“This Christmas,” I said.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Don’t be. It’s the best thing that ever happened to me.” And I was starting to believe that.
The butter I put in the pan turned a lovely golden brown, and when the eggs hit it they smelled like a little piece of heaven. I shaved some sharp cheddar onto the eggs, lifting the edges when they were brown, and flipping one half over the other. I put some toast under the broiler and grabbed a couple of plates from the cupboard. I pulled the toast out just in time, slathering it with butter and putting it on a plate. “Oh, the pork belly!” I said, looking at the slab of meat on the counter. “I forgot to make it.”
Brendan waved his hand. “No worries. The eggs will be enough.” He leaned around the corner of the kitchen, looking down the hallway that ran the length of the apartment to the back door. “Someone at your door,” he said.
I wiped my hands on a rag and peered around the same corner, wondering who would be visiting me on a Sunday morning. By my accounting, the pancake breakfast hadn’t even started yet; if Father Pat was through the homily I’d be surprised. When I saw who was at the back door, though, I pulled myself back into the kitchen, hoping they hadn’t seen me.
It was like the Ghosts of Boyfriends Past, both Ben Dykstra and Kevin Hanson standing there, eyeing each other suspiciously.
I looked at Brendan Joyce, the nicest guy any girl could ever hope to meet, and said, “Jelly on your toast?”
CHAPTER Twenty
They let themselves in, having seen me peering around the corner. Ben sauntered into the room as if no time had passed, nothing had ever happened.
“Hello, love,” he said, giving me a kiss on the cheek, taking a bit of toast off of Brendan’s plate, and shoving it into his mouth. Whereas Brendan’s Irish brogue made him adorable, Ben’s British accent made him sound pompous. Arrogant. And sort of like an extra in Mary Poppins. I shuddered to think that I had once found that attractive and wondered if it was even real.
He was in last night’s work clothes, his short-sleeved chef’s jacket—the kind that only wankers wore—a little dirty, a lot wrinkled, suggesting that maybe he had slept in it for a spell. Kevin stood at the edge of the kitchen, his hands shoved into the pockets of his dress pants, taking in the scene. The thought of him standing in the Foster’s Landing River the week before came back to me, his posture the same as it had been that night.
“Ben, what are you doing here?” I asked. I could smell the bourbon on him from a mile away. “You didn’t drive here, did you?”
“Took the train, gorgeous,” he said. “Great little town you have here. Hung out in a place called The Sandlot until it was time to visit.” He looked around the apartment. “Old guy who owns the place said you’re consulting on the menu?” He twirled a finger by his forehead. “A bit of the dementia?”
“The Dugout. It’s called The Dugout. And the owner is not suffering from dementia,” I said. Behind Ben, Kevin’s eyebrows shot up. I didn’t know what he was doing here, but being here with Ben was not something Kevin had bargained for.
Brendan stood. “I’d better get going,” he said. “Bel, thank you for breakfast.”
Now it was Ben’s turn to raise his eyebrows.
“No. Stay,” I said, but hearing the desperation in my voice, my reluctance at being left here with these two, I stopped myself. “Thank you for your help yesterday, Brendan. I really appreciate it.” I walked him to the back door, his shoes hanging from his hands, his feet bare. I guess he couldn’t wait to get out of here.
He looked down at me. “That guy is a wanker,” he said, smiling. “I’ll see you later.”
I watched him go, taking the rickety back steps at such a fast pace I was afraid he would slip and fall. I hoped that my former association with Ben—both personal and professional—didn’t color me in a way that Brendan found unattractive, but his haste in getting to his car certainly didn’t serve as a rebuttal.
Ben and Kevin were sitting at the counter when I came back in. “Francesco says ‘hi,’” Ben said, not a touch of sarcasm in his tone. Francesco had wished me dead the last time I had seen him. I doubt he had taken the time to say “hi.”
“How’s the restaurant, Ben?” I asked. “How are you enjoying your head chef status?”
“Oh, are you still sore about that?” he asked.
I turned off the broiler; no one else in this strange threesome was getting breakfast. “Yes. I’m still sore about that.”
Kevin looked from me to Ben and then back at Ben again.
“Hey, Kevin,” I said, “I don’t know why you’re here, but obviously Ben and I have some catching up to do. Can we reconnect later?”
“Afraid not, Bel,” Kevin said, standing and opening his jacket wide enough so that Ben could see the gun on his hip. He no longer carried the badge of his teenage masculinity—a football that was with him all the time when his standing bass was not—but a gun was better than that. Ben gave it a cursory glance and looked back at me. “I have some things to talk to you about with respect to the Morrison murder.”
That got Ben’s attention. “The Morrison murder? What in the hell is that?”
Kevin turned to him, officious. “It is the murder of one Declan Morrison who met his demise at Shamrock Manor last week.”
Kevin must have gotten a word-a-day calendar. His vocabulary had improved considerably since we were in high school and I had had to explain to him that “flatulence” meant the same thing as “fart.” I turned and looked at Ben. “In that case, you should go. This is something I need to discuss with Kevin. Alone,” I said as I rounded the counter and pushed Ben toward the door. Outside on the back deck, high above my father’s studio, where the sounds of banging and cursing had ceased while Dad contemplated life and Catholicism at BHJ, I guided Ben toward the stairs.
“Wait,” he said, his chef’s coat moist beneath my hands from sweat or something else, I couldn’t tell.
“What, Ben?” I asked. “I’ve been gone for over two months and that life, the one we had together, is over. You made that perfectly clear when you didn’t come after me. When you didn’t call.”
“To here?” he asked. “To this hellhole? You hate it here. You told me yourself.”
“It’s not a hellhole,” I said, and I was surprised to admit that. Foster’s Landing had wrapped me in its warm embrace, the one where it was not unusual to awaken to the sounds of the train in the distance and, on a really clear night in the summer, the sound of a local band playing at the riverfront park. “I needed a break from all of that. From The Monkey’s Paw. From New York.” I looked into his eyes and seeing nothing that would ever draw me back in—and wondering why he ever had that power—said, “From you.”
“From me?” he said. “Baby, you’ve got that all wrong.”
“No, I don’t,” I said. “And don’t call me baby.”
He leaned in close and I got a good whiff of booze, sweat, and something else that smelled like dehydrated shiitake mushrooms. I wondered what in God’s name—and yes, I took it in vain—I ever saw in this guy. Had the accent been enough? The good sex? The common goal of becoming top chefs, working at competing New York City restaurants but always remembering that we were one unit?
I decided, after I thought it through, that it had been two years of temporary insanity.
“What happened to you?” he asked. “You used to be fun. Now you’re cooking at a bougie wedding hall and living in a dump.”
“At least I didn’t serve a life-threatening piece of snapper to a president,” I said. Behind me I heard Taylor, the feral cat, let out a howl of approval.
“So there it is.”
“There what is?”
“You blame me,” he said. “For everything.”
“And why wouldn’t I?” I said. “You let me take the fall. You let Francesco treat me like garbage. You never said one word to defend me.”
“One word: ‘head chef,’” he said. “You
were responsible for what left that kitchen.”
“That’s two words.” I turned my back on him. because if I looked at his face any longer I would start crying and that would ruin everything. “Why are you here?”
“You never gave me the recipe for the bordelaise.”
“You don’t know how to make bordelaise without a recipe?” I asked. Any chef worth their salt—heck, any home cook worth their salt—knew how to make a bordelaise from scratch and memory. “Have you ever heard of Google? Allrecipes.com? You needed to come up here via train to ask me what the recipe is?”
“Max doesn’t want to do the show anymore,” he said, finally revealing why he was really here.
“Of course she doesn’t,” I said. Max Rayfield was the reason there had been any discussion at all about a reality show about The Monkey’s Paw. She was a cable honcho and the restaurant was her favorite. It all came together except that it didn’t; I didn’t want to do the show. “She wanted to do the show with me, not some guy who can’t make a bordelaise.”
“She wanted a female chef,” he said, spitting the words out with a venom they really didn’t deserve.
“Well, that makes sense,” I said. “Male chefs are a dime a dozen. She’s no dummy.”
He got red in the face. “What did I ever see in you?” he asked.
“Beauty. Brains. Talent,” I said. “I thought that was obvious.” It sounded better and more confident than I felt, but that was okay, given the circumstances.
Kevin appeared at the back door. “I think you’d better go,” he said, and I wondered how anyone took him seriously. He looked like a kid playing dress up in his blazer and pants, his tie tight around his neck.
“You got it, Barney Fife,” Ben said, hustling down the steps. “You’re done in New York, Bel. You know that, right?” he called after himself before disappearing out of sight.
I leaned over the railing. “And you need to know how to make a decent demi-glace to make a bordelaise, something you could never do!” I called after him, but he was gone.
I didn’t look at Kevin until we were inside the apartment again, him assuming his position at the counter. I knew I was officially finished in New York. Thing was, I didn’t know if I cared.
CHAPTER Twenty-one
Kevin was in cop mode when we finally got down to the business of why he was there. “So have you heard from Caleigh since she went on her honeymoon?”
“What kind of question is that?” I asked. “Would you call me if you were on your honeymoon in Bermuda?” He looked a little stricken, whether at the thought of being on a honeymoon or the thought of calling me while on said honeymoon I wasn’t sure. “Let me rephrase that. Do you think Caleigh would call anyone while she was on her honeymoon? Why would she?”
“So, you haven’t heard from Caleigh?” he said, jotting notes down in a little pad that I had seen on sale at the CVS for twenty-nine cents.
“No. I haven’t heard from Caleigh.”
“Mark?”
“Mark Chesterton has even less of a reason to contact me than my cousin. What’s going on, Kevin?”
He toyed with the idea of not telling me anything; I could see it on his face. But in the end, he probably realized that there would be no harm in telling me, Bel, the disaster, where the investigation was headed, and he spilled it. “We found Declan Morrison’s phone…”
Uh-oh.
“… and discovered that he was texting Caleigh during the rehearsal dinner and the wedding.”
I put on my best I’m ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille, face and gasped. “Really? On his phone?”
“On his phone,” Kevin said, my overacting lost on him. “Did you know him?”
“Never saw him before the wedding,” I said. Finally, back to the truth.
“But Caleigh knew him?” Kevin asked. “How could that be? You two are close. She never mentioned him? Never mentioned having a relationship with someone other than her fiancé? Her”—at this he started flipping through his CVS notebook—“third cousin once removed?”
“No, she never mentioned it.”
He looked at me and the years melted away and we were back to where we started: me, Kevin, and Amy, a trio of friends, one of whom went missing and never returned, the other two trying to forge new lives in her absence. “What, Bel? What is it?”
“It’s nothing, Kevin,” I said. “I didn’t know this guy and I didn’t know that Caleigh knew this guy.” My eyes went to the sugar jar on the counter, the one with the big shamrock painted on the front and the earring shoved deep down into the granules.
“Does she love Mark?”
That was a weird question, coming from Kevin. I thought about that for a moment. “I would say yes, but we have evidence to the contrary, don’t we?” I looked at the pork belly, pink and flaccid on the plate in front of me. “Is she a suspect? Caleigh?”
“Everyone is a suspect,” Kevin said.
“Well, Caleigh and Mark sure weren’t when you let them go to Bermuda.”
His face turned dark at the suggestion that I didn’t think he was good at his job. He wasn’t. Yes, they had had alibis, but maybe there was more to the story. Heck, there was more to the story and now one of the key characters in that story was sipping champagne and getting her feet rubbed at a five-star hotel somewhere in the Atlantic. “Everyone is a suspect,” Kevin said, his teeth clenched. “But they had alibis.”
Hers was rather thin, if you asked me. Passed out and alone. How convenient.
“Even me? I’m a suspect?” I asked.
He thought about that for a minute. “Well, probably not you. You heard voices. You saw him come over the balcony. You saw him die.” He studied my face. “At least that’s what you told me.”
It was the truth and I told him so. “I’ve never lied to you, Kevin,” I said, the unspoken words indicting him. He had lied to me, more than once, and all these years later it still hurt, though I wasn’t sure why. Lies. I thought about my mother, her lie about knowing Declan Morrison. The earring in the sugar, found right where the man had last been. “But everyone else?”
“Pretty much everyone at the wedding is a suspect,” Kevin said.
I started naming the least possible suspects. “Jonesy Chesterton?”
“Suspect.”
“Mark’s mother?”
“Suspect.”
I threw one out just to see Kevin’s reaction. “My mother?” I don’t know why I went there, but I did. Mom had been acting weird since that day, whether from the tragic event that had occurred or something else I wasn’t sure.
He didn’t answer, closing his notebook and standing. “Let me know if you talk to Caleigh before she comes back. Suffice it to say that we will be waiting for her upon her return.” He grimaced; he wasn’t supposed to tell me that. “But don’t tell her.” He rubbed a hand over his face. He was still getting used to this detective thing, obviously, finally realizing that the element of surprise would come in handier than the gun on his hip.
I walked him to the door. “Thanks for coming by, Kevin. I’m here to help in any way I can,” I said, even though I didn’t have a lot to offer in the way of information. What information I had once had and that I thought no one else knew was now in his possession. I hoped Caleigh was having a good time on her honeymoon, because it seemed like she was coming back to some unpleasantness, something that would make her little heart-shaped face crumble, her eyes fill with tears. Somehow, I imagined, she would get away with this, too. Just like she always did.
Kevin paused on the back deck. “One question, Bel?”
“Shoot.”
“What did you see in him? That guy. Ben.”
I chose not to answer, giving Kevin a little shrug instead. When he was gone and the only sound in the neighborhood was that of a dog barking in the distance I told Kevin the truth, even though he wasn’t there.
“He wasn’t you.”
CHAPTER Twenty-two
Sunday dinner at my parents’ hou
se was a standard affair, with the entire clan coming together for two hours starting at five. We had missed last week’s, for obvious reasons. I hoped everyone was in a good mood; the comments from the Damscott/O’Donnell wedding guests had been incredibly positive, bordering on glowing when it came to the food. One guest did remark that Feeney had sung off-key all night, but I hadn’t heard any evidence of that. There hadn’t been any events at the Manor that day, so after some basic maintenance—Dad hung a new painting in the foyer, a weird take on Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night but with the faces of various relatives dotting the sky instead of stars—and another sweep through the kitchen to make sure we were ready for the McCarthy wedding the following Saturday, we all assembled at the big handcrafted table that Dad had built during a snowstorm from two boat hatch covers and some leftover wrought-iron legs that he had purloined from a junkyard.
I had gotten a text from Brendan Joyce right before going downstairs; apparently, he hadn’t been that put off by the morning’s events and asked if I was free for dinner the next night. I offered to cook at my apartment, the breakfast I had promised him that morning not having gone as I wanted. “It’s a date!” he had cheerfully replied, and I wondered if the guy was ever in a bad mood.
Before I went to dinner, I stopped by The Dugout and looked over Oogie’s menu. Amy’s brother, Jed, a local cop, was at the bar, eating a hot dog and drinking a pint of beer that was half foam.
“Hey, Bel,” he said. “I heard you came back.”
It wasn’t the friendliest of greetings, but Jed had never been much of a wordsmith or a conversationalist.
“I’m back all right,” I said, leaning against the bar. “Is your dad around?”
“In the back,” Jed said, nodding toward the kitchen door. “You’re helping him with the menu?”
“Sort of,” I said. What Oogie was capable of from a culinary standpoint would severely limit the changes I was able to make. I was hoping to get him up to speed on your basic BLT, maybe a turkey burger, some sausage and peppers if we ever got to the point of combining ingredients.
Wedding Bel Blues: A Belfast McGrath Mystery (Bel McGrath Mysteries) Page 13