Ms. Simon Says

by Mary McBride

  “Been doing this for forty years, sonny, and doing it damned well if I do say so myself,” she told him while she poked letters into slots behind her counter. “Nothing gets past me. I’ll tell you what else. I had a healthy respect for suspicious packages long before anybody ever even heard of anthrax, too.”

  He told her to keep up the good work, then asked where he could find the chief law enforcement officer in town, but it turned out they’d fired the last constable for embezzlement a dozen or so years ago, and the town now relied on the county force, headquartered in Mecklin, the county seat.

  “What you want to do,” Thelma told him, leaning across her counter and whispering as if passing along top-secret information, “is talk to the private security man the folks out at Heart Lake have hired. Fella by the name of Sam Mendenhall. He lives there in a little cabin on the north shore.”

  “I’ll do that,” Mick said. “Thanks.”

  He went back to his car, parked on Shelbyville’s only street, thinking that even a rent-a-cop on the premises would make it easier for him to feel confident about returning to Chicago, leaving Ms. Shelby Simon to her fate. At least she was scared now. That was a step in the right direction. It would make her more cautious.

  She’d been shaking like a little leaf and on the verge of tears in the aftermath of the yarn incident. Mick had almost reached out to take her in his arms, before reminding himself that such a response was pretty inappropriate for the Chicago PD. He’d done his job, after all, by getting her safely out of town. He’d alerted the local post office and felt more or less confident that no letter bomb would get past Thelma Watt. Soon he’d put this Menden-hall guy, the rent-a-cop, on notice to keep an eye out for anything or anyone suspicious around the Simon place. What more could he do?

  Sitting in his car, he phoned his captain, Rita Bruzzi, to get an update on the investigation, but the only news was bad news. Apparently none of the letter bombs had any latent prints other than those of the victims who were the last to handle them before they exploded. One guy had died from his injuries in Buffalo. The other victims were stable. But basically, nobody knew anything more than they had the day before about the bomber or his motive.

  Mick swore, and then suddenly, out of nowhere, he heard himself saying, “I’ve got some vacation time coming, Captain. Any problem with my taking it now?”

  Rita nearly choked on the other end of the line. “Did I hear you right, Callahan? You want vacation time? Like the druggies won’t take over the streets if you’re not there to prevent it? Like Chicago won’t burn to the ground again? Wait a minute. Hold on. There must be something wrong with this phone.”

  He could hear her fingernails tapping on the voice box and the sound of static rasping in her throat. Real cute. Very funny. A little humor in the workplace.

  “Am I speaking to the same Mick Callahan who didn’t even take a full day off for his wife’s funeral?” she asked.

  “Kiss my ass, Rita.”

  “I can’t if you’re on vacation.” She laughed. “I’ll fill out the paperwork for you as soon as we hang up. Take as long as you want, Mick. God knows you deserve it.”

  “Thanks. Listen. Keep my cell number handy, and keep me apprised of any developments in this letter bomb case, okay?”

  “Oh. I get it now. It’s a working vacation.” She laughed again. “I take it little Ms. Simon has gotten under your skin.”

  Mick swore as he broke the connection and then shoved the phone back in the glove compartment. It wasn’t like that. It wasn’t personal, for crissake. He was just trying to keep Shelby Simon from getting her pretty head blown off.

  If it was personal—which it wasn’t—then maybe it served as a kind of atonement for earlier sins, a way of doing penance for not being there two years ago to help Julie during a purse snatching that would probably have been pled down to a mere misdemeanor if his wife hadn’t decided to fight back. She died instantly, damn her, still hanging on to the fucking purse that contained a grand total of four dollars and eighty-seven cents.

  That old, undiluted anger boiled up inside him, and Mick slapped the heel of his hand on the steering wheel. He didn’t think about Julie that often anymore. At least, he tried not to. As soon as a memory tempted him, he’d force it out of his brain, usually by drowning it with booze. For some reason, though, ever since he laid eyes on Shelby Simon, those memories were making a vicious and very unwelcome comeback. He told himself it was probably another pretty compelling reason to point the Mustang south and head back to Chicago.

  Instead, he made a U-turn in the middle of Main Street, and drove back to Heart Lake.

  The headquarters of Linda Purl Designs, its home office and veritable hub, was in the third-floor ballroom of the huge old house. Nobody had attended an actual ball there for eighty years or more, and to Shelby’s knowledge, the last time anyone had danced on its beautiful inlaid parquet floor was when she and Beth had sneaked two boys and a boom box up there one summer during high school.

  As she climbed the stairs to the third floor, she wondered who she had been with that long-ago night. Oh, yeah. It was Stuart Borman, who was on his way to Princeton at the end of that summer and who was currently doing time in a federal prison for some junk bond scam. She knew because he’d written a long letter to Ms. Simon two or three years ago, hoping she’d publish his arrogant, self-serving apology in her column. Fat chance.

  Shelby didn’t need to wrack her brain to remember who her sister’s date was that night up here in the ballroom. It was Sam Mendenhall. For Beth, it was always Sam.

  “Shelby!” her mother said, looking up from a yarn color chart on her worktable. “I thought you went for a walk.”

  She shook her head. She’d meant to do that, but then she got to thinking about her schedule for the fall and had decided it would be a good idea to cancel all her appointments and appearances at least for the next two weeks.

  “Mind if I use your computer, Mom, to get in touch with the office?” she asked.

  “Help yourself, honey. I might even put you to work since Terrible Tina, my assistant, took the whole day off for a half-hour dentist appointment.”

  “Tina Jensen? Does she still live around here? Jeez, I haven’t seen her in—what?—twelve or fifteen years.”

  “She’s Tina Cortland now. She married that boy who used to mow our grass. Remember? The one with the ring through his eyebrow?”

  Shelby not only remembered, but she could feel her stomach turn at the mere mention of the Cortland boy’s body piercing. She shivered. “Does he still have it?”

  “I doubt it. He sells Toyotas in Mecklin now. Tina tells me he’s doing rather well.”

  “That’s good.”

  Shelby plopped into the leather chair behind her mother’s big antique desk, swiveled around twice, and decided this was really a fabulous office. One entire wall was fitted out with wooden diamond-shaped bins where skeins of yarn in every possible color and texture were stored according to a system that probably made sense to the artistic Linda Purl but that completely eluded Shelby at the moment.

  Her mother’s treasured dressmaker dummies—Lucy and Ethel—stood in a corner, each of them wearing a gorgeous original design. In addition to several floor lamps and desk lamps, she was pleased to see that the old Venetian glass and brass chandeliers still hung from the high ceiling. Her great-grandmother had bought them in Italy and had them shipped home via the White Star Line to New York and then by train to Michigan. It was nice, Shelby thought, being surrounded by so many family heirlooms, even if she didn’t appreciate them half as much as Beth always had.

  She sighed and turned her attention to the computer screen, happy to see that her mother was already on-line. It was easy to bring up the Daily Mirror’s Web site, but when she tried to log in to the restricted employees’ section, her password kept coming up as incorrect.

  “That can’t be right,” she muttered, typing the seven-letter, case-sensitive password again, more carefully, and on
ce again being refused. “Dammit.”

  “What’s wrong, sweetie?” her mother asked.

  “I can’t log in to the computer at work for some reason. Would you mind if I called them, Mom?”

  “Go ahead. But use the third line. I’m expecting a call on line one any minute now about a late delivery to Neiman Marcus.”

  “I didn’t know your stuff was in Neiman Marcus,” Shelby said, sounding as impressed as she felt.

  “There are a lot of things you don’t know, dear.” Her mother smiled inscrutably.

  “Like what?” Shelby asked.

  “Well . . .” her mother began, only to be cut off by the ringing of the phone. “That’s Neiman’s, probably. I’ll take it over here.” She picked up the receiver on her worktable and enunciated her name in the crisp, no-nonsense voice she tended to use for business.

  With her curiosity put on hold, Shelby punched the button for line three and then the numbers for the Daily Mirror. It wasn’t until the phone on the other end started ringing that it suddenly dawned on her that she had dialed her own extension. How stupid was that? But just as she was about to hang up, somebody answered. The female voice was familiar, but Shelby couldn’t quite place it.

  “Good morning,” she said, her own crisp, businesslike voice reminding her more than a little bit of her mother’s tone. “To whom am I speaking?”

  “Kellie Carter,” the voice, equally crisp, replied. “To whom am I speaking?”

  Shelby’s first instinct was to wonder why her intern was answering her phone. Her second instinct was gratitude that somebody was taking her calls.

  “Kellie!” she said. “It’s Shelby.”

  “Oh, I’m so sorry I didn’t recognize your voice. How are you? Where are you? We’ve all been so worried.”

  “I’m fine, except I can’t get my password to work. The server isn’t down again, is it?”

  “Gosh. Not that I know of.”

  Shelby couldn’t help but smile. Kellie was the only person she knew who was capable of saying “Gosh” and having it sound perfectly unhokey.

  “Okay,” she said. “Well, I’ll try again later. No biggie.”

  “Is there anything I can do for you, Shelby? Do you need anything?”

  “No, thanks, Kellie. You’re such a sweetie.”

  “I just feel so sorry for you.”

  “You’re a doll,” Shelby said. “I’ll talk to you later.” She hung up, and then sat there biting her lip, feeling sorrier for herself than Kellie possibly could. Jeez. She felt once again as if she’d been fired, forcibly removed from her office, from her home, and even from her city. It just wasn’t fair.

  Twelve years of writing her column, of giving advice—all of it good, if she did say so herself—of working tirelessly to see that the name Ms. Simon Says became a household word similar to Dear Gabby, and now what? What was she supposed to do? Sleep late and take walks and live in fear of every envelope and package in the house? For how long?

  Picking up the phone again, she carefully punched in Hal Stabler’s extension.

  “Stabler,” the managing editor growled.

  “Hal, it’s Shelby,” she growled back. “I hate this. I really, really hate it. I want to come back.”

  “You do, and I’ll fire your ass,” he said, “if it doesn’t get blown up first.”

  “Well, how long is it going to be? Are they making any progress on this bomb thing?”

  “It’s only been twenty-four hours, Shelby.”

  That was twenty-four too many in her opinion. “What can I do to help?”

  “Just stay the fuck away. You hear me? The police and the feds are on this, plus I’ve got four guys on the story, including Derek McKay, and nobody’s as good as he is running down leads.”

  Shelby sighed “Well, that’s good to know. Maybe I’ll give Derek a call and...”

  “He flew east to get a look at a couple of the other offices that were targeted. Probably be back tomorrow or the next day. I’ll let him know you want to talk to him.”

  “Thanks, Hal. Oh. And one other thing. Is the server down? I can’t get my E-mail or access my files.”

  “Relax, Shelby, will you? Just consider this a vacation. You’ve earned it. Where the hell are you, anyway?”

  “In Michigan. At my parents’ place.”

  “Okay. Stay in touch. Gotta go. Bye.”

  She sat with the dead phone in her hand, thinking there was something else she’d meant to tell him, but damned if she could remember what it was. Well, at least Derek was on the story. When the cops hadn’t been able to crack the West Side Strangler case, it was Derek who uncovered the fact that the five victims had all lived in the same apartment building, going as far back as 1972. Except it took him four years to make the connection.

  Dammit. Shelby didn’t have four years to waste. Four days, maybe. Four weeks, tops. After that she didn’t care what anybody said. She was going back to work if she had to write her column, print it herself, and sell it on a street corner.

  It made her feel a little better, putting a deadline on this whole bizarre business. She stood up, stretched, and pantomimed to her mother, who was still on the phone, that she was going out for a walk.

  Sam Mendenhall lived in a prefab log cabin on the north side of Heart Lake. The cabin sat well back from the shoreline in a grove of birch trees whose sunlit yellow leaves cast a mellow light through the kitchen window where Mick sat trying to finish a cup of warmed-over coffee.

  The rent-a-cop turned out to be younger than Mick had expected. For some reason he’d pictured him as a potbellied geezer in his mid sixties. But this guy was probably Mick’s age, thirty-eight, give or take a year or two. He was taller by an inch or two, probably six-two to Mick’s even six feet, and probably outweighed Mick by twenty or thirty pounds. If he’d been a boxer, Sam Mendenhall would’ve been in the light heavyweight category. He had a nose that looked as if it had been broken enough to make boxing, or some other contact sport, a significant part of his past.

  After his first sip, Mick had decided the coffee was shit, but he was still withholding judgment on the security guy himself, knowing full well that nobody could assess a man’s skills and competence much less his courage after a mere ten-minute conversation.

  Even so, he didn’t need a thermometer to tell him that the guy’s temperature spiked the second Shelby Simon’s name was mentioned. The reaction was clear and visceral, but its meaning wasn’t, and Mick couldn’t tell if Sam Mendenhall had the basic hots for Ms. Simon or if he was pissed at her for some unknown reason. Great detective that he was, and having spent the past twenty-four hours with the woman in question, Mick guessed it could have been both anger and lust that was visible in the man’s expression.

  While he sipped the shitty coffee and gave Sam a thumbnail sketch of the letter bomb situation, Mick was still trying to make up his mind whether to stay here at Heart Lake or to return to Chicago. Just because he’d put in for vacation time didn’t necessarily mean he was obliged to take it.

  His inclination at the moment was to stay because he didn’t have complete confidence in Sam’s ability to protect Shelby if the need should arise. Mick didn’t know what the problem was with the security guard. But there was definitely a problem. Sam looked fit enough, but the guy was slightly crippled and didn’t seem to be able to walk without a cane or without a certain amount of hard-to-conceal pain. Mick knew that if something happened and if Shelby called the security guard in a panic, it would take him at least a couple critical minutes to make his way out to his battered Jeep, not to mention to drive the distance around the lake to the Simon place on the east shore.

  “More coffee?” Sam Mendenhall hobbled from the stove to the kitchen table with the old-fashioned, dented metal coffeepot in his free hand, the one without the cane.

  Mick shook his head, covered his cup with his hand, and then watched while Sam poured more liquid tar into his own empty cup. Jesus. The guy’s taste buds were probably crippled,
just like his leg. Then, while Mick watched him, the man wasn’t able to fully suppress another grimace of pain as he lowered himself back into his chair. Curious about the injury, Mick was about to inquire, but Sam spoke first.

  “So, when are you going back to Chicago?” he asked. “Dunno.” That was the truth, but Mick tacked on a convenient falsehood. “I need to talk to my captain and see if she wants to extend my assignment. Whenever I do go, I’ll give you a heads-up. I can keep you posted on the investigation, too, from Chicago.”

  “Yeah. That’d be great. Don’t worry about it if you don’t have time. I’ve got a few contacts with the feds, so it shouldn’t be too hard to stay on top of it.”

  Mick nodded agreeably even as he was thinking that those contacts were probably nothing more than a brief acquaintance with one or two lowly field agents in Grand Rapids.

  “I’ve got some out-of-town business coming up,” Sam said, “but I’ll make sure she’s covered in my absence. You don’t have to worry about it.”

  “Great.”

  Sam angled his head in the direction of the eastern shore. “Linda and Harry need to be aware of this situation. Are they?”

  “No. She didn’t want to worry them.”

  “Let them worry,” Sam said. “I’ll apprise them of the problem if you don’t want to do it.”

  “I’ll do it.” Actually Mick had been debating about that, too. He still wasn’t sure if he wanted to override Shelby’s wishes in regard to her parents.

  “Good because . . .” Sam’s eyes narrowed as he gazed out the window. “Speak of the devil.”

  Mick leaned forward to get a better view around the edge of the burlap curtains. The devil was dressed in skintight jeans and a turtleneck sweater that curved and clung and did things he never knew a sweater could do. In the yellow light, her hair took on a reddish cast. She was still far enough away that Mick couldn’t discern her expression, but her walk was purposeful even as it was sexy as hell, enough to inspire a definite thickening in his blood.