Bel, Book, and Scandal

by Maggie McConnon

  “Even better,” Bobby said dryly.

  Dad straightened a bit. “You don’t like Elvis, son?” he asked, his face contorting, suggesting that he couldn’t fathom this, someone not bowing at the feet of “The King.”

  Alison looked at her husband and then back at me and Dad. “Would you excuse us for a second?” she asked, taking her husband by the arm and leading him to the back of the dining hall by the bathroom where I had discovered a dead groom a few months earlier. It had been an exciting year, to say the least, and not in the best possible way. Dad and I tried to amuse ourselves with talk of the weather, the number of days until pitchers and catchers reported to spring training, anything so we didn’t overhear a rather spirited discussion between the potential clients for a Memorial Day wedding.

  When they were done, they returned to the table, Bobby’s mood considerably lighter, if not a little resigned. “Thanks for the information. Yes, we’ll take the sampler CD and a menu, if you don’t mind. I’d like to bring my daughter and her…”

  When words failed him, his mouth hanging open in silence, Alison jumped in. “Fiancé?”

  “Yes, fiancé. I’d like to bring them here to see the place, get a sense of what it’s like.” He smiled for the first time since walking into the Manor, but it was still a little strained. “It’s very nice here.”

  Dad clapped him on the back, the larger man lurching forward in his chair with the force of it. “Excellent!” Dad stood, gestured toward the window. “You won’t be sorry if you choose Shamrock Manor. Belfast here is one of the best cooks in America, if not the world!”

  “Thanks, Dad,” I said, looking at the couple. “I can do whatever it is you’d like. As a matter of fact, we had a wedding here in October at which we served duck to the guests.” Bobby looked at his wife, stricken at the thought of something besides a big hunk of meat being served at the event. “Not that I’m suggesting that,” I said. If I never had to poach another duck in my life, it would be too soon. “We have a large array of options for you. Bring your daughter and her fiancé and we’ll do a tasting.”

  “That sounds great,” Alison said. She poked her unresponsive husband in the ribs. “Right? Sounds great?”

  He made a little grunt in agreement.

  “Why don’t I give you a call when we can get Erin and Fez up here?” she asked.

  “Fez?” Dad said. “Is that a Christian name?”

  “It’s short for something,” Bobby said, his eyes wandering around the dining room. “We’re still not sure what.”

  Dad put his hand on Bobby’s back. “Come, lad. Let me show you around.”

  After they left, Alison turned to me. “Sorry about all of that. Great guy, Crawford. But wildly protective.”

  “He wouldn’t be the first and he won’t be the last,” I said.

  She studied my face, searching for something. “You’re back home now. How is that going?”

  “I love it here. I love cooking at the Manor.” Even to my own ears, the words rang hollow, but it was closer to being true than it had been when I first arrived. “It’s where I need to be. Should be.”

  She cocked her head, confused. I hadn’t convinced her. “You’re an amazing chef. If I have my say, the wedding is here. But we’re contending with in-laws, the girl’s mother, Bobby’s intractability.” She rubbed her fingers together. “He’s a little tight.”

  When she saw my confusion, she elaborated. “With the dough. The bank. Moo-lah-di. Thinks we can do this whole thing with a hundred people and about two grand.”

  “Ah,” I said. “Probably not.”

  She shrugged. “To me, it’s a no-brainer. With you, the Manor is the place to have this wedding. I could be wrong, though. We’ve got a lot of opinions to consider.” She gave me a hug, catching me by surprise. “I don’t know if it’s because of that night at The Monkey’s Paw, but I feel like I’ve known you a long time.”

  I let myself be hugged and stopped myself from telling her how long it had been since I had had that kind of human contact. A bad breakup, followed by another bad breakup, had left me a little hollowed out and craving companionship outside of my brothers and parents. Moving back to the Landing had been the right thing to do at the time, but I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that it was kind of lonely. One could only get so much comfort from talking to parsnips all day or even one of my brothers, one more eccentric than the next. “Me, too,” I said. “And please, don’t judge me or the Manor based on what you saw that night in the city. That was a really bad time in my life.”

  “I’ll say,” she said, laughing. “But the broken wine bottle was a nice touch. And P.S., the former president blew me a kiss on the way to the bathroom when his wife wasn’t looking, so I wasn’t terribly upset to see him choke, if only for a little while.” She put a hand to her mouth. “Jeez, did I say that out loud?”

  “You did,” I said. “But I can’t say as I blame you.”

  Outside on the front porch, Dad, recovered from the Elvis slight, was extolling the virtues of a May wedding at Shamrock Manor, pointing out all of the evergreens that would be a backdrop to the photos of the wedding party, and the ones that would be flowering. “Planted them all myself about a hundred years ago!” he said, his voice booming in the morning air. Without hyperbole, Dad was an empty shell. “Do come back with the happy couple. We’ll have lunch. Have a delightful case of Malbec in the basement that I’ve been saving for a special occasion.”

  He did? My next stop was the basement. He was holding out on me.

  Alison gave me another hug. “We’ll see you soon. Thanks for letting us drop in.”

  Dad and I watched them drive away. “I hope they come back,” Dad said.

  “Me, too,” I said but for different reasons. Despite Mr. Crawford’s unrelenting pessimism about the wedding, I liked them. I went back into the Manor and walked past the dining-room door. The newspaper that Alison had brought in still lay on the table, so I walked over and picked it up, ready to throw it into the recycling bin in Dad’s office.

  The paper fell open to a page of advertisements for various antique stores in the area, popular destinations for people from other parts of the Hudson Valley. At one of the places she had circled, I had found some antique cooking utensils that were in a box somewhere in my apartment over Dad’s studio. At another, with Amy, I had unearthed a prom dress from the 1950s that I had worn proudly, a photo of me and Kevin still sitting on the mantle in my parents’ living room despite my mother’s heartbreak that we didn’t go to Macy’s like every other girl and her mother in Foster’s Landing to buy a new dress. I smiled at the memory, sitting at the table in the dining room and flipping through the rest of the newspaper, mostly ads for Christmas trees to be hand cut and craft fairs in the area. Yes, the paper had to go. All Dad needed was another place to exhibit his “installations,” sculptures made from anything he could forage in town. Some were good, but most were downright awful, but no one had the heart to tell him.

  An article caught my eye, nothing more than a little blurb at the bottom of the third page, the photo blurry, the people in it barely recognizable. It was a story about a commune that had originated in the late sixties that was something of a legend in a town about an hour north of here before communes became a thing of the past and turned into “holistic healing centers” or, better yet, “spas.” Living together and massaging one another—and the general public—was a convenient cover, not to mention a source of income, for people who had come together during the Summer of Love and had stayed on cheap land until development began to encroach.

  Maybe I needed glasses. Maybe I was just tired. Maybe the weight of the last many years played tricks on my mind. But my blood turned to ice in my veins as I stared at the photo of the barns and large farmhouse on a big tract of Hudson Valley land and the image of one young woman, long blond hair, her head turned slightly so you could only see her in profile. I traced a finger over the photo, trying to divine the symmetry of her face, the c
urve of her nose.

  The girl in the photo—Amy, wearing what I thought was a necklace she had had when we were kids, a dolphin on a chain—smiled up at me, as if to say, See, you were wrong, Bel. I didn’t die. I lived.

  CHAPTER Three

  “Dad! May!” I shouted across the foyer. “I’m going out for a while!”

  I made haste out of the Manor, wanting to get out of there before anyone in my family could ask what I was up to and I also wanted daylight on my side. The trip to Wooded Lake was going to take an hour and it was December, the shortest day of the year just a few weeks away.

  The article had been full of history but short on actual facts about the actual inhabitants of Love Canyon; it did include a map, with a little pin drawn to the upper right, detailing where it had been in the little burg. I didn’t read the entire article, but skimmed it pretty well, preferring impulse over planning (one of my fatal flaws). I jumped in the car I had recently bought: a 2003 Volkswagen Beetle that Dad had procured on one of his junking trips around the county. It was a faded blue and a little long in the tooth as vehicles go, but it ran, if a little noisily due to a wonky muffler. I never had to go far to do what I wanted to do around Foster’s Landing so it was the perfect car for me.

  It was cold and I realized that as I got onto the highway, with the car blowing cold air, my chef’s coat, which I had forgotten to take off, would not provide the warmth necessary in thirty-degree weather. I blew on my hands, the car finally starting to heat up after ten minutes. In my pocket, my phone buzzed with a text, then another, and then with the ring tone that I had assigned my brother Cargan, a chirpy sound with a requisite tone of annoyance—his usual state with me—that let me know when he, and he alone, was calling. Mom, Dad, and the rest of the crew had the same, standard ring tone because when they called it was the rare instance I wanted to talk to any of them. There were so many of them—six in all, four brothers, two parents—that I wouldn’t be able to remember their individual ring tones. Arney and his wife considered me their personal babysitter; Derry only called when he wanted to complain about Feeney; and Feeney only called … well, Feeney was another story entirely and that story had to do with bad decisions, bail, and “time served.” But Cargan was a different story. Siblings and, more to the point, friends, since we were little, he had kept a lot of secrets from me over the years, but I didn’t hold that against him. Rather, to me, it highlighted his protective side, the side that wanted the best for me and for my life to be worry-free. Sure, it was a shortsighted and naïve approach, but after years of my sticking up for him against my other brothers he had wanted to give it a shot for me.

  He would have killed me if I had taken out my phone while driving, so I let it ring in my pocket; it made a little sound after he left a voice mail message. I wondered what he wanted and then my mind started to wander. Maybe this was the year that Dad had taken a header off the balcony, the Christmas tree being the only thing to break his fall. Or Mom had tried to make a grilled cheese on the George Forman grill in the kitchen (the only appliance she used anymore) and burned the place down. After going through all of the things that had gone wrong and finally landing on “everyone’s dead,” like a true Irish lass, doom and gloom around every corner, I pulled off at an exit and parked the car in the lot of a strip mall.

  He answered on the first ring. “Did Dad fall off the balcony?” I asked, holding my breath until he told me everyone was safe and sound. Even better, alive.

  “Bel, you’ve got to settle down. I was just calling to tell you that I took a look in the walk-in and it looks pretty bare considering we have a wedding in five days. Did you place an order with Belhurst Farms for the poultry?”

  I exhaled loudly. “Yes, I did.”

  Cargan was now a manager at the Manor, but he was also an almost-retired New York City Police Officer on leave after years of dangerous undercover assignments. The latter gave him a keen sixth sense, so I shouldn’t have been surprised that he immediately picked up on the fact that I was in the midst of something that had nothing to do with weddings, my family, or my work. “Where are you?” he asked, suspicious.

  “Nowhere,” I said. Truth was, I didn’t really know. Maybe Parkersville? Maybe farther north? “I don’t know actually.”

  “What does that even mean?” he asked. “Dad said you ran out of the Manor like ‘a house afire,’ even though I really don’t know what that means, either. It makes no sense, a house running anywhere, let alone one on fire.”

  “‘I left in a rush,’” I said, translating “dad speak” for my brother.

  “Well, I got the meaning from context.” I heard the whirr of the printer in the background. “So where are you? And if you can’t answer that, just tell me why you left so suddenly. Dad said you had a good meeting with potential clients right before you ran out.”

  “Yeah, it’s not that, Car,” I said. I debated how much to tell him. He had loved Amy once, probably as much as I had, maybe more, so tell him that I thought I had found her? Break his heart all over again if I was wrong? “There’s a sale at a restaurant-supply store in Wooded Lake and I want a new knife.”

  He sighed. “Bel, you were always the worst liar.”

  “I’m not lying.”

  “Yeah, you are. First of all, there is no restaurant-supply store in Wooded Lake. Second, your voice just went up an octave, a sure sign that you’re lying.”

  “How do you know there’s no restaurant-supply store in Wooded Lake?” I asked. The inside of the car was becoming uncomfortably steamy, the heat now cranking. I turned it off, thinking that going home would be a good plan, but it was not an option. I was going up north to poke around, even if it meant that I sounded crazy.

  “Bel, we’ve been over this,” he said. “I know everything.”

  It sounded like an exaggeration, but he wasn’t too far off. If he didn’t know everything, he knew an awful lot.

  I decided not to tell him. “Cargan, I had to get out of the Manor for a while. To clear my head. I’ll be back in a little while.”

  He stayed silent for a few seconds before lowering the boom. “Is this about Brendan Joyce?”

  He did know everything, at least when it came to me. He knew that after coming home, my life in shambles, I had gone right into another relationship, one that had seemed promising, the guy a “keeper,” as Mom would say. Turns out I had been wrong. Small-town boys can break your heart into a million pieces just like guys in the big city. I still hadn’t cried about it because I had learned not to cry over the years, with my brothers a tough bunch who smelled fear—and emotion—like dogs did. Cargan was different, but sometimes he was still “one of them,” the pack who had a little sister whom they had toughened up to the point where she wouldn’t shed a tear lest she seem weak. A baby. “It might be, Cargan,” I said as breezily as I could, but he knew better.

  “Did he ever give you a better explanation than ‘I didn’t know it was in there’? to account for Amy’s high-school graduation photo being in his wallet?” he asked.

  “Nope,” I said. “That’s his story and he’s sticking to it, as they say.”

  “Stupid story.”

  “The worst,” I said.

  “It’s almost so bad that it could be true.”

  “I doubt that,” I said. “He looked pretty chagrined but not chagrined enough by the whole thing. Made me feel like he was lying.”

  Cargan’s pregnant pause told me nothing. Outside, in the parking lot of the strip mall, people were scurrying about, holiday shopping, running errands, looking both stressed and chipper, happy and anxious. It was that time of year. The holidays had that effect on people.

  “I don’t know, Bel,” Cargan said finally. “He seemed like a good egg.”

  “He did, Car.” I looked out the window at a mother pushing twins in a stroller. My mother hadn’t had such conveniences when we were small. Dad carried me and Mom carried Cargan when we were too big for a baby carriage. I would look over Dad’s shoulder an
d make funny faces at Cargan and he would smile back, laughing uproariously at the funniest face of all, crossed eyes, my tongue out. The other boys, a ragtag lot, would dart and weave on the sidewalk, the admonition of “don’t go in the street!” heard again and again. “He did indeed.”

  “So, maybe he’s telling the truth.”

  That was a possibility I had never considered, cutting the guy out of my life on Halloween, making our first dance together at Kevin and Mary Ann’s wedding our last. “How are you always so sure about everything, Brother?”

  “It’s my gut, Sister. It’s never been wrong.”

  There’s always a first time, I thought, before bidding him good-bye and hanging up. He still didn’t know where I was going and, if I were to be honest with myself, neither did I. I guess, like always, I’d figure it out as I went along.

  CHAPTER Four

  Wooded Lake boasted one high school, two middle schools, and as for an elementary school, I wouldn’t know. I hadn’t passed it during my hour-long drive around the small town, the only major building I hadn’t identified. I went down the Main Street one more time, finally stopping in at a coffee place that looked like it had sprung up recently, cheap rents and a burgeoning hipster population putting this whole town on the map, making new businesses necessary. It was called The Coffee Pot, with a little leaf as its insignia, and I wondered at the double entendre. I went in, and while the place definitely smelled like coffee, there was also a musky undertone to that odor, one that spoke of an old building or something else, something more organic in nature. Being a chef for as long as I had gave me a great nose, one that could identify smells with accuracy.