Bel, Book, and Scandal

by Maggie McConnon

  He shrugged again, his go-to nonanswer.

  “He’ll be here soon.”

  “Huh.”

  “Tell me, is Tweed going to make it?” I asked. “Live?”

  “Hard to know. He lost a lot of blood,” he said, looking chagrined.

  It hit me then. His hair was shorter now and he wasn’t quite as nattily dressed as the first time I had seen him, the first time I had come here. “I know you.”

  “You really don’t,” he said.

  “You were the man who told me that Love Canyon was a sore subject around here.”

  “Yep.”

  I sat back in my chair, let that sink in. “Did you recognize me?” I asked.

  He rubbed a hand over his head, pushed back the unruly strands that crisscrossed his pate. “Yes.” He leaned forward. “And that’s why I need to talk to you a little longer.”

  “With my lawyer,” I said, everything coming together. I was a suspect and not only because I was the only “witness” to the crime. Because I had been here, been seen. Been poking around.

  He nodded. “With your lawyer.”

  CHAPTER Thirty-one

  Jimmy Crawford wasn’t what I was expecting but was exactly what I needed. He came into the conference room in a whirlwind of expensive cologne, pants dotted with whales, and a pink polo shirt that would have looked more at home in one of the tonier suburbs south of here. He told me where he lived, and there wasn’t a home that cost less than a million dollars. Jimmy, as Feeney would say, was clearly a “baller,” even if the belly hanging over his fabric belt and the wild mess of black hair belied that fact. He was as loose and feral as his brother was buttoned up and tame.

  “Hey, Detective. Any reason why this young woman can’t go home?” he asked, pulling out a chair at the conference table and whipping a worn leather briefcase onto the table.

  “This young woman is the sole witness to an attempted murder,” Detective Bernard said. “I think that’s reason enough.”

  “I didn’t witness anything,” I said to Jimmy. “I came after the fact.”

  “A moment with my client, Detective?” Jimmy said.

  Larry Bernard left the room, closing the door behind him. Jimmy turned to me. “Tell me everything.”

  I started at the beginning, years ago when Amy disappeared, and ended up at tonight, a few hours earlier. “That’s it.”

  He studied my face. “When I said ‘tell me everything,’ I didn’t mean literally everything.” He wiped his hands across his face. “Wow. That’s quite a story.”

  In spite of his editorializing, it felt good to tell him everything, to reveal the real reason I had come to Wooded Lake again and again.

  “And my sister-in-law is helping you?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  He blessed himself. “God save the queen.” He took a moment to think. “So you didn’t stab this guy?”

  “No!” I said. “I couldn’t do something like that. Besides, I liked him. Well, until I found out just how much he had lied to me.” What was it about my face that made every eligible man I met want to tell me half-truths or, better yet, no truths?

  Jimmy opened the door and called to the detective, who reappeared so quickly that I knew he had been right outside the whole time.

  “Case closed,” Jimmy said, standing up and offering the detective his hand. “You know where to reach us.”

  “Actually, I don’t,” the detective said.

  Jimmy whipped a card out of his pant pocket and handed it over. “Here you go. So, I am assuming Ms. McGrath has told you everything she knows and you have asked her every question you wanted, in multiple forms.” Jimmy leaned over and smiled at me, whispering, “Not my first rodeo.”

  “I have, Mr. Crawford,” Detective Bernard said. “Haven’t gotten much information from her. Hoping she’ll remember something that might help us.” Bernard smiled. “Not my first rodeo, either, Counselor.”

  Jimmy smiled but it wasn’t friendly. “A good night’s sleep, a nice cup of tea in the morning, maybe some eggs, and she’ll regroup and call you if she does remember something.”

  Detective Bernard knew that there was no reason to keep me here, so with a resigned shrug of his shoulders, he stood as well. “Thank you for your time, Ms. McGrath. And please take care of that head wound.” He looked at Jimmy. “She refused treatment at the scene, but she has a pretty big bump on her head.”

  “Yes, she mentioned that,” Jimmy said. “So perhaps the person you’re looking for is someone who goes around stabbing people and then hitting others on the back of the head.”

  “Ms. McGrath?” Detective Bernard said before I left the room. “Here are your keys. I took the liberty of having one of our officers drive your car over here. If it were up to me, though, I’d prefer you left it here. I don’t think you’re in any shape to drive.”

  “Thank you, Detective,” I said, taking the keys.

  Outside, the cold air, mixed with fine, icy crystals, hit my face, and with a new wave of nausea hitting me I decided that the detective was right. I looked at Jimmy. “I’ll call an Uber.”

  “To take you back to Foster’s Landing?” he said. “No way. Get in.”

  “But what about your wife? Your getaway?” I asked.

  “Don’t worry about that,” he said. “It’s been thirty years. She’s used to me by now.”

  His car was a low-slung, two-door sports car, black and sleek. I lowered myself into the passenger side and sank back into the soft leather seat, closing my eyes. “I can’t thank you enough, Jimmy.”

  He started the car. “Ah, it’s nothing. Despite the trouble she gets in, I love my sister-in-law. Would do anything for her.”

  “Because of the French tutoring?”

  He let out a quick snort. “No, not that.”

  “Then what?”

  “For bringing my brother back to life.”

  He pulled onto the highway and gunned the engine. If he drove this fast all the way, I’d be home in no time.

  “You’ll send me a bill, right?” I said.

  He snorted again. “This is one of my pro bono cases.”

  “How many do you do a year?” I asked.

  “Exactly zero. You’d be my first.”

  CHAPTER Thirty-two

  It’s hard to be in one’s thirties yet still be answering to your parents, both of whom stood in the foyer of the Manor, their repeated texts to me and my cryptic answers only infuriating them more.

  “Where were you?” Dad said, enveloping me in a bear hug as Mom stood silently seething behind him. His concern always outweighed his consternation.

  At the sound of the front door or Dad’s voice, Cargan appeared. His face was its usual inscrutable mask coupled with a glimmer of relief. “Yes, where were you?” he asked.

  “I had a date,” I said. “It didn’t go very well.”

  Mom and Dad had no idea why I would have gone to Wooded Lake, but Cargan did. He eyed me warily as I told my parents about this nice man I had met and whom I was casually dating—Remember? I wanted to say. He came to the Manor one night?—but who had met a grisly fate. No one knew why. Maybe it had been a burglary gone bad, him interrupting whoever had plans of ransacking his house.

  But in my mind, I knew the truth, something I wouldn’t voice: This had something to do with Amy, her disappearance, their marriage. It was all there and not at all random.

  “They think it was a burglary,” I said, touching the back of my head. “I got hit in the head.”

  At that, Mom rushed forward, lifting my hair off of my neck. “You’ve got quite a bump there. Let me get some ice. Mal, put on some water for tea.”

  Left alone with Cargan, I averted my eyes as he studied the space over my head, seething like Mom. “You’re in over your head, Bel,” he said finally. “You’re always in over your head, come to think of it.”

  “I’m not, Cargan,” I said. “I’m this close to finding Amy and I’m not going to stop.”

  He
considered that for a long time, but I was used to my brother’s forays into himself, his own fertile mind. “We should tell Kevin. Maybe he can help. Reciprocity with Wooded Lake PD and all.”

  “I don’t know, Cargan,” I said. “It’s been months and they still don’t know who was in Amy’s car. Who they actually found.”

  “That takes time.”

  “Still, you expect Kevin to be able to help me?” I loved Kevin, as a friend of course, but I had never had much faith in his investigative abilities. I couldn’t see how he could help me besides giving me information before the fact, like just who was in that car in the river?

  He turned and started up the stairs. “Give it some thought.”

  Before he got too far, I called out to him, “The license plate? Anything on that?”

  “The car belongs to David Southerland. Just like it should.”

  In the kitchen, I heard the kettle blaring, the water boiling away. I would have a cup of tea and let my mother minister to the bump on my head. I would allow Dad to bluster about how nowhere in the world was safe anymore, and then I would go to my apartment and pull the covers over my head and figure out a cake I could make for Jimmy Crawford to thank him for tonight’s bailout and any future bailouts in which he might be involved.

  While making tea, my mother had made some kind of poultice that she put in a big piece of cheesecloth, poultices and cheesecloths two things that don’t really exist in the modern world but which for us were commonplace. I took a few sips of my tea and held the wrap against the back of my head, feeling better instantly, whether from the poultice or the tea I couldn’t be sure.

  “Thanks, Mom,” I said.

  “I don’t like the sound of this new guy,” Dad said. “Sounds like he has enemies.”

  “It was a burglary,” I said. “A burglary gone bad.”

  “I’ve never heard of such a thing,” Dad said.

  Mom let out a jaded laugh. “Sure you have, Mal. Horrible things like this happen all the time.” She leaned on the counter and looked at him, her eyebrows raised. “And sometimes they happen here, if you recall.”

  Dad shook his head as if to dispel the memories of two deaths at the Manor since I returned home. “Belfast, stick to Foster’s Landing. Stick to the Manor. Stick close to us,” he said, and I saw real fear in his eyes, the thought that I could have been part of something much more deadly written on his lined face.

  I felt my shoulders droop and could see that Dad took that as a sign that I was acquiescing. He didn’t know that it was just exhaustion coupled with the knowledge that in between preparing for weddings and pretending I was focused on work and family, I was heading up north first chance I got to figure this out, once and for all.

  The lie fell easily from my lips. “I will, Dad. I promise.”

  CHAPTER Thirty-three

  Kevin agreed to meet me for breakfast the next morning. There was one authentic Greek diner in town that had been here since before I was born, and while the prices went up steadily every year, one thing remained the same: The food was good but the coffee tasted like windshield-wiper fluid. The place was special to us, though, because back in high school, when we weren’t hanging around Amy’s father’s bar, we were here, eating pancakes and eggs and, if we had gotten paid from our part-time jobs, the occasional greasy cheeseburger. I fingered the laminated menu and thought about how far my culinary horizons had expanded.

  Kevin came in, dressed for work in his usual sport coat, khaki pants, and lace-up shoes, a regular gumshoe’s outfit, the outline of his little notebook, the one he carried everywhere, in his shirt breast pocket. “Did you order?” he asked. “Sorry I’m late.”

  “No problem,” I said. “And no, I didn’t order. You know I like to wait to see what everyone else is having before I commit.”

  “Right,” he said. “I had forgotten that.” He looked at the menu and then up at the waitress when she stopped by the table; if I remembered correctly, she was the same waitress who had been here since I was a kid, and the thought of that made me both happy and sad at the same time. “Coffee, Swiss-cheese omelet, rye toast.”

  I closed my menu. “Make that two,” I said. When she walked away, I said, “See? Same as it ever was.”

  “Hey, where’s your brother?” he asked casually.

  “Which one?”

  He smirked. “Okay, Bel, you know which one. Feeney.”

  “Not a clue,” I said. He had been asleep on my couch when I left and I expected he was still there.

  “If you hear from him, will you let him know that I need to talk to him?”

  “I’m pretty sure he knows that,” I said. “And no, I won’t tell him.”

  “Blood running thicker than water and all that?”

  “Yep,” I said. “And all that.”

  “You don’t want an aiding-and-abetting charge.”

  “You’re right. I don’t.”

  He could see that he was getting nowhere. “You have two choices, then. You can have Feeney turn himself in or you can convince Brendan Joyce to drop the charges.”

  Two unlikely, if not impossible, scenarios.

  That subject out of the way, he pulled over the little ceramic holder of sugar packets and shook a few in preparation for his coffee. “So to what do I owe this pleasure?” he said, quickly revising, “I mean, honor?”

  “Just a catch-up,” I said. “I know you’ll be at the party at the Manor next week, but I’ll be working, so we won’t have a chance to talk.”

  “Yeah, the big party,” he said. “Should be a good time.”

  “We’ll make sure of that,” I said. The waitress dropped off our coffees and we focused on those for a few minutes. “Listen, Kevin…”

  “I hate sentences that start with ‘Listen,’” he said. “That usually precedes some kind of bad news. A negative statement.” He smiled. “A breakup.”

  That last one was a little out of left field, but I let it go. “It’s been over two months. Do they know who it was? Who was in Amy’s car?”

  His face fell at the realization that this wasn’t really a social call, two friends catching up.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I just want to know.”

  “We still don’t have a positive ID, but we’re thinking that it may be a girl who disappeared from that town up the river, you know, the same day that Amy did. It just seems too coincidental,” he said.

  “I guess,” I said. “But it could be anyone, right?”

  “Sure. Tests aren’t back yet, so nothing is conclusive.” He sipped his coffee. “Obviously.”

  “Obviously,” I said.

  “Why are you asking?”

  “I don’t know. It was just on my mind and I thought I’d ask you.”

  He leaned across the table. “Bel, I know you better than that. You don’t ask random questions.”

  “Sometimes I do.”

  “Never.” He pushed his coffee toward the center of the table, pulled it back. “What’s going on?”

  “Listen…”

  “Oh, there you go again,” he said.

  I leaned in close, brought my voice down to a whisper. “I think Amy is still alive.”

  The coffee in his hand made an arc across my head, splashing hot liquid on my neck and landing on the floor beside me. At the same moment, Mary Ann slid onto the bench next to Kevin, having successfully sidestepped the mess that he had made. She kissed his cheek, nonplussed by the flying coffee cup. “What’s going on?” she asked. “Coffee too hot?”

  Kevin ran a shaky hand over his forehead. “Yes. Scalding.”

  A busboy scurried over and cleaned up the spill.

  “I’m sorry, man,” Kevin said. “And I’ll take another one when you get a chance.”

  “Hey, Bel,” Mary Ann said. “How is everything? Flying coffee cups aside?”

  I didn’t tell her, or him, anything, and just went with “fine.” The last thing I needed this model of perfection in front of me knowing was that I was involv
ed in something way bigger than I should, with a giant bump at the nape of my neck to prove it. Thank God for long, unruly curls to cover the injury.

  “Do you need any more information from me regarding the party?” she asked. “Dad has been all over me to make this the ‘best one ever.’” The waitress placed a paper bag in front of Mary Ann, a check stapled to it. “I don’t know why it’s so important to him, but it is.”

  “Everything is set, Mary Ann. Don’t worry about a thing,” I said.

  “The holiday decorations? The lights?” she asked. “All good?”

  “The best,” I said. “If you haven’t seen the Manor at Christmas, you’re really missing out. We’re getting ready to put the lights on the trees that go down to the river.”

  “I will this year,” she said, pulling the bill off of her take-out order. “Honey, I’ll see you later,” she said, kissing Kevin full on the mouth, taking him by surprise, his anxiety over my revelation still the only thing on his mind. “Bye, Bel. Have a good day!” she said, scampering off, the sound of her rubber-soled nursing clogs mixing with the din of silverware scraping plates, cups clattering onto saucers.

  Kevin’s face was ashen, his look confused yet horrified. “I thought you’d be happy,” I said. “About Amy.”

  “I … I-I am,” he said, his stammer belying the statement. “What makes you think she’s alive?”

  I ran through the various aspects of my amateur investigation.

  “Who’s Alison?” he asked at one point in the story, stopping me from going any further.

  “A potential Manor client.”

  “A bride?”

  “A bride’s stepmother.”

  “That makes even less sense.”

  “It doesn’t matter who she is,” I said. “Just follow the story.” As I finished the tale, ending with the night before, his face regained some color, but it was a deep flush rather than a normal hue. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “It’s just that you’ve put yourself in so much danger. In harm’s way. For Amy.”

  “Right. For Amy,” I said.