Bel, Book, and Scandal: A Belfast McGrath Mystery (Bel McGrath Mysteries)

by Maggie McConnon

  “Sounds like we’ve got ourselves a mystery,” Alison said as we headed back to the Manor. “And I love a mystery.” For the first fifteen minutes of the trip, I wasn’t convinced that she wasn’t stoned, but now that we were cruising smoothly along the highway it seemed like she was in full possession of her faculties and I was able to relax a bit. With her, it was hard to tell the difference.

  “Another mystery,” I said. “I am more concerned about Amy’s connection to this place than reclaimed lumber, a father who is supposed to be estranged from his son, and a failing coffee shop in a hippie town.”

  “Yeah, but they are all connected,” Alison said. “Trust me on this one.”

  “Trust you?”

  “Yeah, I’m an expert, remember?” she said. “I’ve solved more mysteries than Nancy Drew.” She stared straight ahead, watching the road, but I could almost see the wheels turning in her head. “That guy was lying. And why do you lie?”

  “To protect yourself,” I said.

  “Or someone else.”

  There had been someone else in Amy’s car when it had sunk to the bottom of the Foster’s Landing River; their identity was still unknown. I had been so focused on wondering where Amy went that I hadn’t considered the question that I really needed to ask: why Amy went.

  CHAPTER Eighteen

  I was still thinking about that question—Why?—when I found Mary Ann D’Amato-Hanson standing in the foyer, her hands on the Bobby Sands plaque. There was a time when I could have asked her husband a lot of questions, questions like Why? and How come? and Who did it?, but those days were over. I was looking for Amy and maybe he was, too. Our purposes, however, may have been crossed and I had to watch out for that.

  “I noticed this on my wedding day, but I don’t think I realized who he was. What he stood for,” she said.

  “Yes. He went on a hunger strike for freedom,” I said. “Heck, if I miss breakfast, I can barely function.”

  “What a terrible story. A terrible situation,” she said.

  “Yes, we Irish are full of them. Lots of joy in our heritage but lots of tragedy, too.”

  She changed the subject, not interested in walking down the Irish memory lane, a road pockmarked by war and disease and, yes, hunger. It still astounded me that as a people we were known for our humor and joviality. “I stopped by because I was talking to my father last night and he reminded me that he wanted to have the department’s Christmas party here this year,” she said, holding up a hand. “I know. It’s short notice. I’m hoping you have the Tuesday before Christmas open. I’m sure your weekends are all booked.”

  They weren’t, but it was kind of her to think so. We did have a post-Christmas-themed wedding, but it was a slow month for us. My hesitation made her think we were really booked when we weren’t.

  “I know it’s short notice, Bel, but I’m hoping…”

  “It’s fine, Mary Ann. How many people are we talking about?” I asked.

  “About fifty,” she said. “You know, all of the officers and staff and their significant others.” She brushed a lock of hair off her shoulder, all the better for me to see the honking diamond stud in her ear; Kevin had clearly upped his game in the gift department. For my seventeenth birthday, he had given me one ticket to a Mets game in the nosebleed section; I never did go, not wanting to venture to Queens by myself. “It’s not a big crowd, as you know.”

  “Let’s go into the office and just confirm the date,” I said. “I want to let Dad know.”

  My parents were in the office in a romantic clinch, Mom with her arms wrapped around Dad’s neck, Dad kissing the top of her head. My parents—even after forty-six years of marriage—were still lovebirds, and while it made Cargan want to heave, he being the one who worked most closely with them, it made me jealous and a little sad. I had never had that kind of connection with anyone, had never had the time to let love grow into something so sustained and constant. They didn’t even flinch when we came in, separating as naturally as they had come together, Mom smoothing down her blond coif and beaming when she saw us, but mainly beaming at Mary Ann, the daughter she wished she had sometimes. Perfection in business casual.

  “Mary Ann Hanson!” she said, using her married name. “To what do we owe this pleasure?”

  “So good to see you, Mrs. McGrath,” Mary Ann said.

  “How many times have I told you to call me Oona?” Mom asked.

  Exactly zero times, I expected. This was as big a girl crush as I had ever seen.

  “Hello, Mr. McGrath,” Mary Ann said.

  “Please, girl, sit,” Dad said, motioning to a chair in front of the desk. “What can we do for you?”

  “Lieutenant D’Amato wants to have the staff Christmas party here,” I said, going around to the desk and opening the reservations book. No online tracking for Shamrock Manor; Mom and Dad wrote each individual booking in a ledger, crossing out those that were canceled and penciling in new events as they booked. “Looks like we’re free on that date, Mary Ann.” I picked a pencil out of the mug on Dad’s desk and wrote in the information that she had given me. “Let’s talk menu.”

  Mary Ann pulled a list out of her purse and read from it. “Three choices: chicken, fish, beef. Your delicious mashed potatoes, Bel. Two vegetables, your choice. Buffet-style.”

  “Well, that makes it easy,” I said. “Dessert?”

  “Can we do an assortment of cakes and cookies?” she asked.

  “Of course,” I said. “And can I surprise you with what they are?”

  “Your surprises are the best, Bel,” she said.

  “Flattery will get you everywhere,” I said, the choices already flashing by on the Rolodex of recipes in my head.

  “And the Manor will be decorated beautifully, Mary Ann,” Dad said. “We are still in the process of decorating the exterior, but everything will be perfect for the event. We’re stringing lights on the trees that lead down to the river.”

  “It will be a winter wonderland,” Mom said.

  They were laying it on a little thick; we already had the booking. I went over a few logistics with Mary Ann, wondering the whole time why it was she, and not Kevin or her father, here planning the FLPD Christmas party.

  I decided that the answer was as it always was: because she was perfect.

  After she said good-bye to my parents, I walked her out into the foyer, where she admired the giant tree. “It’s beautiful,” she said, touching one of the crystal ornaments. “I have no idea how you get it in here and get it decorated, but I give you a lot of credit.”

  I flashed on my fighting quartet of brothers and the work it had taken to get the tree upright. “You don’t want to know,” I said.

  She turned and looked at me. “Bel, tell me if I’m prying.…”

  If you have to ask, you probably are.

  “But what happened?”

  “Oh, you mean Dad’s black eye?” I said.

  “Well, that,” she said, “and Brendan. What happened?”

  “Dad rode the Christmas tree like a bucking bronco and Brendan and I broke up,” I said. I thought it was obvious.

  “I know,” she said. “But why? He’s such a wonderful guy. And you’re equally wonderful. You should be together.”

  It was my turn to focus on the tree, an ornament, anywhere but on her sad face, her eyes, big and brown and full of compassion. Where did I start? “It’s a long story, Mary Ann.”

  She grabbed my hand. “I’m so, so sorry.”

  “Me, too,” I said, and, using every ounce of strength I had, put a smile on my face as if to say “it’s not a big deal.” I was sorry, too, sorrier than I had been when my engagement had ended, than when I had lost my job. It was maybe the sorriest I had been since Amy’s disappearance but I didn’t want her to know that.

  Her face suddenly brightened. “Listen, a group of girls and I go out once a month. For drinks,” she said, as if I thought they went swimming at the Y. “Our next date is Friday. Will you join us?”<
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  “Oh, I don’t know, Mary Ann,” I said. “But thank you.”

  “Think about it? Please, Bel? I think it would be great for you to get out and meet some new people.” She smiled. “Well, they aren’t exactly new. They’re girls from our high-school class.”

  I steeled myself. I couldn’t count on one hand a group of “girls” from high school whom I would want to see again.

  “Like Hallie Gatter,” she started.

  Jesus. Gatter the Chatter? She had been the biggest gossip in our class and the reason I had spent one entire Saturday cleaning the rectory after she told her mother—who told my mother—that she had seen me drinking a beer on Eden Island.

  “And Margaret Dunleavy.”

  Okay, she was nice. Even though I knew the only reason she talked to me was because I could help her do the geometry proofs she couldn’t.

  Mary Ann named a few other innocuous sorts whom I could tolerate but whose take on me I wasn’t sure of. I had a history here and it wasn’t necessarily a good one. She stood there, looking at me expectantly. “These other girls may or may not come.”

  “I’ll think about it,” I said. “Thank you. It’s very nice of you to ask.”

  “It’s fun,” she said. “It’s never a really late night because they all have kids and have to get up early.”

  “Sounds like my kind of crowd,” I said, thinking about my new rising time of 6:00 a.m. and how it was totally at odds with my internal body clock. Dad hit the studio beneath my apartment early and didn’t care who he woke up with his banging and sawing and melding, all in the name of art. I walked her to the front door.

  “I hope you come, Bel,” she said. “And as for Brendan?”

  “Yes?”

  “He really…”

  Loved me? If that’s where she was going, she needed to leave. I didn’t need to be reminded. I practically pushed her out the door and slammed it shut, leaning against it and taking a deep breath to rid myself of the feeling that told me she was right.

  CHAPTER Nineteen

  The next day, I called Tweed Blazer.

  I thought he might ask if I and a friend had visited Wooded Lake the day before, but doing so would reveal that we met Archie Peterson, or whoever that guy was. Sure, Tweed could have come up with a different way of knowing we were there, but I think my call caught him off guard, which was exactly how I wanted him. He knew me as a fake, part-time historian; how hard did he think it would be for me, even a fake, part-time historian, to find out that he was probably not estranged from his father, a guy who taught a kick-ass Breath and Body class in Tweed’s barn? I was leaning onto the stainless-steel counter, holding my phone to my ear, and looking out into the foyer, where I saw Feeney pass through, a set of old golf clubs slung over his shoulder. Why he would need golf clubs in the middle of December was beyond me. And come to think of it, I had never seen him actually play golf; that was Arney’s pursuit. I didn’t think about it again, though, as I listened to the phone ring, just about to hang up when I heard Tweed’s voice.

  “Hi, Tweed. This is Belfast McGrath,” I said, sounding far more confident than I felt.

  He was surprised to hear from me. “Belfast.” It was in that one word that I knew he was aware of my visit to Wooded Lake, his house included, the day before. “How are you? Any closer to finding what you’re looking for?”

  “Not really,” I said. “But that’s not why I’m calling.”

  “It’s not?”

  “No,” I said. “You mentioned getting together. On my ‘home turf,’ I think you said?”

  “Yes, to talk about your friend. Amy was her name, I think?”

  “Yes. Amy. But let’s put that aside for a little while. I’d like to cook for you,” I said. “Show you what we can do here. Downstate, so to speak.”

  “I was never not convinced of the culinary hotbed that downstate represented,” he said.

  The double negative in the sentence took me a moment to decipher.

  “You still there?” he asked after a long pause.

  “Yes!” I said, a little too brightly. “So dinner. I can cook something here at the Manor, if you’re interested.”

  “Interested? In a Belfast McGrath meal?” he asked, letting me know that he had done more than a little research on me in the intervening days since our first meeting. “I’m more than a little interested in that.”

  Although it had been a while since I had been in a professional kitchen—a real professional kitchen, not the Manor kitchen—I didn’t feel rusty in the least. I already knew what I would make, what it would taste like, what it would make him feel like when he put one luscious forkful of boeuf bourguignon into the mouth behind the bushy beard. I wasn’t sure about this guy, who he was, what he represented, if he was telling me the truth, but I knew one thing for sure: He would be putty in my hands after the meal I would make. He would tell me everything, unable to form another lie.

  “Can I bring dessert?” he asked.

  “I have a better idea,” I said. “Bring some me of your coffee and I’ll make a chocolate cake.”

  “Do you want the coffee with or without the marijuana in it?” he asked.

  I paused again.

  “Kidding,” he said. “Just kidding.”

  We settled on the next evening at seven. I’d be done with my work for the day, and presumably so would he.

  Feeney was back. As I hung up, he came into the kitchen, a forty-something—I never could keep my brothers’ ages straight—boy/man, whose dream of becoming a professional musician took a detour and ended with him at the Manor. He was the band’s lead singer, a good one at that, but he would never be Bruce Springsteen, picked from tri-state obscurity to become a rock god. A legend. Nope, he was Feeney McGrath, the self-appointed head of The McGrath Brothers, and playing weddings would be his milieu unless Clive Davis wandered into Shamrock Manor and offered him a recording deal.

  When you know someone your whole life, you know when they are up to something. I looked up from my phone to find him rustling around in the cupboards, checking out the contents of the refrigerator, going into the walk-in. “Help you, Feeney?” I asked.

  He turned around, seeming to have forgotten that I was there. Where else would I be? I practically lived in this kitchen. “Huh?”

  “Do you need something? A sandwich? A drink?”

  He looked at me blankly. “No. Not hungry.”

  That was a first. “So what are you looking for?”

  “Do you have any chicken fat? Or lard?”

  Now it was my turn to stare back blankly. “For what? You’re not cooking something, are you?” Last I heard, his “apartment” was one step above a cardboard box under an overpass. It surely didn’t have a stove.

  “No. I need it for something else,” he said. “Got any?”

  I tried to figure out what his motives might be. Here’s the thing: My brother is gorgeous. I’m not just saying that; he really is drop-dead handsome in a way that few men are. He is the best looking of my brothers but also the most mercurial, the wildest of wild cards. It was no surprise that despite his good looks and kind of feral charisma, he was still single, since his most recent paramour, a woman much younger who seemed to adore him, had flown the coop. Seems the adoration had worn off after a bit, her introduction to my family probably playing a role in her departure, and her recently conferred Associate’s Degree maybe waking her up to the fact that yes, although my brother was a babe as well as a ton of fun, he was also a ne’er-do-well with a Peter Pan complex. That made him the kind for dating but not marrying.

  “No. Not cooking.” We stood across from each other, the counter between us. “I need to grease something up.”

  “What needs greasing?” I asked, figuring I would ask that one question, get an answer, and then let it drop. I walked over to the refrigerator and pulled out the crème de la crème of animal fat: duck. He didn’t respond to my first question, so I asked the most reasonable of second questions if you were a
member of my family and didn’t really want to know the answers. “How much do you need?”

  I could see the wheels turning in his head, his mind measuring the length and width of something, his hands spreading apart and creating a space that was more than a foot in length.

  “I don’t have a foot of duck fat, Feen,” I said. I pulled out a plastic container and scooped a bit into it. “Use it sparingly. It will grease what you need to grease and then some.”

  “I need more,” he said.

  I pulled the original container close to my chest. “Nope. That’s it. That’s all you’re getting. That’s gold right there,” I said, pushing his container toward him.

  He picked up the container. “Well, thanks.” Before he left, the container under his arm, he asked, “Do you know where I could get more fat?”

  “A restaurant, maybe?” I said. “Joe’s Chicken Joint on Route Thirty-Six?”

  Again, the wheels spun furiously behind his furrowed brow. “I just don’t understand why you don’t have chicken fat.”

  “For the record, it’s called schmaltz and I am sorry I have disappointed you,” I said.

  He grumbled a few more unintelligible words, storming off before I could ask him why he had left earlier with an old pair of golf clubs. He was gone, though, so I remained with my own thoughts. What would I serve Tweed Blazer for dinner? But more important, how would I get the information I needed before he figured out that I was in this a little deeper than I had let on? I decided that his lies were now what was keeping me going, more than finding Amy in a way. This was a mystery wrapped in another mystery and at this point I needed to answer one question first: What was he hiding?

  CHAPTER Twenty

  I work with my family. Therefore, whenever someone is coming to the Manor to see me specifically and not for a booking, I have to let them know so that they don’t do the hard sell the minute my guest walks through the door.

  “Welcome to the Manor! We’re running a special! Everything is free!” would be some of the things a person walking through the big double doors might hear. Although Dad hadn’t gone to offering completely free weddings, it sometimes seemed that he was headed in that direction. It was only through Cargan’s strong and steadying hand that the business hadn’t gone completely under.