Bel, Book, and Scandal

by Maggie McConnon

  I went up to the counter and ordered an espresso and being as it was snack time—who am I kidding? Every minute of my day is snack time—added a chocolate biscotti to my order. Before I walked away, I took another look at the guy behind the counter, who was around my age and sporting the longest, bushiest beard I had ever seen. He asked me what I wanted. I sniffed the biscotti.

  “Made fresh today,” he said, and winked at me, giving me pause.

  I held up the biscotti. “Will this make me feel better than I was hoping? A little lighthearted?” I asked without asking of its ingredients directly. “Light-headed, even?”

  He gave me a quizzical look. “I hope so?” he said. “It’s not like it’s magic biscotti or anything like that.”

  “‘Magic biscotti’?” I asked. “Do you have other baked goods here with magic properties?” The last thing I needed was to disappear from the Manor, drive around a town I didn’t know, and then get as high as a kite, so high that I would be forced to spend more time here than I originally anticipated. I hadn’t seen any hotels and my car wasn’t what you’d call comfortable for sleeping.

  He leaned on the counter and I could see that behind that bushy beard was a very handsome guy. Not that I was noticing that kind of thing these days. I had sworn off men if not for good, then at least for a really long time. They all stunk, in my opinion, Cargan being the only standout. And my father, of course. And they were my relatives, so it was weird. Maybe I had set the bar too high, but in my heart I knew that I had set it too low. On-the-ground low. Maybe I would get high and think about that, an altered state being just what the doctor ordered.

  He continued to look at me, my face giving away a mental tug-of-war going on behind my eyes. “Biscotti’s not magic, Chef McGrath,” he said, pointing at my chef’s coat when I cocked my head, confused as to how he knew me.

  “Oh, right, that,” I said. “So, the name here, The Coffee Pot, the leaf insignia…”

  “No double meaning,” he said. “I forgot when I opened it where exactly I was setting up shop. I root for the Toronto Maple Leafs. That’s where the leaf came from. The maple leaf.” He lifted his chin toward what looked like an original Woodstock poster over the big grinder. “Summer of Love really cast a spell around here.”

  There were a couple of stools at the counter in addition to a bunch of mismatched tables and chairs. I sat on one of them and opened my biscotti; it wasn’t magic, but it could have been. I held out a hand. “I’m Belfast. Belfast McGrath.”

  “Tweed Blazer,” he said, holding out his hand. “And before you ask, yes, that’s my real name, and no, my mother didn’t smoke a lot of weed. She just liked the way it sounded.”

  I resisted the urge to laugh. I thought “Belfast” was a lot to carry around, but at least I wasn’t named after an article of clothing. “You could pronounce it the French way,” I said. He looked at me quizzically, so I explained further. “Blah-zay.”

  “I don’t think that would make things better,” he said, picking up a rag and wiping up a sticky spill on the scarred oak. “Call me crazy.”

  I took a sip of my espresso. “Crazy Blazer would be even worse,” I said.

  It took him a minute, but he smiled and pointed at me. “Ah, a jokester.” He leaned on the counter. “So what brings an honest-to-goodness chef up to these parts? Please tell me you’re looking to open a farm-to-table restaurant on Main Street. I can be your coffee vendor.”

  “Oh, sorry,” I said. “Although that’s not a bad idea. I bet you have some great farms up here.”

  “The best,” he said. “My neighbor raises chickens, so we always have incredible eggs. And their chickens are all free-range and fed an organic diet.”

  I thought about the fresh ham and prime rib I served at 80 percent of the weddings I cooked for at the Manor and shuddered internally. I would have loved to do something with free-range chickens, but showing Dad the difference in price and having to listen to him scream about “organic this and holistic that!”—two mutually exclusive things—was not what I wanted to do. Yes, we had had duck at Mary Ann and Kevin’s wedding, but that was only because Mom and Dad thought Mary Ann walked on water and would have given her the sun, moon, and stars if they could have.

  “Real estate’s really cheap,” Tweed said. “Get in before all of the city people come up here and start snapping everything up.”

  “As tempting as that sounds,” I said, “I have a job and a life in Foster’s Landing and no funds to start a restaurant right now. Heck, I barely have enough money to go to a restaurant, never mind open one.”

  “So what brings you to Wooded Lake?” he asked. “I’d like to think it’s my delicious coffee, known for miles around, but something tells me it’s something else.” He clapped his hands together and waved them in the air, the flour that had been on his hands creating a cloud between us. “Magic, perhaps?”

  Maybe a little bit, I thought. “Actually, I was wondering how I could find Love Canyon? I’ve been driving around, but there’s no sign of it.”

  He stopped smiling and stood up straight. “You’re about twenty years too late on that one.”

  “As in it’s gone?” I asked.

  “Yep. Gone,” he said. “Bought by a developer. It’s condos now. Mostly.”

  That explained it. That’s why I couldn’t find any evidence that the place ever existed in this little town. But just bringing it up had erased any of the banter that Tweed and I had going and the subject of Love Canyon seemed to be one he was suddenly not interested in talking about. He turned and went back into the area behind the place where the baristas made coffee, and didn’t come out again. I flagged down a girl behind the counter and had her ring me up, my espresso suddenly not so tasty, the biscotti tasting like paste in my mouth. This had been a mistake. The people of Wooded Lake had moved beyond Love Canyon and didn’t want to talk about it; that much was clear. I pushed my little cup toward the barista and got up, heading for the door.

  Outside, it was getting dark and it was colder than when I had entered; I hoped the Beetle hadn’t gone back to arctic temperatures in the short time I had been in the coffee place, but I didn’t have high hopes. The car was across the street and I waited for the light traffic to pass before stepping out into the road.

  “That’s not a happy subject around here,” a voice behind me said. I turned and an older man, nattily dressed in a blue suit and a bow tie, a scarf around his neck, was standing close to the door of the barbershop a few feet north of the coffee place.

  “What’s not?” I asked, stepping onto the sidewalk.

  “Love Canyon,” he said. “Lots of bad memories in Wooded Lake.” His hair, white like cotton, brushed his shoulders, lifting slightly in the breeze that seemed to seep into my bones.

  “Why’s that?” I asked.

  “There’s been a lot of interest in it lately, the anniversary of its closing coming up, but it wasn’t all sweetness and light there,” he said. “You can do a search. Look online. That will tell you everything you need to know.” He turned away from me, looking over his shoulder. “And some things you probably don’t.”

  “Like what?” I called after him. “What things?”

  But he was gone, ducking into an alley next to the barbershop. When I followed him into the same alley, I found that it was empty, the only sound a cluster of dead leaves scuttling along the edge of the brick buildings on either side.

  I don’t know what I had hoped to find. That Amy would just appear and all would be explained? Forgiven? I felt stupid for having been so impulsive.

  One thing was clear, though: I was coming back up here. And next time, I’d have a plan.

  CHAPTER Five

  Back home, the Manor was shuttered for the night, the only light cast by the big chandelier in the foyer, which was always blazing and could be seen through the large transom over the door. I pulled the Beetle into the spot next to the stairs that led to my apartment and let myself into my darkened home. The bulb had bu
rned out over my door, and like everything else at Shamrock Manor, it would only be replaced after being out for far too long. My parents, brothers, and I were nothing if not practiced procrastinators and that trait would be our downfall eventually.

  I threw my purse onto the counter, poured myself a glass of Merlot, and grabbed a plate of cheese from the refrigerator. A sleeve of crackers completed my meal and I went into my bedroom where my computer sat on my bed, right where I had left it that morning after I had checked the weather for the upcoming Saturday wedding. I didn’t have a desk; heck, my nightstand was one of those particleboard rounds on a spindly tripod covered with a tablecloth. I positioned myself on the bed, carefully placing the wineglass on the nightstand, making sure that it wouldn’t tip the table over, the wine filled to the brim. I opened my laptop and typed in “Wooded Lake,” something I should have done before I had driven there, a fool’s errand if there had ever been one.

  While I hoped that a photo of Amy would jump out at me and assure me of her existence past that one night on Eden Island, every photo of Love Canyon was blurry, faded, or both. It seemed the residents of the commune had been notoriously camera shy and the photos that did exist were taken by someone considered a “mole,” the brother of a girl from Ohio who had disappeared years earlier and whom he had traveled east to find. The guy, one Gary Mertens, had been discovered as not really being into free love and communal living and banished from the place; the article I read said that he had eventually found his sister, Chelsea, living with a poet in Greenwich Village. She was already gone by the time he got there. She went on to fame as a painter and sculptor but never publicly spoke of her time on the commune.

  A Svengali-like leader, the article said, had started Love Canyon in response to the “repressive, capitalist, patriarchal society” that existed in the United States at the time, and invited people to share “brotherhood, sisterhood, love and light” among the tall trees of the village of Wooded Lake. Sounded like a load of hooey to me, but I was a modern-day Monday-morning quarterback, looking at the whole endeavor through a historical looking glass that made the whole idea sound quaint, if not a little kooky. I couldn’t imagine Amy getting caught up in something like that. A commune? Although all she had wanted was to get out of Foster’s Landing, its tiny landscape and small borders hemming her in, a place an hour north and boasting free love didn’t seem her style. She wanted to see the world, to spread her wings. That meant getting out of here and going somewhere else, somewhere bigger and better, not a town that was so much like Foster’s Landing.

  I couldn’t imagine that Wooded Lake had been her idea of flying the coop.

  The Svengali’s name had been Archie Peterson before he changed it to Zephyr. The land had been family owned, deeded to him by his late father as sole owner upon the man’s passing. It was fifty acres and had once been a working dairy farm until it had been turned into a place that promised “serenity and hope in a battered world,” a contention for which the writer of the article, a man named Dave Southerland, could barely contain his disdain. The piece was tabloid journalism at its best and contained adjectives that portrayed the writer’s bias: “Hokey.” “Misguided.” “Unrealistic.” And finally, “Unsustainable.”

  No mention of the people who had been there, just that the population skewed more female than male, which didn’t strike me as a huge surprise. I suspected that if someone changed his name to Zephyr and opened a place called Love Canyon, his idea was to get as many women up there as possible. I’m not sure his idea would work in today’s world, but back then his promise of communing with nature, living off the land, and finding respite from what was a very turbulent time probably appealed to a lot of people, women in particular. Be a feminist or stay in your traditional lane? Protest Vietnam or hide in your suburban tract home? Vote for Nixon or probably the safer choice, Hubert Humphrey? When I thought about all of that, my decision to come back to Foster’s Landing and live with my family seemed a simple one, even if it was setting up to come with its own challenges. Moving to a commune had never crossed my addled mind, thank God. It had crossed some people’s, though, and that had kept the commune working in some capacity at least until fifteen years prior when it seemed Amy had arrived. It had disbanded not too long after.

  What had taken her there exactly? And why hadn’t she told me that this was her plan all along? Maybe it hadn’t been. Maybe it had been a stop along the way to somewhere else, somewhere great. Maybe I’d never know. But I was definitely going to try to find out.

  A knock at the door interrupted my mental gymnastics. Cargan was standing in the dark, looking up at the burned-out bulb. “Why didn’t you tell me that the light needed replacing?” he asked when I opened the screen door to let him in.

  “I could fix it myself, but why bother when I can wait a year and then only do it because I’ve fallen down the stairs in the dark?”

  “Good point,” he said, looking into my bedroom on the right. “Hey, got any more of that wine? I could use a drink after today.”

  I went into the bedroom and grabbed my glass. In the kitchen, I poured a healthy glass for him in a stemless wineglass that said “Queen of Everything” on the front. Before taking a sip, he looked at me. “Really? This is the only glass you have for me?”

  “They didn’t have ‘Nosiest Brother Ever,’ so this will have to do.”

  He took a seat on the couch and put his feet up on the stained and scratched coffee table. “Want to tell me the real reason you ran out of the Manor?”

  I looked into my wineglass, hoping that I could find the answers there. I had tried that before and knew it wasn’t a surefire way to the truth. “I really don’t, Cargan,” I said. In my car, visible on the front seat, was the article about Love Canyon and the photo of Amy. I wondered if he saw it and already knew where I had gone. “Sometimes I get a little…” I looked for the right words. “… hemmed in? And I need to get out of here for a while.”

  “Never like this,” he said. “Was it something about the clients that came in? Did they upset you?”

  “Not at all. They were lovely. The father of the bride was beside himself at the thought of his daughter getting married, but the stepmother was really nice.”

  “Dad said that they were there that night. At The Monkey’s Paw.” He took a sip of wine. “That it?”

  I didn’t realize I had such a convenient cover. “Yeah. That’s it,” I said.

  He studied me for a while, seeing if I would crack, but I held his gaze. “What are the chances?”

  “That they came here? Today?” I asked, shrugging. “One in a million, I suppose. But the stepmom is friends with the woman who wanted me to do that reality show, so maybe Shamrock Manor was always on their radar.”

  “Maybe,” he said. “Who’s the friend?”

  “Max Rayfield,” I said. “If I recall, Max is married to a cop and so is Alison, the stepmom.”

  “Names?” Cargan asked. It had been a while since he had been “on the job” and when he was he was deep undercover, but I still suspected that he knew everyone and that his reputation, even just in name, preceded him.

  “I don’t remember Max’s husband, but Alison’s husband is Bobby Crawford,” I said. “Ring a bell?”

  He nodded. “Yeah. Good reputation.”

  “Well, that’s good,” I said. “I was hoping the wedding wouldn’t be filled with a bunch of crooked cops.”

  He ignored that. “When’s the wedding?”

  “Memorial Day.”

  “And they didn’t book?” he asked. “That’s not a lot of time.” To Cargan, six months out might as well have been two weeks from now. “That’s a busy weekend.”

  “Do we have it booked?” I asked.

  He also had a photographic memory, or something approaching one. “Booked on Saturday, free on Sunday.”

  Back-to-back weddings. Big fun. We barely had time to recover from Saturday before Sunday was upon us.

  “Did you get contact info?�
�� he asked.

  “I’m sure Dad did,” I said.

  “Since you seem to have a relationship with the stepmom, why don’t you give her a call and try to close the deal?” he asked. “We’re in no position to lose a booking, and even though back-to-backs are the worst, it’s money,” he said, rubbing his thumb and index finger together.

  “I wouldn’t say we have a ‘relationship,’” I said. Witnessing my complete and total meltdown at The Monkey’s Paw should have ensured that Alison Bergeron and Bobby Crawford wouldn’t want anything to do with Shamrock Manor, but there they were, looking at the place, leaning toward it, if Alison’s enthusiasm for the place had been any indication. She liked good food and I made good food. That might be all the incentive she and her husband needed to pull the trigger, as it were.

  “I’ll call them tomorrow,” I said. I yawned, signaling to my brother that it was time to hit the road. “I’m exhausted, Car.”

  “Me, too,” he said.

  I walked him to the door. “Did Dad get the tree secured?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “Nah. Found him on top of it in the middle of the foyer. Thankfully the tree has soft needles and broke his fall. Gave him a nice black eye, though.”

  The scenario he described had been the one I had been most concerned about coming to fruition. After confirming that Dad’s injuries were minor, I said, “I’m sure Mom has some old Irish remedy for that.”

  “I don’t want to know,” he said, his hand on the door handle. “She once made me a ‘poultice’ for a bruise I got playing soccer, I smelled like cabbage and Vicks VapoRub for a week.”