by Mary McBride
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.”
“Is he old? Young?” He scowled. “What the hell kind of man drives an old rust bucket like that thing in the driveway?”
“He’s old enough,” Linda said. “And pretty cute.” “Oh, yeah?” Her husband waggled his eyebrows and slid his arm around her shoulders. “You’re pretty cute. You want to spend the night out here, Beauty?”
“Not the night.” She took another sip of wine, then leaned into him, smiling. “Maybe just an hour or two.”
Without the benefit of an alarm clock, Shelby slept past nine the next morning. Rather than having an encounter of the embarrassing kind with Callahan in the bathroom that separated their rooms, she showered and dressed in a bathroom farther down the hall, then trotted downstairs to the kitchen.
Where the hell was everybody? she wondered while she got a pot of coffee going. She assumed everyone was still sleeping since she hadn’t heard a peep or a clank of plumbing anywhere in the house. It wouldn’t be so surprising that her father was sleeping in now that he was retired from his law practice. But her mother? Linda Simon, aka Linda Purl, of Linda Purl Designs, the newly created captain of industry and queen of knitters? Shelby would be shocked if her mother didn’t snap out of bed at the crack of dawn every day.
She hadn’t even seen her father yet. By the time she’d unpacked her things last night, the lights in the carriage house had gone out, and here inside the house, her parents’ bedroom door was closed. It was a relief, actually, not to have to field a hundred questions about her unexpected homecoming and her mysterious companion.
The lieutenant had retired early last night, too, pleading weariness from the day’s drive, although Shelby half suspected he was just avoiding her. “I think I’ll just read awhile and doze off,” he told her, his U. S. Grant biography tucked beneath his arm. “You don’t need to be afraid. Just shout out if you need me.”
“I won’t,” she’d answered. She had no intention of being afraid or shouting out.
While she listened to the coffeemaker gurgle and drip, she considered her current circumstances, tried once more to get really worried about some vague and faceless letter bomber, and then gave up. It was hard, if not impossible, to be back here at Heart Lake, the place she loved, and to feel threatened at the same time. This was home, after all. It was the place she’d always felt so safe.
When the coffee was done, cup in hand, she wandered through the dining room, the foyer, the formal parlor, toward the sunroom where a wall of windows presented a stunning view of Heart Lake. It was absolutely gorgeous this morning, smooth as a mirror reflecting fiery red maples and flaming yellow birches and evergreens. The room itself was gorgeous, too, thanks to Beth’s decorating talents. She had gotten rid of the ragged rattan stuff their grandparents had installed in the forties and fifties— the furniture first Linda, and then Beth and Shelby had abused over many a summer—and replaced it with wonderfully intricate wicker pieces and Tiffany-like lamps and an oriental rug that had the most amazing shades of crimson and navy and cream.
Settling into one of the deep cushions on the sofa, Shelby sipped her coffee and gazed out at the lake. All the summer people were long gone by this time in October. Their cottages would be battened down for the coming winter. That’s what happened with this house every Labor Day weekend before her par
ents had decided to make it their permanent residence.
She was squinting, trying to see the Mendenhalls’ place through the trees on the north side of the lake, when something vaguely purple flashed on the edge of her vision. Then, by the time she had turned to focus on the nearby shoreline, all she could see was a whirl of arms and legs splashing in the water. What idiot, she wondered, would even contemplate swimming at this time of year, much less run full tilt into water that couldn’t have been more than a bone-chilling fifty degrees?
The splashing and the flailing body parts continued for a few seconds, moving from the shallows toward the deeper parts. Then there was a tremendous splash, and then... Nothing. Just stillness. The surface of the lake smoothed back to its former mirrored appearance.
Shelby put her coffee cup down and moved closer to the window, staring out, wondering if she’d only imagined the idiot swimmer. Maybe she was hallucinating, having finally succumbed to the stress of the last twenty-four hours. Maybe... Oh, God. She wasn’t hallucinating. There really had been somebody out there. She was certain. Maybe the idiot in the lake had suffered a massive coronary the minute he hit the frigid water. Should she call 911? Or maybe...
Callahan came up out of the water like some sort of Greek god—half dolphin and half man. Sleek. Sexy as hell. Water sluiced down his broad shoulders and shimmered over his naked chest. He shook his head, and his wet hair shot beads of bright silver into the air around him. For just a second, Shelby thought that she might have her own massive coronary right then because her heart was sort of floundering inside her rib cage and her breathing seemed uneven, more in than out, as if the air had suddenly, somehow thinned.
“Nice,” her mother’s voice sounded just behind her. “A keeper, Shelby, if you ask me.”
Startled, Shelby whirled around to see Linda Simon’s gaze trained where her own had been a moment before. She felt like a kid caught with her hand in the cookie jar, or more exactly, like a kid caught under the covers with a flashlight and a copy of Playgirl.
“Mother! You shouldn’t sneak up on people that way.”
“I didn’t, honey. You were just preoccupied.” She smiled slyly and her blond pageboy bobbed as she gestured out the window with her chin. “He’s very nice, your...uh... friend.”
Shelby, her coronary now a mere flutter, reclaimed her coffee cup and took a gulp of the lukewarm brew. “That’s all he is. Really, Mom. A friend. A friend who was nice enough to drive me up here. He’ll be going back to Chicago today. Soon.”
“Oh. That’s too bad.” Her mother’s smile fizzled out. “I’ve just come from the market with some really nice steaks and a special wine for our dinner this evening.”
“Well, you should have asked me first before you planned a menu.” And there she went, sounding thirteen and petulant again. Worse, she sounded ungrateful. “I’m sorry, Mom. Hey. It doesn’t matter if Callahan isn’t here. You and Dad and I will enjoy the steaks and the wine. We’ll have a wonderful dinner, just the three of us. I’ll even cook, if you’d like.”
Neither Shelby’s apology nor the offer to fix dinner succeeded in removing the lines of anxiety in her mother’s face or the worried slant of her mouth. “Have you talked to your father this morning?” she asked, using that odd tone again that Shelby had heard the night before.
“No,” she said. “I haven’t even seen him. I figured he must be sleeping in now that he’s a gentleman of leisure.” Her gaze drifted briefly, surreptitiously to the window in search of the wet Greek god. “Why?” she asked.
“Oh, no particular reason. I just wondered.” Her mother shrugged. “Well, I’d better get those steaks into the refrigerator.”
“What’s going on, Mom? You’ve been sounding... Oh, I don’t know. Weird. Kind of furtive.”
“Furtive! Oh, for heaven’s sake. Nothing’s going on, Shelby. Don’t be silly. I just wondered if you’d seen your father yet.”
Shelby didn’t press her, but rather watched her mother turn and pick up a bundle from a wicker table near the sun-room door.
“What’s that, Mom?”
“This? Just mail. I stopped by the post office while I was in town. They don’t deliver out here after Labor Day, you know. It’s pretty inconvenient sometimes, I have to say, with all the mail I get for the company. Especially when the weather’s bad.”
While she spoke, her mother was riffling through the assortment of envelopes in her hand. One of them, Shelby noticed, was a large, lopsided manila affair with an un-godly amount of stamps attached to it. She suddenly thought about something one of the postal inspectors had mentioned the day before when cautioning her about letter bombs, about odd-shaped or lopsided packages with too much postage, ones that often emitted funny odors.
And no sooner had the thought flickered through her brain than her mother lifted the manila envelope to her nose and said, “Now this is odd. It smells just like...”
Shelby didn’t let her finish. With a speed she didn’t even know she possessed, she grabbed the envelope out of her mother’s grasp, threw it to the far side of the sun-room, and shoved her mother through the sunroom door.
“Shelby!” Linda Simon shrieked.
“Get out of the house, Mom. Hurry.” She spoke on the run, clutching her mother’s arm, dragging the startled woman along through the parlor. “I’ll explain outside.”
“But, Shelby...!”
“Hush. Hurry. Faster.”
She propelled her mother across the slick marble floor of the foyer and practically pushed her out the front door onto the veranda...
. . . and into Mick Callahan’s wet, bare arms. “Whoa,” he said, trying to keep her balance as well as his own.
“There’s a bomb in the house,” Shelby screamed. “Where?” Immediately he moved her mother aside, and started into the house. “Tell me where.”
“In the sunroom. In a big manila envelope. Here.” She took a step forward. “I better show you.”
“Stay here, goddammit,” he shouted. “Just tell me where.”
“It’s through the parlor. Just keep going left. The big room with all the windows that overlook the lake. I pitched the envelope in a corner.”
“Okay. Stay here. Both of you. I mean it.”
The last she saw of the lieutenant was a pair of bare feet, a glistening wet back, and damp, low-riding jeans with a suggestion of purple at the waistband as he went racing through the foyer.
“Shelby Simon!” Her mother’s hand was splayed across the bosom of her beautiful alpaca sweater and she was leaning against a post of the veranda, breathing hard and blinking furiously. “What in the name of God is going on?”
All of a sudden Shelby realized that she, too, was blinking furiously while standing there with her heart lodged in her throat, fully expecting to hear a gigantic explosion coming from the other side of the house and then watching as little pieces of mail and little scraps of blue jeans and purple briefs rained down upon the lawn.
It was all her fault. If only she’d taken this all a bit more seriously. If only...
“Relax. It’s okay,” Callahan said as he came striding toward the front door with something in his hand.
“What the hell is that?” she asked, feeling relieved and confused and foolish all at the same time.
“Dunno. Some kind of yarn, I think.” He lifted it to his nose. “Smells like Chanel No. 5.”
“I’ll take that.” Her mother pushed past her and plucked the skein from his hand. “This is a very expensive linen and silk blend I ordered from Marseille, France. Shelby, what’s wrong with you? What were you thinking?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” she sighed as she edged a hip onto the porch railing. Maybe that somebody’s trying really hard to kill me. “I don’t know what I was thinking, Mom. I guess I overreacted. That’s probably why I need this vacation.” She managed a limp little “Ha ha” for punctuation.
Her mother simply stared at her. “Are you all right, honey?”
“Yes. Jeez, I’m
fine, Mom,” she insisted. “I’ve just been working hard. It’s nothing a little time off won’t fix. Honest.”
With a little hmpf to indicate that she didn’t believe a word of it and had every intention of getting to the bottom of this later, Linda Simon took her fragrant yarn into the house, leaving Shelby and the lieutenant on the porch.
“Sorry,” she said from her perch on the railing. “I guess I really did overreact.”
He didn’t say anything as he reached for the shirt he’d been using as a towel and had flung aside when all this madness began. “Don’t apologize,” he said, stabbing his arms into the plaid flannel sleeves. “Your instincts were good. That envelope did look pretty suspicious with all that postage.”
Now she was quiet for a minute watching his strong fingers work the buttons on the front of his shirt. Then she sighed again and tried with all her might to keep her lip from quivering when she said, “Okay, Callahan. You win.”
“Excuse me?”
“I’m scared. I’m really scared.”
It seemed an odd time for him to smile, but that’s what he did. And then he said, “Good.”
CHAPTER SIX
To go or not to go. That was Mick’s dilemma an hour after the exploding yarn incident as he was driving into the town of Shelbyville in order to alert the local postmaster of possible problems with the Simons’ mail.
He didn’t like doing a half-assed job at anything, but especially with police work, and he didn’t feel good about just dropping Shelby Simon off up here on the evergreen fringes of nowhere with nobody around qualified to protect her. He hadn’t met her father yet, but she’d mentioned that he was an attorney, and from Mick’s experience with the legal system, he assumed that the man probably wasn’t capable of much more than a good tongue-lashing when it came to defending someone.
The town of Shelbyville was barely the size of a square block in Chicago, so it wasn’t hard finding the post office right next door to the volunteer fire department. The postmaster turned out to be the postmistress, Thelma Watt, a woman who looked about ninety-eight years old, fragile as a china teacup, and stubborn as a mule, at least when it came to procedures at her facility.
