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

by Maggie McConnon

  “Car? Cargan!” I said again, and not getting an answer, just that blank stare, I ran into the kitchen and grabbed my phone, calling Kevin’s cell and saying something, I don’t remember what, when he picked up.

  I don’t know how my parents or anyone else on the property missed what was going on, but they only came running when they heard the sirens. I sat beside my brother, thinking he was still alive, hoping I was right, and holding his hand, cold and lifeless in my own. Kevin was the first person through the door, followed by a uniformed officer who had never seen such carnage, the look on his face indicating that he may have chosen the wrong line of work after all. Soon there were other cops and then people I recognized from various parts of my life and who were involved in the volunteer ambulance corps. I was shuttled about and moved to the living room, where I immediately stained my white slipcovered Ikea sofa with the blood from a wound I hadn’t remembered getting, didn’t know I had. I put my hand to my head and came away with a palm full of thick, red blood, my hair knotted and soaked with it.

  It was all a blur, Mom next to me as Jane-Marie Bell, a girl from freshman algebra, combed through my hair until she got to the wound that was responsible for all of the blood, remarking at how I hadn’t changed a bit, how pretty I still was, asking if I liked being a chef, all in such a way that even I, in my addled state, knew that she was making small talk to keep me preoccupied.

  A body on a stretcher came out of the bedroom, and then another one. I looked at Mom, but she was as she always is: Composed. Perfect. Poised.

  She watched the activity by the door. “Guns. They will be our downfall.” She put a hand on my arm when Jane-Marie walked away to confer with her boss. “After we get through this, I’ll tell you everything.”

  “There’s more?” I said. How much more? And what could it be? I wasn’t sure how much more I could handle.

  “Just a little,” she said, and licked her lips.

  CHAPTER Forty-two

  I had to wear a head scarf to cover the part of my head where they had shaved my hair away and that morning, two weeks after everything, added a pair of giant hoop earrings to add a look of whimsy to the getup. I’d be a gypsy until my hair grew back. I had moved back into the Manor proper, temporarily, or so I told myself, while my apartment was turned from a crime scene back into a suitable place for living. We had gotten through the last two weddings with a little help from my brothers, who in addition to rehearsing for their performances, served as prep cooks in the kitchen in the days prior to the events, helping me silently when I gave them assorted tasks: chops these carrots. Trim this beef. Roll this dough.

  Today, before I started prepping for the upcoming weekend’s wedding, I made a nice fry-up, as Dad would call it: Bacon, two eggs over easy, fried potatoes. Fresh orange juice. A grapefruit cut up with a little sugar dusted on the top. Two pieces of toast slathered with Irish butter. A strong cup of coffee laced with real cream.

  I carried the tray up the stairs and knocked on the door to the bridal suite, the largest room in the Manor with an en suite bathroom, most suitable for someone recovering from a catastrophic injury. “Knock, knock,” I said before toeing open the door and peering in.

  As he had been for the last week since he had been home, Cargan was sitting in the Queen Anne chair by the window, looking out over the barren Foster’s Landing River. “Hiya, Bel.”

  “Hiya, Car,” I said. The doctor said that it was a miracle my brother was still alive, and credited his survival to what the doctor called my quick thinking and fast action. If he meant calling Kevin and screaming into the phone and that qualified as “quick thinking,” well, then okay. When I first opened my eyes that afternoon in the apartment, I thought for sure Cargan was dead, having taken a bullet for me, not knowing that his own quick thinking, and agility from years of playing soccer, had allowed him to move just enough so that the bullet tore through his side and exited out his back without touching a major organ or his spine.

  That and his training.

  The police had gotten there so fast because Cargan was one of their own. Deep undercover, but one of them, nonetheless, that deep cover blown when I had discovered the setup in the basement and Kevin the bugs all throughout the Manor. Kevin already knew about Cargan from that day at the station, the two of them enacting an incredibly convincing play for me that included Cargan asking for a lawyer and keeping up the façade that he was not as smart as the rest of us. Thing was, he was smarter. Way smarter. He had been pulled from the Police Academy—we had been told he flunked out—and put into a special anti-terrorism unit years before. His last gig had been so dangerous that he had been given a leave of absence and returned home to the Manor—the place he considered home base anyway—to figure out what he would do next. He didn’t need to wait long: he suspected Eugene was still in the gun business, a few clues dropped his way to indicate that he was correct, and the wedding, his living in the Manor, afforded Cargan the opportunity to figure out if that was the case.

  Turns out that those years Cargan had spent traveling and touring “playing music” had been the years he had trained with a special unit of the NYPD that investigated terrorism in all of its nefarious incarnations. He was especially helpful in unmasking the leader of a rogue IRA group assembling in Brooklyn—a guy who was the head usher at a rather large church in Brooklyn while plotting to take out the royal family during a trip to the States—and averting tragedy for the British monarchy. Cargan had uncovered yet another group who wanted to assassinate the Pope when he had visited Yankee Stadium. People continually underestimated my brother and that made him perfect for the work. He was as close to a superhero as one could get while still maintaining the façade that he was the simple one, the one we needed to protect. What else he had done was a mystery and I wanted it to stay that way because the thought of my sweet brother, “the wee, poor soul” as I had heard Aunt Helen describe him once, struck a fear in me that would beat right alongside my heart.

  Simple? Hardly. Wee, poor soul? You couldn’t be more wrong, Aunt Helen.

  Eugene was in the weeds, and Cargan was seriously rethinking his plan to put in a good thirty years on the force, the hole in his side making him think long and hard about the life he lived, the loneliness he faced on a daily basis.

  He pushed the food around on his plate before looking up at me, the bags beneath his eyes making him look a whole heck of a lot older than he was. “Thanks for breakfast,” he said as he did every day since he had come home.

  “You’re welcome. Thank you, too,” I said, but I wasn’t referring to his enjoyment of the bacon, the eggs. It was for him being there when I needed him, just like I had been there all those time when he had needed me, but under far less critical circumstances. “How you feeling, Brother?”

  “Like I’ve been hit by a truck, Sister,” he said.

  “Every day is better, right?” I said, hoping the answer was a resounding “yes.”

  He looked over at me and smiled. “Yes,” he lied. “Every day is better. Right.” He looked at his plate.

  “Soccer soon?”

  “Soccer soon.”

  “I’ll come to a game,” I said, just as I had said all those times previously but still had never done.

  “Good. You’ll love the guys. They play the game like they’re possessed.” He pushed the food around some more and looked out the window. “Some of them are single, Bel.”

  I held up a hand. “Stop right there. I think I’m off men for a while.”

  He smiled and pointed at the river. “The drought. I wonder when it will end.”

  “Crazy.”

  “It was a good time to add the eyelashes.”

  “Huh?”

  “I helped Dad add eyelashes to Mom’s eyes.”

  “What do you mean?” I wondered if he was this obtuse with his colleagues. It was a wonder not all of them had died from cryptic communication.

  “The village pool,” he said. “I snuck in with Dad and helped him add
eyelashes to Mom’s eyes. On the mermaid.”

  “Oh!” I said. “Well done. Brilliant, really. I saw them recently and they are spectacular, Cargan. The whole thing is really lifelike.”

  He pushed the plate away, our small talk done. The joking over. “I want to meet someone, Bel. I want to have kids. I’m tired of being in basements and in vans. Of being with guys all the time, the kind of guys who can never tell the truth to the people they love. I’m tired of trying to figure out if Dad’s best friend is a gunrunner or just some rube with a fake leg.”

  I sat on the bed, my hand instinctively going to the spot on my head that had been sewn shut, able to be closed, my brains staying where they belonged, thanks to my brother’s quick thinking. “I hear you, Brother. Now, eat your fry-up,” I said, at a loss to say anything else.

  He told me that Mom knew; Cargan could never keep anything from her. That was the “more” that Mom had alluded to that day in my apartment. Like a good Irish son, he had kept Mom in the loop, despite his promise to keep his identity and his job a secret from everyone else. I made him promise that the Pilates studio, and the women who went in there daily, wasn’t a front for some secret MI-5 faction. He assured me that it wasn’t, but knowing what I did now, that the brother I thought I knew wasn’t that brother at all, made me rethink everything.

  Those were a lot of fit women. If they put their heads together, God knows they could fight some kind of war, win some battle against something besides carbs. But most of them were too busy starving themselves to fit into jeans that were meant for women twenty years their juniors to be of any help to a paramilitary organization with peace and order on its mind.

  “So what do you think?” I asked.

  “About the fry-up? Great,” he said, turning his attention back to his food and devouring his bacon. He never could resist bacon.

  “No. Uncle Eugene. Terrorist or rube with fake leg?”

  He smiled and I saw a hint of my old brother, the one without all of the baggage and sadness, peek out from within. “I’d tell you…”

  “… but then you’d have to kill me?” I was using that joke a lot lately.

  “Something like that.”

  We sat in silence until his plate was clean. “And Oogie? Did you know?”

  He stared out over the dry river, not meeting my eye. “I had an idea that he was about to go off the rails. I was keeping watch.” He looked down at his empty plate. “On him. On you.”

  Oogie had waved the gun around, but it was not in his nature to shoot. He had fired another warning shot into the ceiling, but instead of the bullet going straight up, it had hit the ceiling fan and ricocheted, hitting my brother in the side. Another thick chunk of plaster had hit Oogie in the head, and like me, he had been the recipient of a boatload of stitches. It was unclear what would happen to Oogie now, what charges, if any, would be pressed. Although everyone in the village was heartbroken by the turn of events, most agreed, from what I heard, that Oogie had been spiraling downward the past couple of years and my reappearance in town was the final straw, another reminder of that aching hole in his heart. I tried not to think about that as I lay awake in my bed at night, thinking that my original decision to become a hermit might have been the best one.

  “We all knew something was coming,” Cargan said. “Oogie hasn’t been the same for a while.”

  I wished my brother had been my sous at The Monkey’s Paw. Maybe none of what had happened would have happened the way it had. “You’ve always had my back, Car.”

  “And…,” he started, and we were back at the swimming pool, my mother’s face staring up at us with her long eyelashes, though not quite as long back then, imploring me to do the right thing, Caleigh making fun of him, me holding her head under the water. His little, skinny legs in his red bathing suit. Her cruelty. There were other times, times Cargan and I didn’t mention. The time I had punched Larry McGovern in the mouth after he had called Cargan an idiot came to mind. I think I still owed the Lord Jesus three Our Fathers for that one, having lost count that afternoon in church after confession. It had mostly gone one way, me fighting the good fight, Cargan being the victim. Things had suddenly changed. Maybe that’s why he had done what he had, fighting that good fight, in secret, in private. He swallowed hard. “You’ve had my back, too, Bel.” He nodded almost imperceptibly. “Thank you.”

  “Eat your fry-up,” I said, the sob in my throat making my voice sound stuffy and trapped. There was no fry-up left to eat, though, just the two of us, knowing what he had done and why.

  We did love each other, I wanted to say. We just don’t say it. I love you, Car; you’re the best brother a girl could have, ever. It was also there, but stuck in my throat.

  The fry-up would have to be enough. I ruffled his short buzz cut and took care not to knock over the fiddle by the window and left him, staring out at the arid riverbed, knowing that he would always have my back.

  And that was enough.

  CHAPTER Forty-three

  There were two people waiting for me in the kitchen when I returned. One I desperately wanted to see; the other I wished a painful death. Neither I had seen in a while. I started with Franceso Francatelli and figured I would deal with Brendan Joyce next. I pulled a big knife out of the knife block and held it in one hand, a ripe tomato in the other. I threw the tomato in the air and cut it into two perfectly symmetrical halves, catching one in midair in my knife hand, the other behind my back.

  “Franceso, I had hoped you had contracted dysentery in my absence and died of dehydration,” I said.

  Not my finest hour or opening line. I had thought of all of the things I wanted to say to Francesco if we ever had the opportunity to meet again, but that wasn’t it. Nor, in my fantasies, was I wearing a head scarf underneath which a chunk of my head was missing.

  He laughed, an actor used to responding on cue. “Bel! You always were such a jokester,” he said.

  “Not joking, Francesco.” I looked at Brendan Joyce, wondering why he was there. He looked away, sheepish. Part of him, I could tell, was in awe of being in the presence of an award-winning actor. “What do you want?”

  “Bel,” Francesco said, throwing his hands out. “Friends? Again?”

  “No. Not friends,” I said. “What do you want?”

  Always the actor, his face went into some approximation of sadness, but underneath that was the empty void that was his personality, his lack of soul. “Bel. I want you,” he said.

  I looked over at Brendan Joyce, united in our incredulity. “Are you getting a load of this?” I asked.

  Brendan nodded dutifully.

  “You want me to come back?” I asked. “To The Monkey’s Paw?”

  “That’s what I want,” he said. Francesco Francatelli, a guy who had no business opening a restaurant, never mind playing a sweet, genius paraplegic with a heart of gold. The guy didn’t have an idea of how to run a restaurant. And he didn’t have a heart. “Ben isn’t working out.”

  I laughed out loud. “Brendan, we didn’t even need Beverly Dos Santos to tell us that that was going to happen.” Francesco came around the corner and I brandished the knife. “Stay back,” I said.

  “Didn’t you go to anger-management classes?” he asked, looking like he wanted to give me a hug. I didn’t like hugs and I certainly didn’t want one from him. The tall, good-looking guy in the corner? Now that was a different story.

  “I did. One intense class where I learned that if I feel threatened, I need to remove myself from the situation.” I looked at Francesco in his expensive loafers and with his hair plugs and stepped back. “As a result, I am going to remove myself from this situation by asking you, Francesco, to leave.”

  He put his hands in his pockets. “Here’s the thing, Bel,” he said, chuckling. “You see, receipts are down. Reservations are almost non-existent. And the only way Max Rayfield will do a show is with you,” he said, referencing the cable bigwig who had wanted to film me for a reality show and who had been in the
restaurant that fateful night. “The Monkey’s Paw needs you.” He put his hands out again. “I need you.”

  “You threw me under the bus, Francesco. I did not leave that fish bone in there and you know that.”

  “I know that!” he said.

  “You know that?” I asked. “When did you know that?”

  “That night!” he said. “You’re too good. You never would have prepared something yourself and let it leave the kitchen unless it had been perfect.” He looked aggrieved. “Why, Bel? Why did you let the fish go out like that?”

  I hated having to say this in front of anyone, let alone the two men in the room. “Because I trusted him.”

  Francesco let out a throaty laugh. “Guy is a wanker, Bel. That was your first mistake.”

  “So, why all the drama? Why the public firing?” I asked, forgetting that Brendan Joyce was in the room and that we had unresolved business.

  “Max was there,” Francesco said. “I figured it would be good business. Good for the show.” He smiled again, his teeth fake and all the same size and shape. “Drama. I figured she’d love that.”

  I approached Francesco, the knife still in my hand. “You ruined my life,” I said before realizing that he really hadn’t. He had saved my life, when I took time to think about it. I was done with Ben. I was done with New York. I stepped back and put the knife down. “Please leave.”

  He waved a hand around, surveying the room. He could tell I was serious and that changed his demeanor for the worse. The soulless stare was back and he was done with me and Shamrock Manor. “This is where you work now, Bel? In a kitchen in a wedding hall? For Irish people? You are so much better than that. The Irish don’t even appreciate good food.”

  “And how would you know that, Francesco?” I asked. “How would you know that every Saturday I serve a gourmet meal to approximately one hundred to one hundred and fifty people who eat my food and drink the wine and dance and have a wonderful time because they are good people, not pretentious people? How would you know that?” I turned my back on him. “That’s right. Because you’re a pompous ass who made one or two good movies and thought he knew how to open a restaurant.” I pulled another knife out of the block, just to see him squirm. “And you’re wrong. The Irish love good food. And laughter. And life.” I looked at Brendan. “Right?”