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

by Maggie McConnon

  “Changed my mind,” I said. Behind me, the interior of the coffee shop was full of activity, people having streamed in there after the ceremony in the village square, grabbing cups of decaf, specialty coffees with steamed milk floating on top. “I hope that’s okay.”

  “It was fine,” he said. “Listen, don’t be a stranger. In The Dugout. There’s no hard feelings. Just so you know.”

  I bristled. “Why would there be? Hard feelings?”

  “Because of that night,” he said as if I would know. “Because you were the last one to see her.” He paused. “You were, weren’t you?”

  “That was a long time ago, Oogie. I don’t know what to say about that,” I said, taking a step in the direction of the Manor. “I’m still really, really sorry about everything that happened. About Amy not coming back. I hope you know that.”

  “Everyone is sorry, Bel. Not just you,” he said.

  I didn’t know what that meant, but I let it go. I drifted farther away until he grabbed my arm, this time more forcefully than the touch on my shoulder had been.

  “If you remember anything…,” he started.

  “I don’t,” I said. “Whatever I remember I told you and the police that next day and the day after that and the day after that. There’s nothing else, Oogie. There never was.” But that wasn’t completely true; my version of the events was sanitized to keep everyone blameless and without the hint of scandal surrounding them. Doing what I had done then reminded me of what I had done recently by deleting the texts from Caleigh’s phone.

  I left him standing on the street in front of the coffee shop.

  Only time would tell if anything I had done was right. Or wrong.

  CHAPTER Nine

  The next morning, I started the day clearheaded and with a plan. All those years ago, when my parents had sent me to Ireland, I had met a bunch of girls. All distant relatives but a lifeline for someone so adrift in an ocean of grief and anxiety. One of them—Annie O’Dell—had taught me how to laugh again after so many months spent in abject sadness. I looked in a box that I had stashed in the closet when I moved in and found a recent Christmas card she had sent me, which contained two things: one a photo of the two of us in front of a pub and the other her phone number. It was late enough in Ireland to call, so I dialed her number, hoping she was home in Ballyminster, a place she had wanted to escape but had never left.

  “Annie? It’s Belfast. Belfast McGrath,” I said when she didn’t immediately recognize my voice.

  “Belfast!” she shouted, not out of surprise but to be heard over the din in her home. “Frankie, put that down! For the last time, Jaysus save me, I will put you in your room and you will never come out!” She moved to a quiet place, the sounds of a herd of boys disappearing in an instant.

  “Where did you go?” I asked.

  “Toilet. It’s the only safe place around here,” she said. “Five kids, three of them boys. It’s not for the faint of heart.” I heard the lid of the toilet close. “I’m happy to hear from you, Bel. What’s the occasion?”

  I gave her the Reader’s Digest version of what happened at Caleigh’s wedding and heard her sharp intake of breath. “A murder?” she asked. “That’s awful.”

  “It was horrible. I saw the whole thing,” I said.

  “The whole thing?”

  “Well, not exactly,” I said. “I saw him die, though.”

  “Oh, good lord, Bel. That’s terrible.”

  “It was,” I said. “But listen, Annie, you grew up in Ballyminster. Do you remember anyone named Declan Morrison?”

  “Ah, let me think. It’s Ireland, Bel. Lots of Declans. And Dermots. And Donals.” Someone banged on the door to the bathroom. “Don’t make me come out there!” she hollered. “There’s Declan McDonough and Declan Scurry and Declan Martin and Declan O’Keefe,” she said. “That last one was a bit of a rogue,” she said, chuckling.

  “But no Declan Morrison?” I asked.

  “Not that I remember,” she said.

  I gave her my e-mail address and promised her a lengthier chat in the future, one that would encompass what I had been doing since the last Christmas card that I had sent, five years previous. I looked around the quiet apartment and thought that maybe a week here, away from what seemed like a brood of unruly kids, would be just what the doctor ordered for my old friend Annie.

  That phone call was a dead end, so I got dressed and set out for a little wander. I wended my way through the train station parking lot and headed toward the water, something I had done time and time again when I lived here as a kid. Those were the days when we all had kayaks and would spend hours on the river, traveling to a little place called Eden Island where we really weren’t supposed to go but did anyway. In those days, the local police didn’t have a fancy boat—or the staff—to cruise up and down the river and disperse crowds of teenagers who pulled their kayaks up to the edge of the island and decamped for the better part of the weekend. When I was a teen, everyone decorated their boat as they liked and eventually they were all banged up from going out at low tide, when rocks poked through the water’s surface and scuffed the bottom of your boat.

  I pulled the car into a spot normally inhabited by kayakers and noticed that you could now rent them there, something that wasn’t possible when I was a resident. Oh, that’s right, I thought: I am a resident. Again. As much as I tried to convince myself that I was just visiting, the two months I had been here told a different story. I had a resident parking permit for street parking and a village ID. Yep, I was a Foster’s Landing resident again, despite my protests to the contrary.

  I got out of the car and walked to the water’s edge, which was farther in the distance now, a months-long drought making its presence known here. I watched a group of swans float slowly toward me from the north end of the river, the spot right before it dumped out under the trestle bridge of the train and into the Hudson. I looked for other people, but all I saw was a smooth expanse of water, a couple of geese, and nothing else.

  I walked around, looking for signs of my old life. The initials we carved into the tree when Kevin and I first started dating. The old picnic table that was used by the local fishermen, its top splintered and worn. It was all still here, just like it had been years before, and in that was a small measure of comfort, the familiar wrapping itself around me like a warm blanket.

  Here’s where I was now. Maybe it was time to think of an exit strategy. But the only things I could think of were the sad faces of my brothers and my parents as they watched Goran stride down the gravel path, carrying on about Shamrock Manor being cursed along with the rest of us.

  It’s just temporary, I told myself.

  I can leave any time I want.

  I would never make Dad cancel an event because he didn’t have a chef when a perfectly good one lived in the apartment over the studios.

  I walked away from the porta-potty and over toward the water, my decision made. Heck, that was easy. And before I could change my mind, I pulled out my phone and sent a group text to my family that was comprised of one word.

  Yes.

  I waited for a response, but none came. Dad thought texting was the Devil’s handiwork, and while he read the ones sent to him, he never responded, afraid to touch the keypad with his response. “Where does it go?” he would ask and while no one could really tell him the answer, we laughed nonetheless. As for the other ones, the boys, I wasn’t sure why I didn’t hear back immediately, but after a few minutes the pinging on my phone indicated that they were responding, the messages revealing that they were happy. The breeze that lifted the hair from my neck felt like a collective sigh of relief from the entire family.

  The ground was damp from the tide, but I sat down anyway, holding my shoes in one hand, my knees bent. I was surprised to see that even though there had been no rain, the drought prolonged now, there was still some water in the normally shallow parts of the river, a few birds pecking below the surface looking for fish. Out past the highway
overpass was Eden Island, the place where I most wanted to be right now. My last visit there was full of unanswered questions, while my visit here today was filled with different questions, one of them already answered. I looked around, noticing a pair of eyes staring at me from the other side of the put-in area. A man now, he had been a boy when I had first met him. When Kevin stood, I could see that he still had the loose-limbed physicality of a teenager, scrambling over the rocks, a sandwich tight in one hand, a bottle of water in the other. He looked far more anxious to see me than I was to see him, probably because he knew that he had acted like a pompous jerk two days earlier. Or, after all these years, alone with me, he was still a little afraid of me after what he had done.

  “Bel?” he asked, making his way over. “What are you doing here?”

  Even though I knew that he was a detective now, since I had followed his ascendance from afar, it still surprised me. If there had been a category in the yearbook—“Most Likely to Become the Village Detective”—he would have been my last pick; he was more of a musician/stoner type than law enforcement, but the same could be said of me and my creative pursuits. I had won the math award in high school—much to Caleigh’s chagrin—proving that I could effectively use both sides of my brain, something she always contended wasn’t possible, a myth. I pointed over my shoulder. “Just thinking.” I looked out to the water. “You?”

  He hoisted the sandwich. “Lunch.” He sat down next to me, careful to keep his shoes out of the water. “I can’t stand lunch in the station. It takes Loo about twenty minutes to decide on what he wants and then he usually sends one of us out to get it. I’d rather come down here and be by myself for a few minutes.”

  “I hear you,” I said. I kept looking straight ahead, still a little sore from our encounter at the wedding, when he acted like me not seeing enough of what had happened prior to Declan’s dive off the balcony was a supreme inconvenience to his detecting skills. No time like the present to clear the air. “So, the wedding. The way you acted. Was that for the other cops’ benefit or did you really mean to humiliate me in public? In the middle of a crime scene?”

  He blushed deeply, something I remembered from our time together. His old sensitivity, a trait that I would have thought had disappeared over the years of him being a small-town cop, making itself known. His red cheeks. His shaky hand, palming his face. The last time I had seen him blush like that was when he told me that he had fallen for Mary Ann D’Amato, the Lieutenant’s gorgeous and lovely daughter. “I’m sorry, Bel. I get around those guys and…”

  “You turn into an asshole?”

  “You should be a detective,” he said, smiling. He held out the sandwich he had brought. “Hungry?”

  I shook my head. Although it looked delicious, there was no way I was going to share a sandwich with Kevin Hanson, the wanker, the guy who broke my heart until the next guy broke it all over again with a different form of duplicity.

  “You sure?” Kevin asked, taking a bite of his sloppy sub, oil and vinegar running down his arm. He switched the sandwich to the other hand and knelt down, rinsing his arm off in the little pool of clear water that inexplicably remained. He smiled at me, letting me know that he still thought we were kindred spirits, the onetime swim team captain (me) and the former standing bass player in the school band (him). Truth is stranger than fiction, they say. I guess enough time should have passed that seeing him in this casual setting should have been just that: casual. But after everything that had transpired in my life over the course of half a year, seeing him again felt like just one more sucker punch. “You sticking around?” he asked.

  “I think so.” Saying it aloud made it seem more likely. I didn’t have anywhere else to be, in truth.

  “Want to grab a pint at The Dugout sometime?” he asked. “Well, maybe not The Dugout,” he said, remembering that I might not like to go there. “I owe you one.”

  You owe me more than one, but who’s keeping score? “Maybe.”

  We stayed at the water’s edge for a while and I finally took a bite of his sandwich, two old friends for whom no time had seemed to pass. “Where are you living?” he asked.

  “My parents’. Over the garage. Behind Shamrock Manor.”

  He looked at me out of the corner of his eye. No comment.

  “Still scared of my mother, huh?”

  “She’s terrifying,” he said, laughing. “All those muscles on a woman that age. It’s unnatural.” He took a swig of water. “What does she bench-press? A buck fifty? Two-ten?”

  The easy banter almost made me forget that I hated him once, but maybe it was the old him, not the guy sitting next to me. “Probably two-fifty.”

  “What about you?” I asked.

  “Apartment in Mystic Bay,” he said, referencing a pricey condo complex. “Before you get any ideas, I live on the side that faces the train station. No river view for me.”

  “I see. But you’re close to it and that’s good enough.”

  “I guess,” he said. “Where have you been since you got here? Why haven’t I seen you before this?”

  “My parents’. Over the garage.” You could have found me if only you had looked.

  “Hiding?” he asked.

  “Maybe.”

  “Glad you’re out in the open now.”

  I wasn’t so sure about that, if I was as glad as he was. “So, the dead guy at the wedding,” I said. “What do we know about him?”

  Kevin hesitated.

  “Heck, I’m your only witness,” I said. “You can trust me.”

  “It’s a weird thing,” he said. “We think maybe he crashed.”

  “The wedding?”

  He nodded. “Not on the guest list. Mrs. McHugh didn’t know him.”

  Oh, but Caleigh did, I thought but did not say. I wondered again where they met up, what made her decide that two nights before her wedding was the best time to get to know him. “He was Irish. Said he was one of Caleigh’s cousins, albeit a really distant one.” I decided to keep my mouth shut for the time being, my mind going back to the messages I erased from her phone.

  “I got that. The Irish thing,” Kevin said. “And it wouldn’t have been hard to figure out anyway. Wasn’t everyone at the wedding Irish?”

  “Just about. My cousin Seamus married a woman from Scotland. She was there, too.” I watched a bird swoop in and grab a little fish out of the water, flying away with it in its mouth. “And Mark’s family is…”

  “Protestant?”

  I nodded.

  “And the guy with the one leg?” Kevin asked.

  “You mean Uncle Eugene?”

  “Was there more than one guy there with one leg?” Kevin asked.

  He had a point. “Uncle Jack’s cousin.” He still looked confused, so I elaborated. “Caleigh’s dad. Uncle Jack McHugh’s first cousin. So, he’s Caleigh’s uncle.”

  “Aha,” Kevin said. “You McGraths, McHughs, et cetera, are hard to keep straight.”

  “He used to live here, but he’s been in Ireland for years.” I splashed some water on my feet; it was getting hot. “Why?” I asked. “And how did you know he had one leg?”

  Kevin didn’t have an answer for that, or if he did he didn’t want to share it with me. Maybe he was a better detective than I gave him credit for. “Really. We should grab a drink,” he said.

  I pulled a pen out from his shirt pocket and took his hand, just like I had done when we were kids, writing my number on his palm. I folded his hand over and held it tight. “Call me.”

  “Oh, and if you remember anything else, let me know,” he said.

  I licked my lips, remembering something else: the texts from the phone. I prayed that Declan’s phone had been destroyed in the fall, realizing at that moment that while I had deleted his texts to Caleigh, the originals were still on his phone. I licked my lips again. Jesus, I was developing Mom’s tell. “Got it.”

  “Why’d you come back?” Kevin asked after a few moments of silence, the implication being t
hat once I had escaped the Landing I should have stayed escaped. “You were always the one who wanted to get away from here.”

  “Had to.” I didn’t want to go any deeper than that; that was the truth. Where do you go when you’re out of money, out of a job, and practically left at the altar? Out of your world, the world you thought you knew? You go back home. “I guess you don’t read the paper. The Times?”

  “Nah, I’m a Post guy myself. Something happened?” he asked, concern crossing his face. Although it was impossible not to know, or so I thought, he didn’t seem to have a clue. This was a village that loved its gossip, loved the tale of the fall. But then again, maybe I was only the center of my universe and what happened sixty miles south in some pretentious restaurant with an even more pretentious name was no one in Foster’s Landing concern. Something told me, however, that Kevin hadn’t lived under a rock, that he knew exactly where I had been and why I was home.

  “I’ll tell you when we get that pint.”

  I looked over at him, seeing the boy I used to love, the one who had a different idea of success, who thought that staying in Foster’s Landing and making good—showing everyone just what he was made of—was the definition of “making it.” For me, it was leaving and never coming back. Well, one of us had achieved their goal. In his smile was the memory of the fun we used to have, why I would have left everything for him at one time in my life. “You have a job?”

  “Funny you should ask.” I held out my hand. “Nice to meet you. Bel McGrath, the new head chef at Shamrock Manor.”

  “Really?”

  “It’s a job,” I said. Technically, it was. But I still didn’t know what I was getting paid, if I was getting paid at all.

  He nodded as if he understood, but I knew he didn’t. If what he had shown me at the Manor was indicative of his character, the person he had become, part of him probably thought that I was there because he was. Rather than disabuse him of that notion, protesting too much and all that, I got up, dusting off the back of my pants, dislodging a few loose stones from the fabric. “Oh, and Kevin?”