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

by Maggie McConnon

  Mom poured Dad a glass of water from the one pitcher that the frantic busboy hadn’t taken away. “You do, Mal. You look like you’re going to have a heart attack,” she repeated unnecessarily.

  Dad took the water and greedily gulped it. “Thanks, Oona.” He wiped his brow with his napkin and looked a little bit better, the color fading from his cheeks, his breathing returning to normal.

  “You just met him here?” I asked again. “And Mom, you didn’t know him, either?”

  “Never saw him before in my entire life,” she said. And how did I know that that was the truth? Mom has a “tell” when she lies; immediately after uttering a falsehood, she licks her lips. This time, she locked her jaw and just stared straight ahead, looking as if she was trying to tune out the chatter behind us, the group coming to their own conclusions about who had killed Declan Morrison.

  “He said he was Caleigh’s cousin,” I said. “Third once removed.”

  “Nope,” said Dad.

  “Maybe?” said Mom.

  Caleigh had once confided in me that Mark and his family thought our clan was a little “rough around the edges.” Charming in our own way, but not really like the country-club set he and his people were used to hanging out with. They reluctantly accepted Caleigh, but they never would embrace the rest of us. We were just a little bit different. Too different.

  Nothing like a dead guy at a wedding to confirm their suspicions.

  CHAPTER Five

  The body was carted off by the county’s Medical Examiner, an amiable guy named Mac McVeigh, who looked like retirement was just around the corner for him but for whom this line of work seemed incredibly fulfilling. He gave us a wave as he drove off in his old station wagon and we waved back, just as we would have if we had had the opportunity to see Caleigh and Mark drive off in his vintage Mini Cooper, the one on which Feeney had tied the requisite tin cans to the back.

  My parents, my brothers, and I stood in the foyer and looked at one another. What had started out as a supposedly happy occasion had ended on a bloody note, drama surrounding the entire event. The boys—as we all still called my adult brothers—looked too spent to fight, each one looking droopier than the rest. Feeney pulled off his tuxedo jacket and threw it onto the banister. “I’m outta here,” he said, going into the ballroom to get his equipment.

  Off to the side, police tape outlining the spot that still held the bloodstains from the earlier event, Goran stood by the kitchen door, his apron in his hands. He thrust it at my father. “Here! Take it! You people are crazy!” he said. “Death at a wedding? Who hears of such a thing?”

  Dad looked at the apron in his hand, unable to speak. He took off his tie and wound it around his free hand, and for a brief moment I wondered if he was going to hang himself or strangle Goran with it.

  “I quit!” Goran said.

  “Aren’t you overreacting just a bit, Goran?” I asked, pushing past Dad, my remaining brothers having fallen mute.

  “This place is cursed,” Goran said, narrowing his eyes. “You’re all cursed. I’m leaving here before I become cursed, too.”

  Cursed? That might have been overstating things just a tad.

  Goran started for the door and I grabbed his arm. “Goran, wait.” But he shook me off and kept walking, his black clogs squeaking on the polished marble.

  “Bel, let him go,” Dad said as we watched the tall, thin man in the black-and-white-checkered pants and chef’s jacket stride past the police tape—uttering some kind of whispered prayer as he did—and out the front door, gesticulating wildly and talking to himself as he strode down the gravel path that led to the employee parking area.

  Derry’s face flamed red and he looked at my father; he’s always been the most excitable in the bunch. Of course he immediately regrets his outbursts and then goes to confession. These days, confession only happens on Saturdays, right before the 5:00 Mass, so I guess he has private moments with Father Pat. How do I know this? Mom has been trying to get me to go since I have come home “just to have a chat with the padre.” No, thank you. I think he has his hands full with Derry and his list of non-sins. I think lusting after Pamela Anderson came off the sin list somewhere around 1996. “Well, that’s just great. What are we supposed to do now?” he said.

  Cargan, solemn and serene to the point where sometimes I wondered if he had a pulse at all, looked at my father dolefully. “We have three weddings this month. And it’s not like we have a bunch of chefs waiting in the wings.”

  God bless his little heart; it was almost as if he had forgotten who I was, what I did. I think Mom must have waited a few seconds too long to get to the hospital with that one. He wasn’t exactly the sharpest tool in the shed. But then again, neither was I, because it never dawned on me that they would all turn, in unison, and look at me like I was just the person to save the day. Right on cue, they turned their attention to me like I was a steak dinner and they were all death-row inmates.

  “Ah, no,” I said. I held my hands up. “No.”

  Cargan stared at me, his eyes anchored by deep pockets that were in stark contrast to the rest of his youthful appearance. “You, Bel. You’re the chef. You’re home now. You have to help Mom and Dad.”

  Derry upped the ante, so far that if I weren’t so beaten down from the turn my life had taken I would have decked him like I used to when we were kids and I wasn’t cowed by the fact that he was six-feet-three in the eighth grade. “It’s not like you’re doing anything else.”

  “But I have plans!” I said. “Dreams!”

  Arney, who had remained silent thus far, chose his words carefully but not carefully enough. “I think your plans and dreams changed the minute you served the former president a red snapper bone.”

  I waited exactly ten seconds before speaking, breathing in and breathing out, something I had been taught in the all-day anger-management class I had been forced to take to avoid charges in my horrible display of behavior in Francesco Francatelli’s restaurant. “Nice, Arney. Real nice. Like I needed a reminder.”

  There was still the smell of blood in the air, like a bunch of pennies that had been dredged up from beneath a fetid pool of water. My head swam and I felt my father’s strong hand around my upper arm, his fingers hitting the same place where Caleigh had gripped me so tight the night before. “Take some time, Belfast,” Dad said, giving me a little squeeze that made me wince in pain, as much affection as I was likely to get from the guy.

  Mom gave me one last look before she drifted off to the second floor, taking a hard right at the top, the left cordoned off by police tape, marking the spot where Declan Morrison had come crashing through the antique banister that Mom and Dad had reclaimed from a farmhouse in Quebec. I didn’t have time to tell her that she was missing an earring, lost somewhere in the Manor with all of the hullaballoo that had taken place. Her high heels made no sound on the plush carpeting and I heard the door to their bedroom, way at the other end of the hallway with the rest of their living quarters, close with a thud, its heavy oak providing a necessary seal between her and her emotional progeny.

  Derry and Cargan went into the ballroom to collect their instruments, leaving me with my father and my oldest brother, once an ally. Arney stared down at me, a lock of his jet-black hair—a throwback to some Spaniard who had invaded northern Ireland, or so my mother always claimed—hanging over his eyes, his cheekbones high and not covered with the pudge that even the thinnest McGraths are saddled with. “It’s your turn now, Bel,” he said not unkindly. “It’s your turn to help out here.”

  “We’ve missed you, honey,” Dad said, and although I am not one to shed a tear, preferring anger to sadness like the rest of this dysfunctional clan, the tears were pushing at the backs of my eyes, threatening to make an appearance. One thing I had learned from growing up with four brothers is that once you show them that—the tears, the crying, the femaleness—they knew you were weak and that would be the end of everything.

  CHAPTER Six

  I
didn’t want to go back to my dank little apartment over the garage, not after the day we had all had, but I begged off my father’s suggestion that I join the lot of them at a local restaurant for a burger. Our appetites had returned after we realized that we had passed the dinner hour, but we didn’t want to use the kitchen either in the Manor or in my parents’ living quarters, the smell of the place, even if it was just all in our minds, putting us off my whipping up a dinner fit for a family of starving hosts and musicians.

  Truth be told, I was hungry, too, but I needed to get away from my family. Dinner would turn into something else, some other activity, and I was pretty sure I’d end up with one or more of my nieces and nephews, probably Arney and Grace’s horrible toddler twins, Eddie the puker and Audrey the wailer, while my brother and his wife grabbed a nightcap before going home. Date night. Alone time. Whatever they called it, they never got enough of it, according to them.

  There would also be more strong-arming and name-calling about me becoming the chef at Shamrock Manor, a job for which I was perfectly suited and that I surely didn’t want.

  Taking that job would mean that I was staying and I was definitely not.

  I peeled off from the boys and my parents, my mother having emerged from the bedroom after a few minutes, the promise of a burger too much for her to resist. I got a pair of flip-flops out of the back of the old Volvo wagon that my dad had procured for me and which was serving its purpose for the time being and prepared to drive off.

  I ended up in the center of the village, back to a place I had avoided up until now. Even when I was driving around with nowhere to go, I took care not to drive past it so as not to be tempted to stop in. Too many memories. Too much heartbreak. So, I wasn’t sure why, on this day, the sun starting to set over the Hudson, the memory of the guy’s face as he realized he was going over the balcony and likely to his death lingering in my mind, I ended up at Oogie Mitchell’s place, The Dugout, somewhere I hadn’t been in almost twenty years. In my maid-of-honor dress and flip-flops, my previously coiffed hair hanging in crazy corkscrews around my face, I entered the bar, and while I didn’t expect a hero’s welcome, I didn’t expect total silence to be the greeting.

  The smell of the place brought me right back to that time, melting away the years and making me feel like a teenager all over again.

  And not in a particularly good way.

  Hot dogs on the grill. Peanut shells on the floor. A half century of beer, sticky at first and eventually absorbed into the pine floor, yeasty and organic.

  This place hadn’t gone the way of the other bars in town, the ones that used to be filled with the guys from the railroad and the old guys from the original part of the village. Those bars now served beer with a hint of lilac, a note of ginger, and were empty of anyone with who had the hint of old Foster’s Landing on them, their stools now populated with a younger, hipper set. Microbrews had found the village, and now it was hard to get a beer that tasted like a beer.

  No matter; I liked the cheap wine here anyway. It reminded me of my best friend, Amy, gone all of these years, of bottles purloined from her father’s place and stowed in the tips of our kayaks for a trek out to Eden Island lit only by the moon above.

  I looked around before taking a seat at the bar, mildly amused at its denizens, the regulars, guys who looked as if they had been there for years and probably had. There was a guy snoozing in a puddle of beer sitting next to me; he’s the one I started a one-sided conversation with, letting off some steam after the day. I recognized him as the janitor who worked at the elementary school when I went there what seemed like a hundred years ago; he was also the guy who had held my chin together with his undoubtedly germ-riddled hands after I had taken a header off of the jungle gym in the playground when I was in the third grade. Ten stitches, right to the kisser, Mom in her infinite wisdom asking for the best plastic surgeon the hospital had to offer. All I had to show for that day was a little, tiny divot on the right side of my face, a dimple. Nothing else.

  “Come here often?” I asked, his face firmly planted on the bar, a snore escaping. “Me either. Great hot dogs, though,” I said, looking around for a bartender. I wondered what one had to do to get a drink around here. Back in the day, all you had to do was flash a couple of dollar bills and someone would magically appear out of nowhere. “I saw a dead guy today.”

  The guy mumbled something unintelligible and turned his face to the other side. If I wanted to continue this conversation, it would be with the back of his head.

  “Right. No big deal,” I said, spying Oogie Mitchell coming out from behind the swinging kitchen doors. He hadn’t spotted me yet.

  The last time I had seen Oogie, he had said, “Happy graduation, princess,” on what was my departure from high school. Amy, his daughter, was my best friend and constant companion since kindergarten. It was she who gotten the janitor when I had fallen and she who had convinced me that Kevin Hanson wouldn’t break my heart, that even though he wasn’t as into school as I was, he was cute and nice and worth a chance. I was a lot older than that now and I certainly didn’t feel like a princess anymore, but as I sat on a stool I had occupied a number of times as a teenager part of me hoped that someone would recognize me, welcome me home, even though this was the last place I wanted to be. I had kept a low profile since arriving back in Foster’s Landing, spending the first few days of what I considered my “exile” in the apartment, going through the detritus that had accumulated there, making myself almost believe that what I was doing was not preparation for an extended stay. But over the last few days, I had made some sort of peace with the fact that I was going to be here for a while and because of that I needed to redecorate. I got stuff out of storage and painted the bedroom. I adopted the feral cat, even though the cat wasn’t aware of this new arrangement. I started to make a home for myself, back where it all started a long time ago, in the place I never wanted to return.

  I looked around The Dugout. The last time I had been here I had been wet, cold, and hungover. I had eaten one of the hot dogs and drunk one of the beers, even though it was barely eleven in the morning, but I had felt better instantly, pushing aside the fact that I couldn’t remember a lot from the previous night except that I had said something not nice to Amy, not knowing that I would never see her again. I had never figured out how I had ended up on an island in the middle of the Foster’s Landing River by myself or why I had been alone. But coming into the bar that morning, finding Oogie, made everything all better. For a little while, at least.

  The longer she was gone, the more frantic he became. It was clear, soon after that, that she wasn’t coming back. To me, anyway.

  Now, with the place frozen in time, the guys around me focused on their beers, it felt like the right time to come back. No one paid me any mind. Those railroad shifts were long and it was getting warmer, so all these guys wanted to do was drink their beers before going home to shower the smell of metal and solder off of themselves so that they could settle, clean, into their old recliners and drink a few more beers before drifting off to sleep and starting another day. When I thought about it, there was not a soul in this bar, except for one maybe, wondering why I had been gone for as long as I had.

  The same knotty pine adorned the walls and the pool table still had a slit by one of the side pockets. Over the bar, there was still a shrine to Oogie’s daughter Amy, gone a long time now, her disappearance something it seemed he had never gotten over.

  Me either, I wanted to say. But saying so might indict me, if ever so slightly, in her disappearance and that was something that had hung around me a long time, like a stench that had settled in and clung to every fiber of my being, the main reason I had left as quickly and suddenly as I had, hoping never to return.

  “Ran away,” Oogie told everyone, touching the picture lightly when he said it, Cargan told me, even though everyone suspected that that wasn’t the truth. “I don’t know why.” But people like Amy Mitchell, popular, smart, going places, didn
’t run away; rather, they jetted off in spectacular fashion, coming back to let everyone know that they had left and when they had landed they had arrived.

  On the jukebox, Journey played, bringing me back to that time. Oogie eyed me from the end of the bar. “That you, Bel McGrath?”

  I attempted a smile, but a pang of guilt traced my gut. I had nothing to feel guilty about, at least not when it came to Oogie, but I still felt it, deep inside like a heavy weight pressing on my diaphragm. “It’s me, Oogie Mitchell.” His name was Augustine, but he was and always had been Oogie. I wasn’t sure why and neither was anyone else. Like a lot of things in Foster’s Landing, it was just the way things were.

  His wariness was reflected in his slow saunter to my end of the bar. As unprepared as I was for this visit, it seemed he was even more so. “What are you drinking?”

  “How’s your Cabernet?” I asked, half-kidding.

  He shrugged. “Tastes like dog piss. Probably is.” He reached under the bar. “Probably been under here since you left. We don’t get too many red-wine drinkers in The Dugout.” He poured me a glass, pushed it toward me. “But you’d remember that, I bet.” He gave me a hard stare and I expected a tough question. “You in a bridesmaid dress?”

  “Maid of honor,” I said.

  “Not your color. Redheads shouldn’t wear pink.” He winked. “You’re still a beauty, though.”

  I ignored that. It felt weird to have a man old enough to be my father compliment me. “Caleigh got married.”

  “That little pissant found a man?”

  “Yep. A good one. Handsome. Rich. She’s moving to Bronxville.”

  “Well, well. La-di-da,” he said. “She still can’t hold her liquor?”

  “You could say that.”

  Oogie had turned a blind eye to the fake IDs of our teenage years, and as a result I drank at Oogie’s most of my junior year and all of my senior year, the drinking age a few years beyond my eighteen and a forgery costing all of fifty bucks. Mine had been a doctored license that had once belonged to Jessica Ramos, someone I didn’t resemble in the least, but that hadn’t mattered to Oogie. I suspect he had a cop or two on his payroll, the Landing’s police inexplicably not all that concerned with underage drinking. Back then, Oogie knew I didn’t drive—the brothers always had one of the various cars that sat in my parents’ driveway—so after every evening my friends and I spent drinking cheap beer and eating bad hot dogs he would call out a helpful, “Walk safely!” to us as we navigated the dark streets of the tiny village where everyone knew everyone, but kids were brazen enough to do their underage drinking right in the middle of town. I still wondered if my parents really thought that I spent every Friday and Saturday night “in the library.” Maybe they had too many kids to care, the youngest getting the longest leash.