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

by Maggie McConnon

  I laughed. “Well, one of them.”

  “Will it do?” he asked.

  “It will,” I said, and took a sip. “Hey, you sprung for the expensive one.”

  “I did,” he said. “There was only a fifty-cent difference and I figured why not? You’re worth it.”

  The light banter felt good. Normal. I took another sip of wine before saying, “I have a lot to tell you.”

  He leaned in, his elbows on the table, his hands around his pint glass.

  “They know who was in Amy’s car.” I filled him in on what I knew. “And I think—actually I pretty much know—that Amy is still alive.”

  His face paled, his hands tightening around the pint glass. I had discovered that everyone had a different reaction to Amy’s photo and her potential existence in the world. His was not out of the norm, based on what I had seen from others, but it was curious nonetheless because it made him uncomfortable.

  “It’s a long story as to how I know and I won’t bore you with the details.…”

  “Oh, please. Bore me,” he said.

  I told him about the Hudson Courier and Tweed Blazer, a revelation that made his face go dark, his eyes narrow. I had nothing to hide and nothing to be ashamed of and continued with the story until I got to the present day, to the part where I let Jed Mitchell know about his sister and how we were going to find her, once and for all.

  “So this Tweed guy—” he started before I cut him off.

  “That’s your concern in all of this? The one thing that you want to know more about?” I asked.

  “Well, no,” he said. “If you had let me finish, I was going to ask how he was, if he was going to survive.”

  “Nice cover, but no you weren’t,” I said. “And to answer your fake question, I don’t know. He had surgery and I haven’t heard anything else about him. I have to keep my distance for now. I’m not entirely sure that I’m not a true suspect in this.”

  “I’m sorry, Bel,” he said. “It is all awful. Too awful.”

  A few inches separated us, but there was still some distance. We sat in silence across from each other, studying anything but each other’s faces. Finally, he put some words together. “What are you going to do next?” he asked. “How are we going to find her?”

  “I really don’t know,” I said. “I keep thinking about it but can’t gain any traction in my mind.”

  “Might be the bump on the back of your head,” he said.

  “Might be.”

  “So, we know she had these two husbands. That she went by some crazy made-up name.”

  “Bess Marvin.”

  He laughed. “My sister Francine loved those Nancy Drew books. Me, I was more of a Hardy Boys fan.” He opened his menu, perused it for a minute before closing it again. “She was funny. Amy,” he said, thinking back.

  I thought about that for a minute. “Kind of. Not slapstick or laugh-out-loud funny. More wry than anything. Observant. Whip smart.”

  “The kind of person who could disappear, make up a new life, and stay gone?” he asked.

  “I guess. She’s done it for a long time.”

  “Did you look into her alias?”

  “I’m not sure I can.”

  “But Jed can. Kevin can.”

  “Can they?” I asked, laughing.

  “You’ve got a point,” Brendan said. “Had I not fingered your brother, they never would have figured out who had done that to my car. I basically figured the whole thing out before they had even gotten out of the police station to respond to the call.”

  “I told them both,” I said. “Hopefully they can take it from here.”

  “You’re done sleuthing?” he asked.

  “We’ve got the Foster’s Landing Police Department on the case as well as Detective Bernard in Wooded Lake. Actually, he seems like the real deal, despite the fact that he’s been doing investigations in a tiny upstate town his whole professional life.” I looked around the restaurant, seeing families dining together, servers scurrying to and from the kitchen, hot plates of food on their arms, the din of the place lively and comforting. “I’m tired, Brendan. I think I’m going to let the professionals handle it for a while.”

  He exhaled, relieved. “You don’t know how happy I am to hear that.”

  “I need to make some room in my life. For other things,” I said. I had been home less than a year and had found myself embroiled in a variety of unsavory activities including two murders. It was time to hang up my investigation hat and get to the place where I started living again, the distractions of mysteries and murders and mayhem keeping me from doing just that.

  “What other things?” he asked, hopeful.

  “The things that make me happy,” I said.

  “I can make you happy, Bel. If you give me a chance, I can make you very happy.”

  I smiled. We would see about that, but I was open to trying. We still didn’t know who had put that photo in his wallet or why, but I wasn’t sure I had the energy anymore to figure that out. I wasn’t sure it even mattered anymore.

  “She was so close,” Brendan said.

  “Funny, right?” I said, oven though it wasn’t.

  “And no one could find her.”

  A random thought went through my head: How hard had they looked?

  CHAPTER Thirty-nine

  The winter wonderland that we had promised Mary Ann D’Amato-Hanson was not coming together as quickly or as smoothly as I had hoped or as Dad had promised. This prompted me to call my brothers together again, the ragtag group that they were, in an effort to get the Manor ready for the holidays. It was five days before Christmas and we were behind. Shocker. Thank God we didn’t have a wedding today or else we would really be in the weeds.

  We sat in the foyer, all of us, on the cold marble floor doing our best to untangle the lights that we would eventually wrap around the big evergreens that dotted the back lawn and that would illuminate the grounds all the way down to the Foster’s Landing River.

  “You think this year we could convince Dad to put these back in the containers in some kind of orderly fashion?” Feeney asked, strands of white lights wrapped around his neck and both arms.

  “I’ll give it my best shot,” I said. “Cargan, maybe we should order some of those things that you can wrap lights around? So we don’t have to go through this again?”

  Derry piped up. “I saw something on the DIY Network where you can cut cardboard and fashion it so you can wrap the lights and they won’t be tangled the next time you want to use them.”

  Arney found this hilarious for some reason. “I think you’ve just found your reason for being, Derry. Maybe in your spare time you can ‘fashion’ them yourself?” he asked. “Oh, that’s right. You have nothing but spare time, Mr. Stay-at-Home Dad.”

  This proclamation started a fierce row, one that only was ended by my whistling loudly through my fingers. “I don’t know about you idiots, but I would like to have an evening. And it’s four o’clock, so we have about forty-five minutes of actual daylight before this becomes a two-day job.”

  “Joyce coming over tonight, Bel?” Feeney asked, his animosity toward my ex- and soon-to-be-current boyfriend still bubbling just beneath the surface.

  “What’s it to you, Feeney?” I asked, giving him a look that told him shut up or be shut up.

  Silence was better and we all agreed tacitly that that was the case, so we continued, the only sound in the foyer the occasional light breaking, accompanied by a curse word that Mom would blanch at. Thank God she and my father were out, something that happened rarely but that brought a certain peace to the Manor.

  The lights untangled, we headed outside and into the fading light, the river in the distance, its water level still not what it should have been given the terrible drought we had seen over the past year. I stationed myself at the smallest tree, Cargan and Derry giving me a boost to start the lights at the top and wind through around the thick trunk until I reached the bottom. Derry was in charge
of the electricity and went back into the Manor eventually to get thick orange extension cords that would likely give the fire chief fits and starts when he realized that we were lighting the entire tableau from a few outlets inside the Manor. We hadn’t burned the place down yet, but there was still time.

  We were spread out across the lawn, and one by one the trees were lit to display a gorgeous light show, one that took my breath away. It had been a long time since I had seen the place look so beautiful, my idea of home inextricably linked to this place now and forever. I had resisted it for most of the time I had been here, but now, standing in the twilight with my brothers, one nuttier than the other, I felt a kinship with them that transcended our history. We lived in a beautiful place with parents who loved us, even if they didn’t often express it. We had one another and that was a lot more than many people had.

  Including Amy. It was there, standing on that lawn and looking at the lights twinkling, that I realized she had every reason to leave, though she always put on a brave face. Our families were different, as many families were, but hers was hard, unyielding in their views, loathe to show affection. The town was sometimes the same, seeming to hold her back. She was supposed to go to college and set the world on fire, but in addition to being beautiful and smart and shrewd, with that wry sense of humor, she was impatient, the electricity of it flowing through her veins.

  And now it was possible that she might have been involved in something so serious and deadly that she had no choice but to leave.

  “We’re going inside for a beer, Bel!” one of my brothers called, their voices in adulthood all eerily similar in tone and cadence.

  “I’m right behind you,” I said, but I wasn’t. I stood on the lawn for a long time, taking in the spectacle of all of those lights, feeling a peace that I hadn’t felt since before I returned home, my own impatience serving to catapult me forward in my career but causing me pain in my personal life. I walked down toward the barren river, the lights helping me find my way even though I could traverse this lawn in my sleep. I crouched down and looked across to the other side of the river where houses dotted the jagged landscape, seemingly suspended in mid-air by strings on the big hill on the opposite side of town. Amy and I used to look across at those houses and wonder what they looked like inside. We knew one person who lived there—Mary Ann D’Amato—but I didn’t remember ever going there.

  The river was narrow at that point, more narrow than at any other point, maybe an eighth of a mile across, before it took a turn and opened up into a wide expanse where we could fit tens of kayaks across and still not be able to reach out and touch one another as we made our way to Eden Island. My brothers were all inside the house and it was as quiet as it would ever be on this riverbank, so quiet that I could hear the voice calling to me from the other side of the river, the words directed at me.

  “Bel. Please leave it alone,” were the first words I heard, the sound of that voice one I hadn’t heard since I was much younger, less wise. “I’m never coming back, but I’m okay.” A voice came through, was clear as a bell, carrying across the bottom of the river, its cracks and scars visible in the moonlight.

  “Amy?” I called back.

  “Bel, let it go. Please. For everyone’s sake. It’s just not worth it and I’ve moved on.”

  I tried to speak, but couldn’t. I started out onto the moonlit ground that used to exist beneath several feet of water, until I hit a patch of water, icy cold and bracing.

  “Any further, Bel, and you’ll be in danger,” the person said—Amy, I was convinced—and I didn’t know if she meant from trying to cross the river at night or continuing to find her. “You and everyone else. Cargan. Your mother and father. The boys.”

  “The boys.” That’s how I knew it was her for sure. No one called my brothers the boys unless they had grown up with me and had seen the years of shenanigans. They were grown, but they were still “the boys,” capable of acting like adolescents at the drop of a hat.

  “Amy!” I called out. “Cargan! It’s Amy! She’s here!” But I knew he couldn’t hear me, the boys inside, cracking open the beer that Dad had bought for the Manor and that was supposed to be for the upcoming policeman’s ball, as I had come to call it in my head, glamorizing what was sure to be a very boring event.

  He did hear me, though, my brother coming up beside me silently, listening, as I did, to the voice being carried by the night air. Even in the dark, I could see his wide eyes, the acknowledgment that he could hear her, too.

  “Let it go, Bel,” were her final words, the trees on the other side of the river rustling as she disappeared into the night, leaving me with the one admonition by which I couldn’t abide.

  I could never let it go.

  CHAPTER Forty

  “How hard did you get hit on the head?” was the first thing I heard when I ran into the Manor, finding my brothers in the dining room, sitting at a denuded table, no tablecloth or place settings on any of the tables.

  “It’s Amy,” I had said breathlessly, the run from the river into the Manor having taken the wind out of me. Part of this new life I wanted to live really needed to include an exercise program that would help me get from totally winded after running to just mildly light-headed.

  Derry stood up, his beer still in his hand. “What’s that, Bel?”

  “It’s Amy,” I said, pointing out the window and across to the other side of the river. “At the edge. At the bottom. On the other side.”

  “Someone get this girl a drink,” Arney said, and Derry made his way to the bar, where he poured me a healthy shot of tequila and handed it to me.

  “Sláinte,” he said.

  I threw back the drink and sat down at one of the empty tables. I knew it was folly to try to follow her or even look for her in the Landing. She was in the wind again and my one chance to see her and tell her how sad we had all been at her departure was gone.

  “Cargan heard it, too,” I said. “Heard her.”

  He nodded at my brothers, confirming what I knew: She was back.

  The boys knew nothing about the investigation into Amy’s disappearance or anything I had found out, so I had to tell them everything. Arney sat with his mouth open. “You called another lawyer besides me when you were detained?” he asked, the one question that didn’t need to be asked but that went straight to the heart of his wounded ego. “Bel, really.”

  “So many words you could have said, Arney, and yet you chose those words,” Feeney said, disgusted.

  Derry stood by the window, his arms crossed, staring at me. “She’s alive?”

  “Yes,” I said, now more sure than ever. “She’s alive.”

  Derry sat down in a chair and dropped his head into his hands. “And she’s been an hour from here ever since? How is that even possible?”

  “She was for a time, but now who knows?” I said. “I don’t know where she is.”

  “You’re a cop, Cargan. You could find her,” Derry said, his knowledge of what went into finding a missing person gleaned from marathon viewings of the various iterations of Law & Order.

  “And how do I do that, Derry?” Cargan asked, not an insincere or sarcastic bone in his body. He truly wanted to know how Derry thought he could go about finding our missing friend.

  “You know cops! And they know cops!” Derry said. “You can all help each other find her.”

  I wondered if Derry had hit his head, too. Feeney caught my eye, the same thought going through his mind.

  “She doesn’t want to be found,” I said. “Don’t you guys get it?” It just dawned on me that that was the case and, now that I had articulated it, it made the most sense of all.

  “Then why are we looking for her?” Cargan asked, the one question I hadn’t considered. Would never consider.

  “We are looking for her because…” I started, stopping mid-sentence. We were looking for her because I wanted to find her and for no other reason. And once I gave a voice to that, it would be over for good. “
You’re right, Car,” I said, thinking about what Amy said, that we would all be in danger if I didn’t let it go. I stood up. “It’s over,” I said. “Cargan’s right. We shouldn’t be looking for her. She doesn’t want to be found.” I started for the dining-room door and kept going. “It’s over,” I said as I entered the foyer, feeling foolish for ever having started this whole thing.

  Cargan followed me into the foyer. “I heard it, Bel, but I don’t know if it’s her.”

  “I’ve been in this alone, Car, and I’ll stay in it alone,” I said.

  “You’re not entirely alone,” he said. “I did get you the information on that plate. Dave Southerland is a regular boy scout, apparently. Not even a parking ticket to his name.”

  “Thanks,” I said, my irritation waning somewhat. “It doesn’t mean anything in the scheme of things but it’s helpful, Cargan.”

  “You think he’s involved?” he asked.

  “I don’t know anymore,” I said before leaving him in the Manor.

  I went back to my apartment, leaving my brothers to polish off the two six-packs they’d taken from the Manor’s fridge. I mounted the steps and entered, closing the door behind me and leaning against it, thinking that I would continue looking, if only to find out what she meant when she said to let it go, that we would be in danger if I continued my search.

  I lay down on my bed in my clothes and closed my eyes, my phone in my hand. Its vibrating, persistent and annoying, was the only thing that woke me two hours later at a little after eight.

  The number was a “private caller,” but I recognized the gravelly voice, the inflection. “He’s awake, Belfast.”

  Larry Bernard had some good news for a change.

  “And he wants to talk to you.”

  CHAPTER Forty-one

  I had to wait until the next day, a trip to Wooded Lake in the evening not a good idea for anyone. Not for me, not for Tweed Blazer, awake and recovering from his stabbing, not for Alison Bergeron, who desperately wanted to accompany me, my phone call to her about this new development putting an urgency in her voice.