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

by Maggie McConnon

  Caleigh, directly across from me, met my eye. “Yes, Bel. A crasher. No one knew him.”

  “That’s not true. He said he had met you in Ireland a few times. He was my cousin but he said he met you. And even though everyone else denied it, Aunt Trudie’s arrival certainly confirms that it was true.”

  I turned to Dad, who had suddenly fallen silent at the head of the table, his previous exhortations on Feeney’s indiscretions, the state of Ireland, post–Celtic Tiger, and a host of other topics getting the attention of Frank and Brendan; we had all heard it before. “Really? You seemed to know him pretty well, Dad. He was your nephew. When was the last time you saw him? You said it was when he was a ‘wee baby’ but that can’t be, can it?”

  Mom spoke for him. “Let it go, Belfast. This is not the time.”

  I looked at Aunt Helen. “Not a clue? No idea?”

  Helen looked down at her plate, a lone dollop of mashed potatoes sitting in the middle of the free stoneware that we had collected as kids and that Mom still used. “I didn’t know him, Belfast.”

  I looked at every member of my family: Mom, Dad, Arney, Derry, Feeney, Cargan, Caleigh, and Aunt Helen. “Not one of you?”

  I realized this wasn’t the best time to interrogate the family at large, but we wouldn’t be together for another week and that was another week that the murder of some poor bloke—something no one else seemed to care about—at Shamrock Manor went unsolved.

  Maybe this wasn’t about him, I thought as the family stared back at me like I had lost my mind. Maybe my impending hysteria was about something else. Maybe this was about Amy. Unsolved mysteries. People who appear and then disappear without a trace. Maybe this was about my own guilt, my own sadness.

  I didn’t realize until that moment that I had stood and was gripping the edge of the table. I sat down and looked down at my lap.

  “You knew him, Caleigh.” It was Cargan, having returned from the bathroom, the collar of his soccer jersey damp from when he had washed his face earlier. When she didn’t answer, he continued. “I saw you together. Stop saying you didn’t know him.” He said what I had been thinking for weeks.

  Aunt Helen threw her napkin onto her plate. “Well, I never!” she said.

  Feeney looked at Aunt Helen. “We always suspected that.”

  Helen looked at him, furious.

  “That you never,” Feeney said, earning himself a cuff to the head from Dad.

  “I didn’t know him, Cargan.” Caleigh tried to laugh it off. “You’ve had a few, haven’t you? Bless your heart.” She looked around the table for support but seeing everyone’s downcast eyes, sad expressions, knew that she was alone.

  As beautiful as she was, at that moment she was really ugly.

  “I’m not drunk, Caleigh, and I’m not stupid, like you’ve always thought. Like you used to say.”

  Caleigh looked around for support, but she got none. “Well, you weren’t the sharpest tool in the silverware drawer,” she said.

  Mixed metaphors notwithstanding, I saw red when she said that, an image of us as little kids floating into my head, Cargan, about ten, in bright red swim trunks at the village pool, me, the younger sister trying to teach him to do the backstroke. Caleigh, in a snappy one-piece with cutouts on the side, saying, “What’s the matter with you? Are you a baby? Are you stupid?” And me, getting grounded for a week because I had held her head under the water, not long enough to drown her or cause brain damage (well, I hope not), but just long enough to teach her a lesson.

  “I saw you together after the rehearsal dinner. Outside of The Dugout.” He closed his mouth suddenly, not sure he wanted to continue. But continue he did. “You knew him. I saw you kiss him.” He sat down at the table. “And now, I think I would like a beer.”

  CHAPTER Thirty-five

  Caleigh had left in a huff after dinner and Cargan’s revelation, denying everything that Cargan saw. I believed Cargan over her—everyone did—and she knew it. I never did get to ask her if she had been back to the FLPD to talk to Kevin, as he had promised she would be. She protested heartily to us and for a long time, but it was written all over her flushed face: she knew Declan and more than a little bit. And now others at the table knew what I had known all along. I’m not sure Aunt Helen or any of the other elders made that connection, but Feeney surely did and when he looked at me he rolled his eyes, never having been a fan of our dear cousin.

  In the kitchen, I asked Cargan if he had told Kevin about the kiss. “On the advice of counsel, I plead the Fifth.”

  “Car, we’re not on Law and Order. I’m your sister. You can tell me.”

  But he had just repeated himself and turned his back on me, giving his full attention to the sink and to the roasting pan that was crusted with dried gravy.

  Before I walked out, he whispered, “They have a cell phone. With lots of messages.”

  I knew that, but now I was the one keeping secrets. I kept my mouth shut and made a hasty exit. “How do you know that?” I asked.

  He was caught. “I overheard something at the police station.”

  “Did you also happen to overhear anything about why anyone would have bugged the Manor?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “What do you think?” I asked. “Who do you think did that? Maybe Declan?”

  “I don’t know, Bel. Let the police figure it out. It’s complicated, I’m sure.”

  I eyed him before I left, seeing if he would give something else up, but he was tight-lipped, putting away the leftovers.

  Aunt Helen was crying copious tears at the table as I departed, Frank in the same position he had been in at the wedding, his arm around her, consoling her. “It will be okay, Helen. He’s gone now,” he said in his deep baritone. I wasn’t sure who he was referring to—Declan or Cargan—but Aunt Helen wasn’t having any of his consolation. She threw his arm off with a strength that surprised no one—she was one of Mom’s Pilates acolytes after all—and stormed from the house, slamming the door in my face before I could leave myself.

  I turned to the stunned members of my family. “Well, that went well,” I said, but that proclamation didn’t break the tension like I thought it might. I left right after that, thinking that those first early days when I slept all day, the covers pulled over my head, after my dismissal from The Monkey’s Paw and my broken engagement seemed like the glory days compared to the past couple of weeks here. I left and went to the only home I knew now: the apartment.

  I was lounging on my stained couch when Kevin showed up a few minutes after nine. I wasn’t expecting him and told him, indelicately, that he was the last person I wanted to see.

  “Sorry about that,” he said. He noticed the healthy pour of red wine in the goblet on the counter. “Got another one of those?”

  I only had one wineglass, so I took a water glass from the cabinet and filled it halfway. “This will have to do,” I said. “I’m short on anything that matches around here. All hand-me-downs.” I thought about Mary Ann’s perfectly appointed house on the other side of town and how good it had smelled that night I had had dinner there. I didn’t know where he lived exactly and wondered how it could compare to his girlfriend’s place. “How’s Mary Ann?” I asked. I couldn’t meet his eye. It was too uncomfortable after the kiss.

  “She’s good,” he said. He shifted around in his suit, still on the clock, the red wine notwithstanding. “Hey, Bel. Is Caleigh back from her honeymoon?” he asked. “She was supposed to call me as soon as she got back to the States. I’ve been trying to reach her, but she doesn’t answer her cell or her home number. And I’ve been in touch with Bronxville PD and there’s no sign of her at the house.”

  I wondered about that. Maybe she was the person living in our basement? Was she in hiding? She had been back at least two days that I knew of, but coupled with Cargan’s admission of seeing her with Declan it was no wonder that she hadn’t called Kevin. “She is,” I said, not sure how much I should reveal. She’s a pain in the ass, but she�
�s my pain in the ass and I didn’t wish her ill despite her duplicitous nature. When I thought about it, she’d probably sell me down the river for a new Hermès bag, a thought that was beneath me but probably the truth.

  “How long?”

  I told the truth. “Not sure, really. Two days? Maybe three?” I gulped down some wine. “Why? Is there something going on?”

  “Might be,” he said. “We just need to question everyone again and see if any memories have been jogged over the past two weeks.”

  “Isn’t the case growing colder by the day?” I asked, hearkening back to something I had heard while watching Castle with Cargan when I had first arrived home. “Isn’t it going to be harder to solve?”

  “Yes. It’s getting harder by the day, but we have some new information—” he said, stopping himself from going any further.

  “New information?” I asked.

  “Never mind, Bel. It’s nothing.”

  “Do I need to be questioned again?” I asked.

  “I think we have everything we need from you,” he said, effectively letting me know that I was off the suspect list, if I had ever been on it. It would have been virtually impossible for me to kill Declan Morrison, run down the stairs, and then witness his death. Even Kevin could figure that out. He hemmed and hawed for a few minutes and it was clear he had something to tell me.

  “Spit it out, Hanson. You were never good at keeping secrets,” I said.

  “We have a search warrant,” he said, drinking his wine down in one gulp. “Two actually.”

  “But you already searched the Manor.”

  “Not for the Manor.”

  “And you already looked around my apartment and the studios.” I thought about what it could be. “The bugs? Do you have something on that?” The wheels turned in my head. Cargan lived in the Manor and I thought a thorough search had been done of the premises, including his room and Mom’s office, as well as the bedroom where Caleigh had gotten ready. “Where else is there to look?” I asked.

  He blurted it out. “We need to go back to the studios. The Pilates studio. Your father’s place.”

  “Now what would you hope to find there?” I asked. “There’s lot of torture equipment in Mom’s studio and there’s just … bad art in Dad’s,” I said, regretting my honesty.

  Kevin smiled. “It’s not so bad. His 9/11 tribute was nice.”

  No, it wasn’t. Just ask anyone in the village. “What are you hoping to find?” I asked. “And didn’t you search the other night? The night you found the bugs?”

  “Like I said: new information.”

  I gripped the glass in my hand thinking of Dad talking to Declan at the wedding, looking chummy, running across Mom the week after his death in the wedding suite, crying. My eyes went to the sugar bowl on the counter, the one with the earring in it. They both had acted very strangely and that was saying a lot, because they were a bit strange on a normal day, a day that didn’t include a relative’s wedding and a murder. “And if you tell me, you’ll have to kill me?”

  Like every joke I had told this week, this one fell flat, too.

  “Just tell me, Kevin. Do I need to worry? Do my parents?”

  “Not if they don’t have anything to hide,” he said. Outside the sun finally set completely, and the apartment was almost completely dark, so dark that I could barely see him. I switched on the overhead light in the kitchen, making him wince. He finished his wine.

  “When?”

  “Tomorrow morning,” he said. “We were going to come in tonight, but McDougall called in with a bout of scurvy.”

  “Is he a pirate?”

  “Nah. Just a hypochondriac.”

  “He’d better get that looked at. Or have an orange.”

  “He thought he had mange last year. It was poison ivy.” Kevin headed for the door. “Well, okay. Bye,” he said, looking at me like he regretted everything, everything he had said, everything he had done.

  He was warning me. I didn’t know why and I didn’t care; obviously, he had no idea I was as nosy as I was and that the minute I knew he was out of sight, I would be out of my apartment and into the studios. I waited for the sound of gravel spraying, kicking up onto the lawn of the Manor, before I put my clogs back on and ran down the stairs to Dad’s studio, hoping against hope that I wouldn’t find anything that would incriminate him in this sordid case. We already knew that the guns weren’t anything to worry about, their barrels stuffed with cement and ready for an installation. Mom I wasn’t so sure about. She lived her life close to the vest, and if there were someone in my life to whom I needed to entrust a secret, something that I would want them to take to their grave, it would be Mom. All my life, and I don’t know why, I felt as if she was holding back, as if she was keeping something from me and maybe even Dad. I wasn’t sure I ever wanted to know what that was, if anything, but the stakes were higher than they had ever been.

  The former Rose of Tralee, the mother of four boys (and me, of course, even though I never felt like it counted among her friends, the Irishwomen who thought that raising boys was akin to herding cats and worthy of a Nobel Peace Prize), the grande dame of Shamrock Manor.

  My mother, the enigma.

  CHAPTER Thirty-six

  Dad’s studio was clean.

  Well, as clean as any place that housed used bits of scrap metal, oil-covered paintbrushes, and giant canvases splattered with the musings of what I suspected was kind of a tormented mind. There weren’t any more guns and there was no trace of firepower anywhere, no ammo, no clips, no shiny pieces of metal that seemed to be part of a larger, more deadly contraption. I crept across the small expanse of lawn to Mom’s studio, housed in another outbuilding, fronted with large windows that on a sunny day let in warm sunlight that bathed the place in a soft glow, the bodies glistening in the heat and under my mother’s watchful eye.

  I had a key. Back when I had first arrived home, I had answered the phones for exactly three days but had tired quickly of looking at sinewy women dressed in expensive athletic wear. I had taken over for an “exhausted” Aunt Helen, who had needed some time off from the job and gratefully accepted me as her replacement for a spell. Once I left the position, Helen’s exhaustion dissipated and she returned, using the small office as her unofficial wedding planner central location, booking flowers, and ordering cake and making sure that everything Caleigh wanted Caleigh got. Within reason, of course. Caleigh still had her wedding at her aunt and uncle’s wedding hall, a place she associated with proms past and the Irish step-dancing recitals of our youth.

  I didn’t dare put on a light; what with the large windows in the front everyone would be able to see me, get a gander at what I was doing. I had grabbed a small flashlight from one of the drawers in the apartment and held it in my teeth as I wrestled with the door, which always stuck and required a jiggle or two to open. In the dark, the studio was even creepier than it was during the day, all of those contraptions standing at attention, just waiting for my mother to bark orders in her low, “inside” voice to the grateful women who benefited from her physical ministrations. I broke out in a light sweat at the thought of the contortions that the women twisted their bodies into, all in the name of “health.” If that was health, leave me out. I’d continue with my foie gras, good wine, and delicious chocolate and die happy, probably at a much younger age than the women who came to the classes. I was okay with that, a life well lived and all.

  I wended my way around the equipment and went back into the office. Mom had two desks—one for her and one for Helen—but a quick spin through Mom’s told me that she kept nothing here, one drawer containing only a few business cards, another holding a stash of pencils, and the last four used ChapSticks. Helen’s desk was a different story, the contents revealing just how different the sisters were from each other. Papers spilled from the drawers and it was hard to open them, even tougher to close them when I tried. Old client contracts, new client contracts, stuff that should have been filed but had never
been, the history of Oona’s Pilates Studio right there in all of its messy glory. I riffled through the papers in each drawer, the flashlight still between my teeth, my mother’s voice in my head saying, Belfast! If it’s not food, don’t put it in your mouth. I had taken those words to heart, for the most part, but in the dark, and with so much to examine and read, I had only one option. The mouth it was.

  I slammed the three desk drawers shut and turned my attention to the drawer that slid right under the top of the desk, the one where one would keep extra paper or pens and papers, paper clips. Not Aunt Helen. I pushed aside a half-eaten peanut-butter sandwich and dug around, feeling around in the drawer for anything unusual, something not a client contract. My fingers grazed a manila envelope, stiff and unyielding and, when opened, revealing a bunch of photographs.

  Ireland, 1986. Or so said the inscription on the back, Dad’s mullet on display in the first photo, taken at JFK Airport, and Aunt Helen’s shoulder pads in the second supporting the date. I remembered that trip. It was years before the chicken pox vaccine was required for all kids and getting the virus was a rite of passage; everyone eventually got it, and if you had four brothers the chances were that you would be next in line once the last brother’s scabs had healed. The day we were to leave to visit the family in Ireland, I had broken out in it, my body covered with sores. Mom stayed home, canceling her ticket for the family trip, giving me flat soda when I had a fever, dabbing my body with calamine lotion when the itching got too much. I remember crying like I had never cried before when Dad and the boys drove away, Cargan the only one showing any sympathy for me, knowing, as he did, that I wanted to go on this trip more than anything. His face, staring out of the Vanagon, his fingers waggling a little good-bye to his sister, was an image etched in my brain.

  I looked at the photos, the memories flooding back. My brothers were in one photo and Caleigh was in another. And as I looked at the last one, a photo of a handsome boy, good-looking in a dark-haired, dark-eyed way, a few freckles dotting his nose, it occurred to me how much he looked like Arney, a younger Feeney. I turned the photo over.