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

by Maggie McConnon

  There was a strange sound building in Mary Ann’s gut, rising from deep within her, something feral and not human.

  “I decided to leave the party at the same time you did, and that’s when I saw what happened.”

  We waited, knowing that although this would be the truth, the final missing piece of the puzzle, we also knew that it would be the worst part.

  “I saw you hit her with your car and I saw you drive over her.” Amy started crying. “And then I saw you back up over her until she was really gone, really dead, and you didn’t even know until I stopped the car and ran into the road screaming for help.” Tears were running down Amy’s face at the memory. “I was hysterical. You slapped me so hard that I still can’t hear completely out of my right ear.” Mary Ann’s hand trembled even more as the retelling got darker and more sinister. “You put her in my car, but she was already gone.”

  “I told you then and I’ll tell you again: No one would ever believe this, Amy,” Mary Ann said. “Because you were you and I was me.” Her voice dripped disdain like an oily slick of something rotten. She had become someone I didn’t know in that moment and the ones that followed.

  “Meaning what?” I asked. “Everyone loved Amy. They still do.”

  “How could they?” she asked. “She was a bar owner’s daughter, a girl from the wrong side of the tracks.” Mary Ann laughed. “Who would believe that lush’s daughter about anything? Especially now after what he did to Bel and Cargan? After he stalked her and shot Cargan? Your family is trash, Amy. They always have been.”

  Amy ignored her. “She made me drive to the edge of the river, to that big hill over the rapids.” “Rapids” was an exaggeration, but the water was deep and it did gush through the rocks with a force we hadn’t seen since the drought hit. “She put the car in neutral and pushed it into the river and it sank,” she said, sobbing now. “I helped her. And every day I live with that.”

  The boys started playing one of Feeney’s favorites, a Bee Gees/Barbra Streisand duet called “Guilty.” He had crafted the set for tonight with great precision, focusing on songs that were related to our law-enforcement clientele.

  Amy ran a shaky hand over her eyes. “And when I started to leave, when I started to go back to the village, she told me that no one would ever believe me and that, if I told, it would be me who would go to jail. It would be me who she blamed. That it was me who had hit and killed that girl.” The story finished, Amy slumped a bit, out of details and seemingly out of air. I put my arm around her, held her up, feeling the familiar boniness of her shoulders and seeing the lines of her face up close, marring what was still a nearly flawless complexion. “It was my word against hers.” She spat the last part out, glad to have it over.

  The Lieutenant finally spoke and I was grateful for that as well as his presence. If anyone was going to get through to her, it was him. “Sounds to me as if your guilt has gotten the best of you, Amy. And that’s why you’re back. Case closed. Now we know who killed that girl,” Lieutenant D’Amato said. “Give me the gun, Mary Ann.”

  “Oh, thank God,” I said, listening with one ear to Feeney’s rendition of a song from around long ago, its peppy tune at odds with what was happening here, or even what it was about. A love gone wrong.

  We have nothing to be guilty of.

  His daughter dutifully handed the gun over to her father, who emptied of its bullets, wiped it clean with one of my dishrags. My breath came out in one jagged exhale. It was over and he had seen it all. He knew the truth.

  We had nothing to be guilty of.

  It was only when he started toward Amy, his face taking on an angry redness, that I knew that what I thought was going to happen was in direct opposition to what would really happen.

  It hit me like a punch to the gut, just like one from one of my brothers back in the day when fighting was all we could think to do, peace not in our repertoire. He was never our ally, never on our side. He knew all about this for all these years, and while he paid lip service to finding Amy and bringing her back, it was all a charade for us, her brother, her father.

  He handed the gun to Amy, who, as surprised as we all were, took it. “And now, I’d like everyone to leave the kitchen,” he said. “Except for you, Amy,” he added, pointing his own gun at her, more sure-handed and confident than his daughter had been, his posture suggesting that with the slightest provocation he would use it and not have a second thought about it.

  “Death by cop. It’s a convenient way to go,” Cargan said, exposing the Lieutenant’s hand. “If you’re a murderous small-town cop with a crazy daughter and a vendetta.” He linked his arms across his chest, considered that. “And what are you going to do with us? You’ve already tried to get rid of one witness.”

  I looked at Cargan. “What are you talking about?”

  “Tweed,” Cargan said. “There’s no way that Mary Ann could have done what was done to him. It was you, Chief, wasn’t it?” Cargan asked. “But now there’s more of us who know. What do you do now?”

  The chief hadn’t thought about that, a flicker of doubt crossing his face.

  “She killed someone and covered the evidence,” I said. “She’s a murderer.” After all these years and hearing about the wonderful Mary Ann D’Amato, I still couldn’t reconcile our shared history with this craven act.

  “Get out,” the Lieutenant growled.

  “You’ll have to shoot us all,” I said. I pointed at the desserts on the counter. “And then no one gets cake. That would be a shame, wouldn’t it?” I asked, the babbling sounding reasonable to me even though my plea was completely at odds with what was going on in the room.

  Cargan gave me a sly look and with one graceful movement jumped atop the stainless-steel countertop, dislodging a few plates. Everyone was stunned by the grace with which he ended up where he did, high above us, including the Lieutenant, who stared at my brother as if he were witnessing the moon landing at Shamrock Manor. Once there, Cargan began to dance a spirited jig on the slippery metal, one that ended with him flying through the kitchen and onto the much larger man, pointing the gun at the ceiling and letting off several rounds, ceiling tiles raining down on everyone. I pulled Amy onto the shelf beneath the counter, knocking aside giant pots and pans, hearing the music in the dining room stop abruptly and the kitchen door being broken down with a splintering crack. A myriad of voices came together in a panicked command, variations on a theme.

  “Stop or I’ll shoot.”

  And shoot they did, our kitchen filling with the smell of cordite, the sound of shell casings hitting the floor like candy falling out of a piñata.

  When it was done and it was silent for more than a few sustained moments, I slid out from under the counter, dragging Amy with me, the two of us sitting on the floor, our backs pressed up against the wall that the foyer shared, my hand still gripping hers. Her brother was the first to come to her, hoisting her into a standing position, wrapping his arms around her, his sobs filling the small, noiseless, empty spaces that filled my kitchen. She held on to him like he was a life preserver in an angry sea, the two of them weaving back and forth, two siblings separated for over a decade and a half.

  As she was led out of the kitchen, her wrists encircled with handcuffs, Mary Ann D’Amato offered me one parting shot. “I tried to warn you, Bel.”

  I didn’t know what that meant.

  “That night at the river?”

  I stared back at her, the woman I once admired and even felt a pang of jealousy toward.

  “I warned you that if you kept at this, it wouldn’t end well. For anyone.”

  She had been right.

  CHAPTER Fifty-one

  I went back to the start. Back to the beginning. The next day, I walked out to Eden Island, my kayak useless in the barren river, still patchy after the drought, rocks jutting out. I bundled up, pulling a scarf around my neck and putting a hat over my red curls. It wasn’t very far, but it took me about an hour, picking over the stones and in between
unexpected pools of water, and by the time I reached the edge of the island the sun, high in the sky when I left, was dipping now, clouds covering what light there was.

  I walked up onto the bank and stood, my hands in my pockets, my reason for being there less known to me now than when I left. The policeman’s gala wasn’t exactly what we had hoped it would be, a thought that was a massive understatement, and after it was over everyone was exhausted, hungover, and not wanting to see one another ever again. What had happened was ugly and torrid and now cast doubt on everything the Lieutenant had ever done in what was once a storied career in our little village. It was two days later and everyone knew about Amy Mitchell’s miraculous reappearance, some overjoyed, others tentative and shaky at the thought of why she had left and now, why she had returned.

  It was after a few minutes of staring up at the clouds, of trying to make sense of a world that made absolutely no sense anymore, that I realized I wasn’t alone. Kevin came out from behind a tall copse of trees, his face ashen, his body suggesting that he was broken, officially and forever. “Hey, Bel.”

  “Hey, Kevin,” I said. “What are you doing out here?”

  “I guess I could ask you the same thing.”

  “Just wanted to visit where it all began.”

  “We call that the ‘scene of the crime,’” he said.

  “In this case, almost literally,” I said, finding a big, broad rock with a flat surface and sitting down. “Where’s Mary Ann?” I asked, Kevin off to my right looking into the distance at the Manor.

  “Jail, Bel. She’s in jail. Where do you think she’d be?” he asked.

  “No bail?”

  “No bail,” he said. “Amy could be charged as an accessory.”

  “I guess she could,” I said. “But she won’t. She’s cooperating with the police and that has to count for something. It’s not like we don’t have a full confession from…”—here I stumbled over what to call the woman none of us had ever really known—“… your wife. Or her father.” Amy was staying with Jed, the whole thing still a mess. “One thing I don’t understand, Kevin.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Stabbing Tweed. What purpose did that serve?”

  “She didn’t do that,” he said. “My father-in-law did. Cargan was right.”

  “The Lieutenant?”

  “Yes,” he said. “This whole thing stinks to high heaven, as your dad would say. Once they found out that you were close to finding Amy, that Tweed was part of this, they went up there together.”

  “My God,” I said.

  “Loo would have done anything to protect her,” he said. Silence was the only response I had.

  “She’s awful,” Kevin said, shaking his head. “You know what she told me? That she put that photo in Brendan’s wallet to throw you off the scent. That you were getting close to figuring it out. That she wanted to implicate him in all of this.”

  She had been right. I had been close. And my brother had been right to believe Brendan when I couldn’t.

  Kevin was pacing the little patch of ground at the base of the island, his feet taking him in circles, his mind a jumble. “You had no idea,” I said.

  “Do you think I would have married her, Bel? I’m a cop,” he said, as if that needed repeating. I knew that. I also knew that it might be hard to continue in that capacity for the foreseeable future. Things had unraveled quickly and didn’t seem to be reparable.

  “You suspected. I saw you at the river one night when you thought you were alone. I saw the look on your face when you told me you were engaged. I saw you at your own wedding. If you didn’t know, you suspected.”

  “Or I realized I didn’t really know her,” he said. “There was always an element of that.”

  The clouds had completely covered the sun and it was now a typical gloomy Northeast kind of day, the kind that my parents felt completely comfortable in, the dank murk reminding them of Ireland. I pulled my scarf tighter around my neck and thought it might be a good time to start going back home, even though it was only early afternoon and it would be hours before the sun really set.

  I had to ask. “What’s next for you, Kevin?”

  “What’s next for you, Bel?” he asked in response.

  “Oh, you know,” I said. “A wedding here, a communion party there. The kitchen at the Manor. I probably won’t venture out much because, as we’ve seen, that’s never a good idea.”

  He noticed the approaching clouds, too, and started for the edge of the island. “I’ll probably take a leave of absence. I’ll sell the house. I may leave for good.” He looked at me. “Can you think of a reason for me to stay?”

  He searched my face for an answer, but this newfound interest in me and my whereabouts was misplaced, about fifteen years too late. A Band-Aid. A balm to a very open wound. No thank you. “I can’t,” I said, his face falling. “I can’t think of one.”

  A third person joined us, settling in beside us, just like old times. We were silent for a long time, listening to sounds, in the distance, of cars rumbling over the bridge.

  “Why now?” I finally asked my best friend from a long time ago.

  I had never really seen Amy cry real tears like the ones running down her face. “I got really tired,” she said, her voice choked behind the sobs, her shoulders shaking. She leaned in and put her head on my shoulder. Kevin reached around and, finding his arms not long enough, scooted around until we were in a circle, our heads bent together in silent prayer for what had been done and what had been lost.

  “I don’t know who you are anymore,” I finally said, lifting my head to capture some of the waning light, hoping that would reveal something.

  “I’m exactly the same,” Amy said.

  “There’s no way you could be,” I said. “I’m different. Kevin’s different. We all changed.”

  She thought about that for a few minutes. “You’re right,” she said. “I’m hoping I’m better.”

  It was Kevin who finally gave voice to what I was thinking, the one thing I didn’t want to say out loud. “What you did hurt all of us but especially Bel, Amy. People in this town have never treated her the same. They think she had something to do with your leaving or that she knew where you were.” He was a simple guy and used simple words, his last words of the day to both of us the ones I wanted to say but couldn’t. “You owe her an apology. You need to make this right.”

  “That’s going to take some time,” Amy said.

  Kevin got up, the conversation, the events, the whole heft of the memories, turning him into a new person, someone with something to say, commanding us to listen. “Make it fast. Everything’s been ruined, but you can still make it right.” He leaned over and kissed the top of my head, walking past Amy and out onto the dry riverbed, the two of us watching as he got smaller and smaller until he finally disappeared.

  “So Tweed,” I said.

  “He’s a great guy,” Amy replied.

  “Seems like it. So why did you split up?”

  She thought about how she would answer that. “Well, we were too young. And I was too damaged. Maybe there will be some day when we can figure it out.”

  “And Dave Southerland?”

  “Rebound man.”

  I shook my head. “This is all completely unbelievable.”

  “I guess it is,” she said. “I was young. That’s all I can say.”

  I wish she had a better answer. “I have more questions,” I said.

  “Shoot.”

  “What do you do now?” I asked. “For a living?”

  “I’m an editor of an online magazine for women. Vashti? Have you ever heard of it?” she asked.

  I thought back to Margaret Dunleavy and that unpleasant night in the craft-beer bar as well as Cargan’s assertion that he read it and that’s how he stayed current on women’s issues. “I do.”

  “We consider Vashti to be one of the original feminists,” she said. “She went against her husband in a time no one would think of doin
g that.”

  She was still in there, the girl I had known hidden behind an older face, a shorter haircut. She was still the girl with a strong core. I could see the spark in her.

  “We don’t have to cover everything at once, Bel. We have a lot of time.”

  “And how do I know you won’t disappear again?” I asked.

  “Because the truth is out there now. I don’t have to run.”

  Overhead, the sky darkened some more so that soon it would be pitch black out.

  She put a hand on my arm. “You had a good family. All those protective brothers.”

  I let out a snort, derisive and pointed. “Not so protective.”

  “But they were,” she said. “They looked out for you and made sure you were part of the fold.” She wrapped her arms around herself to ward off the chill. “My family wasn’t like that, Bel. Sure, you grew up there and you think you know what I’m talking about, but my father was a hard man and my mother grew hard as a result of that. Jed was so busy protecting himself that he didn’t have time to look out for me or my sister, so we were all on our own, three kids trying to stay clear of Oogie’s rage. If I hadn’t had to leave, I probably would have anyway.”

  “I never saw your father like that.” But that wasn’t true. “Until he almost killed my brother and me, thinking that I knew something I didn’t.”

  “I never let you see that part of it,” she said. “Think about it. We played at the Manor mostly.”

  “That’s because there was no better place to play than the Manor. All those rooms, all that land, direct access to the river. It was paradise.”

  “And my family wasn’t there. They wouldn’t have protected me like yours did for you,” she said. “I couldn’t go to them when this happened. I was the party girl and Mary Ann D’Amato was the perfect girl. No one would ever have believed me, believed that what I had seen was not a direct result of my carelessness. We were the Mitchells, from the wrong side of the tracks, and she was Mary Ann, the daughter of the chief. She said it herself.” She bit her lip, considering all of that. “That’s what she told me and that’s what I thought. That’s what I believed and what she still believes now. So I ran.”