Beverly was leaning against the conference room table, looking me over.
“We’re done, right?” I said, standing. “Did I remember anything that’s helpful in any way?” I wasn’t sure which answer I wanted. “Yes” meant more questions for me and “no” meant no resolution for Cargan and his situation, whatever that was.
Kevin had shrunk back into a corner of the room, his arms crossed over his chest. Had I professed a lingering love for him? Said something totally inappropriate and embarrassing? The two other people in the room silent, the only sound the whir of the air conditioner as it kicked into life, I looked at both of them, searching for some indication of what had happened during my session, one that I was surprised had been successful in terms of my going into a trance, or whatever Bev and her fellow hypnotists called it. “What? What’s going on?”
Kevin, as I looked at him more, studied his face for an answer, paled. “Tell me everything you remember about that night.”
This was getting frustrating. We had been over it a thousand times, or so it seemed. “I told you everything, Kevin. Met the guy at the wedding. Found out later that he had crashed. Heard voices. Next time I saw him,” I said, willing my face not to turn red at the lie, “he was coming over the balcony at the Manor. He died. You came next.” Short and sweet—that’s how you had to keep these things. Otherwise, you’d get tripped up and the next thing you knew you were sharing a prison cell in the local police department’s jail with your brother, wondering why you hadn’t made two ham sandwiches.
“What else?” Kevin asked, and I knew the jig was up. He tapped the phone in his hand lightly to jog my memory.
“Oh, you mean the text messages?” I asked.
“Yeah, the text messages,” he said, not happy.
Bev looked at both of us, thrust into the middle of a drama that she was enjoying thoroughly.
“They were incriminating,” I said, rolling my eyes toward Bev. “Can we talk about this later?” I asked.
“Okay,” Kevin said, knowing the power of the Post Office gossip chain. “And what else?”
“The earring?” I said.
Kevin looked confused but shook his head. “No, not that.”
“Then what?” I asked. “What else is there?”
Whatever it was, he couldn’t say it.
Bev was the one who finally broke the silence. “Why did you tell Amy Mitchell twenty-five years ago that she ‘would be sorry’?”
CHAPTER Twenty-eight
I guess my friendship with Amy and her disappearance was going to haunt me until the day I died. It had been pretty clear that that would probably be the case, but now I had hard proof. And if my subconscious was any indication, I was my own worst enemy in terms of not letting myself off the hook.
Out of respect for my family and our long affiliation with everyone on the police department and in Foster’s Landing in general, Cargan was also released, and the two of us began the walk home to the grounds of the Manor, both silent for most of the journey. When all was said and done, he hadn’t needed a lawyer, he didn’t know very much, and there was nothing more to say. Kevin was not curious enough to follow up on the earring I had mentioned, never asking what I meant.
Kevin knew why I had said what I had said that night; he just didn’t want to admit it. And by the look on his face, I knew he was covering his tracks and pretending like he was a good detective following up on a lead when, in fact, he was the reason I had said those things I had said to Amy on her last night. I still wanted to ask him why he had been at the river that night after I had eaten dinner at his house, but I didn’t think that doing so in front of Bev was the best idea, so I filed that away.
Kevin and I did discuss the text messages, and if I wasn’t who I was and so completely guilt ridden for doing what I did I think I would have been in bigger trouble. Caleigh’s responses to Declan’s messages were surely included in the ones on his phone but I didn’t know how much they revealed. I had deleted Caleigh’s messages so quickly that I hadn’t had time to read them. But whatever was on that phone, Kevin wasn’t saying, out of respect of me, Caleigh, or someone else, it was hard to tell.
Before Cargan and I reached the road that led to the mansion, I turned to my brother. “Why did you ask for a lawyer? What are you not telling me?”
He had already been through this with Mom and Dad; otherwise they wouldn’t have left the police station and driven away, leaving me and my brother to do the walk of shame back home, something I had done many times, usually in the middle of the night after a party somewhere in the village or out on Eden Island. He looked at me. “I did what you asked, Bel. I told them what I knew. But Kevin kept hammering away at me like I had more to do with that guy’s death and I got nervous.” He balled up his hands at his sides, his body stiff.
“There’s nothing to be nervous about, Car. You had nothing to do with this. You know that. Kevin knows that. And now that Paul Grant knows it, so will the entire village,” I said, trying to make a joke that ended up falling flat by the look on my brother’s face.
“This whole thing was a bad idea, Bel. I never should have listened to you,” Cargan said, walking away from me and starting for home.
“Why did you say he was your mate?” I called after him.
“It’s an expression, Bel. It means nothing,” he said before giving me a dismissive hand wave without turning around.
Was that true? An expression? I didn’t think so, but I let that go. I caught up with him and stopped him for one last discussion. “Cargan, Dad has guns in his studio,” I said, him being the only person I thought I could tell what I had seen.
“Guns?”
“Guns,” I said. “AK-47s.”
“And how would you know what an AK-47 looks like?”
Good point. “Just guessing.”
“Bel, you’ve been nothing but trouble since you got here. If I didn’t know better, I’d think that you thought that Dad was a gunrunner, or worse, and that the entire family is keeping some giant secret from you.” His face turned red. “There’s nothing going on. A guy at the wedding argued with the groom, probably being cut off at the bar. He died and the police will find out who did it.”
“You have more faith than I do, Cargan,” I said, attempting a joke. “If it wasn’t for you and your tutoring in high school, Kevin Hanson would still be in freshman algebra.”
“Dad is making some kind of cockamamie installation. He’s not a gunrunner or…”
“A murderer?” I asked.
“Oh, Bel,” Cargan said. “That’s awful. How can you even say that?”
He was right. How could I think it, say it aloud?
“We’re not keeping anything from you. Just leave everything alone,” he said, the disappointment on his face staying with me as he started down the hill again, leaving me to watch his back as he got smaller and smaller on the road.
I sat down and stretched my legs out in front of me, staring into the copse of trees on the other side of the road. Maybe he was right and I was wrong. It wouldn’t be the first time. I wished I had been hypnotized to forget everything unpleasant that had happened, but no, everything that had happened was now etched in my mind, as fresh as it had been the day it had happened, particularly when it came to Amy and our troubles. I remembered telling Amy that she would be sorry, but it was never as sinister as it sounded, not as dire as Kevin and Bev seemed to think it was. She was going to be sorry that she had lost me as a best friend, that she had committed the ultimate betrayal that night, as far as my teenage mind could see. She had kissed Kevin in full view of me and everyone else on the island that night, a drunken misstep that uncovered the truth of the situation, which was that we were rivals, not friends, and that she had seen me always as competition, not as a soul mate, not as someone on whom she could always count, always rely. As an adult, I could see the truth and the situation for what it was: teenage indiscretion fueled by cheap beer, a bad decision made worse by the things that were said
afterward, and the fact that after that night no one saw Amy Mitchell ever again.
Kevin went from pale to deep red remembering that night, along with the fact that I had had to recount the whole thing in front of Bev, Post Office lady/psychic/hypnotist. Clown. He begged for her discretion, which she promised, but we couldn’t be sure that this juicy tale—the one involving a village detective, the chef at Shamrock Manor, and a missing girl—would not be retold thousands upon thousands of time to every single patron of the Foster’s Landing PO.
Who loved me? That’s what I wondered, that one piece of information being dropped by Bev into my proverbial lap something I puzzled over. I hoped it was Brendan and not Ben. Not Kevin, even though the look on his face was odd, embarrassed. Not anyone else but the guy whom I likely had sat next to at countless assemblies, never really taking notice of him, my eyes always on Kevin and no one else.
I sat there for a long time, pondering all of this. Nothing else had come out of the hypnotist’s session; everything I had told Kevin was what I said again while in an altered consciousness. Finally, I got up, brushed off the back of my pants, and started up the hill.
Behind me, a car crawled along slowly. I turned and saw Brendan behind the wheel of his old Honda; he gave the horn a little beep in greeting. The passenger-side window rolled down and he leaned across the seat.
“You look like you could use a drink,” he said.
At the sight of him, uncomplicated, friendly, and warm, I felt the stress leave my body, my limbs relax. “You’re right about that,” I said, walking over to the car.
“I was hoping I’d find you here.” He reached over and opened the car door. “Hop in. You look like you have a lot to tell me.”
On our way to the river, I asked him the one question that had been niggling at the back of my mind since we first met at the empty swimming pool. “Are you for real?” Between Kevin, who had kissed my best friend right in front of me, and Ben, the wanker who let me take the fall for his mistake and had cheated on me, I was unaccustomed to guys as nice as Brendan Joyce. He looked taken aback at the question. “Yes, I’m for real.” He turned left out of the street and headed toward the river. “You may not have noticed, but there aren’t a lot of opportunities to date here in the Landing, unless I want to go out on a limb and ask Bev from the Post Office out.”
My stomach got a little sick at the mention of her name.
“Which I don’t, by the way.” He turned and looked at me. “By the look on your face, I take it you know Bev, pet psychic?”
“I do,” I said, leaving out that we had just become acquainted. I turned and looked out the window, watching the village go by. “She’s also a clown.”
“Now that’s not nice, Bel.”
“No. For real. She’s a clown, too. It’s on her Web site.”
“Huh,” he said. “Multitalented.” He made a left, heading toward the water. “She’s actually trying to channel my cat, Felix, and help me find him. He ran away about six months ago and I’m lost without the little bugger.”
“Hmm,” I said, not paying attention to what Brendan was saying, where we were going.
“So, our date,” he said, pulling into the train station and driving down to the kayak put-in. “What happened? Why did you have to cancel?”
I explained the whole thing. Cargan, his recollections, the murder. How it was unsolved and no one seemed to have a great urgency to solve it. How Dad had involved Paul Grant.
“You mean Philip?” Brendan asked, pulling into a spot, gravel spraying up around the car.
“Yeah. Remember him?”
“I do,” he said. “I guess ‘Paul’ rhymes with ‘fall’?”
“That’s my guess. And Paul is a saint.”
“Paul Grant?”
“No. Saint Paul.”
“Saw his kid on Jeopardy! Little bugger is as smart as a whip, but I hate kids’ week.”
He and Mom had that in common. Here’s hoping the kid’s father was as smart as a whip, too, in case we ever needed him again.
Brendan and I took a spot at the splinter-covered picnic table. Once we sat down and he revealed the items in his reusable grocery bag I asked him why he had shown up. “Why did you come looking for me?”
“I don’t know,” he said, though I could tell that he did.
I waited.
“Well, yeah, I do.” He handed me a piece of baguette with a healthy smear of soft cheese. “I wanted to see you. Felt like things were left off a little abruptly the other day and then you canceled. Just wanted to make sure we were square.”
“Square?”
“Solid.”
I gave him a little fist bump. “We’re square. Solid.”
“I guess I’ve been teaching at the high school for too long. I’m starting to sound like one of the kids.”
I laughed. “You definitely do not sound like one of your students. I don’t think any one of them would use the word ‘square’ to sum up a relationship.” He handed me a glass of wine and I caught sight of the label as he poured himself one. A good bottle, somewhere in the thirty-buck range. I complimented him on his choice.
“Thanks. I took a class at a local winery one summer.”
“To meet chicks?” I said. As far as I knew, that was the only reason men went to cooking class, wine-tasting seminars, yoga.
“To meet chicks,” he said, nodding enthusiastically. “It didn’t work.”
“There was always Bev from the Post Office.”
“Indeed.”
“But I hear she’s taken.” She was. According to her Web site, he—Jacob, a blacksmith—was her “one true love,” her “reason for being.” Okay then. “And a clown.”
Brendan snapped his fingers, dismayed. “Damn it.” He topped off my wine. “I bet she’s flexible. Can probably ride a unicycle.”
“Both great traits in a partner.”
“It’s slim pickin’s around here, Bel. You have no idea.”
I did have an idea. Since I got back, I had eaten dinner every Sunday with my parents and four brothers. I had no social life to speak of. I knew well of the dearth of possibilities for young, swinging singles in Foster’s Landing, having been in my apartment for the last two months with no one to talk to, not one person with whom to hang out.
“Will you be my social life now?” he asked. “Will you hang around with me? I would hate to have to ask Bev to go for a kayak ride or a pint at the Grand Mill.”
“Well, that would be cheating, because of her husband. A clandestine love affair,” I said.
“Good point.” He turned and stared into my eyes. “Will you hang around with me, Belfast McGrath?”
“Brendan Joyce, are you asking me to go steady?” I asked.
He took a slug of wine. “I guess I am.”
It had been a long, crazy day. I looked at his open, honest face and didn’t hesitate.
“Sure, Brendan Joyce. I would love to go steady with you.” And something finally dawned on me. “And I think I know where your cat is.”
CHAPTER Twenty-nine
Brendan took me home a little before eight and we hunted around for the cat we hoped was Felix. I gave Brendan a description of the cat I had appropriated and he sounded an awful lot like Felix. After searching for almost an hour with no sign of him, we gave up. Brendan said that after he pulled together some paintings for a show that weekend he’d come by and see if he could lure the cat home.
“He likes lo mein.”
“That’s my cat,” Brendan said.
“Ah, well,” I said. “I hope I can visit from time to time.”
He gave me a quick kiss before I got out of the car. “That can be arranged,” he said before driving off.
I stopped by Dad’s studio to see if I could smooth things over between us, but he was deep in conversation with Uncle Eugene and Frank the Tank. Uncle Eugene was still in town and not scheduled to leave, I had learned at our last family dinner, for another two weeks. He had spent a week in the Br
onx visiting with some old friends and was now back in the Landing and staying in one of the guest rooms at the Manor. The three men were drinking a pint of beer and eating some kind of organ meat, the smell of which filled the studio and made my stomach hurt just by smelling it. I hadn’t jumped on the offal train when it became a thing, preferring to stick to clean, delicious food that you didn’t need to convince people to eat because it was the latest trend. I was surprised that Frank was partaking, but he was right there with the guys, eating whatever delicacy my father had prepared. Frank nodded silently when I walked in, downing his beer and beating a hasty getaway, mumbling something about Helen and chicken.
Dad watched him go. “Never can understand what that guy is saying,” he said, looking at me. “Belfast. Nice to see you.”
But it wasn’t. I could tell that I was still in trouble for the Cargan mess.
At least Uncle Eugene, who was usually a giant crank pot, looked happy to see me. “Belfast! How are ya, my girl?” He proffered the meat. “Black pudding?”
“Ah, no thanks, Uncle Eugene. I’m full.” I gave him a hug. Dad stood to the side of the big table in the middle of the room and avoided my eyes.
“You good, girl?” he asked.
“I’m great, Uncle Eugene.” I looked around the room and into the side room, but the big box, the one marked “ART,” was gone. “Little excitement here, but that’s all over now,” I said to him, hoping my father would agree.
“I heard,” Eugene said. “Poor lad. Quite a scare sitting in the police department.”
“Sure is,” I said. “It was all a big misunderstanding.”
I heard my father mutter something under his breath. Sounded like “thanks to you.”
“It’s just that—” I started, hoping to explain what had happened and why.
But Dad cut me off, exploding into one of his patented tirades. “‘It’s just that’ nothing, Belfast. You put your brother in a very precarious position by making him talk to that wanker Kevin Hanson again. What the heck has gotten into you?” he said, storming about the room. Even Eugene, who was given to his own flights of bluster, seemed a little surprised and a lot wary. My dad is a big man, and even though he has the heart of a lamb, when he loses his temper it’s a sight to behold. It’s not like Mom’s slow burn; it’s a full-on volcano. I’m not sure which was scarier. Right now Dad was winning, but I hadn’t seen Mom yet to see if her emotions were at full boil. “You need to remember that family comes first! That we protect our own! That we take care of each other. You had no business marching your brother down to the station.”
Wedding Bel Blues: A Belfast McGrath Mystery (Bel McGrath Mysteries) Page 17