mick. Ms. Simon, in her wisdom, always said there were two sides to every story, but in this case she didn’t give a rat’s ass about Doctor Julie’s version.

How could she not have wanted to have children with this man? He was bright and strong and funny and loyal and far more sensitive than Shelby ever had imagined.

She closed her eyes and sighed.

Dear Ms. Simon,

How will I know if this one is The One?

Signed,
Hopeful at Heart Lake

Dear Hopeful,

He is. Ms Simon says so.

In her mother’s absence, Shelby took it upon herself to feed the two men in her care.

It turned out badly.

The shopping part of it was fun, though. Mick pushed the cart along the aisles of the grocery store in Mecklin while Shelby consulted her list, agonized over one type of cream versus another, wished she’d brought a ruler to measure the thickness of the pork chops, and discovered that she knew absolutely nothing about onions. Who knew there were so many varieties?

And who knew that among Callahan’s many talents was a pretty good working knowledge of wine? The store’s selection wasn’t vast, but he seemed absurdly happy with a California pinot noir. When he confessed that he’d boned up on the subject of wine in order to please his wife, it was all Shelby could do to stifle an indignant snort. She vowed once again to be careful about those reactions. The man had loved his wife, after all, for a long, long time, and even after her betrayal, he refrained from speaking ill of her. Mick’s gallantry made Shelby love him all the more.

Well... She respected him for his restraint. She was still waffling on the love thing.

After they came home and put the groceries away, with no one in the house to hinder them, and dinner still hours away, they raced upstairs to make love again. And again.

Shelby decided she was a lot better in the bedroom than she was in the kitchen. Her mother’s pork chop with onion cream sauce was one of her father’s favorites, but Shelby’s version was nothing like Linda’s even though she followed the recipe step by careful step.

“How long did you cook these pork chops, honey?” her father asked from his seat at the head of the table.

She was still sawing hers as she replied, “An hour and a half. Just like the recipe said.”

“The sauce is great,” Mick said.

“Oh, good.” She hadn’t sampled it yet because she was still trying to cut her first bite of pork.

“Great wine,” her father said.

Shelby didn’t comment because at last she was chewing the entrée that she’d slaved over.

“It’s a little fruitier than I usually like in a pinot noir,” Mick said, contemplating the pale liquid, “but not too bad.”

“Nice and dry,” Harry said.

Speaking of dry, Shelby thought morosely. She put her fork down and lifted her napkin to discreetly get rid of the chewed over chunk of meat in her mouth, then gulped down half the wine in her glass, and asked as cheerfully as she could, “Who’s up for a grilled cheese sandwich?”

“Sounds good, honey,” her father said, putting down his knife and fork with what appeared to be monumental relief.

Mick, bless his heart, insisted on finishing what was on his plate, but didn’t put up much of a fight when Shelby grabbed it out from under his nose and took it into the kitchen.

She looked at her mother’s recipe card again. “Well, no wonder,” she exclaimed.

“What?” Mick asked while he scraped their plates into the trash can.

“I was supposed to cook the chops for half an hour, not an hour and a half.”

“So, next time you’ll know.”

“Next time I’ll order out,” she said.

The phone rang just then, and Shelby picked it up and answered with a crisp “Simon residence.” After a moment of silence, she said, “Hello?” And then somewhere in the silence, she heard somebody breathing. Or didn’t hear it exactly, but sensed it. A presence on the other end of the line. How creepy was that!

“Hello.” This time she didn’t say it like a polite greeting. It came out more as an accusation.

All of a sudden, Mick was standing beside her. “Who is it?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“Hang up,” he said.

“But...”

“Hang the fuck up, Shelby.”

She did.

Mick was glowering at the telephone now. It was an ancient rotary device, harvest gold, and nearly as big as and as obsolete as a bread box. The thing had sat on its little wrought-iron stand in the kitchen for as long as Shelby could remember. It had never been threatening, though. Not until this evening.

“No Caller ID on this damned thing,” he muttered. “What about the extension in my mother’s office?” They raced up to the third floor to discover that the call had come from a pay phone with a Chicago area code. Mick placed a call to his office while Shelby went back to the kitchen to put together a second dinner.

“The pay phone was at O’Hare,” he said when he joined her after a few minutes.

“O’Hare!” Shelby exclaimed. She pictured the airport, once the busiest in the country, and still a welter of travelers nearly twenty-four hours a day. “Well, that narrows it down to about ten thousand possible suspects.”

“Yep. No sense even checking for prints in a case like that. If the calls keep coming, I’ll see what I can do about putting a trace on your line. But, you know . . .” He came up with a tiny, hopeful grin. “Maybe it was just a fluke, Shelby.”

She narrowed her eyes. “What are the odds of that, Lieutenant Callahan? Tell me that. What are the odds of some tired, confused traveler wandering through O’Hare, picking up a pay phone, and dialing these ten digits by mistake?”

With each word, Shelby heard her own voice begin to tremble more as it climbed into higher and higher registers. The call hadn’t been a mistake or “just a fluke.” It was deliberate. She had felt the malice across several hundred miles. She could still feel it.

Mick wrapped her in his arms. “Nothing bad is going to happen to you. I promise you.”

A few days ago, Shelby would have been eager to believe that. But now she wasn’t quite so sure.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

I
t rained the following day, one of those chilly all day deals that usually depressed the hell out of Mick, but not this time. He built a crackling fire in the fireplace beneath the watchful eye of Shelby’s great-great-grandfather’s portrait. He whipped up a pot of hot chocolate from scratch, impressing Shelby with another one of his hidden talents. He sat next to her on the big Victorian sofa in front of the fire, sharing an enormous Linda Purl designed afghan, reading his Grant biography while Shelby dinked around on her laptop.

“This is nice,” he said, probably for the tenth time. It was just that whenever he looked up from his book and took in the fire and the rain on the windowpanes and Shelby beside him, a palpable feeling of contentment would course through him and he’d have to acknowledge it out loud. It was better than nice. It was heaven. He wished he could think of a way to prolong this day for the next forty or fifty years.

The phone had only rung once so far today, but the sound nearly paralyzed Shelby. Mick answered it, relieved to hear Linda Simon’s voice and happy to know that she’d be returning earlier than expected from her trip. He promised to pass the news along to Harry, who was somewhere out on the lake, fishing.

“Is everything all right there?” Linda had asked. “Everything’s great,” he lied.

The call the night before worried him a lot more than he’d let on to Shelby. If there was still an aura of coincidence about the letter bombs, the death of the chemistry student at Northwestern, and that of Derek McKay, Mick had a bad feeling about the phone call. While the other incidents had been aimed
around
Shelby, the call had been directed right
at
her. It wasn’t good news. And the fact that the call was made at a pay phone at O’Hare was a pretty good indication that they were dealing with somebody who put some thought into his malicious business and wasn’t anxious to get caught.

Mick found himself staring into the flames, wondering not only who but why? Shelby had wracked her brain again and again, but hadn’t been able to come up with a reason somebody might want to kill her. Without any sort of motive, the investigation was pretty much dead in the water. And Mick had to suspect everybody.

He closed his book and reached for Shelby’s hand. “It’d be nice to get away to someplace warm and sunny, wouldn’t it? What do you say we fly down to Cancun for the weekend? We could leave tomorrow. Does that sound good?”

“It sounds great, except my sister’s coming back for the Masque tomorrow night. Remember? I told you.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I forgot. Well, Saturday, then.”

“I hate to leave when she’ll only be here a few days. Maybe next weekend?”

“Yeah. Okay. Maybe next weekend.”

He had a sinking feeling that would be too late.

Linda arrived at dinnertime with an enormous bucket of extra crispy fried chicken plus all the trimmings that she’d picked up on her drive from the airport in Grand Rapids. God, it was good to be back. She felt as if she’d been away three months instead of just three days.

In her absence, not only had dismal weather settled in at Heart Lake, but Harry had acquired the beginnings of a cold, while her daughter and Mick Callahan seemed to have acquired the appearance of two people with a distinct case of the hots.

“Her lieutenant is a wine connoisseur,” Harry said when Linda commented on the two of them after she joined him out in the carriage house for an espresso after their fried chicken dinner.

“That’s nice.” She took a tiny sip of the dark, rich brew. “Good wines will help distract from Shelby’s inedible meals. She told me about her pork chops.”

Harry rolled his eyes, which were beginning to look a little glassy with fever. “I’m worried about her,” he said.

“Oh, Harry. Women don’t have to be good cooks these days. That’s why God invented freezers and microwaves.”

“It’s not the cooking. Do you know that your daughter hasn’t offered me so much as a crumb of advice the past couple of days.” He sniffed. “Hand me one of those tissues, Beauty, will you?”

Linda plucked one from the box on the coffee table and handed it to him. “So I guess she didn’t tell you not to sit out in a rowboat in the freezing rain for six hours without proper clothes.”

“Nope. Can you believe it? Our little Ms. Simon is slipping.”

“She’s distracted.”

He reached for her hand. “
I’m
distracted, Beauty.” “You’re also contagious, Harry, so don’t get any ideas about exchanging fluids of any sort. Anyway, I’m exhausted.” She sighed and put her feet up on the coffee table, then leaned back while balancing her diminutive cup and saucer on her leg. “I hardly had time to stop and breathe on this trip. It was just grueling.”

He moved closer in order to rub her neck and shoulders. He could always zero in on just the right spot, and when he did, Linda couldn’t stifle a moan.

“Oh. Now down just an inch. Mm. Oh, yes. Right there.”

“Maybe I should go with you on your next trip,” he said quietly.

Linda turned her head toward him. He’d already said that Shelby hadn’t been hounding him about anything, so she had to assume there’d been no mention of his working for her. If Shelby hadn’t nagged him, then maybe he’d had a change of heart about working for Linda Purl Designs all on his own? She was almost afraid to ask in case she jinxed it. After thirty-five years she knew Harry wouldn’t be pushed. The man would cut off his nose to spite his face with very little provocation. But she couldn’t
not
ask about this. “Does that mean...?”

“No,” he said, continuing to knead her shoulders. “It doesn’t. Slow down, sweetheart. It just means I’m volunteering my services as a baggage handler and part-time masseur for a while. Don’t jump to any conclusions or read too much into it, okay?”

“Okay.” She searched his expression. “But you haven’t ruled it out, have you? Actually working for the company.”

“I haven’t ruled it out,” he said. “See those books up on the bar?”

She looked at the big stack of thick volumes at which he was pointing.

“That’s contract law, Linda. About thirty pounds of contract law, give or take a few pounds. And I want to tell you that after three decades in criminal law, it’s about as exciting as reading the goddamned phone book.”

“Well, Harry, there are other ways to get excited, you know. I’d be more than happy to show you once you’re over your cold.” She shimmied her shoulders beneath his hand just a bit. “Oh. There. That’s perfect. Now just a half inch to the left. Mm.”

When Shelby awoke the next morning, the first thing she noticed was that it had stopped raining. The second thing she noticed was that her bedmate was gazing at her with a warm smile on his face.

“Happy Halloween,” he said, dropping a kiss on her forehead.

“Omigod.”

“What?” Mick jerked up on his elbow, looking over his shoulder as if he expected to see someone standing there with a knife.

“It’s Halloween,” Shelby said.

“So?”

“Masque! I haven’t even thought about a costume.” He swore softly and lay back down beside her. “The last time I went trick or treating I was eight years old and a gang of skinheads beat the shit out of me and stole my candy.”