Ms. Simon Says

by Mary McBride

  He or she had to know that Mick was getting punch for Shelby and Beth, as well as himself, but since there was no way to tell who’d drink which, Bo must’ve slipped the cyanide into all three cups. Jesus. When he thought that he was the one who’d actually handed Kimmy the poisoned punch, he felt his stomach clench. And when he thought that it could have been Shelby instead, he nearly vomited.

  The ambulance’s siren was shrill now as it approached the town. He strained to hear the spinning tires ahead of him in the field. Had they stopped? He couldn’t be sure, but he picked up his pace, running now instead of walking.

  “Mick! Wait!”

  Goddammit. He turned around. “I told you to stay the hell inside,” he yelled.

  Shelby kept striding toward him in that fucking blue suit. By God, when this was all over, he really was going to burn the thing. It was cursed.

  His mind was racing now, trying to decide whether to keep her with him or to send her back.

  “My mother said she saw Little Bo Peep going out the front door a few minutes ago,” Shelby said. “I thought you ought to know.”

  “I’m glad you told me.” She looked so pale and frightened that Mick decided that he needed to keep her close. Mostly there just wasn’t time to see her safely back inside. “Stay close to me, Shelby. Do you hear me?” he shouted over the now nearly earsplitting scream of the siren.

  The EMS vehicle, its blue and white lights flaring in windows all along Main Street, pulled up in front of the VFW Hall.

  “Thank God,” Shelby said.

  “Stay close,” he said again, taking her hand, listening once more for the spinning tires now that the siren had stopped.

  “Where are we going?” Shelby asked.

  Mick motioned for her to be quiet. He couldn’t hear the tires. He couldn’t hear the fucking tires. And just as that realization dawned on him, the headlights of a moving vehicle appeared ahead of them, just at the edge of the field. He and Shelby stood caught in their glare.

  And then the tires squealed viciously, not because they were stuck in mud, but because the driver stepped hard on the accelerator, aiming the car right at them.

  Shit. There were cars and pickups parked along both sides of the street. The ones on the right were a couple yards closer. They were going to need that smaller distance in order to make it.

  Shelby stood like a doe, mesmerized by the oncoming lights, as if she couldn’t believe this was happening, so Mick curved his arm around her waist and yanked hard, pulling her, pushing her with all his strength toward the curb.

  At the same time, with his other hand, he was aiming his Glock as best as he could at the speeding car. He got off four shots, two at each front tire, and hoped to hell he hit them before he shoved Shelby past the rear bumper of a pickup truck and onto the sidewalk.

  The speeding car lurched left, caromed off a minivan, and then came careening across the street and crashed into a panel truck mere feet from Shelby and Mick. He could see its airbag deploy into Bo Peep’s face, and then the car’s alarm started shrieking.

  Shelby wasn’t even breathing anymore because her heart was pounding the hell out of her lungs.

  “Stay here,” Mick told her mere seconds after the car crashed. “I mean it.”

  “Okay,” she answered, not bothering to add that she didn’t think her legs were working all that well anyway.

  It was all she could do to just maintain her upright stance while she watched Mick cautiously approach the driver’s door with his gun drawn and an expression of grim determination on his face. He reached for the door handle, pulled it open, then stood with both hands on his weapon, taking dead aim at the driver.

  “Step out of the car,” he ordered.

  From her vantage point on the sidewalk, Shelby could see a pantalooned leg emerge from the open door, followed by the ruffles of a skirt, a slender arm, and then— finally—a face.

  “Kellie!”

  Shelby couldn’t even stand up anymore. Her legs just buckled and she sagged down onto the sidewalk. She could hear Mick’s voice then, but it seemed a mile away.

  “Turn around and put your hands on the hood of the car. Spread your legs.”

  “I will not. Get your hands off me. I want a lawyer.” “You have the right to remain silent...”

  With the alarm on Kellie’s car still blasting, and people beginning to stream out of the VFW Hall and down the street, it was like some bizarre dream, some nightmare from which Shelby couldn’t extract herself or shake herself awake.

  There were clowns milling around. Abe Lincoln was checking out the damaged door of the minivan across the street. Little Bo Peep kept screaming that she wanted a lawyer.

  “I’ll get you a lawyer, young lady,” Shelby heard her father say in his best courtroom voice. And then Shelby really did think she was trapped in a nightmare when her father punched a number into a cell phone and then calmly began a conversation.

  “Maureen? Hello. This is Harry Simon. Is Franklin there by any chance?”

  Her mother sat down beside her on the sidewalk, and then Beth the Pirate settled on her other side.

  “Are you okay, baby?” her mother asked, putting an arm around her shoulders.

  Shelby wasn’t quite sure. “I think so. How’s Kimmy?” “They think they got her in time,” Beth said. “They’ve taken her to the hospital in Mecklin.”

  “Thank God,” Shelby said. She looked back at her mother. “Who’s Dad calling? He’s not really getting Kellie a lawyer, is he?”

  “Yes, he is,” Linda said. “He’s calling Franklin Louche.” She leaned closer to Shelby and lowered her voice to a whisper. “Franklin’s new at your father’s firm. And he’s lost every single case he’s tried so far.”

  She wanted to laugh, but she just couldn’t. What she wanted, more than anything at the moment, was to know why.

  Why had Kellie done this?

  “I’ll be right back,” she told her mother and Beth. Then, with her legs still shaking, Shelby stood and walked toward the Mecklin County patrol car where Kellie sat in the backseat with her hands cuffed behind her back, looking less like an innocent Bo Peep than a deranged female in a blond, curly wig. Her lipstick and mascara were smeared. She looked awful. When their eyes met, Kellie regarded Shelby with utter contempt. The young intern who’d always curried her mentor’s favor was looking at her now with hatred on her sweet-young-thing face. The expression nearly made Shelby’s blood run cold.

  “Why, Kellie?” Her throat was so constricted she could barely get the question out. “What did I ever do to...?

  “It’s all your fault, Shelby.” Kellie practically hissed her name. “God! Why didn’t you just do the right thing? Then no one would’ve gotten hurt.”

  “My fault?” She couldn’t believe she’d heard correctly.

  “You stupid bitch. Why didn’t you just quit right away after the letter bombs made it so clear that people hated your stupid column with all its self-righteous drivel and bogus good cheer.”

  Kellie shook her head to fling a hank of yellow curls out of her eyes. “If you’d just resigned right then, the way you were supposed to, with no plan to come back, none of the rest would’ve ever happened. But, no. You were too selfish to give it up.”

  “I don’t understand,” Shelby said.

  “That’s because you’re stupid.” Kellie’s eyes glittered almost feverishly, reflecting the lights of all the emergency vehicles nearby. “You wrote your dumb little column every day, year after year after year, and you never realized what an opportunity it was. It’s a forum. A stage. A fucking grandstand.”

  “It’s an advice column,” Shelby said.

  The young woman rolled her eyes. “That’s all it was to you. And you were obviously content to just have your picture on a few crummy buses. I was going to make it something special. I was going to work a deal with Oprah for a regular weekly spot. And that was just the beginning, Shelby.”

  “Kellie. My God.” Shelby still couldn’t
believe what she was hearing. “This was all because you wanted to write a column?”

  “I told Uncle Hal before I started my internship at the paper. I was very clear about my ambitions. He knew. And he made a lot of vague promises about helping me, but the bastard never followed through, so I just had to help myself.”

  “With letter bombs? With poison?”

  Kellie shrugged awkwardly with her hands fastened behind her. “Well, that was your fault.”

  “I didn’t poison the student at Northwestern,” Shelby said.

  She shrugged again. “He screwed up. He wouldn’t have had to die if he’d just been smarter about those chemicals.”

  “And Derek?” Shelby asked, dreading the answer. Unbelievable as it seemed, Kellie smiled at the mention of his name. “Poor Derek. He really loved me.” There was a touch of wistfulness in her voice now. “He wanted me to turn myself in.”

  Shelby felt nauseous. “So you pushed him under a train?”

  “He fell.” There was no honey or mist in her tone now, and her smile flattened out to a thin, hard line. “Go away, Shelby. Leave me alone. I need time to think.”

  Without another word, Shelby turned away, determined to see to it that Kellie would have the next hundred years with nothing but time to think. She’d done it all for a column? For the dubious fame that came from writing advice to strangers in a newspaper every day? Whether that was insane or purely evil, Shelby wondered if she’d ever truly know.

  And then, all of a sudden, it all seemed to hit her—the letter bombs, the poisonings, the fact that she and Mick had nearly been roadkill tonight—and just as her legs threatened to buckle again, Mick was there, wrapping his arms around her, telling her it was all over, everything was fine, telling her he loved her, over and over again.

  After a week back in the city and a refill of her tranquilizer prescription, Shelby relaxed. Kellie Carter was in the slammer because Franklin Louche couldn’t get her bail.

  Ms. Simon Says was set to reappear the following Monday. Helm and Harris renewed her contract for an additional five years, and Hal Stabler moved her to a bigger office with a better view. Shelby and good old reliable, true blue Sandy had worked twelve and fourteen hours a day reconstructing all the files that Kellie Carter had deconstructed during her internship. The Chicago Transit Authority slapped her picture back on the buses.

  Her mother called to say that Kimmy was home from the hospital, that Beth had moved out of Danny’s apartment, and that Sam’s surgery went okay.

  Life was pretty good.

  Except Shelby hadn’t seen Mick since they drove back from Michigan and he dropped her off at her apartment. They played phone tag a lot. He was “wrapping things up on the street,” whatever that meant. He’d see her soon.

  But it had been a week, and Shelby was beginning to think she’d just hallucinated his feelings for her and the words “I love you” that terrible night. She had the sinking feeling that his job, such as it was, had ended. And so had they.

  Which was really unfortunate since the day after she returned to Chicago, she’d bought him a dog, not just to express her gratitude for saving her life, but because he said he’d always wanted one and because she was just so damn in love with him. She sneaked the puppy past Dave the Doorman because the Canfield Towers prohibited pets of any kind, and she was now sleeping with a baby beagle in her bed instead of Michael Rainbow Callahan.

  Mick parked where he always did, right in front of the Canfield Towers. Before he got out of the car, he speed-dialed Shelby’s apartment.

  “Can I come up?” he asked when she answered. “Hey, stranger.”

  “Hey, yourself. Can I come up? I’ve got a question for you, but I don’t want to ask over the phone.”

  “Right now?”

  Jesus. He’d expected at least an iota of enthusiasm, but Shelby sounded as if she didn’t want to see him at all. He could feel the sweat beginning to foam his Speed Stick deodorant.

  “Right now,” he said, punching through his fear. “How ’bout it? I’m parked out in front. I can be up there in two minutes.”

  “Well...”

  He lost it. “Shelby, goddammit, I love you. What the hell’s wrong? Are you telling me you don’t want to see me?”

  She was quiet a minute on the other end of the line. “I love you, too, Mick. See you in two.” Then she hung up.

  He sprinted through the lobby, yelling “I know. I know. I’ll move it,” to Dave the Doorman, who sat at his desk shaking his head. He almost leaped into the elevator and punched the button for the twelfth floor. He tried to keep the sweat to a minimum as he walked down the corridor.

  After he knocked, Shelby opened the door just a couple inches. “I wasn’t expecting you,” she said.

  “But you love me, right?” He tried to peek past her. What the hell was she trying to hide?

  “I love you big time,” she said. “Completely. From here to the moon and back again. It’s just that I have this surprise for you, and...”

  He couldn’t stand it a minute more, so he pushed the door and went through.

  “What the hell is that?”

  “It’s a baby beagle. And she’s yours. Surprise!”

  Mick felt the most foolish grin work its way across his mouth as he bent to scoop up the puppy and nuzzle her under his chin. “What’s her name?”

  “Dunno,” Shelby said. “I’ve been calling her Baby Beagle. You can name her anything you want.”

  “Baby. I like that.”

  “What were you in such a hurry to ask me, Mick?” He’d completely forgotten. Then he remembered, and he started laughing so hard he could barely speak.

  Shelby finally got exasperated. “What’s so damned funny?” she asked, almost ripping Baby Beagle out of his arms.

  “I came up here to ask you if you wanted to help me decorate my new apartment.”

  “You’re kidding! You’re moving? No more Hattie and Lena? No more Eau de Pine?”

  “No more skid row. I’ve come up in the world, my love. Wanna see my new digs?”

  “Sure. Let me put the puppy in her crate, and...” “You don’t have to. Bring her along. It’s close.” “Well...”

  “Trust me, Shelby.”

  She did. She trusted him implicitly. With her heart. With her life. So, with Baby Beagle in her arms, she followed him out the door and down the corridor.

  But not that far down the corridor. He stopped at Mo Pachinski’s apartment, pulled a key from his pocket, and inserted it into the lock.

  “Wait a minute,” Shelby said. “What is this?”

  “My new place.” He pushed open the door, revealing an empty living room.

  “I don’t believe this!” Shelby stepped across the threshold. “How is this possible?”

  “Well, Mo needed a favor,” he said. “Nothing illegal. Shady, maybe. But strictly within the law, I swear. I even checked with your father.”

  Shelby rolled her eyes.

  “So, Mo needed this favor, and I needed an apartment.”

  She put Baby Beagle down on the thick gray carpet. “Don’t piddle,” she warned her. Then she looked at Mick. “Do I even want to know what you did for Mo?”

  He shook his head. Then he draped his forearms over her shoulders, pressed his forehead to hers, and said, “I was hoping you’d decorate it for me. You know, in all those wild patterns and colors you always dreamed about.”

  Shelby smiled. “The way you always dreamed about a dog.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “We’re screwed, Callahan.”

  He blinked. “What do you mean?”

  She could hardly keep from laughing. “You got an empty apartment so I could do the decorating I always wanted. I got you the dog you always wanted. But we can’t keep the fricking dog in the fricking apartment.”

  “You’re serious?”

  “I’m serious. I’ve been in flagrant violation of the No Pets rule here for the past six days. You should probably arrest me.”

>   “Well, shit. Let me think about this a minute.” He pulled her closer and planted a score of warm kisses on her neck. “As I see it, we have two choices.”

  “Which are?”

  “Getting rid of the puppy is not an option. So, we can move back with Hattie and Lena, where dogs are more than welcome, or we can look for a nice little house with a nice little fenced-in yard for Baby Beagle.”

  Shelby hugged him harder. She had to swallow the lump in her throat. “I love you so much.”

  “I love you, too. But you haven’t answered my question. What’ll it be, Ms. Simon? Skid row or the ’burbs?”

  “I’d go anywhere with you, Callahan.”

  “But which? Hattie and Lena, or the white house with the picket fence?”

  “Tough choice,” she said.

  “How about if I asked you to marry me? What would you say to that?”

  She actually pretended to think about it for a second, before she said the words she’d been longing to say for such a long, long time.

  “Ms. Simon says yes.”

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Mary McBride has been writing romance, both historical and contemporary, for a dozen years. She lives in St. Louis, Missouri, with her husband and two sons.

  She loves to hear from readers, so please visit her Web site at MaryMcBride.net or write to her c/o P.O. Box 411202, St. Louis, MO 63141.

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  PLAY IT AGAIN, SAM

  available in paperback

  December 2004.

  CHAPTER ONE

  On a map, the township of Shelbyville, Michigan, resembled a startled face. Blue Lake and Pretty Lake, each very nearly round, formed a pair of staring eyes, set wide by the dense woods between them. The pinched lobes of Little Glory Lake sufficed for a nose, and just below it, Heart Lake was carved out like an open, astonished mouth.