Ms. Simon Says

by Mary McBride

“I’ll get it,” Shelby said, but her mother had already sprung from her chair and was sprinting toward the door, chirping, “That’s probably for me.”

  And it was. Hardly a minute later, Linda Simon, aka Linda Purl, paused in the dining-room doorway just long enough to say, “I’m sorry. I have to take this call. It seems a truck has jackknifed in Colorado and my merchandise is being scattered all over the Rocky Mountains.” Then she disappeared.

  From the head of the table came a grim, fairly hostile silence, and for a brief instant Harry Simon’s face said it all. This was a Maalox moment if ever Shelby had seen one. And suddenly she knew exactly what the problem was with her parents. Bingo! Eureka! How could she not have known? How could she not have guessed? It was just so obvious, and as plain as the nose on her face. Harry Harry Quite Contrary was now on the receiving end of a high-powered career, and he didn’t like it one little bit.

  Ha!

  She picked up her wineglass and took a healthy swig. Instead of being upset by the revelation, Shelby was hugely encouraged. Now that she knew what was wrong—and she was sure she was right—it ought to be easy enough to fix.

  Her father cleared his throat, probably of bile, and like a good host leaned forward and inquired, “So, are you originally from Chicago, Mick?”

  “No, sir. I was born in West Virginia.”

  “Ah. I’ve never been there,” her father said. “I hear it’s pretty nice.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” Callahan replied. “I only lived there a couple of months.”

  Shelby sampled her baked potato, then picked at her salad. Sometimes it was nice having a lawyer for a father. Given the least opportunity, he’d grill her boyfriends so she didn’t have to do it herself. But this time her father had barely framed his second question when her mother reappeared in the dining room with the phone in her hand and a look of concern on her face.

  She handed the phone to Mick. “It’s Sam Mendenhall. For you. He says it’s important.”

  Callahan took the phone, and after a series of terse “Yeahs” and “Okays,” he broke the connection and pushed back from the table. “There’s somebody suspicious hanging around outside. Excuse me. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  He glared across the table then. “Stay here. Inside the house, Shelby.”

  “Well, why don’t I...?”

  “Make her stay here, Mr. Simon,” he ordered. And then he raced out of the room.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Mick had grabbed his Glock from its hiding place beneath the mattress in his room, and then retrieved his flashlight from the car before heading into the dark woods behind the house. It crossed his mind that there might indeed be bears up here in the dense backwoods of this rural county. He swore under his breath, deciding he’d rather face a dozen gang bangers than a single mama bear playing defense for her cubs.

  Edging forward, he swung the flashlight beam in a wide arc, expecting any moment to light up Sam Mendenhall, or if not to catch him in the light, at least to hear the guy limping through the underbrush.

  But he didn’t see or hear a thing. Not until a voice, only a foot or so from his right ear, softly spoke his name.

  “Mick.”

  He pivoted, gun in one hand, flashlight in the other, and there was Sam, who’d apparently materialized out of thin air.

  “Jesus H. Christ,” Mick muttered. “You’re lucky I didn’t put a bullet in you.”

  Sam didn’t appear to be either relieved or concerned. He angled his chin toward a distant spot in the dark woods. “Our stalker’s over there,” he said quietly. “Peeping Tom. Tell Shelby to keep her fucking curtains closed.”

  Mick looked in the direction the security guard indicated, but he didn’t see a thing. “You recognized him?”

  “It’s a kid from town. Eric Shaler,” he said. “The punk’s about to get busted. Listen. I want you to go around that way, come up behind the little bastard, and chase him toward me.”

  Considering Sam’s status as a rent-a-cop versus his own as a longtime member of the Chicago PD, Mick was about to countermand his order—for that’s what it sounded like, as opposed to a strong suggestion—but then he figured it was as good a plan as any, so he nodded and then headed in the direction of the twisted little twerp. As he circled around through the dark, Mick was soon able to discern the boy’s lumpy shadow against the trunk of a tree. Beyond the boy and the tree shone the soft yellow glow of Shelby’s bedroom windows.

  A flicker of pure and undiluted anger flared inside Mick’s chest, a feeling far more personal than professional, as if this Eric kid were treading on Mick’s home turf somehow. He’d been a cop long enough to know that feelings like that weren’t just inappropriate. They made you careless. They could get you killed. Instinctively, he shut down everything that didn’t pertain to the job and to the task at hand.

  Angling silently between the trees, he decided to take up a position slightly up the hill behind the boy. That way, when he flushed him out, the kid would flee in the path of least resistance, back the way he had come no doubt, and straight into Sam.

  “Police, Eric,” he shouted. “Don’t move. Don’t do anything stupid.”

  Naturally, he did, taking off through the trees, crashing through the underbrush just the way Mick had predicted. By the time Mick and his flashlight beam caught up with the kid, Sam’s cane was snaking out a foot above the ground to bring the idiot down. Panicky now, the boy tried to scrabble away on all fours. That was when Sam reversed his cane with the slick efficiency of a Big Ten baton twirler and he hooked the boy by the collar of his denim jacket.

  “You need a ride home, Eric?” Sam asked him, his voice sounding utterly in control, infinitely cool, and maybe a little bit like God’s.

  “Y-y-es-sir,” the kid stuttered. “You’re not g-going to tell my...my mom, are you?”

  God’s voice warmed a degree or two. “Well, that might be negotiable. Why don’t we talk about it on the ride to town?” He looked at Mick. “What do you think, Lieutenant Callahan? Care to come along and join the negotiations?”

  “Sure. Why not?”

  Sam’s Jeep was parked on the gravel road just at the edge of the woods. The negotiations amounted to Sam telling Eric he expected him to keep his nose clean, his pants zipped, and if he ever caught him behind the Simon house again, he’d beat the shit out of him.

  “So, you won’t tell my mom?”

  “Not this time. Next time, though, if there is a next time,” Sam warned, “it’ll be on the front page of the Mecklin County Times and you’ll be in a holding cell in the county jail with somebody looking at you like dessert. You hear what I’m saying?”

  “Y-yessir.”

  Shelby was in the kitchen, covering Callahan’s barely touched plate with a foot of plastic wrap when the telephone rang. She grabbed it on the second ring, not because she was faster than her mother or closer to the phone, but because her mother’s hands were currently wet and soapy from rinsing dishes.

  Hello was hardly out of her mouth when Sam said, “False alarm, Shelby. Your boyfriend and I are going to have a few beers. Don’t wait up.”

  “He’s not my . . .” Too late. Sam had already clicked off. Shelby swore as she slammed the receiver back into its cradle.

  “What’s up, kiddo?” Her father, who had been smoking a cigar out on the porch, appeared in the kitchen doorway, his forehead creased and his mouth drawn down with worry.

  “Nothing,” she said. “That was Sam. Apparently it was just a false alarm. He and Callahan are heading into town for a beer.”

  “Well, that’s good,” her father said. He pitched his cigar out onto the lawn before coming through the screen door and sauntering toward the sink. “It’s getting late. Guess I’ll head out to the carriage house and watch the Lopez-Casteneda fight on TV.”

  “Have fun,” her mother said, coolly offering her cheek for his kiss even as she continued to run a salad plate under the faucet.

  Shelby, on the other hand, when it
was her turn, threw her arms around Harry Simon’s neck. “Good night, Daddy.”

  “Good night, little girl. It’s nice having you home.” Then he whispered, “You should probably stay inside tonight, honey, false alarm or not. Just in case.”

  “I will.” She planted a loud mm-wah of a kiss, half on his shirt collar, half on his warm neck before letting him go.

  “G’night, Beauty,” he called to her mother as he went out the door.

  Shelby finished securing the plastic wrap over Callahan’s plate before putting it in the refrigerator. Hearing her father’s favorite nickname for her mother nearly broke her heart. What did they think they were accomplishing with this ridiculous separation when it was perfectly obvious they still loved each other to death?

  Frustrated, she closed the refrigerator a little harder than necessary, rattling all the bottles and jars on the inside of the door, and then turned toward her mother at the sink and launched a not-so-subtle trial balloon. “Dad’s having a hard time coping with the wild success of Linda Purl, I guess.”

  Her mother reached for another plate to rinse under the hot stream of water. “Oh, I don’t know about that,” she replied, the Queen of Casual. Then she looked over her shoulder and added, “It sounds as if Mick and Sam have hit it off rather well, don’t you think?”

  Touché. Good one, Mom. Shelby didn’t want to talk about Mick any more than Linda wanted to talk about Harry, apparently. So, rather than answer, she asked if she could help with the rest of the dishes.

  “I’m almost done,” her mother said. “You go on and do whatever. Are you tired?”

  “Maybe a little,” Shelby lied. She looked at the half bottle of Merlot on the counter. “Want some more wine, Mom?”

  “No, thanks, honey. I’m thinking about having a little dish of ice cream later.”

  Shelby reached into an upper cabinet for a wineglass. “Well, maybe I’ll just take this upstairs for a little nightcap. Good night, Mom.”

  “Night, sweetheart. I guess we should leave the front door open for Mick. Chances are we’ll both be asleep by the time he gets back.”

  “Yeah,” Shelby said. Okay. One more try. “Unless you want to sit up and talk a while about... you know... things... sweaters at Neiman Marcus... sweaters lost in the Rockies... you and Dad.”

  “Not tonight, honey,” her mother said in a voice that was as sweet as honey and as firm as concrete.

  Shelby sighed. “Okay. Maybe later. G’night, Mom.”

  The Penalty Box in the little burg of Shelbyville was no different from any corner bar in Chicago that Mick had frequented over the years, with lighting provided by Coors and Anheuser-Busch, and warmth provided by too many bodies packed into too few square feet, pretty typical of a Friday night anywhere.

  He and Sam Mendenhall sat shoulder to shoulder at the bar. After one beer, the rent-a-cop had switched to coffee. Since Mick figured he had the benefit of a designated driver this evening, he was halfway through his third mug of draft.

  Ol’ Sam, it turned out, was a babe magnet. It had to be the cane, Mick decided as he watched women of every age and size stop to flirt with the guy on their way to and from the rest room. The blond, ponytailed barmaid had just leaned across the bar, refilling Sam’s coffee mug and spilling a considerable amount of cleavage in the process, to ask the security guy if he wanted her to come out to the lake after she got off work. When he answered, “Maybe some other night, Rosie,” little Rosie looked like she was going to cry.

  “Got a date for the Masque?” she asked him then. “It’s next Friday, you know. You’re planning to go, right?”

  “If I’m here,” he replied. “I’ll be out of town for a couple days. But if I’m here, babe, I’m yours.”

  Rosie fairly glowed with contentment as she went back to drawing mugs of cold lager.

  “Out of town?” Mick asked.

  He nodded. “Yeah. I wanted to talk to you about that. About making sure Shelby’s covered while I’m gone.”

  “No problem,” Mick said. “Looks like I’ll be hanging around here for a while. Probably through next weekend, anyway.”

  “Great.” He blew across the surface of the steaming brew. “Shelby will probably drag you to the Masque, you poor bastard.”

  “The what?”

  “Masque.” He spelled it. “It’s the town’s big annual blowout. Fourth of July, Valentine’s Day, New Year’s Eve, and Halloween all rolled into one. Especially Halloween. Everybody wears a costume. There’s even a queen.”

  Mick tried not to appear too jaded or indifferent. “Cute,” he said, feeling his lip curl slightly in spite of his good intentions

  Sam laughed. “Hey. It’s something you have to grow up with, I guess.”

  “You grew up here?”

  “Yep. How about you? Where are you from? Chicago?”

  “Yep,” Mick said without embellishment, then asked, “So, where are you off to?” Not that it was any of his business. Not that he even cared, really. He was just making Friday night bodega conversation, something that wasn’t exactly his long suit. In all honesty, he figured he didn’t have much in common with the rent-a-cop who hailed from Shelbyville, but his question was at least a rung or two above “How ’bout those Cubs?”

  “Washington,” Sam said. “I’m going to have some tests done at Walter Reed.” His gaze strayed to his bum leg by way of explanation.

  “That’s the army hospital.”

  “Right. That’s what I did before.” He smiled kind of mournfully. “Before this.”

  Now Mick was genuinely curious. This put the gimp in a whole new light. “Infantry? Artillery?” he asked him.

  “Special ops.”

  Ah. Well, that explained the earlier aura of command in the woods and probably also the facility with which Sam had wielded his cane to capture the fleeing perp. So, he wasn’t just your average rent-a-cop. That was good. Mick had a healthy respect for military training, and he admired the ingrained discipline of his fellow cops who’d come out of the army or the Marine Corps. There were times he thought maybe he could use some of that himself. At any rate, he felt a lot better about leaving Shelby up here in the backwoods, if and when he decided to go back home.

  He lifted his beer mug in a toast to his companion. “Good luck at Walter Reed,” he said.

  “Thanks.”

  Then he was about to ask, “So, what happened to your leg?” when another highly perfumed member of the Sam Mendenhall Fan Club wedged herself between them, precluding further conversation.

  Shelby refilled her wineglass with the last of the Merlot, and leaned back against the brass headboard. The house was as quiet as a mausoleum, which both pleased her and unsettled her. This way she’d be able to hear any intruder larger than a field mouse, but then she’d have to deal with it, and at the moment her self-defense skills were... well... wobbly at best, or nonexistent according to some people she’d rather not think about right now.

  Gazing around her, she was glad that Beth had kept all the monster pieces of marble-topped walnut furniture that had always decorated this room. Thank heavens her mother had forbidden Shelby from turning it into a typical teenager’s den with a white-laminated dresser and bookcases, black lights, BeeGees’ posters, and a waterbed when she was in high school. This was so much nicer, not to mention a whole lot neater than when she was in summer residence here. Jeez. Just the sand on the floor back then could’ve contributed to a new shoreline for a man-made lake.

  When people wrote to Ms. Simon complaining about their children’s messy rooms, Shelby always responded with her laissez-faire advice. Let them have their space, she’d answer. Pick your battles carefully, moms and dads. A messy bedroom isn’t a battlefield, after all. It’s a son’s or daughter’s sanctuary.

  Ask Alice disagreed. Bless his tidy, tyrannical, Neo Nazi little heart. Only last week he/she had written: “Organization is the true key to success, and it’s never too early to learn.” This bit of wisdom came in response to the mo
ther of a four-year-old with a neatness disability.

  Phooey. Shelby took another sip from her glass. Now that she was on the sidelines, more and more people would be turning to Alice for advice. It was a measure of Shelby’s devotion to her column and her confidence in her own advice that the mere thought of awful Alvin Wexler becoming the country’s foremost adviser nearly made her sick to her stomach.

  “I gotta get back to work.”

  Oh, great. Ms. Simon was talking to herself now after a mere two days in exile. In another few days, she’d probably be writing Ask Alice herself, begging for advice. After that, who knew? She might strip off all her clothes and walk straight out into the lake until the cold water closed over her head.

  On the upside, she supposed, was that after twelve years of doing her column, any tendency she might’ve had to take her career for granted was gone. She would be returning with renewed appreciation for every letter she read and every piece of advice she offered.

  Feeling a bit less glum, Shelby swallowed the last of the wine, set the glass on the antique marble-topped nightstand, and reached to turn off the lamp just as a car door slammed in the driveway at the bottom of the hill.

  That would be Sam dropping off Callahan. A quick glance at the clock told her that Michael Rainbow Callahan was twenty minutes shy of turning into a pumpkin at the stroke of midnight. Then she wondered what the two of them had talked about over their beers.

  Well, two guesses what Sam had said about Shelby, the Evil Buttinski, and how she’d altered the course of his life with her “good” advice to Beth. She was surprised he’d been civil to her this afternoon, considering the grudge he bore her for something that really wasn’t her fault. After all, Sam was the one who’d immediately gotten married to that bimbo in Georgia and had put an end to any future plans with Beth.

  Of course, he was single now, wasn’t he? And so was Beth. There was still time to fix things, to repair the damage she had done. If she could only get the two of them together and...

  Oh, wait—wait a minute—hold the phone—why hadn’t she thought of this before? Next Saturday would be Halloween, which meant that Masque was coming up. Masque, with the entire town in attendance and in disguise. Even a flock of summer people made it a habit to come back at Halloween for the festivities. It was the only time her parents had ever brought their daughters back here after the summer was over. To participate in Masque, the celebration founded by Orvis Shelby, Jr., half a million years ago.