Wedding Bel Blues: A Belfast McGrath Mystery (Bel McGrath Mysteries)

by Maggie McConnon

  I started toward the staircase, turning to ask him one last question. “How do you do that?”

  “Do what?” he asked, still lingering by the closed bedroom door.

  “Take advantage of someone right before her wedding and then actually attend the wedding?”

  A smile spread across his face. “And how do you know it wasn’t the other way around?”

  I thought about that for a moment. I didn’t. Although I liked to think of Caleigh as innocent and simple in her approach to things, I’m sure in the years that had passed since we graduated from high school and then college, the years where I had been cast in the role of her protector and de facto sister, she had matured into her own woman, someone who was completely capable of doing something like having a one-night stand with a mysterious wedding guest, someone I had never heard of and now never wanted to see again. My family had changed—heck, I had changed, too—the individual members turning into people I would have to reacquaint myself with over time, it seemed.

  Caleigh’s third cousin once removed, my ass.

  I didn’t answer him, making my way back to the wedding. I ran into Mark on the dance floor, dancing stiffly with his grandmother, Jonesy, a tiny dynamo in a St. John suit who had told me last night at the rehearsal dinner that the key to staying slim was a secret fifty-year smoking habit.

  “Marlboro Lights. Best way to keep your weight down,” she croaked. “Every girl in my sorority smoked them.”

  You know what also keeps you thin? Cancer. But I wisely kept my mouth shut and nodded gratefully for that sound piece of health advice. And the secret of her smoking habit was not so secret, I wanted to mention. A cloud of smoke followed her everywhere she went.

  I pulled Mark to the side. “FYI, Caleigh is upstairs sleeping off the bottle of champagne she drank.”

  He grimaced. “She can’t hold her liquor,” he said, some kind of indictment in his voice. Behind us, Feeney was revving up and a loud song with a cha-cha beat began, complete with accordion accompaniment. Thanks to Derry’s interest in diversity, The McGrath Brothers, my siblings’ unoriginally named quartet, now seemed to cover every ethnicity known to mankind, so much so that I wondered if Feeney would switch to a sitar right after a musical trip to Cuba.

  “She’s all yours now, Mark,” I said, reminding him that his vows just a few hours ago made it so that I was no longer her caretaker and that he was.

  “I know, Bel,” he said. “And that makes me the happiest man in the world.” His face broke into a smile so wide and sincere that my heart almost broke, knowing what I knew. Sure, Mark Chesterton wasn’t a guy I found attractive, but in that moment—more than any other moment so far—I saw that he adored her. And that was enough to make me feel better about the union.

  He walked off, leaving me among a sea of dancers all hell-bent on making “Besame Mucho” seem like a new Siege of Ennis, the intensity of their cha-chaing rivaling my relatives doing their favorite dance. There wasn’t an Irish-Catholic person among them, leading me to believe that the Protestants at this wedding had all attended the Arthur Murray Dance Studio at some point and learned well.

  I decided to get a breath of fresh air, choosing the front of the historic mansion for a little sojourn before the cutting of the cake, if that would even happen, given the bride’s inebriation. Although I should have been more interested in the goings-on in the kitchen, Goran was in charge and I had been warned to leave him alone, even if I thought his knife skills rivaled those of Jack the Ripper.

  Out on the front porch rocking chairs faced a grand lawn that also had a view of the Hudson, and that was my destination. I had one foot in the foyer, its marble floor gleaming in the afternoon sun, when my attention was diverted by commotion overhead, somewhere in the vicinity of Caleigh’s slumber.

  Not my business, I thought, as I heard what sounded like two men speaking in hushed but angry tones. My first thought was that a worker was getting reamed by my father for letting the Chesterton/McHugh schedule get out of hand—where was that damned cake anyway?—or for letting Jonesy Chesterton smoke in the ladies’ room. (It had to be her. No one smokes anymore and I had seen her face when her filet mignon—a big, honking piece of meat—was served. It was utter despair followed by steely resolve. And a hasty exit to smoke presumably.) I looked up just in time to see the former man of my dreams, Declan Morrison, take a swan dive over the second-floor balcony, hitting the large resin bust of FDR that incongruously sat in the center of the foyer, breaking it—and his own beautiful head—into a million little nasty pieces all over the polished stone.

  CHAPTER Four

  Let’s look at the bright side. There has to be a bright side, right? I’m a McGrath; we were taught from a young age that whatever you were going through, someone had it much worse. At least I wasn’t thinking about my own broken engagement or the end of my very promising career anymore. No, I was thinking about death and blood and all of the horrible nightmares I was likely to have after seeing someone die.

  I hadn’t signed up for this, standing to the side of a dead body in the grand hall of a beautiful historic mansion, blood everywhere, ruining what appeared to be a very well-made shirt on a very dead guy. And being the only witness, except for whomever Declan had argued with prior to his dive over the balcony railing. I stifled a gag. There was no way I was letting Kevin Hanson, otherwise known as “the wanker” in my family, see that I was feeling a little under the weather and that if I were a different person, one who didn’t have complete control over her wonky digestive tract, I’d have spewed all over the place, ruining his precious crime scene.

  “Bel?” Kevin said, looking at me as if I had just beamed into the crime scene, as if I had no place being in my parents’ place of business at my cousin’s wedding. “What are you doing here?”

  Not much of a detective there, are you, Hanson? That’s what I wanted to say, but instead I smiled. He was probably the last person in Foster’s Landing to know I had returned and that didn’t bode well for the investigative skills the badge he displayed so proudly seemed to connote. “Just passing through,” I said, and that was true enough. I had just been passing through when I heard angry whispers and then the sound of wood shattering, along with one very handsome guy’s head. FDR was smashed to smithereens. And so was Declan Morrison.

  Kevin read my mind. He always could. He tried to affect some kind of nonchalance that he didn’t have the chops to pull off. He wasn’t excited to see me. Indeed, he seemed a little bothered by my appearance in his crime scene. “I’ll want to talk to you again,” Kevin said, still looking, in the final approach to middle age, like the boy he had once been.

  “That makes sense,” I said, my last word punctuated by a gag that stuck in my throat.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked. “I know what I’m doing,” he said, the implication being that I—or someone else—didn’t think he did.

  “Of course you do,” I said, swallowing hard, but I wasn’t so sure. Kevin wasn’t exactly what you’d call a brain trust, but he sure was cute. That’s what had gotten him over several academic humps in high school, his ability to charm his way into a passing grade.

  “Stay put. You’re our only witness,” he said as he gave me another once-over, still in my really uncomfortable raw-silk bridesmaid dress. He smiled even though the words sounded curt, insensitive, like I was the worst witness ever to see someone die. I was. Beyond the actual dying part, I could offer nothing more about what had happened prior to that event.

  Hard to believe that I once loved Kevin Hanson so much that I almost agreed to drop out of the the Culinary Institute for a stint at Ulster County Community College. So glad I listened to my mother, just that once. After I left, he started dating Mary Ann D’Amato, the Lieutenant’s daughter, and had been with her for years. She was someone whom I wanted to hate but couldn’t because she had been nice always, a real gem. A nurse. She volunteered at a local soup kitchen as often as she could, given her schedule, a regu
lar Mother Teresa with long legs, gorgeous hair, and a heart of gold. Mom had filled me in on the details of Mary Ann’s endeavors and her and Kevin’s courtship over the years, often closing with the observation that everyone in the Landing—everyone!—wondered why Kevin had never proposed, never made Mary Ann an “honest woman.”

  It was like going back in time, coming here.

  Of course he had left me for her. He couldn’t leave me for a harridan, some harpy. Nope. Mary Ann D’Amato had been class valedictorian, a Peace Corps volunteer, and an all-around wonderful girl. Just ask anyone. She took my mother’s Saturday morning Pilates class, one of the first things Mom told me when I moved into the apartment over Dad’s studio.

  “She’s as gorgeous as ever,” Mom had said. “Lovely girl.”

  I know, I wanted to say. She always had been. Even though Kevin had picked her over me, I couldn’t hate her. She was just that wonderful.

  “You’re lucky to have me as a witness,” I said, unable to turn my face away from the dead body on the floor. RIP, Mr. Hot Stuff, I thought. You were a lovely fantasy while you lasted. I looked up at the broken banister, so wrecked that I wondered at the strength of the person who had thrown Declan through it.

  Kevin ignored me, getting down in a crouch in front of the body. As if he knew what he was doing. Which he didn’t. Kevin Hanson was a Foster’s Landing boy and now a Foster’s Landing cop. “Detective,” as he reminded me. Not much difference, in my book. He looked around the foyer, taking in the stunned expressions of the two uniformed cops who had responded after Goran had called 911 after hearing me scream. “You two,” he said, throwing his investigative weight around inside his Men’s Wearhouse suit, “go inside and question everyone who spoke to this guy, served him a canapé, or maybe had a one-night stand with him.” He looked at me pointedly as if I were the painted whore of Babylon, smiling again to lessen the impact of his words. He stood up, shoving his hands in his pockets. “That happens at weddings,” he said, keeping his eyes on me. “One-night stands.” He offered a chuckle to cover the fact that what he had said was insulting—albeit accurate, unbeknownst to him—but the damage was done. He was being an ass and I wasn’t sure why.

  “Jealous?” I asked. I don’t have as much control over my bloodstream as I do my digestive tract, so I knew I blushed red, telegraphing to the entire room that even if I hadn’t had a tryst with dead wedding guest number one, I had thought about it. I also knew that the blushing bride, not the innocent she pretended to be, had made good on that thought. “You should call the county cops,” I said in the most helpful tone I could muster. “I think we’re all a little out of our league here.” I wondered why I was the only one who saw that. Kevin responded by turning his back on me. He had already asked me what I had seen, heard. I told him everything, except for the part where I had deleted all evidence of Declan’s rendezvous with Caleigh on her phone. That I was keeping to myself, at least for the time being.

  I stepped back and waited for Kevin to take control of the scene, something that would have required him to do more than clear the area and stare at the body like it was a mermaid who had been dropped into the middle of a bar mitzvah. Tired of watching him consider the gaping hole in the guy’s head, I moved into the main dining area, where two hundred silent people greeted me, one old lady pointing mutely at my shoes, blood splattered and ruined. I stripped them off and threw them in a waste can before going to find my parents in the crowd. The shoes had been the wrong size and definitely the wrong color, a fuchsia gone so wrong that it would never be right. I was happy to be rid of them, my toes cramped and stiff after a day in those suckers.

  I passed my brothers, still on the stage and standing at rapt attention, holding their instruments as if to say, We all have alibis! They did. They had been playing some mash-up of “The Girl from Ipanema” and what sounded like Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way” and everyone in the room had had their eyes trained on them. They had then segued into a version of Elvis Presley’s “Suspicious Minds,” which made me wonder if I was the only person who knew about Caleigh’s transgression. But then I remembered how Feeney had used to dress up as Elvis when we were kids, inking long sideburns down his chubby face, and it all made sense.

  I walked around the head table, where Aunt Helen was sobbing loudly into one of the linen napkins, her boyfriend, Frank the Tank, as we liked to call him, with his arm around her shoulders. Frank was a former firefighter and his size and shape indicated to me, at least, that he was the guy to call if I was ever trapped in a fire. I gave Aunt Helen a quick hug. Frank grabbed my arm, his hand shaking.

  “This. Is. Awful,” he said in a halting tone, his face pale. Poor guy had seen his share of death and destruction, but his reaction to the day’s events pointed to a sensitive nature his size and normally silent demeanor didn’t make apparent.

  “It is,” I said.

  He shook his head sadly. “And at a wedding.”

  There was nothing to say to that so I drifted off, looking for my parents. When I reached them finally, my mother threw her toned arms around me. She has never known quite what to do with a short, chubby daughter, wondering how she—a five-foot-ten lithe beauty—could have given birth to someone like me despite having the genetic capacity to wear the same jeans over a twenty-year period without the benefit of an elastic waist and an intrepid tailor. “Oh, honey,” she whispered into my hair. “That poor fella. What happened?”

  I broke the embrace and shrugged, trying to act like I saw accidents—or, worse, murders—every day. “He came over the balcony.” That was one way to put it. “Not sure how it happened without somebody seeing something.” Me, in particular. I didn’t want to go into too much detail because I wasn’t sure what I heard or what I saw besides his lifeless body on the floor.

  My dad leaned in, his arms crossed over his chest. “Maybe it was one of them,” he said, raising an eyebrow in the direction of Mark’s family. He dropped his voice to a whisper, which for him, on a scale of 1 to 10, is about a 15. “It could happen,” he said.

  Maybe. Probably not. Something told me that Mark’s family was incapable of that sort of violence, looking as they did, as if they had turned to stone, a phalanx of wedding guests pressed up against the windows at the back of the room. This looked a little more like a crime of passion to me, but what did I know?

  “Do you know what this is going to do for business?” my father asked, drawing a hand across his balding pate. “A murder at Shamrock Manor?” He shook his head sadly.

  Mom put a hand on his arm. “Let’s not go there yet, Mal. We don’t even know what happened.”

  “Officer Hanson on the scene?” my father asked, no love lost between my old boyfriend and my father.

  “Sure is,” I said, the three of us sitting down at the table. “And it’s Detective Hanson now.”

  “We were told we couldn’t leave,” my mother said. “By that officer over there,” she added, pointing to a trembling cop who looked like he had just graduated from high school. “He looks like he’s about to faint. I think I changed his diaper once at a church picnic.”

  He did look like he was about to faint. It wasn’t every day that you went to work thinking that you’d be answering calls related to shoplifting at the local grocery store only to find that you were now part of a team investigating a murder. Suicide was ruled out relatively quickly because, really, who tries to kill themselves by jumping off a second-floor balcony, the danger of the FDR bust notwithstanding? The word “murder”—as well as the rumor of an argument on the balcony—floated through the crowd like the sound a crow makes on a spring morning.

  Murder.

  “He says that they’re going to interview every single one of us,” my father added, looking chagrined.

  I looked around the room. “That will take a while.” Three cops plus two hundred guests equaled a long night ahead. “Where’s Caleigh?” I asked, not spying the bride. “Mark?”

  “Kevin gave them permission to leave
,” Dad said. “He had a quick word with them and then let them take off.”

  A “quick word”? In a murder investigation? Interesting. I wondered what their alibi was or if they even had one. I had gotten Kevin through sophomore-year geometry, so I wasn’t all that impressed by his ability to incorporate logic into his thinking. Presumably, Caleigh was still sleeping when all of this happened, but that little voice in the back of my head was telling me that maybe she wasn’t. Maybe she was on the balcony. Maybe she had seen something.

  “Kevin looks good?” Mom said, throwing it out there like it was some innocent question, something that wasn’t fraught with emotion, years of recrimination.

  “He does,” I said. I looked at my father, squirming uncomfortably in an oxford shirt, the collar of which circled his size 17 neck in a way that suggested it was a wee bit too tight. “Dad, did you know the dead guy? This Declan character?” I said, trying to make it sound like I didn’t know him, didn’t think he was the most attractive guy I’d seen around these parts in a long time, and that I hadn’t daydreamed that we might see each other without clothes sometime later in the evening.

  My dad pulled at the collar of his shirt. In addition to owning Shamrock Manor, he is also a painter, sculptor, and creator of “installations” that use random pieces of wood and metal as their foundations, so he’s more comfortable in a paint-covered T-shirt and jeans than the formal wear he’s required to wear when there is an event at the Manor. I looked at his hands, little bits of blue paint dotting his freckled skin. No blood, not a speck. I don’t know why I went there in my mind, but I had. I quickly looked away while I waited for his answer.

  “Just met him at the wedding,” he said. A thin sheen of sweat had appeared on his forehead.

  “He said you had met in Ireland,” I said.

  Dad looked up at the ceiling, either trying to remember or formulating a lie. “No. Nope. I don’t think so.”

  “Dad, take off your tie,” I said, reaching over and loosening the knot. “You look like you’re going to have a heart attack.”