Bel, Book, and Scandal

by Maggie McConnon

  “And your mother?”

  “She was long gone,” he said. “I think it started out as a good idea, but as time went by, it was clear that it was really just an excuse for him to be the philanderer that he had always been in his heart and nothing else; she took off.” He took his glasses off and wiped his eyes, even though they were dry. “She hung in there a long time. I was a teenager when she left, but I decided to stay. We did stay in touch over the years until she died. Two years ago. Breast cancer.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. Suddenly, I felt a little dirty, my lie bringing back terrible memories for what seemed like a nice guy trying to tamp down the past.

  “Thanks,” he said. He looked up suddenly, directly at me. “Hey, do you want to see it?”

  “See what?” I asked. “Isn’t Love Canyon condos now?”

  “Most of it, but not all of it,” he said. “That’s why you’re here, right? To see what’s left?”

  I didn’t think anything was left, but I played along. “Sure. Yes. I’d love to see it. But don’t you have to work?” I asked.

  “Hey, that’s the best part of being the boss,” he said, getting up and taking off the apron tied around his waist. He called over to a young girl behind the counter, “Hey, Julie. I’m going to be out for about an hour. Cover?”

  “You got it, Tweed,” she said while ringing up the customer in front of her.

  The coffee shop was filling up, but I wasn’t going to point that out to him, now that his reluctance in showing me the remaining part of the place where he had grown up had turned to enthusiasm. Outside, Main Street of the little village was bustling, Christmas lights adorning every door and window of the quaint shops, small decorated trees in pots that lined the sidewalk. He led me through the alley that I had seen the old man disappear into a week earlier. “We’ll take my truck,” he said, motioning toward an old pickup, cherry red, in pristine condition. The inside smelled of whatever oil he had used to clean the leather seats and the dashboard, not showing a hint of the lint that collected on mine. The truck started and idled smoothly, sounding better than the Beetle and riding more smoothly as well.

  We drove through the streets of Wooded Lake, past one of the middle schools I had seen the other day and around a collection of new town houses and condos that had been built to blend in with the surrounding area, looking as if they had been there for far longer than they had. Someone had taken the time to make sure that the landscape remained unblemished by new construction, the complexes reflecting a rustic style and sensibility. He turned off on a dirt road, trees on either side of the narrow lane, the sun struggling to peek through the myriad branches that crisscrossed overhead. It must have been spectacular in the other seasons, spring’s greens giving way to summer’s lush, mossy overhangs and fall’s beautiful metamorphosis from gold to red to amber. I looked out the window and saw a small lake on the right side of the property that we were approaching, a dilapidated barn standing at its edge. A small cabin was next to the barn, tended carefully, two rocking chairs on the porch. Why hadn’t I run here when I was leaving New York? Why had I stopped at Foster’s Landing? This was way more my speed, a place to heal. Home was probably where my heart was, but it was also where my family was, and that complicated things, to say the least.

  “Nice place,” I said. “Is this where you lived growing up?” I asked as he pulled the truck onto a slab of concrete that fit it perfectly.

  “This is where I live now,” he said. “It’s all that’s left over from Love Canyon. Want to look around?” he asked.

  We got out of the truck, and walking across fallen spongy pine needles, the scent redolent in the brisk winter air, he led me to the barn, which still had an odor of horses and manure even though there were no signs of animals anywhere. I wound my scarf tighter around my neck, a little breeze coming in off the water turning my cheeks pink.

  “Nice barn,” I said, wondering why he had brought me here, what he wanted to show me. The interior was rustic but looked as if someone had recently been in here doing something; there was a large space heater in one corner and a long table against one of the side walls. “No more horses?”

  He walked deeper into the barn, sunlight splintering through the gaps in the beams above us. “No more horses. Lots of work. And I don’t have a lot of free time.”

  “So you kept some of the land for yourself?” I asked. “For your home?”

  “Four acres,” he said. “I sold the rest.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “Not sure. Exorcising old demons maybe?”

  “What happened here?” I asked as he walked deeper into the barn, realizing at that moment that I’d gotten in a truck with a guy I didn’t know, driving out to the woods for a tour that was sure to be unenlightening, given what I was seeing. I don’t know what I was expecting—people running around naked? Old hippie men and women frolicking in the freezing lake? The smell of pot wafting in the stiff winter wind?

  Or better yet, the sight of Amy, older now and still wise beyond her years, walking across a meadow, her long blond hair flowing behind her, her arms outstretched as if to say, Bel! I’ve been waiting for you!?

  I stood in the middle of the barn, one shard of light spiking the ground in front of me, realizing that this was a mistake. All of it. If I was going to find Amy in Wooded Lake, I didn’t have to lie.

  I just had to ask.

  Tweed had disappeared into the shadows of the barn, and when he reappeared seconds later his face wasn’t the relaxed coffee-place owner’s visage but the face of someone tense, concerned.

  Before I had a chance to speak, he approached me, lifting a hand to expose his wrist, the one wearing a bracelet that was mostly wooden beads but on which something silver—a dolphin charm—glinted in the sunlight. I resisted the urge to grab his wrist to ask him the real question: Was she here and did you know her?

  But before I could do that, he asked the question I had been dreading.

  “So, do you want to tell me who you really are and what you really want?”

  CHAPTER Eleven

  I backed up a few steps.

  “Really,” he said, coming toward me. “Who are you? Why are you asking around about Love Canyon? Didn’t you learn everything you needed to know on all the stuff on the Internet? There’s nothing here that isn’t there.”

  It was too late for lies. “I’m looking for someone. Her name was Amy. Her name is Amy. You knew her.”

  He stopped dead in his tracks, the space between us just a few feet. “Amy?”

  “Yes,” I said, sorry I didn’t have a photo with me, or the newspaper where I thought I had seen her photo. I took his wrist in my hand. “This,” I said, grabbing the charm, “this was hers.”

  He pulled his hand away. “This is my mother’s,” he said. “She was a swimmer.”

  He was lying. I don’t know how I knew, but I knew.

  “So was Amy. She got it when she broke a school record. From our swim coach.”

  He pulled out his phone and punched at the screen. He held the phone to my face, showing me a site that featured the exact same dolphin charms in all sizes and finishes. “You’re grasping at straws,” he said. “This was my mother’s. And these charms are literally a dime a dozen.”

  I wasn’t convinced, but I let it go. She had been here. I could feel it. “She’s our age. She was barely eighteen when she disappeared. It was right after our high-school graduation.”

  “What did she look like?” he asked, his brow creasing, concerned.

  “Blond. Thin. Athletic.” I looked up at the rafters, willing back the tears that were pressing at the back of my eyes, my throat. All of a sudden, the seriousness of what I was doing became apparent to me and my reaction gave me pause. I knew I was invested in finding her but wondered if this was where I should let the road end.

  “There were a lot of girls here. A lot of women in general,” he said. “All through the years. Archie kept it going a long time.”
<
br />   “I’m talking fifteen years ago,” I reminded him.

  “That would have been around the time I was going to head out of here and go to college.”

  “Were you here then? When she got here?”

  “How do you know she was here?” he asked.

  “I saw the article. In the Hudson Courier.” I turned, starting for the door. The room suddenly felt stifling, like the air was leaving it, floating up to the rafters and out of the patchy roof. “I need to get out of here,” I said, suddenly feeling short of breath. I needed to get out of the barn, out of Wooded Lake, back to the safety and security of Foster’s Landing. “This was a mistake,” I said, suddenly as scared and unmoored as I had been years earlier when I had awoken on the shore, cold and wet, with no one to hear me ask where I was, what I was doing there by myself. It had been my family—my brothers—who had come for me and I needed to remember that, not push them away when I needed their help, a safe place to land.

  I started for the truck, feeling Tweed’s hand on my shoulder. “Wait,” he said. “Wait.”

  I turned and looked up at him, the sun framing his thick hair.

  “I’m sorry. It’s just that it wasn’t a good time here for a lot of different reasons. I can tell you about them sometime. I can think about your friend, if I knew her.”

  “How many people were here at that time?” I asked. “It was the beginning of the end by that time, right?”

  “You’d be surprised,” he said.

  That didn’t answer my question at all, but I didn’t pursue it. There had been nothing on his face to indicate that the name Amy meant anything or sounded familiar at all. Nothing to say, Yes, I remember a young blond girl who arrived in June and left…” whenever she had left. “Is there anyone still here in town who was at Love Canyon?” I asked. “Anyone but you?”

  “Honestly, they scattered like the wind once it was clear that Archie was a fraud, there was no money, the food had run out.” He laughed ruefully. “Once the electricity was gone, around August the year I left for school, that sealed the deal.” He smiled, any of the annoyance he had displayed earlier gone. “I can try to remember more, answer any questions you might have. How about on your home turf?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. I looked around the place, the beautiful log cabin, the old barn, the lake in the backyard. Thoughts of Amy having been here maybe brought the tiniest bit of uneasiness to my consciousness. Here, out in the sunlight, the place seemed like a comfortable existence, a happy one for the right person. “I don’t know.”

  “Think about it,” he said. He pulled a card from his pocket and, picking up my right hand, placed it gently on the palm. “Here’re are my numbers. But you can always find me at The Coffee Pot. That’s where I spend most of my time.”

  I looked around, taking in the surroundings, trying to ground myself again. “A dog,” I said, changing the subject, wanting to move away from what we had been discussing. If I was going to learn more, I was going to need to disarm him, to make him think that my intentions carried no bad intent.

  “’Scuse me?” he said.

  “A dog,” I repeated. “This place is calling out for a dog.”

  “Had one,” he said, walking toward the truck. “Lost him last year. Haven’t had it in me to replace him.”

  “A big dog?” I asked. A guy this burly needed a Lab, a Bernese mountain dog. Something with heft.

  “A Yorkie,” he said, laughing. “He weighed eight pounds, soaking wet.”

  “Interesting choice,” I said.

  We got back into the truck and headed into town. When he parked in the lot behind the store, he turned off the truck and turned his head slightly, pointing to the card still in my hand. “Think about it. Bring a photo with you. I’ll tell you whatever you want to know.”

  Would he? He seemed to be holding back, but maybe I was just paranoid. “Thanks,” I said, before getting out of the truck, putting my feet on the grass next to the parking spot. Before I walked away, down the alley to Main Street on the other side, I called to him just before he went into the back door of the coffee shop, “Hey! Tweed!”

  He turned and looked at me, his hand holding the door open. The scent of rich coffee floated out of the building and into the spaces around me, enveloping me, getting into the fibers of my clothes; I would smell it for hours. “I’m sorry. That I lied.”

  His reaction was a cross between a grimace and a smile. “You wouldn’t be the first to say that. And you won’t be the last.”

  CHAPTER Twelve

  When I got home later that day, Mom called out to me from the office, “Belfast? Where have you been, girl?”

  “Sorry, Mom,” I said, not wanting to go into the whole thing about how I was adult, I could come and go as I pleased as long as my work was done, I didn’t have anyone to answer to. “I was on an errand,” I said, turning my face when she came out into the foyer so that she wouldn’t see the lie written all over it.

  “What kind of errand?” she asked.

  The most important kind, but I’d never tell her. “Checking out a new egg farm.”

  She looked at me, studying me really, seeing when I would crack, if I would crack. “Hmmm,” she said. “Taught my morning Pilates class and you were already gone.”

  Ah, Pilates. The thing that framed everything around here, women in leotards with sinewy muscles who could plank for hours, marching around the grounds of the Manor, searching, it seemed, for that elusive concave stomach, that toned behind. Mom taught the hottest class in town, her sixty-something-year-old body something of a legend among the middle-aged lady set who were hoping to bypass the Not Your Daughter’s Jeans—the ones with stretch—and head straight to the Free People or 7 For All Mankind areas at Nordstrom. “Yes, got up early, decided to take a drive. Trying to establish some work/life balance,” I said.

  “But it was a work errand,” she pointed out.

  Shoot. It was. “Stopped along the way and had a coffee,” I said to underscore that I did have some pleasures in life.

  “So that’s what that smell is,” she said. “To me, it almost smelled like marijuana, but then I thought, ‘Not my Belfast.’”

  “No, not pot, Mom. Coffee. That comes in a pot.”

  I had to get away from her, or the next thing you knew I’d be grounded. She’d take my keys and I would be stuck at the Manor until she decided I was allowed to leave. It sounds crazy. It is crazy. But it’s my life now and I knew this woman; she was capable of anything.

  “You should take my morning class,” she said. “Might help with this work/life balance that you speak of.”

  “Me? Pilates?” I laughed out loud, not intending to. “I don’t think so, Mom, but thank you.”

  I started for the kitchen. “Oh, and Belfast,” she said before I went through the swinging doors. “You have visitors. In the dining room. Kevin and Mary Ann.” Before I left, she called out one more thing. “Family dinner! Six sharp.”

  How could I forget? It was a command performance every week and usually resulted in the proverbial airing of grievances, decades old, and a few tears. Good times, I tell you. Good times.

  I went into the dining room. Kevin Hanson and his bride, Mary Ann D’Amato-Hanson, were the last two people I expected to see on a Sunday, particularly since I assumed that they went to Mass first, after which Mary Ann forced confession plus a round of Stations of the Cross on her husband. “I hope you haven’t been waiting long,” I said, even though I had no idea why they were there in the first place. They were sitting at the same table that Alison and Bobby Crawford had sat at, facing the big windows, looking at the Foster’s Landing River in the distance. In front of Mary Ann was a thick book, the cover padded and white, their wedding album, if I had to guess. When I walked in, Kevin stood and sniffed the air around me.

  “Coffee,” I said. Before he could say it, I held up a hand. “I know. But it’s not. Pot, that is.”

  “I was going to say patchouli, but okay,” he said, t
he guy I had known since kindergarten and whom I had once loved. He smiled at me. “We got our album!” he said with much more enthusiasm than I would have expected from him. He had seemed terrified in the days leading up the wedding, but now that they were officially married he had returned to his old self: hapless, good-humored, a guy without a care in the world, all qualities at odds with his job as a detective with the Foster’s Landing Police Department, working right under Lieutenant D’Amato, his new father-in-law.

  We like to keep it close in Foster’s Landing. All in the family. Among friends.

  I gave Mary Ann a kiss and sat down at the table, holding out my hands. “Can I see?” I asked. I ran my fingers over the embossed initials on the front, the trim around the photo in the center of Mary Ann and Kevin, framed by falling leaves on the great lawn of Shamrock Manor. I remember the photographer’s assistant in the tree, shaking branches as leaves rained down around the smiling couple, an optic that needed a little help in execution.

  “We wanted to show you because they got some nice shots of your food,” Mary Ann said. “The beautiful canapés. The hors d’oeuvres. The duck ballotine.” She looked at me, wonder in her eyes. “It was amazing. The best food I’ve ever had at a party that big. How do you do it, Bel?”

  I looked at her, a pediatric oncology nurse, someone for whom every day brought stress and sadness, wondering how she could think that putting microgreens on top of mini-crostini even warranted the question. She was a saint. An angel. I was a cook. “It’s my thing, Mary Ann. Always has been. And it was my pleasure.”

  “I’m recommending the Manor to everyone for any event they’re having. Some of the nurses at work were here and they are talking the place up, too,” she said.

  I flipped through the wedding album and looked at the photos of her family, small but close, a shot of Kevin and his sister by the windows while his best man toasted him. There was a photo of the boys playing a particularly festive tune by the looks of it, Cargan’s violin bow strings hanging off the end of his instrument, Feeney’s mouth open in song, Derry mid-bang on his snare, Arney jamming on an accordion. In another, I was holding out a tray of duck ballotine proudly, the intricate dinner one that I hadn’t wanted to make but to which I had finally acquiesced, making more duck than I ever had for one party. The guests had been floored and Mary Ann and Kevin had been thrilled. I had to admit that I had been proud of the accomplishment as well, thinking that I was finally settled in at the Manor; I was cooking my food, my way, and that was something I never thought I’d live to see.