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

by Maggie McConnon

  “Heard you lived in New York City,” Oogie said.

  “Used to.”

  “Like it there?” he asked.

  “I guess,” I said. I did. I loved it. Every single minute.

  “Heard you’re a chef?”

  “Was.”

  “Wouldn’t have pegged you for that,” he said. “You look like you’d be married by now. With a bunch of kids. Taking care of them.” He smoothed back his snow-white pompadour in the dingy mirror over the bar.

  Thank you? “You have any grandchildren, Oogie?” I asked, thinking about Amy’s older brother, Jed, and her younger sister, Elaine.

  Oogie didn’t answer, asking me another question instead. “Going to the candle lighting tomorrow?” he asked. “I’m giving a speech. Nineteen years tomorrow.”

  I shrugged. I wasn’t sure I’d be welcome.

  “Suit yourself,” he said, repositioning some liquor bottles behind the bar, in front of the dusty glass. “How’s the wine?” he asked. “Want a hot dog?”

  “Wine’s good,” I said. “No hot dog.” I looked into the wineglass, magenta liquid with a few specks of something unidentifiable floating on the surface. “How you been, Oogie?”

  He picked up a rag, ran it over a sticky spot on the bar. “Good, I guess.” He started away from me. “Wine’s on the house. If you stick around, don’t be a stranger,” he said over his shoulder.

  I’d try. But these days, I wasn’t sure who I was, where I belonged. The past could do that to you, make you a stranger to yourself.

  CHAPTER Seven

  “I brought you a cheeseburger.”

  My mother was waiting for me when I walked in, having mounted the rickety stairs to the apartment over the garage in her high heels and dress before I got back home. She had a key and wasn’t above using it. How did I know that? Well, first, I always lock the door, my life in New York City and some sketchy apartments I’d lived in convincing me that the world wasn’t a completely safe place. Also, I now had a toilet brush and cleaner in the space where I had put a makeshift litter box, hoping that the feral cat would settle down and become mine completely, even though I was still at a loss as to what to call him. Or her. I could never get close enough to find out. My refrigerator was regularly stocked with salads and things made with lentils, otherwise known to me as “lentil crap.” Sometimes, even though I never made my bed, it was all arranged, new throw pillows at the head, when I returned home at the end of the day. Other times, my living room smelled like Febreze.

  I made a mental note to change the locks the next day and then remembered that in order to do so I’d need to make money. And ask my Dad’s permission. With Caleigh off on her honeymoon, probably bemoaning how “her day” was ruined by a guy dying and how it “just wasn’t fair,” I couldn’t ask my cousin for a loan, even though, all told, she probably owed me close to a grand from her borrowing money over the years. Talk about “not fair.” Not being fair was the story of our childhoods, her rallying cry when she didn’t get her way. (Which wasn’t often.) I got a new bike while she rode last year’s model? It wasn’t fair. I got an A on the Geometry Regents and she had to repeat the test in August? Not fair. Everyone was paying attention to me because my best friend was missing? Totally unfair. Amy had been Caleigh’s friend, too. Had everyone forgotten how she might feel?

  You know what wasn’t fair? Getting fired for something you didn’t do. That was the unfairest thing of them all. Knowing your fiancé had cheated on you repeatedly and lied to your face. Not having the wedding you thought would be the best day of your life.

  All not fair.

  Mom was sitting on my Ikea sofa, picking disconsolately at the fabric, her makeup still flawless even after the Siege and everything that had happened at the wedding, her thin legs crossed at the ankles. “Hungry?”

  I opened the Styrofoam container and inspected its contents. With blood leaking out of the sides of the burger and ketchup covering the fries, all I could see was Declan Morrison’s busted head and not one of the best cheeseburgers the Landing had to offer. I closed it and thanked Mom. “Maybe later,” I said, kicking off my shoes and climbing onto the couch, finding myself curling up into the crook of her left arm, something I was much too old to do. “Did you meet Declan during the wedding?” I asked.

  “Declan who?”

  “The dead guy.”

  “Oh, him,” Mom said. “I guess during the cocktail hour.” She kicked off her pumps, a beautiful pair of black sling-backs that never would have supported my thick ankles. Irish ankles, the kind that you get from taking ten years of Irish-dancing lessons, or that you were just unfortunate to inherit from your father’s side of the family, Aunt Finnoula the likely culprit. Mom had the legs of a Thoroughbred, but even that wasn’t enough to convince me to get me hooked up into one of her Pilates machines for a spell.

  “He’s supposedly Caleigh’s third cousin or something?”

  “Or something?” Mom murmured, a question mark at the end.

  “But Dad knew him.”

  “He did?” She shifted slightly, redistributing my weight. “I don’t think he did.”

  Being as I was nestled in the crook of her arm, I couldn’t see if she had used her “tell,” licking her lips nervously. Turning around to see would have taken too much effort and I was exhausted.

  She changed the subject. “Where have you been, honey? Work?”

  “The Dugout,” I said, and could immediately feel her tense beside me.

  “You didn’t eat one of those horrible hot dogs, did you?”

  “No, I didn’t eat a hot dog.” I wondered why that was her only concern. I hadn’t been there in nineteen years and for one specific reason: I had been with Amy the night she disappeared. For a while, that made me persona non grata in town, as if I were hiding something. I wasn’t. I had no idea where she went but couldn’t seem to convince a lot of people of what was the God’s honest truth. “I did have a glass of crappy wine, though.”

  “Just not the hot dogs, Bel. Those things will kill you,” she said. “Sorry. Bad choice of words.”

  “It certainly wasn’t a hot dog that killed Declan,” I said. But what was it? I had replayed that scene over and over in my mind, trying to re-create the sound of the two voices I had heard—one of them certainly Declan’s but the other so muffled I couldn’t even tell if it belonged to a woman or a man—and the events leading up to the point where he landed at my feet, his head cracking open with a sound I wasn’t going to forget anytime soon.

  My mind kept going back to Caleigh, spread out on the bed with the canopy, inches from where all of the action was taking place. Had she woken up? Had it been me, even totally inebriated, I would have come running when I heard the commotion, but the door to the bedroom at the top of the stairs never opened.

  “Did you see Caleigh before she left?” I asked. “After Kevin questioned her?”

  “I didn’t,” Mom said, and I was able to turn my head slightly, catching a glimpse of her tongue touching her upper lip.

  Liar.

  “Where’s Dad?” I asked.

  “Painting,” she said, moving from in back of me and getting off the couch. She stretched, the top part of her dress coming up and exposing a sliver of belly that would rival a twenty-year-old’s. “I guess I’d better go find him and see how he’s doing. He was pretty unnerved by what happened.”

  More unnerved than he should have been? I didn’t ask. Maybe I didn’t want to know. They were both acting strangely, and I knew there were things they weren’t telling me. “Thanks for the cheeseburger.”

  She leaned over and kissed my head. “See you tomorrow?”

  She’d see me every day unless there was some kind of miraculous event that spirited me far away from Foster’s Landing and back into the culinary world of New York City. Maybe that was a good thing. Maybe it would leave me with plenty of time to figure out just what I was going to do with my life, where I was going to go.

  Or what I would be
when I finally grew up.

  “Did you give any thought to what you discussed with Dad?” she asked.

  “Yes and no.”

  “It would be a tremendous help, Bel. To us.” She smiled at me. “To you.”

  “Let me sleep on it,” I said, knowing that there was really only one answer to the question. A vision of Mom from long ago, her hair tied up in a green scarf, stirring a huge pot of potatoes on the stove in the Manor came back to me. Although she wasn’t the best cook and didn’t profess to be, in the early going of the business she was always there, adding butter to this and salt to that, and smiling merrily the whole time. Those times were in the days before she became the “hostess” and steered the events of whatever wedding the Manor was having, a job she took to with steely determination, with less of the genuine happiness that had accompanied her kitchen duty. She seemed at home there. I guess the apple didn’t fall far from the tree after all.

  After Mom left, I downloaded the snippets of video I had on my phone into my computer, and it was a lot of footage, more than I remember. I scanned it for any view of Declan Morrison. There he was, dancing with Bridie McKay, one of Mom’s cousins. And there he was again, a few minutes later, talking to a busboy about something. And still again, glad-handing a guy with his back to the camera but who was clearly one of the Protestants. (Don’t ask me how I knew. I just did.) And finally, there he was, the time stamp showing that it was moments before I spirited Caleigh up to the bedroom, talking to the new Mrs. Mark Chesterton, their noses practically touching, a tear running down Caleigh’s flushed cheek.

  I saved the entire raft of footage into a folder called “Recipes.” Anyone who knew me well, like Amy had once, would know that this was a dummy file. I don’t use recipes. I’m too good for that. Then, I edited out any footage that included Caleigh talking to Declan and saved the file as “Raw Footage.”

  I stared at the computer screen for a while, the picture of Caleigh talking to Declan a shadow on my retinas even when it wasn’t on the screen. I was good at a lot of things, I determined, but I was getting especially good at forgetting the past.

  CHAPTER Eight

  I hadn’t planned on going to the candle lighting for Amy in the village square the next night, but that’s where I found myself, moving wordlessly among a sea of people for whom the disappearance of Amy Mitchell was a singular focus, at least for one night every year. I had pushed my red hair up under a baseball cap and wound a gauzy scarf around my neck, taking out my contacts and putting on my glasses before leaving the house; maybe no one would know who I was and maybe no one would realize that I may have been the last person to ever see Amy.

  Earlier that day, I had attempted to go back into the Manor to see what awaited me in the kitchen should I take the head chef job, but the place was swarming with Foster’s Landing finest, led by Kevin and Mary Ann D’Amato’s father, Lt. Daniel D’Amato, our village’s chief of police and keeper of the peace. I was shooed out by a uniformed cop who I recognized as a classmate who had thrown up on me during one particularly laborious bus ride to a local farm when we were in the fourth grade and so, knowing about his delicate constitution, I made haste back to the apartment. Lieutenant D’Amato had caught up with me outside.

  “Sorry for your loss, Bel,” he said, referring to what I thought was my broken engagement and lost job. “Poor guy. A cousin of Caleigh’s?”

  “Oh, you mean the dead guy?” I said. “Yes, a shame,” I said, sounding far less troubled than I actually was. I was preoccupied by the thought that exactly nineteen years ago Amy Mitchell and I had had our first and only fight, after which she had disappeared, and that the event would be commemorated, as it was every year, with a candle lighting that night.

  “Anything else you want to tell me, Bel?” the Lieutenant asked, looking down at me, his bushy black eyebrows two question marks over his kind eyes.

  I thought about it. “Nope. I told Kevin everything.”

  “Are you sure?” he said, and in that question, asked in a kind voice, was the memory of a similar question he asked me a long time ago when Amy didn’t come home. “Are you sure there’s nothing else you want to say?” he had asked then.

  “I have a habit of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, Lieutenant.” I looked up at him, the kindly officer who had been a part of this town, my life, for as long as I could remember. “You know that,” I said, giving voice to the fact that I knew what everyone thought: I knew more than I let on.

  They’d be wrong.

  He rubbed his hands together even though it wasn’t cold. “Yes, Detective Hanson filled me in.”

  I did have something to ask him, though. “Why did he let Caleigh and Mark leave?” I asked. “You know, go on their honeymoon? Shouldn’t they be forced to stay around in case there’s anything else that comes up?”

  Behind him, I saw Kevin poke his head out of the Manor’s front door and then, seeing that I was talking to his boss, quickly disappear again. “Well, Mark was on the dance floor with his aunt,” Lieutenant D’Amato said, “and Caleigh was in the bridal suite.”

  “Alone,” I said.

  He frowned and it occurred to me that while I was only speaking the truth, I had just implicated my cousin unintentionally. I don’t know why it mattered to me that she was on her honeymoon and we were all here; that was the way it was supposed to be even before Declan had died.

  So, she and Mark had alibis. It got me wondering who didn’t.

  I don’t know what made me go to the candle lighting, but I was here now and took a look around. I recognized several of our old classmates and Amy’s brother and sister in the crowd, as well as some of the parents of people I had grown up and gone to school with. The McNultys. The Blakes. The Cozzastanzas. They were all there. It seemed like the whole town had come out.

  When Amy first disappeared, I had lain low, my sadness over the loss of my best friend turning me into a hermit that summer before I left for college. Not to mention all of the people who thought I should have known more about what happened that night. My parents had hovered and worried over me until it got to be too much and I took leave of my self-imposed exile and spent too much time out and about, drinking and carousing, looking for any way out of the deep pit of despair in which I lived.

  People hadn’t been kind, alternately trying to insert themselves into the tragedy by becoming nicer to me than they had been before or shutting me out, not wanting to be associated with one of the last people who had seen Amy. Kevin—and no one else really, if memory served—hadn’t had the same experience, seeming to rise above all of it, remaining as popular as before, as normal in his dealings with the people in town. Maybe it was me. Maybe I had become different in my mourning and that’s why people treated me the way they did.

  My parents sent me to Ireland later that summer, hoping that a change of scene would do me good. It had. It was so great that I hadn’t wanted to return, but return I did.

  As I looked back, it seemed as if every decision I had made, every place I had run, had been as a result of that night, the night my best friend had looked at me and heard me say the words “you’ll be sorry” without feeling a bit of remorse.

  I left the crowd and went and sat on the hill behind the Bleeding Heart of Jesus—or BHJ, as we proudly wore on our Catholic Youth Organization’s basketball uniforms—a huge Gothic church, too big for this little village, looking out over the crowd that had assembled in the square below. Amy’s father, Oogie, spoke, beseeching his daughter to return. Jed, her brother, stood next to Oogie, and next to Jed was Elaine, his and Amy’s younger sister, looking exactly as she had when we were kids. She was the one who tagged along with us in that annoying fashion that younger siblings had. The candles bobbed and danced in the encroaching darkness until that was all I could see, hundreds of lights blending together into one.

  “She’s dead,” I whispered to no one, knowing that that statement would be received with gasps. Sad sighs. But to me, it was the truth. I d
idn’t know it for sure, but it had to be. People like Amy Mitchell didn’t just disappear into thin air.

  I sat there for a long time, long after everyone else left. I hoped that wherever Amy was—whether she was dead or alive—she wasn’t sorry but very happy, bobbing and dancing in the darkness like the candles that were lit in her memory.

  I got up finally after an hour or so and began my trek home. I passed all of my old haunts, purposely staying on the opposite side of the street from The Dugout as I made my way through my hometown, stopping to look in the window of what used to be a five-and-dime and which was now a fancy coffee shop. I caught my reflection in the window and, behind me, the silhouette of someone else, someone a little stooped, thin, with a shock of white hair, his appearance startling me. I turned.

  “Oogie,” I said. “I didn’t hear you come up.”

  “Sorry, Bel,” he said, reaching out to touch my shoulder, to steady me. “Didn’t mean to scare you.” He backed up a bit, taking his hand from my shoulder. “I thought you said you weren’t going? To the candle lighting?”