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

by Maggie McConnon

  The front door was ajar, and when I knocked, it swung open, its weight giving it motion. It banged against the wall behind it, a wall at the bottom of a long staircase, startling me. I called out to my host, “Tweed? Are you home?”

  When he didn’t answer, I entered the house, taking in its beautiful, rustic styling, the well-worn leather sofa, the Shaker-style end tables and stained-glass shaded lamps, the neatly stacked issues of The New Yorker on the coffee table. I called out his name again and got no response. I passed a credenza outside of the kitchen, photos artistically placed, a photo of his father, Archie Peterson, featured prominently. My eyes grazed over the other ones, a mix of old and new, his mother, presumably, the focus of a few photos, a tall, gorgeous woman with light hair and azure-blue eyes, a woman from whom Tweed had inherited his prominent yet finely planed nose. The resemblance couldn’t be denied, Archie a more rough-hewn sort, a man who looked like he would be equally at home on a farm or in a seedy biker bar.

  One photo, pushed toward the back, caught my eye and I picked it up. In it, a young Tweed, barely out of his teens, or so it appeared, stood beside a woman in a long white dress, a ring of flowers on her head, the two of them standing beside the body of water that sat right in back of the house in which I stood, my feet refusing to move, my limbs frozen. They looked happy. Healthy. Beautiful and free.

  Alive.

  A noise behind me broke my paralysis and I turned, taking in the sight of Tweed, a guy I didn’t know at all really but who I now knew had lied to me, again and again. I had been right: In some ways, this was a waste of time and I would never get the whole truth, the truth being a ball of yarn that kept unraveling, end never in sight.

  “You married her,” I said. “Amy. She was your wife.” She had been busy since leaving Foster’s Landing, with two marriages behind her and maybe another one on her marital résumé. Who knew what she had done, what she was doing. It was a mystery that couldn’t be solved. Not without the truth from the man in front of me, someone whose blood had drained from his face.

  He reached a hand out to me. “Help me,” he said, a mere whispered croak.

  “Help you what?” I asked, my ire rising at an alarming rate, the thought of sweeping my hands across the credenza and knocking the photos to the floor prominent in my mind. “Help you? You lied to me. Over and over.”

  He stumbled forward and it was only then that I saw the pool of blood at his feet, starting back at the stairs, a maroon handprint on the wall. He came at me, falling into my arms, the two of us crashing back into the credenza, the photos that had my attention a few seconds earlier falling to the floor in a hail of shattering glass. My back hit the large piece of furniture, going numb right before the pain flooded my body. We ended up on the floor, Tweed on top of me, my eyes catching sight of the reason for the blood, the knife sticking out of his back. His body convulsed at the same time that I heard footsteps on the stairs and the door slam against the wall again.

  It took some effort, but I managed to get out from beneath the man on top of me, pulling the knife out of his back with some effort, the sound it made as it slid from his body not unlike what I heard when I yanked a blade from a hunk of meat. A gag rose in my throat as I saw the giant wound from which the blood flowed and I thought back to the time when my mother had encouraged me to be a nurse and forget culinary school. I didn’t know what to do with a wound like this, something so big and gaping that it seemed it could never close, so I pulled off my scarf and pushed it down, hoping to stanch the river of blood that seemed to come from his body.

  I found a vintage-looking wall phone on which I dialed 911, breathlessly asking for help before hanging up and heading outside. I hadn’t passed another car on the road in, nor had there been a vehicle besides Tweed’s in the driveway. Whoever had done this was on foot.

  I got outside, my eyes taking in the number of hiding places that there were on a large wooded lot, finally landing on the barn. I hesitated, the only thing breaking up the soundless night a bird overhead letting out a sharp caw. I approached the barn, knowing I was in over my head now, but there was no turning back. Amy had brought me here, and now I was devoted more than ever to solving this mystery.

  I thought of Amy, of our life before and my life after. This wasn’t how it was supposed to end with me bumbling around a dark lot and her out there, somewhere, maybe living a better life than I could ever imagine. This wasn’t the script. We would find out that she had died and we would move on. Or I would find her, happier than she ever been. But this wasn’t it, lies on top of lies, with no end in sight, no truth to be told.

  We still didn’t know whose DNA was in Amy’s car, unearthed by the drought. We knew it wasn’t her, but the identity of that person was still an unknown. Did she have something to do with that person’s death? Is that why she had run? The questions swirling in my brain, I started for the barn, leaves crackling beneath my feet. Finally the sound of sirens broke up the silent night and gave me hope that it wasn’t too late.

  My hand on the barn door, I thought of a few things before the night went completely black and I with it.

  My parents.

  My brothers.

  Even Brendan Joyce.

  The last time I had seen Amy, her smile a betrayal of me and everything we had ever had.

  CHAPTER Twenty-nine

  “Wrong place at the wrong time or part of the problem here?”

  Swimming back to consciousness and not having a lot of luck, I listened to the voices around me, not one of them familiar.

  Or friendly.

  I opened my eyes, but the lights were too bright, red, blue, white, spinning around me.

  “She’s awake.”

  “Great. Let’s get her up.”

  “She’s not ready yet. Give her a few minutes.”

  Coffee breath, sharp and pungent, washed over me, the person kneeling beside me having ingested a strong brew.

  “Wonder if she can tell us anything?” a female voice said.

  “Wonder if she’s the one who did it?” a male voice replied.

  At that, I bolted up, not wanting the conversation to go on any longer. Suspecting me of stabbing Tweed was not part of this script and I had to let them know that. A wave of nausea flooded my body as I sat up and I swallowed a few times, the cool night air having no effect on the sweat breaking out on my forehead.

  Did what, exactly? I had to assume that things hadn’t worked out for the best, that Tweed Blazer was dead, but I had watched enough cop shows to know that I should keep my mouth shut and maybe even ask for a lawyer, even though in my addled brain I thought that doing so might imply that I was guilty. All of these thoughts floated through my head as my consciousness swam to the surface, my eyes adjusting to the pitch black punctuated with bright light.

  “What’s your name, sweetheart?” a guy wearing a puffy down coat asked me as he helped me to my feet. He looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t place him, like someone I had met once or a long time ago, or both. White hair billowed around his head like a silky halo.

  “Is he dead?” I asked.

  “Well, that’s an odd name,” he said. He looked up at the woman beside him. “Must be a nickname.”

  A regular comedian. Just what I did not need right now.

  “Tweed. Is he dead?”

  “Why don’t I ask the questions and you give the answers?” he asked. “What’s your name?”

  “Belfast.”

  “Belfast?” he asked. “What kind of name is that? That’s not a name. That’s a place. And just how hard did you hit your head?”

  “My parents are Irish. I’m Irish. We’re Irish,” I said, bending over at the waist and taking in a few gulps of chilly air.

  “Huh,” he said, an older man with a wispy gathering of last remaining gray hairs covering his shiny pate, glasses that magnified his kind eyes hovering on the tip of his nose. “Interesting. Glad my parents didn’t follow suit and name me Kraków.”

  “You’re
farsighted,” I said, wondering, too, just how much damage that hit to my head had done. “And I didn’t hit my head. Someone hit it for me.”

  “Well, that wasn’t very nice,” he said, holding out his hand after I stood up straight. “Larry. Larry Bernard.”

  The woman whose voice I had heard in my state of semi-consciousness stood behind him, clarifying just who he was. “Detective Larry Bernard.”

  “You have detectives in Wooded Lake?” I asked. Kevin Hanson was a detective, and not a very good one, which mattered not a whit in Foster’s Landing for the most part.

  “Just one,” he said. “Me. Been doing it for nearly forty years. But this is a new one on me.”

  “What’s that?” I asked, not wanting to give too much away.

  “Why don’t you tell me?” he asked, leading me to the back of an ambulance and helping me sit down on the steps. He grabbed a blanket from inside the vehicle and placed it over my shoulder. An EMT appeared out of nowhere and handed me an ice pack for my head, which I gingerly placed as close to the injured spot as I could without pressing on it. It hurt like hell and I was going to have quite a bump.

  The detective repeated his question. “Why don’t you tell me?” He pushed his glasses up on his nose and his eyes, cornflower blue behind thick lenses, grew larger from the magnification.

  I figured there was no harm in just starting with arriving here, leaving out any mention of previous visits or mysteries to be solved. “I came to have dinner. With Tweed.”

  “And how did you meet?” he asked.

  “At the coffee shop. I’m a chef. I was driving around, looking for places to buy locally sourced food. Vegetables. Meat. Eggs.”

  He held up a hand. “I know what food is.”

  “I guess you do,” I said. I moved the cold pack to a spot closer to the bump on my head. “That’s how we met.”

  “And tonight?” he asked.

  “I got here around seven thirty.” I looked around. “What time is it now?”

  “A little after eight,” he said.

  So I hadn’t been unconscious that long.

  “Tell me more.” I watched as the female cop talked to one of the EMTs, a cup of coffee in her hand, a cigarette in the other. In all, there were two police cars with two uniformed cops in attendance, one ambulance and two EMTs on the scene. I wondered where Tweed was—if Tweed was—but knew I wasn’t going to get anywhere until I told Detective Larry Bernard my story in full.

  “We had a date to meet and then we were going to decide what to do. Once I got here,” I said. “But there was no answer at the door, which was open, so I let myself in and…” I stopped, fluttering my hands to indicate what I had found without having to actually say it. “Blood,” I said. “Lots of it.”

  “And you saw no one else?” he asked, dropping his hands between his legs, rubbing them together to keep them warm.

  “I didn’t see anyone, but I heard someone leave. I suspect they hit me over the head, but I can’t be sure.” I pulled off the ice pack. “Too cold.”

  “Yep. All of it,” he said. “Way too cold.”

  I knew he wasn’t talking about just the weather. “Can I go?” I asked. “If I give you my name and contact information?”

  He still hadn’t told me about Tweed and I didn’t see another ambulance, so I went with the assumption that he was gone, if not just from this place then from the world. I wasn’t sure where to put that emotionally, as I was numb, both physically and emotionally. In shock. Shut down until such time as I would power on again and make sense of everything that had happened, beginning with that newspaper article about Love Canyon and culminating with the death of a guy I barely knew but had wanted to get to know better, if only to get closer to the truth.

  My truth.

  Larry Bernard rubbed his hands together some more, thinking of his choices. “You know, I don’t think you should go anywhere for the time being, the biggest reason being that you’re a little concussed, in my humble opinion.” He waited while an EMT attended to my head, looking on silently. “Looks like a leftie hit.”

  “How would you know that?” I asked.

  “Been doing this a long time.” He fell silent.

  There was more.

  “And?” I asked, waiting.

  “I feel as if there is more to this story than you’re letting on,” he said.

  “There’s not,” I said, a little too hastily and without conviction.

  He let that sink in, an old detective with a lot of experience being lied to by someone he could only imagine had a lot to hide. “Well, you’re my only witness to an attempted homicide,” he said, giving me the answer that I had been hoping to hear but wasn’t expecting.

  “Attempted” was good. “Homicide” was not.

  CHAPTER Thirty

  When my parents had five children and the oldest had exceeded all expectations by going to law school and becoming the only divorce lawyer in the town of Foster’s Landing—a hundred Hail Marys for his soul, please—they thought they had knocked it out of the park both genetically and in terms of child-rearing. But then came the rest of us: lazy Derry, who was only too happy to marry a woman who kept him in a lifestyle to which he wasn’t born but quickly acclimated; Feeney, who didn’t meet a petty crime he didn’t like; and Cargan, who was the smartest of us all but odd in the way that most geniuses are.

  And then there was me. Belfast McGrath. The chef with a temper. The girl who couldn’t leave well enough alone, who was now involved in something and way in over her head, sitting in a small police station in an upstate town, Larry Bernard giving me half of his pastrami sandwich and a splash of Diet Coke while he asked me more questions about what I had seen.

  In between bites of some of the best pastrami I had ever eaten, I asked the one question I swore I wouldn’t. “Do I need a lawyer, Detective Bernard?”

  He shrugged. “Meh. What do I know?” he asked, chomping away on his sandwich. “Do you think you’d feel more comfortable with a lawyer present?” He handed me a napkin and pointed to the side of his mouth. “Mustard.”

  I dabbed the side of my mouth and, true enough, there was mustard on the napkin. Nice guy, this Larry Bernard. Did they make him in a younger model, one that would attend to my every need and bring me pastrami on rye just when I needed it? “I think I might,” I said, realizing that my only option was Arney and, well, he was a pain in the ass as well as a not-so-great lawyer.

  “Then you should call a lawyer,” he said. “And if you can’t afford a lawyer, one will be provided to you.”

  “Those sound like my Miranda rights,” I said.

  “Nah,” he said, throwing down his crumpled-up napkin. “I just have to tell you stuff like that so that you know…”

  “My rights,” I said. “My Miranda rights.”

  “Right. Your rights,” he said. “Do you have a phone?”

  I checked my coat pocket and there was my phone. At least one person knew where I was—Cargan—but instead of calling him and trying to explain what had happened and why I needed a lawyer who was anyone but Arney, I called someone else.

  “Hello?”

  “Alison? It’s Bel.” I looked at the detective while I spoke.

  “Bel? That was fast. That can’t be good.”

  “It’s not,” I said. “Hey, do you know a lawyer? A good one?”

  “A lawyer?!” Her voice was so loud that the detective moved back from the table.

  “Yes. Unfortunately, when I got here,” I said, attempting to sound casual and failing, “well, you’ll never believe this, but Tweed had been stabbed.” And married to Amy! I wanted to scream but didn’t. I smiled at Larry Bernard, pointing at the remains of my sandwich and giving him a thumbs-up.

  “That’s horrible!” she said. “A lawyer. Yes. I have one. And he owes me.”

  I couldn’t imagine why a lawyer might owe her something but figured I would ask later, after I had been let out of the Wooded Lake Police Department’s conference room. />
  “Got a pen?” she asked.

  I mouthed, Pen, and wrote some doodles in the air; the detective handed me a pen, a little slippery from being in his pastrami-covered hands. I wrote down “Jimmy Crawford” and a phone number. “He’s Crawford’s brother. Crazy as a loon but a good lawyer. The best, really. I’ll call him and tell him to expect your call.”

  “I’m all the way up in Wooded Lake,” I said. “And it’s late.”

  “I was his kid’s French tutor for six solid months. Without me, she’d still be in French One and ordering beef heart instead of a hamburger during her study abroad. He won’t mind,” she said. “And if he does, he’ll never let on to you. Me, maybe. Crawford, for sure. But not you.”

  “Thank you, Alison. Really. You’re a lifesaver.”

  “You’re the first person who’s ever said that,” she said before hanging up.

  I waited ten minutes before calling Jimmy Crawford. In the intervening minutes between my punching his number into my phone and his picking up, the detective had produced a brownie, which he cut in half, placing my piece on a napkin and sliding it toward me.

  “Is this Belfast McGrath?” Jimmy asked.

  “It is.”

  “Hear you’ve got a bit of trouble,” he said.

  “I do.”

  “Can you keep your mouth shut for about an hour?” he asked. “You’re in luck. I’m at some mountain resort with my wife about a half hour away. If I were downstate, you’d be chilling in Wooded Lake all night.”

  “Guess I’m just lucky,” I said.

  “Guess you are,” he said. “No surprise that you’re friends with my sister-in-law. She has a habit of getting arrested, too.”

  “Really?”

  “Well, just once, but she’s been in her share of scrapes. You two had better be careful. I’m thinking of retiring soon.”