Ms. Simon Says by Mary McBride Page A

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