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

by Maggie McConnon

  The truck backed up to the riverside of the manor and Javier and his guys jumped out. Javier, an old contact from my days in the city and the first guy I had thought of when the plan entered my mind, gave me the once-over. “Late night, Bel?” he said, taking in my rumpled jacket and pants. I had put them on when I got home, afraid that in my addled state I’d end up out here in my pajamas with the guys. Behind him, a couple of guys whom I would never see again and couldn’t describe to anyone given the darkness, opened the back of the truck. “Is that a hickey?” he asked, leaning in to get a better look at me under the one light that shone from the manor.

  I grabbed my neck. “No.”

  “Just kidding, chica. Just confirming what I already knew: you had yourself a booty call,” he said.

  “A date, Javier. It was just a date. Nothing more,” I said, peering around him to get a look at what was in the truck.

  “A date, a booty call, whatever. You say ‘tomato’…,” he said, trailing off. “Glad you’re away from that Ben guy. What a…” He searched for the right word.

  “Wanker?” I provided helpfully. That was the closest approximation of what my former fiancé, a Brit, Ben Dykstra was. He was a liar, and a cheater. In other words, a wanker. It had only been two months since I had been home, a little more than that since we had broken up, and already I was over him, going on dates. What did that say about me? Did I care?

  “I was thinking of something worse, but I’ll keep it to myself,” Javier said. He blessed himself. “My mother up in heaven would strike me down,” he said, kissing a medallion around his neck. He turned around and in a shouted whisper told the guys to hurry up.

  One of the guys jumped off the back of the refrigerated truck and brought down the lift gate. Another guy wheeled down what I was waiting for: a one-hundred-pound pig, raised for the express purpose of providing “ham” to the O’Donnell wedding guests. Neither he nor his former owner knew that at the time he was living peacefully on a farm somewhere, but today he was a feast fit for a family celebrating the wedding of their only daughter, the lovely Patrice.

  Javier waved a hand with gravity. “And there he is.”

  The team made quick work of getting the pig all ready for the roasting. A half hour after they arrived, the pig was smoking away, turning lazily on the pit, Javier’s guy Fernando getting two hundred bucks in cash and a tryout as my new sous chef as his reward for making sure that Henry, as I had dubbed our pig, was not getting too brown on any one side at any given time.

  As the dusky morning light turned to soft sunlight, the smell of roasted pig filled the air around the Manor. I prepared myself for what my father would say when he saw a pig roasting a few hundred yards from where the cocktail hour would take place—under the same tent where Caleigh had not eaten enough canapés to soak up the booze in her stomach—but I was resolute. If I was going to be the chef at Shamrock Manor, things would be done my way, not the way some thickheaded groom or unsophisticated bride wanted. Roasting a pig was casual but just retro enough to be elegant.

  At least that’s what I told myself.

  “Make sure you put on sunscreen, Fernando,” I said, tossing him a tube of something that I had in my jacket pocket. Mom had been vigilant about keeping her own skin protected and ours, too, years before it was considered the norm to lather up in the sun. Fernando looked like he wanted to object but, seeing the look on my face, wisely kept his mouth shut.

  In the Manor, I grabbed another chef’s coat, left over from Goran’s tenure, and brought it outside to Fernando as well. I had never asked about staff; I knew that Goran had had help, but I wasn’t sure of their caliber. And now I wasn’t sure where any of them were. None of them had shown up for work during the week and Dad had been evasive, leading me to believe that they had either all quit or been deported in the days since Caleigh’s wedding. Hence, Fernando. Fortunately, the O’Donnell wedding was a later-afternoon affair and on the small side, so I had plenty of time. I went to work making several trays of shepherd’s pie the way I wanted—with short ribs, not the foie gras that Cargan had accused me of slipping in there—and preparing a host of beautiful hors d’oeuvres with just the right amount of whimsy for a bride such as Patrice O’Donnell, a young woman who had come in for a tasting weeks before and thought she was getting Goran’s specialties of the house or the Shamrock Manor “special”: the aforementioned shepherd’s pie, ham of some kind, mashed potatoes, carrots, and a wilted salad drenched in a crappy dressing. Dad said that Mr. and Mrs. O’Donnell had been very happy with the fare and maybe they were. But Patrice deserved better.

  How did I know that? I didn’t. But after Googling her announcement and finding only one in the local paper that went on endlessly about her groom, one Keith Damscott of the Poughkeepsie Damscotts, and his incredible career as a budding novelist and only one line about Patrice—that she “taught math at a local high school”—my heart broke just a little bit for her. Implicit in that announcement was that Mr. Damscott didn’t have a visible means of employment and that Patrice was supporting her husband with his non-existent writing career. It was all right there on the page, right down to the dark circles under Patrice’s limpid eyes, the ones that she clearly had tried to cover up before the photo was taken but had failed.

  I had stared at the picture a long time, maybe recognizing myself in Patrice’s optimistic face, thinking that maybe, like me, she was talking herself into something that would turn out not to be a very good idea. I thought about her as I carved out little centers in tiny potatoes and filled them with caviar, topping them with a dollop of crème fraiche.

  No, Patrice O’Donnell, you will not have “ham,” at least not the ham of your youth, the kind of ham that came in a can and that your mother studded with cloves for a special occasion. You deserve better.

  CHAPTER Eighteen

  Turns out Patrice O’Donnell didn’t deserve better. But Keith Damscott did.

  The not-so-blushing bride and shell-shocked groom arrived at Shamrock Manor just after six o’clock, pretty much right on schedule, and Patrice, in a wedding dress that cost more than the last renovation of the Manor, demanded to see the chef. Her attitude made me wonder if she had ever really been to Shamrock Manor, because clearly she had higher hopes for her wedding day that went beyond a down-on-its-heels catering hall that boasted a spectacular view and not much else.

  Oh, but there was the great chef now. There was that even though Patrice didn’t know that when they had booked the place.

  The pig, roasting in the hot sun, had been a better idea when I had originally come up with it. Now it just seemed like folly, Fernando having looked as if he were one of those rowers in a Charlton Heston movie about slaves in ancient Rome. Fernando was rethinking becoming a sous chef at Shamrock Manor and he hadn’t even seen the kitchen yet.

  Mom and Dad had seen the pig before the wedding started and hadn’t said a word, Mom just looking at me silently and shaking her head, Dad putting a paint-splattered mitt to his face and rubbing vigorously, their own versions of abject disappointment in their only daughter.

  I met Patrice O’Donnell in the foyer, the bust of FDR having been replaced with a bust of Bobby Sands, the most famous of the Irish prisoners who had led the 1981 hunger strike in a British prison. Where my dad had gotten a Bobby Sands bust on such short notice was anyone’s guess, but there he was. My guess is that Dad had been working on this for years and Declan Morrison’s destruction of the FDR bust was just an excuse to bring out this new creation, one that bore the hallmarks of Dad’s late-night work. The crooked nose. The asymmetrical eyes, the squiggly mouth. So how did I know it was Bobby Sands? The plaque affixed to the bust gave helped me figure it out.

  “Who’s that?” Patrice asked, pointing one gloved finger at the bust.

  “Bobby Sands,” I said.

  “Brother?”

  “No,” I said, smoothing down my chef’s coat. “Irish martyr.”

  “He wasn’t here a few weeks ago. FDR was.
I prefer FDR.”

  She said it as if old Franklin had really classed up the joint. “Yes. Unfortunate incident,” I said, wondering how Patrice O’Donnell had missed the news that a man had died in the Manor just a week earlier or if she had chosen just to ignore that little fact. Or if Dad had cut the price per person and the O’Donnells were getting a bargain. “We lost President Roosevelt and replaced him with a great figure in Irish history.”

  “Right,” Patrice said. “The murder. The only reason we’re still here is that your father cut the price in half.”

  I knew it. But we’d have to talk, Dad and I. We’d be closed in a month if word got out that Mal McGrath was slashing prices on weddings.

  Patrice crossed her arms. “Hmmm. What’s for dinner?” she asked.

  “Just what you ordered,” I said.

  “And where’s the sexy foreign chef?” she asked. Next to her, Keith Damscott remained silent while he should have bristled, even just a bit, in my opinion. Their official union was only hours old and already she was talking about another man in a way that suggested that she had a wandering eye. What was it with the brides at Shamrock Manor? I had only met two so far and both were lacking in both the morals and fidelity departments.

  “He got promoted,” I said. “He’s now the chef at the Ritz-Carlton in New York. But he did all of the prep on your meal tonight, so I think you’ll be happy.” The lie fell off my lips so easily that I almost believed it myself. Behind me and through the doors to the banquet hall I saw my brothers testily setting up their equipment, Cargan looking as if he was on the verge of tears. That could mean one of two things: his soccer team had lost that morning or the brothers were in all-out war with one another about one of his arrangements. I suspected the latter.

  She regarded me coolly, the only sound in the foyer the whir of the air-conditioning, now working after two days of Dad tinkering with the wonky system. I had encountered some tough customers in my time, but Patrice O’Donnell was a force I hadn’t encountered in a long time. She was bitchy. Tense. Unhappy. On edge. That didn’t mean that I was unprepared for her; she couldn’t hold a candle to some of the customers I had served throughout my career.

  “The only reason we’re here is because you’re cheap,” she said, hitting the one button that I knew I had to address with Mom and Dad. We were cheap and even cheaper when you factored in that they were paying half of cheap. At a good twenty dollars per head below that of our chief rival—Le Chateau in Monroeville—we needed to up our game. This place was falling apart, and even though I wasn’t staying that long, I could help make some changes that would elevate the standards, if only a bit.

  “And your father is friends with Mal,” Keith said, reminding her of the connection. Keith looked at me and smiled, accustomed to using his pearly whites to smooth over whatever tenseness his wife brought to the interpersonal communication in which he was involved.

  “Yes. My father is friends with Mal.” She handed Keith her small handbag. “Well, it just better be good. The last guy promised me the world.” She hooked a thumb in Keith’s direction. “Just like this guy over here. Still waiting for the proof on that one.”

  “And what a lucky man he is,” I said, affecting what I hoped was a sincere tone. The “limpid pools” that I had thought described her eyes previously really just indicated a lack of soul that I hadn’t been able to ascertain from the photo. Whereas Keith had looked smug and arrogant in the wedding photo, the man before me was anything but, attending to his bride and her lengthy train like a bridesmaid himself.

  “And was that a roasting pit out there?” she asked before leaving the foyer and entering the anteroom to the banquet hall, where guests were starting to assemble after getting half a load on at the cocktail hour. She didn’t wait for an answer and I didn’t give one, wondering if she had gotten a glimpse of the butchered animal in our kitchen, fine roasted pork ready to be served to fifty starving guests of the O’Donnells.

  I had texted Brendan Joyce earlier in the day when it was clear that the “staff,” the existence of whom Dad had danced around, really had been deported. Or something. If they had even ever existed. Brendan ran into the kitchen, breathless, a smear of yellow paint across his handsome mug, and put on the apron I handed him.

  “I don’t know how to cook,” he said, blurting out the one thing that I knew for sure about him. The way he had devoured his food at the Grand Mill last night, as well as asking for a meal to go, was an indication that the guy had a tremendous appetite and probably didn’t cook for himself.

  “I just need hands,” I said. “You’re my expeditor.”

  “If that means ‘love machine,’” he said, burying his head into the hair that was falling out from beneath my head scarf, “I’m your man.”

  “No,” I said, extricating myself from his welcome embrace. “It means ‘food handler.’ Or guy that makes sure what I plate gets into the servers’ hands.” I let him give me a kiss, glad that Fernando and the servers were otherwise occupied. “That’s it. That’s your job.”

  The servers who remained were a bunch of girls who had come over from Dad’s hometown and who were staying in the United States for no more than the summer, ostensibly. Dad still had friends in Ballyminster and, hence, an ability to hire girls who wanted a little adventure but not at the expense of their safety. They lived around town in various rented rooms, something else Dad had a bead on as well. He paid them well and the tips were not insubstantial, making it so when they weren’t working the girls could go to New York City if they wanted and shop at the outlet malls a few miles up the river, snapping up last year’s styles at bargain prices. Working at Shamrock Manor was a boon for girls from the small village in the north of Ireland. Although their visas allowed them a certain time to work and after that they would return home, that wasn’t always what happened, many of them disappearing into the weeds after their stint here and joining the hordes of illegals who stayed on after their approved tenure. The three working today—Colleen, Eileen, and Pauline—entered the kitchen and awaited my instructions. They had already served a round of hors d’oeuvres and were back for more.

  “Like a nest of hungry vipers,” I heard one of them say when they entered en masse.

  I leaned on the stainless counter and peered under the warming rack at the three of them, nearly identical in their Shamrock Manor black vest/black pants/white shirt combination, their hair all pulled back into tight ponytails. “How’s it going out there?”

  Colleen, or it could have been Pauline or Eileen for all I knew, made a sad face. “The thingies with the caviar? Not a hit, Belfast.”

  One of the other raven-haired servers underscored the point. “There’re a bunch in a garbage pail.”

  Beside me, I could feel Brendan brace for a histrionic display from a temperamental chef. But there was none. Those days were over. Anger-management class had brought me this far and my own self-control would take me the rest of the way. “Okay. So, what do they like?”

  “The crab cake canapés,” Eileen said. I now remembered that Eileen had a pronounced, and adorable, lisp, one of the things that had Fernando’s eyes trained on her since she had introduced herself to him earlier.

  And Colleen had the long legs and a prodigious bosom. Pauline was very skinny and, according to Dad, a “runner.” Whether that meant she was a flight risk for INS or just into jogging I never could figure out. Maybe both.

  “Fine,” I said. I pointed to the other two. “And you two? Did you crowdsource the hors d’oeuvres? What’s going well?”

  “The pigs in the blankets,” Pauline said. “They love them.”

  Fortunately, suspecting that my more ambitious creations would fall flat, I had put in a few more trays of the old standbys. With Brendan’s help, I loaded up the girls’ trays and sent them back out, taking time to check the butchering I had done on the pig. Perfection.

  “Fernando!” I said, spying him in the refrigerator. “What’s going on in that walk-in?” I aske
d.

  “Nothing, Miss Bel,” he said, emerging finally. “I was just hot.”

  I could imagine he was. All of those hours in the sun, roasting a pig, had taken their toll. Fernando was shaky and pale. “Sit down, brother,” Brendan said. “I’ll be right back.”

  When the doors opened, I could hear my brothers tuning up, the sound of the drums, lots of cymbals, the most prevalent. Feeney was singing in a half whisper, something about how much he hated Arney set to the tune of “The Fields of Athenry,” but since his half whisper was amplified by an impressive sound system everyone could hear what he was saying. A few guests laughed while others stood in openmouthed horror. I leaned into the dining hall and when I got Feeney’s attention drew a finger across my throat. Cut it out, I mouthed. Cargan really was on the verge of breakdown now, his lips white and set in a grim line. Boy could never handle the drama of being a McGrath, having a pathological aversion to conflict. I looked at Feeney and pointed at Cargan, staring disconsolately at his fiddle as he plucked at the strings, and Feeney turned off the mike, turning around to clap a hand on our brother’s shoulder in an attempt to calm him down.

  Feeney came into the foyer. “What?” he said, his whining not attractive on a grown man.

  “I get it. You want to be a rock star. You want out of this one-horse town. You want a life separate from the extended family on whom your livelihood depends.” I gave him a little slap to the cheek and held a finger to his lips when he tried to protest. “Take a number, Brother,” I said before going back to the kitchen where Brendan was doing a great job tending to the potatoes bubbling in the giant pot of water. I’d mash them within an inch of their starchy lives and add a lot of butter and, with the roasted pig, would serve a dinner the likes of which no one at Shamrock Manor had ever eaten. The guests were working their way through the salad course, after which there would be some dancing and speeches, and then the entrée would be served.