Ms. Simon Says (8 page)

Knowing her parents, no matter how she explained her companion, whether it was a business associate, a reporter doing an extended interview of her, or merely a friend, they’d jump to the conclusion that he was her boyfriend. And the harder she insisted he wasn’t, the more certain they would be that he was.

Strange. After her thirtieth birthday, it wasn’t her own biological clock that had speeded up, but her parents’. They rarely missed an opportunity to inquire about her love life or to drop not-so-veiled hints about grandchildren. Her mother had even written a not very well disguised letter to Ms. Simon a year or so ago, pointing out the decrease in fertility in females over a certain age.

Okay. So she’d let them assume that Callahan was her boyfriend. That would work. Anything to keep them from worrying unnecessarily about this bomb deal.

“Do me a favor, will you, Callahan?”

“What’s that?”

“I’d rather my folks didn’t know about this letter bomb business,” she said. “No point in getting them all upset. So let’s not tell them you’re a cop, okay?”

“Okay.” There was a note of skepticism in his voice, a hint of reluctance, as if he clearly didn’t relish subterfuge. “So if I’m not a cop, then what am I supposed to be?”

“Um. Well . . .” She closed her eyes a second and dragged in a breath. God. She hated this. Just hated it. “I was thinking about introducing you as my boyfriend.”

“Your boyfriend!”

“Well, you don’t have to sound all shocked and awed, for God’s sake. It’s not unthinkable, after all, that somebody like me might find somebody like you attractive or...”

He snorted. “Or that somebody like me might find somebody like you the least bit fun to be around.”

“I’m fun,” she shot back.

“Oh, yeah? When?”

“Well, not right now. This isn’t fun.”

He rolled his eyes for about the seventeenth time today. “You’re telling me.”

“Look. Will you just do it?” she shrieked, hating the exasperated tone of her own voice. “Please.”

“Yeah. Okay,” he grumbled. “Whatever.”

“Thank you.” She pointed ahead. “Turn right at the stop sign. The lake is just a mile or so down the road.”

Well, maybe it was a mile or so to a crow, Mick soon discovered. Once they turned off the blacktop, the final half mile to the lake wound its way through a deep forest of pines that looked damned near virgin timber to his untrained eyes. Hey, if Shelby Simon had to hide out for a while, the forest primeval was probably the perfect choice.

She was sitting forward in the passenger seat, her nose practically pressed to the windshield, unable to disguise her excitement over this homecoming.

“Turn here,” she said, pointing right.

He swung the Mustang into a pebbled drive that crunched under his tires, then finally pulled up in front of some sort of fancy detached garage. Well, it seemed fancy until his gaze encountered the house not too far away up a sloping lawn.

“Whoa,” he murmured. “That’s some house.”

“It is, isn’t it?” she responded, already halfway out of the car. “God, it’s good to be back. I had no idea how much I missed it until just this minute.”

The place was lit with spotlights that angled up from the front yard, making it nearly bright as day. He’d never seen anything like it in his life.

“What do you call it?” he asked, still eyeing the house while he opened the hatchback for the luggage. “Victorian?”

“Uh-huh. Well, technically, it’s Italianate. At least I think so. My sister is the authority on that.”

Maybe it seemed so big because it sat—loomed, actually—on the crest of the sloping lawn. The sucker had to be ten or twelve thousand square feet or more, all three stories of it. A deep, columned porch ran around the first floor. All the windows were tall and arched and elaborately framed. Every possible surface was carved, or turned, or somehow decorated. Mick half expected to see a sign out front saying “Historical Society.”

Shelby, standing beside him, seemed to be regarding it with an awe similar to his own.

“I haven’t been back since my sister finished all the renovations. I can’t believe how fabulous it looks.” She squinted. “Beth must’ve used five or six different colors of paint. Amazing. It used to be just a flat, fairly boring white with green trim.”

Not anymore. In addition to a basic pale gray, Mick picked out touches of navy blue, maroon, and even some gold.

“Well, the lights are on, so I guess they’re expecting you,” he said, pulling her suitcase out of the trunk.

“Actually, they’re not. I couldn’t reach them this afternoon to tell them I was coming. But that’s okay. They’re pretty good about surprises.”

“Oh, yeah?” He angled his head toward the front door where a female figure had just emerged and stood, fists on hips, staring their way. “If that’s your mother, I’d say she doesn’t look all that pleasantly surprised.”

Actually, the woman looked pretty much like a deer in headlights.

Surprise!

CHAPTER FIVE

“S
helby!”

Her mother looked great, absolutely stunning tonight in a pair of beige wool slacks and one of her own designer sweaters, this one a gorgeous turtleneck concoction of nubby beige yarn and black silk ribbon. Nobody ever said Linda Simon didn’t know how to dress to show off her perfect size six figure and to set off her meticulous blond pageboy. Aside from her fabulous appearance, though, Shelby couldn’t quite discern the expression on her mother’s face.

Was she surprised?

Taken aback?

Flummoxed?

All of the above, Shelby decided as she ascended the veranda stairs with Callahan a few steps behind her.

“Shelby!” her mother exclaimed again, coming forward to kiss her. “My goodness! What a surprise! Why didn’t you call, honey?”

“I did, Mom, but nobody answered. I didn’t leave a

“ message because...Well...” She sighed. “It’s complicated.”

At the moment her mother was peering over Shelby’s shoulder, apparently getting a good look at the complication. “Hello,” she said in the gracious, almost musical tone that always translated to Shelby’s ears as “Thank you so much for your interest in my unmarried daughter.”

“Mom, this is Mick Callahan, my...uh... friend.” “Welcome, Mick!”

He dropped Shelby’s suitcase in order to take her mother’s extended hand. “Mrs. Simon.”

“Oh, please. Call me Linda. It’s so nice to meet one of Shelby’s . . .” She paused, as if carefully considering the meaning and importance of her vocabulary. “Friends,” she finally said with a faint sigh, making it sound like suitor or gentleman caller anyway. “Well, come in, you two. Let’s find a place to put your bags.”

Shelby trudged through the front door, thinking maybe this hadn’t been such a good idea. All of a sudden she was
trudging,
for heaven’s sake. Not just walking or even gliding across her parents’ threshold, but coming through the front door like a dorky, slump-shouldered teen. Why did she always forget that despite the fact that she was a successful and independent thirty-four-year-old, her mother had this strange, almost Wiccan ability to turn her instantly into some sort of petulant spinster?

Behind her, she heard Callahan breathe a quiet “Holy shit” as he entered the foyer and encountered the full effect of Victorian grandeur from the massive walnut hall tree on the right, the huge porcelain urn filled with peacock feathers on the left, and the half acre of inlaid black and white marble beneath his feet.

“Welcome to 1880,” Shelby said with a laugh.

“Yeah. No kidding.”

Her mother was already upstairs, flinging open doors and shutting them again, talking to herself.

“This way,” Shelby said, leading Callahan up the staircase with its oriental runner and heavily carved walnut banister.

“Why don’t you put your things in your old room, Shelby?” her mother said. “Then Mick can take Beth’s old room, and you’ll have the bathroom between. Or . . .” She lifted her designer clad shoulders in a shrug. “If you prefer being in a room together, I don’t have any objections. It’s really up to you.”

For some strange reason, Shelby glanced at her bodyguard
slash
boyfriend. The look on his face was as neutral as any human being could possibly manage. Not even a tiny tic to suggest how he might feel about sharing a bedroom with her. And why her brain was even entertaining the thought was a complete mystery to her.

“Separate is fine, Mom,” she said. “No big deal. Really.”

Really.

Perish the thought.

She took her big suitcase from Callahan’s grasp and shoved it into the bedroom where she’d spent hundreds of summer nights. “Your room is two doors down the hall.” She pointed.

“Great.”

“Well, I’m going back downstairs while you kids get settled,” her mother said. “Have you had dinner?”

“Don’t worry about us, Mom. Okay? If we’re hungry, we’ll find something in the fridge.”

“All right.” She sighed again and turned to go downstairs, almost as if she couldn’t get away fast enough.

“Where’s Dad?” Shelby asked. It wasn’t like him to hide out during any sort of homecoming, expected or not.

“He’s out in the carriage house,” her mother said as she continued her trot down the staircase.

There was something odd about her tone of voice. Shelby couldn’t quite put her finger on it. Her mother was usually pretty straightforward rather than veiled or ironic or downright shifty. Shelby was about to comment on it when Callahan cleared his throat and asked, “Did you say three doors down?”

“No, two. Here. I’ll show you.”

Once downstairs, Linda Simon paused in the kitchen only long enough to pour herself a glass of chilled Chardonnay before she slipped outside and made a bee-line across the lawn to the carriage house. Ordinarily, she didn’t drink after dinner—why consume a few hundred extra calories in stomped grapes when she far preferred a midnight snack of Häagen-Dazs butter pecan or Belgian chocolate?—but tonight a little liquid fortification seemed like a good idea. A very good idea.

She stood at the carriage-house door a moment, debating as she always did whether or not to knock, willing herself not to be foolish or impetuous, and at the same time wondering what she’d do if she just barged in unannounced and caught her husband with another woman.

In the five months since they’d been “separated,” Harry had managed to garner the sympathy as well as the attention of every female who wasn’t tied down within a radius of twenty or thirty miles. They made sweet, sympathetic noises. They brought him god-awful casseroles. They vied to do his mending and cleaning and ironing. God only knew what else they’d offered him in the way of soft shoulders to cry on and other consolations.

Linda sighed out loud, dispensed with knocking, and walked into the large, loftlike space that had once been used as servants’ quarters on her family’s property. She went first to the big-screen TV, turned off the Golf Channel, then plopped on the sofa beside her husband of thirty-five years.

“Hello, Beauty,” he said in the rich baritone that was partly responsible for his amazing success in the courtroom over the years. If he was surprised to see her on his turf tonight, he managed to hide it with his usual aplomb. “Is that Chablis?”

“Chardonnay.” Linda handed him the wineglass. “It’s pretty good, actually. Try it.”

While he sampled it, she couldn’t help but notice that he needed a haircut. His sandy hair was threaded with silver these days, and even though it was curling over his shirt collar in back, it was thinning dramatically on top. She’d even caught him once last year, in front of the bathroom mirror, experimenting with a comb-over. Just the thought of that made her smile for a second.

“Your daughter’s home,” she said, taking back her glass.

He blinked. “Who? Beth?”

Linda shook her head. “Shelby. Didn’t you see the car pull into the drive a while ago?”

“What? That old beater? I saw it, but I thought it was one of your knitters from town, delivering more sweaters or scarves or whatever it is you’re peddling this week.”

She bit her tongue, refusing to rise to the bait. In her heart of hearts, she knew that Harry was enormously proud of her midlife success and of the fact that her designs were now featured not just in assorted boutiques in Chicago, but in most of the major department stores in the country. In the past few years, she had taken what was essentially a hobby of designing and knitting sweaters for herself and her daughters and friends, and turned it first into a cottage industry and then into a multimillion-dollar corporation with no apparent limits on its fiscal horizons.

Harry could count. He knew how well she had done. Not only was she raking in money hand over fist, but she employed fourteen women in the vicinity, eight of them full-time, most of whom were now able to earn fairly decent wages just by staying home and knitting. Her company, Linda Purl Designs, had increased the gross national product or whatever it was of this rural county by a whopping fifteen percent. She even belonged to the Mecklin County Chamber of Commerce. Harry was proud of that, too.

But Harry was still a stubborn ass. And so, Linda supposed, was she.

“I haven’t said anything to her yet,” she said. “To Shelby, I mean. About us.”

“Chicken.” He laughed softly and his brown eyes warmed as he reached out to finger a lock of her hair. “Afraid of what our daughter will say when she finds out you kicked her poor old daddy out of the house?”

“I didn’t kick you out,” she said defensively. “I just suggested a temporary
détente
for the sake of our sanity, Harry. A little sabbatical for both of us.”

“Same difference.”

She ignored his irritating snort, and said, “And to answer your question... No, I haven’t told her anything because she only got here a little while ago. With a man, Harry.”

His eyes widened perceptibly. “What kind of man?” “The kind who wears pants,” she said. “For heaven’s sake. How do I know what kind of man he is? I only just met him.”

“What does he do for a living? Does he work with Shelby at the paper?”

“I have no idea.” Now it was her turn to snort. “Don’t always be such a lawyer. Frankly, I don’t care what the man does for a living. I’m just glad Shelby finally brought somebody home.”