Ms. Simon Says (32 page)
But it had been a week, and Shelby was beginning to think she’d just hallucinated his feelings for her and the words “I love you” that terrible night. She had the sinking feeling that his job, such as it was, had ended. And so had they.
Which was really unfortunate since the day after she returned to Chicago, she’d bought him a dog, not just to express her gratitude for saving her life, but because he said he’d always wanted one and because she was just so damn in love with him. She sneaked the puppy past Dave the Doorman because the Canfield Towers prohibited pets of any kind, and she was now sleeping with a baby beagle in her bed instead of Michael Rainbow Callahan.
Mick parked where he always did, right in front of the Canfield Towers. Before he got out of the car, he speed-dialed Shelby’s apartment.
“Can I come up?” he asked when she answered. “Hey, stranger.”
“Hey, yourself. Can I come up? I’ve got a question for you, but I don’t want to ask over the phone.”
“Right now?”
Jesus. He’d expected at least an iota of enthusiasm, but Shelby sounded as if she didn’t want to see him at all. He could feel the sweat beginning to foam his Speed Stick deodorant.
“Right now,” he said, punching through his fear. “How ’bout it? I’m parked out in front. I can be up there in two minutes.”
“Well...”
He lost it. “Shelby, goddammit, I love you. What the hell’s wrong? Are you telling me you don’t want to see me?”
She was quiet a minute on the other end of the line. “I love you, too, Mick. See you in two.” Then she hung up.
He sprinted through the lobby, yelling “I know. I know. I’ll move it,” to Dave the Doorman, who sat at his desk shaking his head. He almost leaped into the elevator and punched the button for the twelfth floor. He tried to keep the sweat to a minimum as he walked down the corridor.
After he knocked, Shelby opened the door just a couple inches. “I wasn’t expecting you,” she said.
“But you love me, right?” He tried to peek past her. What the hell was she trying to hide?
“I love you big time,” she said. “Completely. From here to the moon and back again. It’s just that I have this surprise for you, and...”
He couldn’t stand it a minute more, so he pushed the door and went through.
“What the hell is that?”
“It’s a baby beagle. And she’s yours. Surprise!”
Mick felt the most foolish grin work its way across his mouth as he bent to scoop up the puppy and nuzzle her under his chin. “What’s her name?”
“Dunno,” Shelby said. “I’ve been calling her Baby Beagle. You can name her anything you want.”
“Baby. I like that.”
“What were you in such a hurry to ask me, Mick?” He’d completely forgotten. Then he remembered, and he started laughing so hard he could barely speak.
Shelby finally got exasperated. “What’s so damned funny?” she asked, almost ripping Baby Beagle out of his arms.
“I came up here to ask you if you wanted to help me decorate my new apartment.”
“You’re kidding! You’re moving? No more Hattie and Lena? No more Eau de Pine?”
“No more skid row. I’ve come up in the world, my love. Wanna see my new digs?”
“Sure. Let me put the puppy in her crate, and...” “You don’t have to. Bring her along. It’s close.” “Well...”
“Trust me, Shelby.”
She did. She trusted him implicitly. With her heart. With her life. So, with Baby Beagle in her arms, she followed him out the door and down the corridor.
But not that far down the corridor. He stopped at Mo Pachinski’s apartment, pulled a key from his pocket, and inserted it into the lock.
“Wait a minute,” Shelby said. “What is this?”
“My new place.” He pushed open the door, revealing an empty living room.
“I don’t believe this!” Shelby stepped across the threshold. “How is this possible?”
“Well, Mo needed a favor,” he said. “Nothing illegal. Shady, maybe. But strictly within the law, I swear. I even checked with your father.”
Shelby rolled her eyes.
“So, Mo needed this favor, and I needed an apartment.”
She put Baby Beagle down on the thick gray carpet. “Don’t piddle,” she warned her. Then she looked at Mick. “Do I even want to know what you did for Mo?”
He shook his head. Then he draped his forearms over her shoulders, pressed his forehead to hers, and said, “I was hoping you’d decorate it for me. You know, in all those wild patterns and colors you always dreamed about.”
Shelby smiled. “The way you always dreamed about a dog.”
“Uh-huh.”
“We’re screwed, Callahan.”
He blinked. “What do you mean?”
She could hardly keep from laughing. “You got an empty apartment so I could do the decorating I always wanted. I got you the dog you always wanted. But we can’t keep the fricking dog in the fricking apartment.”
“You’re serious?”
“I’m serious. I’ve been in flagrant violation of the No Pets rule here for the past six days. You should probably arrest me.”
“Well, shit. Let me think about this a minute.” He pulled her closer and planted a score of warm kisses on her neck. “As I see it, we have two choices.”
“Which are?”
“Getting rid of the puppy is not an option. So, we can move back with Hattie and Lena, where dogs are more than welcome, or we can look for a nice little house with a nice little fenced-in yard for Baby Beagle.”
Shelby hugged him harder. She had to swallow the lump in her throat. “I love you so much.”
“I love you, too. But you haven’t answered my question. What’ll it be, Ms. Simon? Skid row or the ’burbs?”
“I’d go anywhere with you, Callahan.”
“But which? Hattie and Lena, or the white house with the picket fence?”
“Tough choice,” she said.
“How about if I asked you to marry me? What would you say to that?”
She actually pretended to think about it for a second, before she said the words she’d been longing to say for such a long, long time.
“Ms. Simon says yes.”
Mary McBride has been writing romance, both historical and contemporary, for a dozen years. She lives in St. Louis, Missouri, with her husband and two sons.
She loves to hear from readers, so please visit her Web site at MaryMcBride.net or write to her c/o P.O. Box 411202, St. Louis, MO 63141.
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PLAY IT AGAIN, SAM
available in paperback
December 2004.
O
n a map, the township of Shelbyville, Michigan, resembled a startled face. Blue Lake and Pretty Lake, each very nearly round, formed a pair of staring eyes, set wide by the dense woods between them. The pinched lobes of Little Glory Lake sufficed for a nose, and just below it, Heart Lake was carved out like an open, astonished mouth.
Or, if you didn’t have much imagination, Shelbyville township looked like five lakes and a hell of a lot of trees just above the 43rd parallel and a few miles east of Mecklin, the county seat.
The population of Shelbyville was 1,245 souls, give or take a soul or two. In June, July, and August, though, that figure swelled, almost doubling with the influx of tourists, or what the townspeople called “the summer folks.” And the summer folks tended to get in a lot more trouble than the residents.
It was summer now, and Constable Sam Menden-hall was responding to an early morning call about more trouble. He walked into the post office carrying the coffee he’d picked up at the Gas Mart.
“What’s up, Thelma?” he asked the elderly post-mistress.
“Somebody stole my flag.”
Sam took a thoughtful sip of the steaming brew, hiding his exasperation behind the paper cup. From her urgent tone on the telephone, he’d been expecting an actual burglary. He thought her cash drawer had been cleaned out, or that someone had made off with her stamps.
“It was a brand new one, too. I just got it a couple weeks ago.” She slapped a liver spotted hand on the countertop. “Damn it all. In over fifty years, I haven’t missed a single day—not one!—of running my flag up the flagpole out there. A lot longer than you’ve been alive, Sam Mendenhall, I’ll have you know.” She shook a crooked finger in his face.
Obviously Thelma didn’t think he was taking this seriously enough. The last thing he wanted to do was to insult her. He’d known Thelma Watt his entire life. She been Shelbyville’s postmistress for more than half a century, which meant she knew more about the local population than they knew about themselves.
Just by handling the mail, Thelma knew who was getting ahead, who was falling behind, who was simply holding on. She knew whose children wrote home once they’d left the nest, whose sweethearts abruptly quit their correspondence, whose hearts had been broken by lined paper and a ball point pen.
His, for instance.
Hell.
Sam didn’t doubt for a second that the old gal had read every post card that ever passed through this building and held every interesting envelope up to the light. He wondered how many of those cards and letters had been his.
“Any idea who might have taken the flag?” he asked her now.
She glared across her counter, looking down her nose at him—a pretty amazing feat since he was 6’2” to her diminutive 5’1”.
“Of course I know who took it,” she snapped. “The same criminal who’s been taking all the other things around town. Who else would it be?”
She was probably right, Sam decided. There’d been a lot of weird stuff going on lately. Things just went missing. Weird things. The curtains in Carol Dunlap’s sun porch. Every single jar of peanut butter at the grocery store. A Detroit Tigers coffee mug that Jim Bick-ford had been sipping from one minute, then the next minute—pfft—it was gone.
Last week, after graduation ceremonies at the high school, somebody noticed an empty space in the trophy case where the bronzed pigskin for the state football champs of 1968 should’ve been.
There was more. Sam had a list in the glove compartment of his Jeep.
Now he’d be adding Thelma’s flag.
As crime waves went, this one seemed fairly innocuous. But still... Plenty of people were spooked, and Thelma was downright mad.
“How did it happen?” he asked her. “Somebody break in, or did they take it down from the pole?”
“I never had time to get it up there. I took it outside at seven-fifteen, just like always, hooked it onto the lanyard, but then the phone rang before I could run it up the pole. When I got back outside, the durn thing was gone.”
“Who was on the phone?” Sam asked.
“Nobody.” The elderly woman blinked. “Are you thinking that call was some sort of diversion?”
He shrugged. In fact, he was thinking it was probably just a wrong number, or that the octogenarian post-mistress moved so slowly that the caller had hung up before Thelma reached the phone.
“I’ll see what I can find out,” he told her.
“You do that.”
He was already on his way to the door when she called him back.
“Wait a minute, Sam. Mercy. I was so upset about my flag that I almost forgot to tell you. Beth Simon’s coming back from California. Her mail’s already being forwarded here.”
“Oh.”
It was all he could think of to say. His mind was suddenly a complete blank. His heart had given one hard kick and then seemed to quit beating entirely. He felt like an idiot, and probably looked like one, too.
Thelma’s head was cocked to one side, and there was an expectant expression on her face. Sam couldn’t decide if the slant of her mouth was sympathetic or snide. What was it she wanted him to say?
Oh, goodie. That’s great. Glad to hear it. Good old
Beth. I can’t wait to see the woman who dumped me sixteen years ago.
He drained the rest of his coffee, crumpled the paper cup in his fist, then lobbed it into the tall trash can against the far wall.
“I’ll let you know what I find out about the flag, Thelma,” he said, then turned and walked out the door before the woman could say another word.
Poor Sam. Thelma had meant to warn him a bit more gently, perhaps even accompany the warning with some sage advice, but she’d been so discombobulated by the stolen flag that she’d simply blurted out the news about Beth, and the fellow had just stood there, looking like she’d punched him in the gut.
Not that she would have expected any other reaction, considering the history of those two.
She reached beneath the counter for the rubber-banded packet of mail that had arrived yesterday from San Francisco, CA 94117. There was a Mastercard statement as thick as a ham sandwich, a bill from San Francisco General Hospital, and a subscription renewal to “Victorian Times”. After more than half a century in the post office, Thelma could tell an awful lot from a few pieces of mail.
Obviously things hadn’t worked out for little Beth Simon in California.
She was broke, or at least heavily in debt. That no good boyfriend of hers, the one she’d gone to California with, had undoubtedly hit her again, this time hard enough to send her to the emergency room.
She was headed back here, to her family’s big old Victorian house on Heart Lake.
On second thought, it was probably good that Thelma hadn’t fully apprised Sam. After all, the U.S. Mail was privileged information, not meant for passing on to third parties.
He’d find out for himself soon enough.
And for mercy’s sake, she hoped he also found out who made off with her flag.
Sam sat in his Jeep, staring at the little spiral notebook and its growing list of oddities. There didn’t seem to be a pattern. At least none that he could discern. The only thing that seemed to make any sense was that it was some kind of scavenger hunt. The culprits were likely to be some of the summer kids with too little supervision and too much time on their hands. Still, a bit of petty theft was preferable to drugs, booze, drag racing, or any other crazy stunts that kids could pull.
He wasn’t going to lose any sleep over it. With any luck, he’d catch one of the young perps in the act, give him a stern talking to, then turn the little bastard over to Thelma for whatever punishment she deemed appropriate.
