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

by Maggie McConnon

  My phone vibrated in my pocket. Kevin.

  I know it’s short notice, but would you like to have dinner tonight?

  It took me a few seconds of nail biting and mental gymnastics before I thought, What the heck? and texted him back that yes, I could come, falling asleep moments later with the phone on my chest.

  That night, after my confrontation with Cargan and my surreptitious preparations for the O’Donnell wedding, I thought about Mark and Caleigh on the beach in Bermuda, sunbathing, not a care in the world unless you count the fact that a wedding guest had come to celebrate their union and was dead before the cake cutting.

  I was going so insane that I almost couldn’t wait for Caleigh to come back from her honeymoon. Maybe, I thought, Mark Chesterton would reveal himself to be a really good egg, someone with whom I would bond. Be the brother I always wanted to have, not the ones I did have. Right. That was insane.

  I had a few more texts from Kevin, who seemed to enjoy this mode of communication more than any other. According to him, Mary Ann had made “gravy,” or what we Irish Americans call sauce, which we liberally coat with “sprinkle cheese,” otherwise known as Parmesan, for her family dinner and there was a lot left over. She had also made fresh pasta. And tiramisu. All while tending to the children in the pediatric cancer ward at a local medical center.

  I looked at myself in the mirror, running a comb through my red curls. “You are so not worthy, Belfast McGrath,” I said, riffling around in the drawers of the vanity that my father had crafted from the reclaimed deck of a boat that was found floating, empty, in the Foster’s Landing River. I found a lipstick, something I remembered wearing to dinner at Ben Dykstra’s apartment for our fourth date—the one when he had said, “I love you,” and I had believed him—opened it up, and then closed it. I tossed it in the garbage. A tinted ChapStick would have to do. I would never wear MAC “Razzledazzler” ever again, despite it being the perfect shade for a redhead. It landed in the bottom of the garbage can with a little ping.

  My wardrobe was sorely lacking and I was at a loss as to what to wear. When you work—nay, live—in a uniform like I had for much of my adult life, you don’t spend a lot of money on clothes, and my closet was evidence of that fact. I spent way too much time thinking about it, staring at my choices before finally settling on a tunic I had bought in a bazaar in Istanbul, jeans, and some silver bangles. I was a little upset to find that the tunic wasn’t quite as flowy as it used to be, hugging my curves with a little more seriousness. I guess a steady diet of takeout from Happy Life/Hunan Style wasn’t a recipe for being svelte. Still, it wasn’t enough for me to even consider a morning of Pilates with Mom. I still had some standards.

  Mary Ann lived in the Hadley section of town, a short drive from where I had grown up and now lived again. Her house was a tiny Tudor on a tidy street with a variety of different house styles, all old, all immaculately tended. The front door was red and the lawn was manicured within an inch of its life. Everything about the place was perfect, just like Mary Ann D’Amato, whom, if I wouldn’t hate myself for feeling it, I wouldn’t like at all. But I couldn’t go there. She was just that wonderful.

  She opened the door, still in her scrubs from work, her shirt adorned with dancing bears. She wore clogs on her feet and her gorgeous mane of jet-black hair was pulled back into a sensible bun. A stethoscope hung around her neck. “Bel McGrath,” she said, pulling the heavy door open wider. “So good to see you!” she added, pulling me into a hug.

  I so wanted to be the woman who had an archenemy, but even I—of the vivid imagination and highly suspicious nature—couldn’t cast Mary Ann D’Amato in that role. I wasn’t Catwoman, after all. If I had to be honest with myself, my relationship with Kevin was over long before Mary Ann had reappeared after getting her nursing degree. She returned to the Landing after graduating, moving back in with her mom and dad and commuting to her job at the hospital. I guess during that time she, on the one hand, had saved for a house, like a smart woman would. I, on the other hand, after dickering and negotiating with Kevin about what our life would be like if we did stay together, couldn’t convince him that my new job, which had crazy hours, would be conducive to a marriage. Kids. All those things that he seemed to want yet still didn’t have.

  That fact gave me pause. Maybe it wasn’t the circumstances of my new life back then that had been the final nail in the coffin of our relationship. Maybe it was just me.

  I stood in the foyer of the well-appointed house, a bouquet of flowers in my right hand, a bottle of wine in my left, and waited for instructions. So this was what it looked like to live like an actual adult. Even when I had lived in the city, my house had that just-ransacked look that someone who worked day and night could identify with. There were boxes from my move years previous and a coffee table that doubled as a bar, dining table, and sometimes seat. I look around Mary Ann’s and wondered if someday I would be someone who had a cut-glass vase of gerbera daisies sitting jauntily on a polished foyer table.

  I didn’t think so, but time would tell.

  Mary Ann excused herself to change and Kevin appeared from the back of the house, taking both of my offerings. I bit my tongue, not asking the question that seemed most obvious: Why aren’t you married to this woman? And if you don’t to marry her, can I?

  He held the wine up to the light to get a better look at the label. “Rosé. Mary Ann’s favorite.” He gave me a little chuck to the shoulder with the flowers. “You done good, McGrath.”

  Stepping into the house was like taking a walk through a Pottery Barn catalog. A little rustic chic here, a little French country there. Kevin led me to the back deck, where potted plants and assorted greenery dotted the perimeter and tasteful wind chimes hung from the eave over the back door, signaling to me that this was a place of calm, not conflict. It was a little different from what I was used to at Mom’s. For all of her “namaste” this and “universe” that—words she tossed around but that were at odds with her devout Catholicism—the house I had grown up and now had dinner in every Sunday with my brothers and their families was about as calm as Grand Central at rush hour.

  “I could get used to this,” I said, realizing, too late, that I hadn’t meant to verbalize that aloud, looking around at the lush expanse of garden, the water falling gently from a rock formation. Maybe I was the one who should have taken up with Mary Ann D’Amato. Maybe she was actually the catch and he had partnered “up.”

  Mary Ann emerged a few minutes later with three glasses of the wine that I had brought on a silver tray, bending over to hand me one. Not only was she gorgeous and nice, but she smelled like a newborn baby’s breath, just a hint of something sweet and lovely. Her hair was now down, swinging behind her as she walked. Whereas I felt like I had been rode hard and put up wet, as they say, she looked like the teenager I remembered from growing up, the first female altar server at our church, someone for whom piety came easy. I, sitting in the pews sandwiched between my brothers, prayed that church would be over in under an hour; that’s how I rolled back at BHJ. “Thank you,” I said, resisting the urge to add, I love you! I just hadn’t realized it until now!

  She sat across from me on an Adirondack chair, sipping her wine. Finally, after several minutes of uncomfortable silence, during which time the back of my fancy tunic became soaked with my sweat, she leaned in, a concerned look on her face. I was starting to worry. Was it natural to sweat this much at my age? Was I entering perimenopause? “Did you go to the candle lighting, Bel?” Mary Ann asked.

  “For Amy,” Kevin added unnecessarily.

  “No,” I said, lying. “You?”

  “We go every year,” Mary Ann said, taking Kevin’s hand. “It’s beautiful. The whole Landing coming together. Supporting Oogie and Margaret. Just candlelight. And silence.”

  Sounded like a whole lot of weird to me. And it had been.

  “Where do you think she went, Bel?” Mary Ann asked, studying my face for an answer.

  “Amy?
” I asked.

  Mary Ann nodded. The solemnity of this occasion, one that I thought might include some laughter in addition to amazing spaghetti sauce, was throwing me off my game a little bit.

  I didn’t want to say what I thought had happened to Amy, because if I did it would be out there and I’d never be able to take it back. She’d been taken and murdered. That was the only answer, because I had been her best friend—her sister from another mother, really—and she would have told me where she was going if she had left on her own. All I said, an unsatisfactory answer at best but the same answer everyone else gave, was, “I don’t know.”

  Over dinner, Mary Ann’s sauce living up to its reputation, I asked Kevin what he knew about Declan Morrison, if the investigation had turned up anything else about the mystery guest.

  “You’ve heard nothing, Bel?” he asked, going back to one of the first questions he had asked me after he had come into the crime scene. “Now, after a few days, you’ve got nothing that would help me with this?”

  I thought that was his job. I sincerely hoped that what I heard in his voice wasn’t accusatory, like I was holding something back—which I was—or I was so addled that I had forgotten everything until this very moment. I was still sitting on Caleigh’s interaction with the handsome Celt, but other than that, I had nothing to offer. “Just some muted voices on the landing, Kevin. Nothing else.” I told you, I wanted to say, but sitting here at this beautiful, candlelit table, with the beatific Mary Ann sitting across from me, it didn’t seem appropriate to get snippy. I wanted to ask if Kevin had Declan’s phone and, if so, what might be on that phone, but I didn’t want to tip my hand in that direction.

  Mary Ann shook her head sadly at the idea that I couldn’t help with the investigation, my mind so full of holes that it was just a crying shame. “Maybe you should be hypnotized?” she said, brightening at the thought.

  I felt the pasta in my mouth turn to a grainy paste at the thought. “Hypnotized?” I asked, choking down the once-delicious food. I had been hypnotized once to quit smoking, so I knew that I was highly suggestible, because I no longer bought cigarettes. But I also had developed an inexplicable aversion to onions, once a staple of all of my recipes and now gone from my culinary repertoire, the mere thought of them making me gag.

  Kevin looked at Mary Ann as if she had discovered the cure for cancer. “Brilliant! That’s a great idea.”

  “That’s not a great idea,” I said, putting my napkin to my mouth. “That’s not a great idea at all.” A Vidalia onion, all papery and yellow, popped into my head.

  “Why not?” they said in unison, studying my face for an answer.

  How would I tell them that if they were going to hypnotize me to see if I could remember anything the likelihood was that I would spill what I really knew: that Caleigh had not been the gorgeous, blushing bride everyone thought they saw but a two-timing woman who wasn’t sure that the guy who adored her was the right man for her. That before walking down the aisle and pledging her troth to Mark Chesterton she had given Declan Morrison—if his texts to her were to be believed—the night of his life.

  CHAPTER Fourteen

  I didn’t go back home right away, making a left out of Kevin’s street and heading toward the train station, at the end of which was the kayak put-in that I had visited two days before. Rather than sit at the water’s edge, I elected to take a seat, carefully, at a weather-beaten picnic table, hoping that I wouldn’t add insult to injury and put a butt splinter on the list of complaints I now had related to my life.

  The last thing I needed or wanted to do was go back to Kevin’s to have Mary Ann play find-the-splinter-in-Bel’s-butt.

  I hadn’t planned on coming here, but I felt like Amy’s name had come up more in the past few days than ever before, her presence like a whisper in my ear. This is where we were last together, where we had had the first, last, and only fight we would ever have, me leaving in a huff, she standing by the water’s edge, her own car parked in its usual spot by the trees. How could I have known that that was the last time I would see her? That my last words—“you’ll be sorry”—were words I had never strung together since and that I wished, daily, that I could take back? Like the footage I had left on the cutting-room floor, so to speak, from Caleigh’s wedding, I had left those words out of my statement to the police when they came to my house, questioned me, and insinuated I knew more than I was telling. I didn’t know more. I knew less than they thought. But I had said those words and they could have been some of the last words she had heard.

  Sometimes I wondered what her killer had said to her before he took her life, because I was sure she was dead. We had a kind of telepathy, a two-hearts-beating-as-one connection, and a few days after she went missing I was convinced that it was so, that my heart had started to beat alone.

  I had left my car back by the train station, under a streetlight, walking the short distance to the water. More rocks were visible at the put-in now, the water having receded to the lowest point that I could remember. This drought was no joke, the real deal. Even in the dark, lights from the train tracks the only thing illuminating the area, I could see that this was serious. If we didn’t get some rain soon, there would be no water at all in the small river.

  Behind me, I heard a car driving over the gravel that separated the paved train station parking lot from the sandy area where cars parked at the put-in. Its lights off, the driver drove slowly over the uneven ground, pulling right up to what was once the water’s edge but was now exposed rock and silt. At the picnic table, in relative darkness, the lights from the train station not extending as far as the area I was sitting, I was protected, hidden from view. I sat perfectly still and waited, wondering why I now had company, who it might be, and what he or she had planned.

  Just out for an evening swim? I’ve got news for you: no water.

  The car stayed at the edge of the put-in, the motor running, the lights off. I couldn’t see what kind of car it was, but it looked like a small SUV, a Honda CRV or a Toyota Rav4, something of that ilk. The driver’s side door opened and someone got out, someone tall, thin, and who moved like a teenager, scrambling more than walking over the rocks and into what remained of the river, many feet in the distance. Whoever it was, and it seemed to be a man, wasn’t wearing shoes; that was evident by the way he picked his way gingerly over the rocky ground and into the water. There was nothing to suggest that another person was there except for my shallow breathing, something that sounded loud to my ears but which I suspected couldn’t be heard in the still night. I couldn’t see much except for the outline of a figure out in the water, the gentle waves lapping at his ankles. He stood and stared out at the dwindling river, the phragmites bending in the breeze, a duck or two gliding by, not realizing they might have to migrate sooner than they thought if the drought continued.

  Minutes passed and the person continued to stare. A train barreled north, chugging by the trestle bridge that spanned the Foster’s Landing River and the adjacent Hudson, its headlamp casting a glow over the whole area. I ducked back, not wanting to be seen.

  But just before the light faded, glancing over me to light up the tracks going into the station, it lit up the person standing in the river and I finally saw who it was.

  I wondered why Kevin was staring out toward Eden Island.

  CHAPTER Fifteen

  On Thursday, I did more prep for the wedding on Saturday, still dismayed by the sad stock of ingredients that I was presented with in the underwhelming kitchen. But I was a chef and it was my job to make it wonderful for the happy couple, their guests, and my parents, who would be the harshest judges of all.

  After putting in a tray of bacon-wrapped scallops that I would serve to Mom and Dad for their take on them before putting them on the menu, I took a few minutes to poke around the Manor, seeing what had changed since I had last been here. Heck, who was I kidding? I wanted to go upstairs and see what the crack detective squad—aka Kevin—had missed in his investig
ation after Declan’s death. There had to be something. I knew it wasn’t the right thing to do, but I did it anyway, making sure no one was around, slipping under the police tape that was still draped across the door to the bridal suite and letting myself into the room where I had last seen Caleigh draped across the bed, passed out drunk. I closed the door behind me, stepping over a mess of police tape in a pile by the floor, all wadded up and waiting to be disposed of.

  I had a pair of plastic gloves in my coat pocket and slipped those on as I poked around the bridal suite. I got on my hands and knees and pulled up the dust ruffle around the four-poster bed, making a mental note to tell Cargan that whoever he had cleaning the guest rooms was doing a piss-poor job of it and that in addition to getting rid of the police tape, they needed to acquaint themselves with a vacuum and its purpose. I ran my hands under the bed and came out with a face full of dust but not much else. I opened every drawer of every dresser in the room, finding nothing, and pulled open the armoire to see if there was anything in it or behind it.

  Nothing.

  I stood in the center of the room with my hands on my hips and surveyed the space. The windows were spotless; that was something, I guessed. But if we were going to up our game around here—something I wasn’t convinced the rest of them wanted—then we were going to have to do a massive overhaul of the place to bring it into at least the twentieth century, if not the twenty-first. Baby steps.

  I covered every surface of the room visually before crawling around and seeing what I could find beyond the dust bunnies that were stuck in every corner, behind every piece of furniture. I stifled every sneeze, knowing that Mom, Dad, and Cargan were lurking in the Manor somewhere, preparing for the next wedding by taking stock of the chairs, overseeing the ironing of the tablecloths and napkins, and making sure the dining hall was in good shape after Saturday’s debacle of a wedding. I was on the other side of the bed, my ass sticking up in the air, my torso under the bed frame, when someone entered the room. Along the wall under the headboard, taped to the molding, was a long wire. I couldn’t figure out where it went or if it was attached to the landline on the nightstand, but I didn’t have time to find out, my brother’s voice interrupting my investigation.