Ms. Simon Says (27 page)

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 of 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

T
hey 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.

He was in no rush to tell her his sad little story, although he had come to the conclusion that it was indeed time for her to know the truth. From various comments she’d made, especially on the drive today, he thought she had a really mistaken impression of his marriage. Well, hell. So had he until it was over.

It wasn’t easy knowing where to begin, but when Shelby’s warm body moved closer to his and she spread her hand over his heart and pressed her lips to his shoulder, he somehow found the words.

“In the beginning,” he said, “Julie was my lifeline. We were just kids, but wanting to stay with her gave me the courage to tell my mother I’d had enough of traipsing all over the country. And the Traverses, her parents, were good to me. It felt like I had a family for the first time in my life.”

Shelby made a soft little sound. She probably knew better than to make an actual comment, for fear she’d ruin his momentum.

“We got married the summer after we graduated from high school,” he said, almost leaving it there, but then deciding he cared enough for this woman to not hold anything back, no matter how it reflected on his character. For better or for worse. “She was pregnant, so that hurried things up a little. Well, a lot.”

“Did you have a big wedding?” she asked.

“The whole nine yards. The church. The white dress. The bridesmaids. My mother didn’t come, but she sent us a check that covered a weekend honeymoon at a cottage on Lake Michigan, which was where Julie miscarried.”

“Oh, Mick.”

“Save your tears, kiddo. She was thrilled. It meant that all her plans for college and med school were back on track. And I have to admit I was pretty relieved myself. We were just kids ourselves, and nowhere near ready for a responsibility like that.”

“Then what happened?” She kissed his shoulder again. Mick boiled the ensuing eight years down to a couple sentences about how they’d scraped for scholarships and part-time jobs in college while living in Julie’s parents’ basement, and how he’d finally dropped out in favor of the Police Academy, not to mention a bit of privacy in a place of their own.

And then, mostly because he was just so damned tired of talking about Julie, he cut to the chase. “Those last couple of years it seemed like we never had any time to spend together. We had a nice place on Rush Street, but she started a new residency and I started working under-cover, and we were hardly ever home at the same time. I was ready for kids. She wasn’t. Plus...”

He started wishing he’d never gotten into this in such detail.

“Plus what?” Shelby asked.

Shit. Acknowledging this to himself was one thing, but saying it out loud was something else.

“Plus, Julie seemed to be embarrassed by my job. Our deal originally had been for her to go to med school, and then to help finance me through law school. Only when we finally had some money, I didn’t want to quit the force. I liked my fucking job. I liked being on the street. No, I loved it, and she just couldn’t seem to understand that. To her it was comparable to working in the sewer.”

Trying to tone down the harsh resentment in his voice, he took in a deep breath, then said, “And then two years ago she died.”

“What about the suit?” Shelby asked.

“What?”

“You were going to tell me about the suit. Why you hate it.”

“I wore it to her funeral,” he said.

“Well, no wonder you have such bad feelings about it, Mick. And so many sad associations.”

“Sad? No, not sad,” he said. “Try mad.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Yeah, well . . .” He filled his lungs with another shot of air, let it out slowly, and proceeded to tell her the story he’d never told anyone else. And as he told her, he felt as if he were living through it, dying through it, all over again.

He could almost smell the flowers in the funeral parlor. His were a spray of white and pink lilies directly in front of the closed bronze casket. The florist had asked him if he wanted a ribbon with “Beloved Wife” in gold lettering, and Mick had almost puked on the poor old guy. No. No gold letters. The flowers, her favorites, were expressive enough.

It was hard to feel bereaved and numb and angry at Julie for clinging to her purse instead of her life all at the same time, so he probably looked like a zombie in his navy blue Armani suit. He barely recognized people as they reached for his hand and expressed their condolences.

At some point, he’d been staring vacantly across the room when a man in a similar blue suit stared back at him, then slowly made his way toward the casket and Mick. The closer the guy came, the more Mick realized there were tears in his eyes and his expression more grief-stricken than somber.

He extended his hand to Mick and introduced himself. “Dr. Solomon Fellows. We haven’t met yet, but I can tell from your expression that you know who I am.”

Mick didn’t know what the fuck his expression had communicated or who the fuck this guy was, but he stood there as the stranger droned on.

“I gather Julie told you, Mick. We didn’t plan for it to happen, you know. It just did.” He paused to gaze at the coffin, then cleared his throat and said, “Christ, I miss her. The baby was a boy. Did she tell you that?”

Mick had mumbled something. He didn’t know what. He hardly heard his own words for the thundering inside his head.

“No question that the child was mine,” Solomon Fellows said. “The amnio results came in last week. Julie and I thought we could take care of things—the divorce, our marriage—next month in Las Vegas.” His gaze strayed to the casket again, and his voice broke. “But now... They’re both gone. I don’t know what I’ll do.”

Mick didn’t know what he’d do either until he found himself drawing back his fist and smashing it into Solomon Fellows’s nose. The good doctor took out the spray of lilies and two other huge bouquets on his way to the carpet. Whatever transpired after that, Mick didn’t know because he walked out.

“My next lucid thought,” he said now, concluding the whole shitty tale, “was three or four days later when I woke up in the Eleventh District’s drunk tank, still wearing the goddamned suit.”

“Aw, Mick.”

That was all Shelby said. Just a soft “Aw, Mick,” her breath warming his skin as she moved even closer to him.

Then, as they lay there in the golden, flickering candlelight, Mick felt every muscle in his body melt with relaxation and every nerve unwind and smooth out. And damned if he didn’t feel something shift inside his chest, some kind of weight that he hadn’t even known was there. He turned his head to rub his cheek against Shelby’s forehead, so grateful for her presence beside him.

Her soft,
quiet
presence. Maybe it should have surprised him that Ms. Simon, the High Priestess of Help and Advice, the Monarch of Meddlers, considered a whispered “Aw, Mick” sufficient commentary on his plight. If she’d wanted to discuss it at length, if she’d wanted to discuss it
at all,
Mick wasn’t sure that he could’ve refrained from snarling at her or shouting shut up.

But her silence didn’t come as a surprise somehow, and it pleased him that she seemed to sense his mood, and seemed to know that all he needed right now was to hold her close.

Mick blinked. All
he
needed? That didn’t say much about his sensitivity to
her
needs, did it? The heaviness in his chest came back, even more oppressive now, and he wondered about all the opportunities he might have missed with Julie. As he had for the past two years, he wondered what he’d done wrong.

“Shelby?” he whispered.