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

by Maggie McConnon

  Mom stood up behind the desk, leaning forward. “And why does Cargan need a lawyer?” she asked. “Let’s start at the beginning.”

  I had asked Kevin that exact question, but he had been vague. He said my brother felt more comfortable with someone in the legal profession in the room, that Kevin’s questions were making him “nervous.” Any questions made Cargan nervous and he was always stubbornly obtuse. Obviously, this had to do with the types of questions Kevin was asking and Cargan was afraid to screw things up even more than I had to this point. “I’m not sure, Mom. Let’s let Paul handle it with Kevin. I’m sure everything is fine. You know how Car gets when there are too many questions thrown at him.”

  She narrowed her eyes, keeping them trained on me. “This is not how I expected this day to go, Belfast.”

  Yes, on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being that your business was going under and 1 the crate of eggs never being delivered from the local farm, this was about a 22. Sorry I ruined your middle-aged foreplay, otherwise known as a “foot massage.”

  My father stood stock still by the door, not saying a word. A mad Oona was not a good thing, and while Mom’s ill wind only blew through every so often, everyone took cover when it did.

  “Me either, Mom, but now that it’s going this way, I’ll leave the attorney issue to you and I’ll make Cargan a ham sandwich.” When no one moved, I said, “Agreed?”

  Mom shuddered as if to shake off the cobweb of disappointment that had enveloped her, and picked up the phone. She was yelling at my dad to find Paul’s number so that they could get him over to the station.

  As I assembled a sandwich for my brother, I thought about just what he could possibly need a lawyer for. I hoped it was just standard Cargan overreaction to a simple situation. He watched a lot of television at night in the bedroom that he had once shared with Feeney and still resided in and a lot of his viewing, when it wasn’t fútbol, of course, was related to detective shows, various iterations of the Law & Order franchise, which seemed to be on every channel, every day, at every hour. Maybe he had watched one too many episodes and decided that no one should talk to the police without a lawyer. Maybe that was it.

  I could only hope. I cut the crusts off his sandwich, sliced it diagonally, and wrapped it in foil, grabbing a piece of leftover cake from the O’Donnell wedding and adding that to the haul that I was bringing back to the police station.

  Dad cornered me in the foyer, just as I was about to leave. “This was a bad idea, Belfast,” he said.

  I went for broke. “You know what’s an even worse idea, Dad?” I said. “Keeping a bunch of guns in your studio.”

  I could see the wheels turning in his head, practically see smoke coming out of his ears as he thought up a response. “Ah, Belfast,” was all he could muster.

  “Dad,” I said, trying to keep my voice at a whisper. “Why? Is Uncle Eugene still involved in bad stuff? Are you trying to cover for him?” A more sinister thought floated through my head. “You? Are you doing—”

  My questioning had given him enough time to come up with an answer, the lightbulb going off over his head, so to speak, and he cut me off. “An installation!”

  I studied his face for some indication that he would change his answer and tell me the truth, but all that was transmitted was his pleasure at coming up with a lie on short notice. When it was clear that that was his story and he was sticking to it, I left.

  I trudged back down the hill away from the Manor, needing the bucolic surroundings of the Manor’s grounds to help me get into a better head space over this whole thing, my role in it. I wondered just what it was that made my brother “lawyer up,” as they say.

  CHAPTER Twenty-six

  I delivered the sandwich and was told to wait at the front of the station, having tried to get a look at Cargan in the conference room and failed. Lieutenant D’Amato blustered by, gave a couple of orders that sounded fake—just what was a “forty-seven-sixty-nine?”—and went into his office. The cop whom he told to patrol the perimeter of the village pool—a “three-ten-ninety-two” in progress—a place where no one went because of the drought, a place that was gated at night according to Brendan, looked just as confused as I did at the order. Something told me that the Lieutenant was just a wee bit uncomfortable with today’s turn of events, the son of Oona McGrath, a woman everyone knew the widowed Lieutenant was sweet on despite the ring on her finger and faithful husband, in police custody. Who could blame the guy? Mom was a flirt, plain and simple. And everyone knew it.

  Except for Dad.

  Maybe she could flirt Cargan out of an obstruction of justice charge. Or worse. She was that good.

  The Lieutenant nodded at me as he passed to go into his office. “Belfast.”

  “Lieutenant.” I looked down at my lap so as not to make eye contact with anyone else in the office. Mom and Dad still hadn’t shown up and I could imagine them frantically calling Paul Grant, telling him the story in that back-and-forth style that they used—Dad starting a sentence and Mom finishing it—and probably confusing the hell out of the attorney, our only hope.

  Mom was usually the cool customer, leaving the emotional outbursts and carrying on to Dad. I thought back to the day of the wedding, thinking about whether anything seemed out of the ordinary with them, if having a wedding crasher had dampened her spirits at all, knowing, as I did, that everyone seemed rather chummy with Declan Morrison prior to his untimely demise. But all I could think of was Mom in that impeccably cut dress, the high heels, her smile as she went round and round during the spinning portion of the Siege of Ennis, literally kicking up her heels. There hadn’t been a trace of discomfort on her face, in her demeanor. It had been the usual Oona McGrath hostess show, the lady of the Manor, the iron maiden, running the place with her usual aplomb and strictness.

  “She raised four sons,” the women at the wedding had whispered, “and look at her.”

  Yes, there was a daughter, too, but apparently that didn’t count, especially when you spoke of how wonderful an Irishwoman—an Irish mother—in her sixties looked after breeding and bringing up four rapscallions, one more trouble than the next.

  If they only knew.

  The nicest one, the one all of the mothers thought would be perfect for their fair lasses, was sitting a few feet away from me in a conference room, probably near tears at this point, thinking that he was in some kind of major trouble he would never escape.

  Paul Grant stormed into the station about a half hour later, his curly hair sticking up wildly, a Hawaiian shirt announcing that he hadn’t planned on working that evening. He greeted me like a long-lost friend. “Belfast!” he bellowed. “Great to see you!” He went into some stock small talk that didn’t apply to me. “How’s the hubs? Kids?”

  “No ‘hubs’ and no kids, Philip,” I said. “Just me and my cat,” I added, taking ownership of a feral animal that wanted no part of me unless there was salmon in a pouch to be had.

  “Cat?” he said, rubbing the beard he had grown to give him some gravitas, or so I suspected. That had been the one thing he had going for him in high school: the ability to grow facial hair in the course of a school day. I could see his mind working and reviewing the file in his brain of all things Belfast McGrath; clearly, he had a home subscription to the Times, because the look on his face told me that he knew what had happened. That and the fact that he took a step backward, bumping into Francie’s desk, led me to believe that he thought I might cut him at the slightest provocation.

  “So, I’m going to see your brother now,” he said, backing up slowly and keeping an eye on me as he made his way to the conference room, feeling behind him for sharp objects while making sure I didn’t pull any out myself.

  Kevin left the room a few seconds later to give the client and his attorney a chance to talk. He came over and took a seat next to me so that while we talked we didn’t have to look at each other.

  “What’s going on in there?” I asked. Before he could answer, I held up a
hand. “I know. You can’t say.”

  “I can’t.”

  We sat in silence for a few minutes. “So, how’s Mary Ann?”

  “She’s good,” he said, nodding. “She’s good.” As if saying it twice made it twice as true.

  What I really wanted to ask him was how long he planned on dating her, if he ever planned on proposing. I could imagine Lieutenant D’Amato being pleased with the longest courtship on record for his only daughter. “And work?”

  “Work’s good. It’s good.”

  Francie clocked out for the night, making a great show of punching an actual time card into an actual time card machine. I hadn’t seen one of those since my stint working as a line cook at the BHJ convent, a place that housed three dozen nuns, all of whom took a turn at one point or another asking me if I had gotten “the call” or if God had sent me a private message to become a nun. He (or She) hadn’t. And if He (or She) had, I probably would have ignored it, my contrary nature having been set in stone at a young age. The universe didn’t have that good a sense of humor.

  Francie now out of the picture, Kevin relaxed a bit. “I don’t know, Bel. Cargan seems mighty troubled by something.”

  “Does he now?”

  “Something about Declan Morrison being his ‘mate’ and how he wished he could change what happened that day.”

  His mate? Really, I thought. Cargan had told me they had never met. I shifted uncomfortably in the molded-plastic chair. “That doesn’t sound terribly incriminating.” Behind the closed doors of the conference room I could hear Paul’s usually booming voice, now muffled, and the lower tones of my brother’s voice.

  “It’s not. But he seems to know more than he’s saying and he’s being very tight-lipped.” Kevin pulled a piece of candy from his pocket, a caramel, and handed it to me. “And then there was the asking-for-a-lawyer-thing.”

  “He watches a lot of Law and Order,” I said, by way of explanation. And there was the short-lived stint in the police academy a long time ago, a place he left and from where he took off to roam the land with his fiddle, law enforcement not for him.

  Kevin gave a little chuckle. “Most of our ‘customers’ do. Not a lot of what they see on those shows is entirely accurate.”

  “Don’t tell Cargan that,” I said. “Those are the only shows he watches.” I turned the caramel over in my hand, a memory seeping into my brain, Kevin slipping me candy during Geometry in sophomore year, Amy pegging the move as one designed to get Kevin into my good graces after a year of pining for me, not very discreetly. He had been smart enough to know even back then that the way to my heart was with food, and that much hadn’t changed, on either of our accounts. “Really, Kevin, I think you should let him go. Give him some time. I’ll talk to him, see what else he knows.”

  Kevin shook his head. “You know I can’t do that, Bel.” He looked at me. “Have you given any more thought to the hypnotist?”

  I hadn’t. And wouldn’t.

  “See what you know, maybe?” He stood. “We use someone great. A local. Beverly Dos Santos.”

  “Bev?” I said. “From the Post Office? Beverly is a hypnotist?”

  “And psychic healer,” Kevin said, as if he, or anyone, knew what that meant.

  Before I could express more incredulity, Paul emerged from the conference room. “My client is ready to make a statement,” he said, his Hawaiian shirt looking even more preposterous as he made the statement. I hadn’t noticed the full-length hula girl that ran up the left side, looking expectantly at Paul’s bearded face, as if she were waiting for an answer to some question about hula dancing.

  “Yes!” I said, blurting out the one word I hadn’t meant to say.

  Kevin stopped midway to the conference room. “Yes?”

  “Yes. I will be hypnotized,” I said, the look on Paul’s face, concern mixed with sadness, all I needed to see to convince me that if I could help in any way and that help involved being hypnotized by the lady who sold my mother stamps, then I was in.

  “You will?”

  I stood. “I will. Get Beverly over here.” I walked over to Paul and grabbed him by the arm, crushing the erupting volcano on his shirt. I whispered in his ear, “Hold him off. I don’t know what he plans on saying, but you don’t have much of a poker face, so what Cargan plans to say concerns me.”

  “Okay, Bel.” Paul turned to Kevin. “There’s been a change in plans. My client would like to consult with me further, so we will need more time.”

  Kevin looked a little stunned so I gave him a gentle push toward a desk with a phone.

  “Call Bev.”

  CHAPTER Twenty-seven

  I learned later that Beverly Dos Santos had been born Spring Lake Autumn Winter in Woodstock during the Summer of Love to Marcia and David Winter, two hippies from Massapequa who still lived close to where the epic concert had taken place. It was all right there on her Web site, complete with a list of things that she purported to be:

  Pet Psychic

  Crystal Healer

  (Regular) Psychic [her parentheses … not mine]

  Wholistic [sic] healer

  Hypnotist

  Nutritionist

  [And finally and inexplicably] Clown

  Thankfully, when she showed up at the police station she was not in her clown persona but in full-on hypnotist mode. Or maybe it was (regular) psychic mode. It was hard to tell. She studied my face for a minute.

  “You have a lot of pain.”

  “Not really.”

  “You do. It’s in here,” she said, clutching her breast.

  My breasts were fine, one of my best features, in my and several others’ opinion.

  “Your heart,” she said, making the shape of a heart with her hands. “It’s broken.”

  “It’s really not,” I said.

  “It is. You just don’t know it.”

  Now, I’m not the most self-aware person in the world perhaps, but my heart was no longer broken. It had been—two times to be exact—but right now it was whole and really kind of mended. And the mending was recent, but still, it was all better. Maybe.

  “Someone still loves you.”

  I looked at Kevin, but he looked away and blushed. She looked at him, too. I’d deal with that later.

  “And the cat isn’t yours,” she said.

  My mind flashed on Taylor. “I know she isn’t.”

  “She will never be yours. And she’s a ‘he.’”

  “Got it, Bev. The cat, a boy, isn’t mine.”

  She studied me for a few more minutes, her long blondish-grayish hair hanging halfway down her back. I could just hear my mother if she came into contact with her knowing she felt a woman her age should have a short cut, a bob at the very least. My mother’s thoughts as to what “a woman her age,” basically anyone over forty, should be doing were well-known. “Shall we get to work?” Beverly asked.

  Since the police station only had one conference room, and I use that term loosely, Kevin asked Cargan and Paul to move to a desk where they sat across from each other, Cargan looking forlorn and downtrodden and Paul punching away at his phone, probably sending Khan Academy links to one of the little Grant geniuses. Paul certainly didn’t seem interested in my brother or his sadness. I shot Cargan a look and put my hand over my mouth to telegraph, Not one more word. He gave me a little nod to tell me that he understood.

  I didn’t have a lot of hope for the session, but I wasn’t beyond giving it the old college try. I settled into another of Foster’s Landing Police Department’s uncomfortable chairs and tried to arrange myself in a way that made me open to Beverly Dos Santos’s suggestions of “deep sleep.” Thoughts of onions flooded my mind.

  The last thing I remember was Kevin’s look of concern, Bev’s instruction to relax, my saying, “This isn’t working,” and the clock on the wall ticking away, the time now five thirty. My eyes fluttered open again and the clock—which I was sure someone had messed with while I had my eyes closed—now said six seventeen and
Kevin’s look had changed from concern to confusion.

  Beverly looked at me. “How are you feeling?”

  I stretched my arms over my head. “Wow. I feel great,” I said, letting my head roll around on my neck for a few minutes. Any fatigue or stress that I had had in my body prior to my session was gone and in its place was a languid, liquid feeling, a sense that everything was good again and that we could resume our normal lives, the ones that didn’t include a worried-looking brother in the police station and two irate parents. Outside the room I could hear my father bellowing and the lower tones of my mother’s voice, talking to either Paul, Cargan, or both at the same time. It didn’t sound like a particularly productive conversation, but then again, when Dad was involved there was a lot of bluster before there was resolution.