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

by Maggie McConnon

  That and flat beer.

  Anyway, it was an epic Siege. It went on for twenty minutes, and when it was clear that the remaining dancers had worn themselves out and I could get across the dance floor without being whisked into a bus tray I headed straight for the bar, where I got a pint, found an empty table, kicked off my shoes, a gorgeous pair of fake Jimmy Choos that I bought used on eBay, and took a breather. Jacqui, I noticed, had taken the newly married couple out to the lawn and was doing some still shots in his patented Night of the Living Dead style, not a smile exchanged between man and wife.

  Caleigh never told me whom she had slept with the night before and I didn’t ask. It seemed curious to me that she wasn’t dying to tell me, secret keeping not being one of Caleigh’s character traits. She liked to spill the beans and spill them often, which led her to tell my mother things about me over the years that I didn’t want my mother to know, ever. I had learned a long time ago that if you wanted the entire world to know something you told Caleigh. The fact that she had kept her paramour’s identity a secret was telling, in and of itself. I scanned the crowd, wondering if that person was here.

  It was a little hotter in the room than I would have liked and, coupled with the mass of sweating Irish bodies, it was downright unbearable. I grabbed one of the busboys.

  “Hey, Padraic. Go turn the air-conditioning down to sixty.”

  The kid paled beneath his freckles. Mal McGrath was notoriously stingy when it came to creature comforts. “But Bel…”

  “Just do it. I’ll take the heat,” I said. “So to speak.”

  I found a napkin and fanned my cleavage vigorously just in time for the cute guy in the sharp suit to come over and have a seat next to me.

  “How ware ya?” he asked, and I’ve been around enough people with thick Irish brogues to know that he was inquiring after my state of mind, not asking if he could don me like a raincoat.

  “Grand, thanks,” I said, speaking his language.

  “Declan Morrison,” he said, holding out his hand.

  “Bel McGrath,” I said, thinking that I was correct: he was from Ireland and we were definitely related. He looked like my cousin Jimmy on my dad’s side, but then again, everyone looked like Jimmy. And me, a bit. Declan also resembled my brothers, who when together looked like they had just come from a casting call for Riverdance. “Caleigh’s first cousin on our moms’ side of the family.”

  “Caleigh’s third cousin, once removed,” he said. “Do you know the groom?” he asked.

  “I do,” I said, keeping mum.

  He leaned in close and I got a whiff of the suave-guy odor. Musk. A little hint of sandalwood. Something else that made me swoon just a tiny bit. “Thoughts?” he asked.

  I thought about it for a moment. “Nice. Smart.”

  “And?”

  “Well, there’s the family money and the incredible good looks, too,” I said. “It’s all good,” I added, more to myself than to the guy across from me.

  He leaned back in his chair. “Fair enough.” He asked for a sip of my beer, a little intimate for a first meeting, I thought, but I had been engaged recently to a really cheeky guy, so I was used to it. As I sat here looking at this guy, I found myself not missing my former fiancé all that much. That was a good sign, the ever-present pain in my gut diminishing a little bit. “So, what do you do, Bel McGrath?” he asked.

  “Chef,” I said, spreading my arms wide. “Currently on sabbatical.”

  His eyebrows went up. Saying you’re a chef always impresses people. “Really?”

  “Yep,” I said. I resisted the urge to tell him that I had won the Rising Star Chef of the Year from the James Beard Foundation ten years prior, because if I told him that then I’d have to tell him the real reason I was back in Foster’s Landing and why I was thinking about becoming a line cook at Five Guys.

  “A chef?” It seemed my beer was now his and I watched as he made quick work of it. I don’t know why he was so surprised at what I did, but I have found over the years that people often mistake curvy redheaded females for jobs other than head chef. Bartender. Waitress. Busgirl. Nanny. “Been doing it a long time?” he asked.

  “Cooking, yes.”

  “And no job right now?” he asked.

  “No. I came back to the Landing about two weeks ago, so I’m still looking.”

  “Came back from where?”

  We must be related. He was as nosy as any other McGrath or McHugh, curiosity running through his veins. “I was in New York City. Working at a restaurant.” I didn’t say which one. Even if he was from Ireland, he might have heard about the one-star Michelin restaurant where a former president of the United States had nearly choked to death on a fish bone that had inexplicably remained in his red snapper. And how the actor who owned the restaurant—a famous curmudgeon in his own right—had fired the chef on the spot.

  And how that chef, a small redhead with a fiery temper that she had seemed to have since misplaced in favor of a dulled sense of not belonging, had—after apologizing profusely to the former president, who just minutes before had propositioned her in her kitchen—stormed out, telling the curmudgeonly actor that the Oscar he had won for playing a North Dakota farmer with the secret CIA past should have gone to another A-list actor for his role as Rambo’s grown, angry son in Axis of Terror, a roundly panned film despite the A-list actor’s performance, an acting tour de force.

  And there was also a flipped table and a broken bottle, but I can’t actually say that I remember that part.

  I do remember, however, the face of the restaurant critic for the New York Times, who between bites of my famous shepherd’s pie—the one made with foie gras—was greedily taking in every detail of the passion play unfolding before him.

  Not my finest hour.

  The curmudgeon had always wanted a Times review. Now he had one. And a front-page story about the restaurant, the ending paragraph insinuating that the chef who had previously wowed diners with her artistry would never work in this town again.

  I didn’t wait to find out. I was out of my apartment, and the New York restaurant scene, within days.

  Declan’s eyebrows went up, almost as if he had read my mind and heard me tell the story out loud. “Sounds exciting. I’ve never met a chef.”

  It was exciting. And thrilling. And life affirming.

  And over.

  “Yep,” I said, staring into the bottom of my empty glass. “But I’m back here now and…”

  “… and so happy to be among family again?” he asked, knowing that that wasn’t the answer I was going to give.

  “Right. Back in their loving arms.”

  “Do they do anything here but weddings?” he asked.

  “Not really. Just my luck,” I said.

  “Why?” he asked.

  “Not sure. I guess they like weddings,” I said. Sure, we had the odd bar mitzvah and one or two christenings, but weddings were Mom and Dad’s stock-in-trade.

  “Not that,” he said. “Why just your luck that they only do weddings?”

  “You really want to know?” I asked.

  He smiled. “Sure, I do.”

  “Broken engagement,” I said. I held his gaze, waiting for his reaction. People always had one, I had found.

  Declan studied my face in turn. “Well, that stinks.”

  “It’s not so bad,” I said when, in reality, it was too painful to acknowledge. The thought of the wedding dress I had left hanging in my apartment’s closet, available now to the super, the landlord, or the next tenant, was something I had tried to banish from my mind. I focused, instead, on my lost career, the thought of never being in a New York City restaurant kitchen again. That was easier to think about, though difficult in its own way. It was a broken heart, but of a different sort.

  “What have you been doing since you got home?” Declan asked, changing the subject in the nick of time.

  “The first month, I hid,” I said. “And the second month, I got up and decided that m
y life was better than that.” I had also come to the conclusion that it was possible that no one in Foster’s Landing really gave a hoot about a formerly engaged, disgraced chef. They had their own concerns. I probably wasn’t even worthy of their gossip.

  “Are you happy now?” he asked. “Is not being in hiding working out for you?”

  Guy was a regular Dr. Phil. Caleigh’s third cousin once removed and wedding therapist. I could get behind that kind of guy. Or under, as the case may be.

  “It’s as good as it’s going to get for right now,” I said, and that was the truth. I was living in an apartment over Dad’s art studio behind Shamrock Manor, feeding a cat that I didn’t own but who showed up every night for a bowl of milk and a saucer of Friskies, and stalking my former fiancé on the Internet, where I had come to find that he was dating a Victoria’s Secret model. Already. And likely starving to death if the photos of his newly trimmed physique were any indication. It had only been two months and he looked as if he had lost thirty pounds. He was on his way to becoming the celebrity chef now, sought after and desired. And I was the maid of honor at my cheating cousin’s wedding. Maybe it wasn’t as good as it gets and it could get better. Time would tell.

  “Fair enough,” he said.

  Realizing I had finished my beer, Declan went to the bar and came back with two more. “Thanks,” I said. “So are you that close to Caleigh that you made the trek from Ireland?” I asked. “She and I are pretty close. Kind of like sisters. How come this is the first time we’re meeting?”

  “First time I’ve been here,” he said. “Caleigh came to Ireland a few times and that’s how we know each other. And her ma and my ma were very close.”

  Being as her ma was my ma’s sister and I had never heard of this guy, I wondered about that. But he had a quick smile and a very unassuming air and there was no reason for me not to believe that there was a McHugh cousin from Ireland I had never met. That and he seemed to know my dad pretty well. Then again, the whole crew—Mom, Aunt Helen, Dad, Uncle Eugene—all came from the same little village in the north and stayed together like a tight-knit circle of friends, coming to America, settling in the Landing. I wondered if Dad knew Declan’s ma, too, and that’s why they were talking at the bar. After Caleigh and Mark had said their “I dos” I had noticed Dad and Declan at the bar, deep in conversation, my dad’s hands on Declan’s shoulders in a paternal gesture that suggested that this was not the first time they had met.

  “Where’s your mom now?” I asked. I recognized almost everyone here.

  “Oh, she stayed back home,” he said. “I’m representing the family today.”

  “And my dad? How do you know him?” I asked.

  “Trip to Ireland in the seventies,” he said, his attention diverted by a buxom guest in a strapless gown.

  I looked around the hall, noticing that after a short break the dance floor had filled once again.

  “You fancy a dance?” he asked, holding out his hand. No ring. Good sign.

  “Oh, thanks. You’re sweet. But no.” Truth was, I was only a good dancer with half a bag on. I pointed to my feet. “Aching dogs.”

  “Ah,” he said. “Too bad. Maybe a pint when all of this,” he said, waving a hand around the room, “is over?” He flashed that smile again and, I’m sorry to say, I was becoming kind of a sucker for it.

  “Maybe,” I said, and downed my pint. Caleigh and Mark were headed back from the great lawn and it appeared that despite having suffered through one round of toasts, we were going to suffer through another.

  I watched my brothers reassemble on the stage after a short break, the tension between Arney and Feeney palpable as they argued about which song they would now play now that some of the Irish-dancing stuff was out of the way. A line of people queued up to toast the happy couple. I noticed Declan Morrison somewhere in the crowd and he gave me a little wave, making a gesture that suggested we would be drinking another pint together when all of this was over.

  Caleigh returned to the hall and I watched her dance with my father, the old guy sobbing like he was sending her off to Afghanistan rather than a five-bedroom house down county in Bronxville, complete with a full-time maid and groundskeeper. When they were finished, she grabbed me as she exited the dance floor, holding on to my arm to steady herself. Caleigh could never hold her liquor; I knew that from experience. My car had been detailed more than once after a night spent with my darling cousin, a trip to Eden Island in the middle of the Foster’s Landing River to party ending with a crying, nauseated Caleigh in the backseat.

  “Why don’t I get you a glass of water, Caleigh?” I asked, extricating her hand from my arm. She had the brute strength of someone who was a devotee of my mother’s legendary Pilates classes. Around Foster’s Landing, there was a cadre of women who looked more fit than a team of Navy SEALs thanks to Oona McGrath’s torture sessions. “Oona” means “Queen of the Fairies” in Gaelic, but for my mother it meant “Queen of the Biceps.” At sixty-five, the woman could bench-press her body weight and then some.

  “Cute, right?” Caleigh slurred, accepting the glass of water I had grabbed from a nearby table and slurping noisily.

  “Who?”

  “The guy you were talking to.”

  “Yes. Adorable,” I said. “Apparently, you’re related?”

  She didn’t answer, spilling the rest of the water down the front of her dress, missing her mouth completely. “I love you, Bel. You are the closest thing to a sister I’ve ever had.”

  I’d seen this show before, too. This was the part where Caleigh had so much to drink that she turned sappy and sentimental. If I weren’t careful, copious tears would follow, sentimentality followed quickly by spiraling depression. I chose my words carefully. “I love you, too, Caleigh.” It was the second time I had said it that day, words that I had never uttered to Caleigh ever before.

  “Like a sister?”

  “Like a sister. Now let’s get you upstairs,” I said, steering her toward the exit. I looked around for Mark, but he was nowhere to be found.

  “We’re best friends! Right, Bel?”

  “Right. Yep. The bestest.”

  I pushed open the door to the hall and escorted her out into the grand foyer of the mansion and toward the stairs, which hadn’t seemed so daunting when I wasn’t half-carrying a 110-pound bride. Now their wide expanse practically mocked me as I stood at the bottom, staring up at the Promised Land above, the second floor and the bedroom where Caleigh had gotten dressed.

  “And you’ll never tell Mark, right?” she said, taking each step as if she were a baby calf, just born. Behind us I heard raucous laughter as the strains of a peppy hornpipe drifted out from behind the closed doors of the ballroom.

  “Never,” I said. That wasn’t a lie. I wanted to forget what Caleigh had told me the night before and move on. I’m sure she wasn’t the first person to have a fling right before her wedding, but why did I have to know about it? I didn’t know who it was, but I knew that it had happened. I couldn’t unknow it and the thought of that made me queasy with anxiety that I might spill the beans one day, undoing this happy union with my loose tongue.

  Maybe I was the one who would have to quit drinking, loose lips sinking ships and all.

  We made it to the bedroom. Caleigh fell backward onto the plush bedding, her wedding dress flying up around her in pillow-like clouds of taffeta and silk. “I’m a good girl, Bel.”

  “I know you are, Cousin.”

  Satisfied with that, she smiled under a film of tulle veil. “I think I’ll take a nap,” she said, exhaling a piece of it off the front of her face, her snores immediate and labored.

  “Good idea,” I said, hearing her phone, left on the dresser, trill merrily. I picked it up to silence it but ended up staring at the screen, a message from the man involved in the tryst letting her know how great a time he had had. As I looked at his words, I wondered why, of all the people in the world, Caleigh had to have slept with the one guy who had shown any in
terest in me since my broken engagement. His name—Declan—was displayed prominently on the screen of her phone. There was no last name, but really, did he need one? The only other Declan at the wedding was an eighty-year-old cousin of Jack McHugh’s, and I felt certain that Caleigh hadn’t slept with him.

  It didn’t take me long to figure out her security password, unlocking the phone. “Caleigh922”—September 22 being her birthday. I texted Declan back as my recently betrothed cousin.

  Please don’t text me again. I’m married now.

  And then I proceeded to delete every piece of evidence that existed on her phone—photos included—of what happened two nights before Caleigh McHugh married Mark Chesterton.

  CHAPTER Three

  If all weddings were going to have this much drama, I was never getting married.

  I had had my fill of my own drama, and now that I was home again I eschewed it like the plague. I had come home to be invisible, to live a life without anyone mentioning what had happened at The Monkey’s Paw in Tribeca, to be seen around town without anyone mentioning Francesco Francatelli, otherwise known as the guy who had won the Oscar for playing the North Dakota farmer with the secret CIA past.

  I left Caleigh napping, closing the bedroom door behind me and bumping into Declan Morrison, who, if I didn’t know better, seemed to have followed us up the stairs. Why else would he be standing in the second-floor hallway, close to the room where I had just put Caleigh to bed? The handsomeness I had seen earlier, knowing what I now knew, had drifted away and in its place was an oily suaveness that I hadn’t noticed before.

  “She’s sleeping,” I said, keeping my hand on the door, him at arm’s length.

  “Ah, just looking for a place to put my feet up,” he said.