Ms. Simon Says

by Mary McBride

  Before he went to the living room where Shelby was waiting for him, he put in a call to his precinct captain to get an update on the investigation.

  “Nada,” Rita said. “Zip on the kid at Northwestern. Not much more on the Daily Mirror guy. His blood alcohol level was enough to account for a swan dive under the train, though.”

  “Yeah. Well, I doubt it,” Mick grumbled.

  “How’s the vacation?” she asked, her voice fairly embroidered with sarcasm. “Getting a lot of rest, are we?”

  “Just let me know if anything turns up, Cap. Okay?” He tossed a few more pairs of socks and underwear into a spare gym bag, threw in the suit and tie, then walked out to the living room and stopped dead in his tracks.

  “What the hell is this?” he asked.

  While she’d waited for him, Shelby had not only picked up all the debris in the room, but she’d also rearranged his furniture.

  The smile that had been perched on her lips sagged a little bit. “You don’t like it,” she said. “Well, I can put it back. Here.” She began to shove the couch, but Mick stopped her by wrapping her in his arms.

  “I didn’t say I didn’t like it, Shelby. It just kinda surprised me. That’s all. And it . . .” He fell silent, shaking his head.

  “What?” she asked, tilting her face up to study his. Mick had been about to say that it depressed the hell out of him that she seemed to care so much about his environment, the one he’d have to return to eventually. Back to this dump. This den of discouragement. Alone. It was enough to make him think that a swan dive under the El wasn’t such a bad idea.

  “What were you going to say, Mick?”

  He kissed her. Just a sample. And then he lied to her. “I was going to say that you probably inherited your design skills from your mother. This room looks great.” Then he forced a laugh. “At least it’s not beige.”

  Shelby blinked. “Oh. You noticed that.”

  “What? That your apartment looks like it was decorated by Lawrence of Arabia? Nah. I didn’t notice that.”

  Oh, shit. He’d meant it as a joke, but it was immediately clear, when Shelby wrenched out of his embrace, that she didn’t think it was funny. At all.

  “Hey.” Mick tried to draw her back against him, but she wasn’t having any of it.

  “I love beige,” she insisted.

  “So do I. I wasn’t criticizing you, babe. It wouldn’t make any difference to me if your place was wall-to-wall black.”

  She just stood there glaring at him a minute, then her expression softened. “Well, I don’t love it. I like it.” She stared at the ceiling a second, then took in what turned out to be a long, confessional breath. “Okay. I don’t really even like beige. In fact, I’m actually starting to hate it. Satisfied?”

  Mick didn’t know the right answer to that one, so he just gathered her against his chest again, where she seemed content to stay for the moment, muttering into the pocket of his shirt.

  “I hate beige,” she said.

  “Okay. Well, that explains why you’ve surrounded yourself with it. Suicide by displeasure.”

  Again, she didn’t laugh at his remark, making Mick realize that this was really important to her. “Tell me,” he said softly.

  After she dragged in a long breath, she did.

  “Ever since I was a little kid, I’ve always had this mental image, this dumb vision, of the house I’d eventually live in with my handsome husband and our adorable

  2.3 kids. It’s a place full of color and patterns, with big comfy chairs and upholstered ottomans, sofas like down pillows, thick oriental rugs, and bookcases everywhere, the kind you need a ladder to reach the highest shelf, all of them filled with leatherbound classics and . . .” Her words dwindled to a soft little curse. “Well, shit. Just shit.”

  “Go ahead,” he said. “I’m really into those bookcases.”

  “You’re thinking I’m insane,” she said.

  “Nope.” He tightened his embrace. “But I still don’t get the beige.” He didn’t get it at all. If Shelby dreamed in a full palette of colors, why was her waking life monochromatic?

  “I’m not sure I get it completely, either,” she said. “My mother, God bless her, seems to think I have some sort of commitment problem. But it’s not that. It’s . . .”

  He waited quietly for her to continue while he thought about her dream, especially the husband part of it and the

  2.3 kids. He’d always wanted those 2.3 kids himself. “It’s not really a conscious choice,” she said softly.

  “But I think maybe, deep down, I’m afraid to start accumulating those brightly colored dream house things. Like I’ll jinx it all somehow. So I buy beige and neutrals, which can always fit in someplace.”

  “Makes perfect sense to me.”

  She leaned back and blinked up at him. “It does?” Well, it didn’t make perfect sense, but he loved the complicated little twists and turns of her brain and the quirks of her personality. Besides, goofy as her theory was, it did strike a somewhat familiar chord in him.

  “I always wanted a dog,” he said. “I mean really, really wanted one. And here I am, thirty-eight years old, and I’ve never had a dog in my life. It just never felt like it was the right time for some reason.”

  Shelby nodded and her face lit up. “That’s it! You really do understand, don’t you?”

  “Yeah. I do.” He grinned. “ ’Course just because I understand, doesn’t mean you get a gold star for Mental Health Week.”

  “Hey. I’ll settle for a bronze.”

  He dipped his head, savoring the laughter on her lips, still thinking about those 2.3 kids. And now the stupid dog, too.

  Her “beige problem” was something Shelby had never confessed to anyone. The fact that Mick hadn’t looked at her and asked “Whaddya nuts or something?” kept a smile on her face and a twinkle in her heart long after their delicious kiss.

  She followed him down the dank staircase of his building and out the front door, wondering if they’d keep seeing each other after this case was finally solved and she was out of danger. The only danger she felt in at the moment was losing her head completely, not to mention her heart.

  A little while earlier, back upstairs in Mick’s apartment, when he was kissing her, Shelby had almost blurted out an “I love you.”

  Did she?

  Love him?

  Omigod.

  Her feet just stopped moving as if sudden paralysis had set in, and she stood on the broken concrete sidewalk, gaping at the man some twenty feet in front of her. She hadn’t even known him a full week. If somebody wrote to her, asking if they could possibly be in love after such a short time, Ms. Simon would have said, “I doubt it.”

  So what was this? If it wasn’t love, did it have a name? Lust with a side order of tenderness? The hots with care sprinkled on top? Physical attraction with complications of the heart?

  “Callahan!” she yelled.

  He spun around, his right hand poised in the vicinity of his weapon, his expression hard and alert.

  Shelby gave a quick wave of her hand. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you.” What had she meant, she wondered, by calling out to him that way? “I just...”

  “What?” He walked back to her, stood looking down at her.

  Shelby looked up, tilting her head to the side. “I just wanted you to kiss me again.”

  A slow smile worked its way across his mouth while a warm hazel light kindled in his eyes. “Lady, I’d love to.” He dropped his gym bag and drew her into his arms and kissed her until her knees wobbled and she had half a mind to drag him back upstairs to the mattress on the floor.

  When she finally opened her eyes, she was about to moan with pleasure, but instead she gulped and said, “Oh, shit.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Look who’s coming up the sidewalk,” she said, angling her head toward his two neighbors who were just then pulling their shopping carts along behind them. “Aren’t I supposed to be your sister?”


  “Jesus,” he breathed.

  Shelby couldn’t help but laugh. “Boy, if they thought you were on your way to hell in a handbasket before....”

  “Need some help with your groceries, ladies?” Mick called to them.

  Hattie, the short one, was shaking her head in a combination of dismay and disgust.

  The tall Lena was glowering. “This is sister,” she said sternly to Mick as she got closer, jabbing a finger toward Shelby. “No kissing.”

  He looked genuinely sheepish. “I’m sorry. She’s leaving town and I just got a little carried away.”

  “I’ll say you got carried away,” Hattie exclaimed. She started shaking a finger at him, too. “Don’t you be carrying on like that in this building, young man. You, too, sister woman. There’s respectable, God-fearing folks living here.”

  Mick bent to pick up his gym bag, still apologizing profusely to his accusers, while at the same time Shelby could see that he was trying to keep from laughing. Oh, God. So was she.

  “Come on, bro.” She grabbed his hand and hustled him down the sidewalk to the car, while Hattie and Lena just stood there and stared, like two mismatched guard dogs, protecting the premises.

  As he started the car, he was still trying not to break up. “I’m going to have to move, I guess.”

  “Probably,” Shelby said. “Either that, or start going to church with them. If you want my advice...”

  “I don’t.” He shot her a little glare. “Thanks anyway, sis.”

  “Don’t mention it.”

  They had driven all the way across the border into Indiana before they could stop laughing.

  This time the five-hour drive to Michigan seemed to go by in the blink of an eye because once they’d stopped laughing, they talked the entire way. After being somewhat reticent at first, Mick described his years crisscrossing the country with his mother and her succession of boyfriends. Shelby was amazed that a life like that didn’t seem to have left deeper psychological scars. But Mick didn’t appear to harbor any anger toward Carrie Callahan. Quite the opposite. He seemed to actually remember her rather fondly.

  That didn’t appear to be the case with his wife, however. Try as she might, Shelby still couldn’t get him to really discuss his marriage or Julie in any detail. While he spoke of his mother in glowing language, his references to his late wife were mostly platitudes. She was a good doctor. She was a big spender. She was this or that. Shelby still didn’t have a clue what the woman had really been like, or why it was so difficult for Mick to talk about her.

  Well, she supposed if she’d lost a mate after almost twenty years, she might have a hard time finding the right words, too. Maybe it was less painful to speak of her in generic terms than specifics.

  He also told her more about his career with the police department. Funny. She’d come to think of him as some sort of professional bodyguard, and pictured him doing that on the force, as well. But for the past two years he’d been working undercover, buying drugs in the worst neighborhoods in the city, putting together a regular Who’s Who of pushers, slowly working his way up from the guys on the street to the major players. He didn’t name names.

  Shelby did. She told him all about the mess she’d made for Beth and Sam, all about her plans to end the estrangement of Linda and Harry, all about her less-than-professional resentment of her up-and-coming young intern, Kellie Carter.

  “I’m a meddler,” she finally confessed.

  “There’s news.” He chuckled softly.

  “Do you think I’m a horrible person?”

  He shook his head. “No. You can meddle with me anytime you want. Just not in front of Hattie and Lena.”

  Shelby laughed again, and then sighed. “I’ll really miss you, Callahan, when this is all over.”

  “I’ll miss you, too, babe.”

  He kept his eyes on the road as he spoke, so Shelby couldn’t tell whether or not he really meant it.

  The big house at Heart Lake was all lit up, exactly the way it had been when Mick had first seen the place. Only tonight, in some odd way, all those lights seemed to be welcoming him home. It was a nice feeling, even if it wasn’t true.

  Once inside, Shelby called out to her mother. Once. Twice. After the third yoo-hoo, she looked pretty alarmed and began to tear through room after room in search of the elusive Linda. Mick followed her just in case something was really wrong. When she turned on the lights on the third floor and found the huge space empty, she became really alarmed.

  “Your dad’s probably out in the carriage house,” Mick said, trying to calm her. “Maybe your mother’s out there with him.”

  “Oh, I hope so.”

  He followed her downstairs, across the lawn and into the carriage house, where she hadn’t paused long enough to knock.

  “Shelby!” Harry looked up from his book. “I didn’t know you were coming back tonight, honey. Hello, Mick.”

  “Mom’s not out here?” she asked, looking a little wild-eyed now.

  “No, honey. She left this morning for Denver. Something about that truck that overturned with all her merchandise in it. Then she’s flying on to Los Angeles for a day. She’ll be back Thursday night.”

  Mick could hear Shelby’s sigh of relief as she wilted onto the long curved couch. There was nothing he wanted more just then than to put his arms around her, but it seemed like a good time to let father and daughter have a private moment.

  “I’m going to go unpack a few things, and then hit the hay. Good night, Harry.”

  “Glad you’re back, Mick. Maybe we can get some fishing in later this week if the weather holds.”

  “Great.”

  On his way back to the house, Mick consulted the stars in the clear autumn sky. With any luck some clouds, big ones, would roll in early tomorrow.

  Shelby felt pretty silly for panicking when she couldn’t find her mother, and she was extremely grateful to both her father and to Mick for not making her feel more like a fool than she already did.

  Her father was sitting at the counter that separated the kitchen from the rest of the space. There was a goose-necked lamp beside him, casting its light across the open pages of a big fat book. If she wasn’t mistaken, it looked a lot like one of the old law books that used to line the walls of his office downtown.

  “What are you reading, Dad?”

  He looked up at her over the rims of his glasses. “Contract law,” he said. “I called Myra Phipps, our office manager, and asked her to send me the best text she knew of. Myra probably knows more about the law in general than any six attorneys in the firm put together.”

  “Contracts! Since when . . .” Shelby bit her lip and told herself to shut the hell up. If Harry was boning up on contract law, that just might mean...

  “Don’t say anything to your mother about this, Little Big Mouth. You hear me? I’m just taking a look at this, you might even call it a refresher course, in case your mother needs some help expanding her business.” He narrowed his eyes. “And this is none of yours, Shelby. I want you to understand that.”

  “You haven’t called me that in at least twenty years,” she said, grinning at his use of her childhood nickname. She had been Little Big Mouth while Beth had earned the monicker Stands With Hammer because she was always building things or tearing them apart.

  “Well, you haven’t changed much,” he said. “And I don’t want your mother to get all excited only to be disappointed if I can’t stomach this contract and merger stuff. So keep it zipped, okay?”

  She pantomimed a zipper closing across her mouth. “Mum’s the word,” she said. “Mom’s going to be so...”

  He pitched her a glare that silenced her immediately, and Shelby promised herself that she wouldn’t say a word to Linda Purl because she, too, didn’t want her mother to be disappointed if this business alliance didn’t pan out.

  But it would. Shelby had a really good feeling about it. And the amazing thing was that she didn’t even have to offer a single word o
f advice to Harry about going into business with Linda. Her advice seemed to have gotten through telepathically or by some weird osmosis.

  Boy. She was good.

  She kissed her father good night, and headed back to the house with a smile on her face and every intention of being just as good, or even better, with the man who was waiting for her there.

  Then, just as she reached the top of the stairs—good ol’ Warren G. Harding—she heard Callahan’s curse reverberate along the second floor hallway.

  She knocked on his door, then opened it to find him swearing again as he twisted up the navy blue suit he’d worn earlier today.

  “What in the world are you doing?” she asked.

  “I meant to drop this off at the Good Shepherd Shelter on our way out of town. I feel like the goddamn thing is stalking me.”

  “Okay.” Well, what the hell. She couldn’t buy anything but beige, and he had a personal vendetta with a suit. They were probably perfect for each other. “Do you want to tell me about it, Callahan?”

  “No,” he said, drop-kicking the wadded-up trousers across the room and pitching the purple tie right behind them.

  “Suit yourself,” she said, trying unsuccessfully to suppress a grin that was begging to become a full-blown laugh.

  “Suit myself?” He glared at her, but in a matter of seconds he was grinning, too. “Okay. You win. Get your jammies on, Ms. Simon, because if you want to hear about this suit, it just might be a very long night.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  They snuggled in the big bed in her room. Shelby had lit a couple candles that created an amazing effect with the old-fashioned furnishings. She had also donned a not-soold-fashioned, oversized T-shirt whose front was a replica of her Daily Mirror bus poster, so Mick found himself looking alternately at two versions of the same lovely face.