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

by Maggie McConnon

  “Declan,” it read. “Age 10.”

  In another photo, my father was crouched down in front of Declan, handing him something that looked like an envelope, the boy accepting it and smiling.

  Mom was so quiet that I never heard her enter; that or I was so engrossed in looking at the photos that I wasn’t aware of anyone else in the room until I heard her voice. “Bel? What are you doing?”

  I dropped the photos on the floor, the one of Declan Morrison/McGrath as a young boy going facedown, his image hidden from view. “You did know him. You all knew him.”

  “Sit down, Bel,” Mom said, less angry than I thought she would be at finding me in the office of the studio.

  “I will not sit down,” I said, my voice sounding like an extended hiss. “You all lied.” I shook off the hand she had put on my arm, the pressure not subtle at all. “Did you lie to the police? I thought you said that none of you knew him really, even though he was Uncle Dermot’s kid?”

  By the look on her face, it was clear they had.

  “The boys don’t remember him,” she said. “At least, I don’t think they do.”

  “Cargan?”

  “Definitely not,” she said. “He was too young when they met.”

  “How do you know?” I asked.

  She was silent. She knew just like she knew that not telling me had been a huge mistake.

  “Mom,” I said as calmly as I could, “Kevin has a search warrant for this office and Dad’s studio. He warned me, essentially, because I can’t think of any other reason a good detective, which of course we are not sure Kevin really is, would let someone know about a search. You have to come clean. This is serious.”

  “I know it’s serious,” Mom said. In the gloom of the office I got a glimpse of the woman she had been forty or so years prior, one with dewy skin and innocence in her expression, one who would soon meet my father and start a life with him, not knowing how mercurial he might become, how his “art” would become a singular focus, to the detriment of the business they built together. Even though the room was dark, I could see that she had tears in her eyes.

  CHAPTER Thirty-seven

  I went to bed, confused, a little sad, and a lot angry. If there’s one thing I hate, it’s being kept in the dark.

  And onions. Thanks to hypnosis, I hate onions.

  “Caleigh knew him,” I had said, the enormity of everything pressing down on me. My parents lying to the police, Caleigh disavowing any knowledge of a man she had met in Ireland a long time ago.

  “She only met him that one time. And she was little,” Mom had said. “How old was she, Mal? Eight? Nine?”

  And there began a heated discussion of how old Caleigh had been in 1986.

  Finally, I ended the debate. “Who cares?”

  Mom was beyond doing the math at that point. “I’m not sure she put the pieces together at the wedding.”

  I wondered if Caleigh and Declan’s pillow talk had included his admission that they had played Ring Around the Rosie in Ballyminster back in 1986. I suspected not. But the idea that she had met him when they were children haunted me as I tossed and turned and tried to fall asleep. Was she really that dense? That dumb?

  I decided, right before I fell into a dream-filled, tortured sleep, that yes, she was.

  No one had even a guess as to why he had shown up to crash Caleigh’s wedding. He was a family member, so was he really crashing? Or just representing his side of the family?

  When I woke up in the morning, just like he said he would Kevin brought most of the police department with him—sirens turned off, thankfully—and searched Mom’s Pilates studio and Dad’s art space. Mom had canceled the morning session the night before, so thankfully we didn’t have an army of taut middle-aged women stomping around the grounds, waiting to be tortured by Mom in her spandex leotard.

  Mom and Dad seemed preternaturally calm about the whole thing, even going so far as asking me to whip up a buffet breakfast for the cops while they trampled through the various rooms at the Manor and its outbuildings.

  “A little fry-up,” Dad said, ushering me into the kitchen when I emerged from the apartment.

  “Should I whip up a pitcher of Bloody Marys, while I’m at it?” I asked.

  He thought on the question for longer than it deserved. “I don’t think so. They are all on duty after all.”

  It took all morning, with various boxes being carted out by the uniformed cops, who each took a break to have a meal in the dining hall of the Manor. “Great sausage, Bel!” one said, and I recognized him as Jimmy Hanry, my former dodgeball nemesis.

  “Glad you’re enjoying it,” I said, going back into the kitchen to cook some more food. These guys were eating as if aliens were about to descend on the Manor and spirit us all away.

  Cargan showed up a few minutes after ten, sweaty and nervous. “Are Mom and Dad suspects?” he asked.

  “Don’t know,” I said, handing him a hotel pan and instructing him to dish the eggs I just made into it. “It was the weirdest thing, Car. Kevin came by last night and told me that this was going to happen.” I thought of the photographs that I had found in Aunt Helen’s desk drawer, now between my mattress and box spring. “Does that sound like normal police behavior to you?”

  He thought about that for a few seconds. “Well, on one episode of Law and Order: SVU, Olivia warned a guy she was sleeping with that her partner liked him for a rape in Brooklyn.”

  Wow, he really did watch a lot of crime shows. “Liked” him? That was something only the cops on television said. “I think that’s different,” I said. “Kevin isn’t having a relationship with anyone here.” That wasn’t entirely the truth, but it wasn’t a lie, either. I willed myself not to blush at the thought of us sharing a kiss at the bottom of the stairs a few nights earlier. I was not successful.

  Cargan started scooping eggs into the hotel pan. “Yeah, but he did.”

  “That was a long time ago, Car.”

  “I see the way he looks at you,” my brother said, unable to meet my eye.

  “He’s with Mary Ann.”

  “Yeah, but they’re not married.”

  “But they are in a committed relationship,” I said, whipping up a bowl of pancake batter, which in and of itself, after all this time, was strange. Out in the dining hall, the natives were getting restless. I wondered if I kept feeding them if that would distract them from the task at hand.

  “But they aren’t married,” Cargan said, his love of the literal trumping everything else. Like reason. And common sense. “And I wonder why that is?”

  “I’m not interested,” I said. I thought about Brendan Joyce and what a perfect guy he was. Had been. Still was. But he wasn’t mine anymore. After Kevin, and then Ben, I think I was learning to trust again, and that was a comfort. When I had first arrived home, emotionally battered and bruised, I wasn’t sure that time, or anyone, could heal those wounds. “Back to the investigation. Did you know that Declan Morrison was our cousin?” I asked.

  Cargan focused on the eggs. “Mom told me this morning.”

  “You didn’t remember him from that trip to Ireland in ’86? The one I couldn’t go on because I had the chicken pox?”

  “I didn’t remember, Bel. Heck, I can barely remember what I had for dinner last night.”

  “I can tell you: leftovers from the McCarthy wedding last weekend.”

  He looked up and smiled.

  “Any time I package stuff up and then find it gone, I know it’s you.”

  “I had a midnight snack,” he admitted. “And your food is so much better than Goran’s.”

  “Thanks, Car.”

  We went back to preparing and serving breakfast to the cops and finally, around eleven, they left. Mom retired to the office, where I could hear her tapping furiously on her MacBook. I poked my head in. “Everything okay, Mom?”

  “Grand,” she said, not looking up.

  Today’s investigation had nothing to do with me, so I could think of n
o reason for her to be mad at me. I decided that until this kind of attention was off the Manor she was going to be in a perpetually bad mood and I would bear the brunt of it because I was always here.

  “Oh, and Belfast?” she said as I pulled out of the doorway.

  “Yes, Mom?”

  “We were just trying to protect you.…” She paused.

  “From what?”

  “The unpleasantness.”

  “I saw a guy die, Mom. I was already part of the unpleasantness.”

  In the kitchen, I started washing up the pans I had used, thinking about what my mother had said. Growing up, the five of us had been shielded from unpleasantness almost never. The horrid details of Uncle Eugene’s missing leg, how a British bomb had blown it off along with the head of a local bartender. My maternal grandmother’s remembrance of the time one of her childhood friends in her small village had actually starved to death. (That one came in particularly handy when Derry, a picky eater, refused to eat his vegetables or, really, anything else on his plate.) The baby who had died, along with its mother, in childbirth, my paternal grandmother—a child herself—the de facto midwife on call. My father’s recounting of his arrival at Ellis Island—something we later came to find out was a lie; Ellis Island had closed its doors in 1954, six years before Dad even thought of coming abroad. Aunt Helen’s telling of the horrible fight that took place between Uncle Dermot and my father one night, both of them ending up with bloody noses. That’s how we grew up, and those were the stories we listened to. Now that we were adults, it seemed much too late to try to right the narrative ship and only tell stories that cast everyone in a good light.

  I had been away a long time. I had to keep that in mind. People changed. I had changed. But when did they become completely different people?

  That’s the question I found myself thinking about a lot.

  CHAPTER Thirty-eight

  Before the police left, I found Kevin. “Did you find Caleigh yet?”

  “I did,” he said. “She came in on her own. Finally.”

  “And she gave you her phone?” I asked. I was tired of everyone else’s lies, so I decided to come clean.

  Kevin nodded.

  “Anything else on there?” I asked.

  He didn’t answer, all of sudden deciding, it seemed, that he would be a real cop and do things by the book.

  I stood on the lawn for a while, figuring out what to do next. After all of the cops were gone, I made my decision. It was a long shot, finding Declan’s mother, but I decided to give it a try.

  There aren’t that many places to stay in Foster’s Landing, so it didn’t take me long to find Trudie McGrath. For obvious reasons she had elected not to stay at the Manor, and I didn’t get the sense she’d be welcome there anyway, the way everyone reacted to the sound of her name making her seem like persona non grata. The next morning, after doing some prep work in the kitchen, I ran down the list of four bed-and-breakfasts in town, and found her on my third try. The receptionist at the B and B was someone I used to know from swim team and she put me right through to Trudie’s room. After a little negotiation on time and place, she agreed to meet me at the Grand Mill for an early lunch.

  I couldn’t remember ever meeting Trudie formally, though I had heard about her. Apparently, she was the second most beautiful gal in the small village that she, my father, and my mother had grown up in, but unlike my mother, she hadn’t aged quite as well in the intervening years since they were rivals for the local pageant crowns. The little woman who walked into the Grand Mill looked a full ten years older than my mother and clearly wasn’t into Pilates, either, being doughy and soft. I hugged her and fell into an ample bosom. I told her how sorry I was for her loss.

  She sat down, adjusting her napkin on her lap. “Thank you, Belfast. You’re the image of your dad’s ma,” she said.

  I had heard that before, so it didn’t surprise me. “She was the redhead, from what I understand.”

  “Yes, and your mother herself had a bit of red in her hair before she started keeping it blond,” Trudie said, looking down at the table.

  “I’m so, so sorry about Declan,” I said, repeating myself but at a loss for words.

  “You saw it happen,” she said.

  “I did.”

  She looked at me expectantly and I knew what she was asking.

  “No. He didn’t suffer. He died right away,” I said, but I couldn’t be sure. It had been a horrific, violent death but fast? Who knew? I thought so, but I also knew that in this case I would be forgiven for lying. “Is that what you were told?”

  She nodded and I was off the hook. One less sin to atone for.

  The waitress came over and Trudie ordered a cup of tea but nothing else. “You’re not hungry?” I asked.

  “Sure, I haven’t eaten in days,” she said, her eyes filling with tears. “He was my only boy, you know.”

  “Can I ask you a few questions?” I said. It seemed as if she might be the only person who would tell me the truth. I waited for her tea and my soda to come and I asked her the question that no one seemed to be able to answer. “Why did he come to the wedding, Trudie? After all these years?”

  “I don’t know, Bel,” she said, but that was a lie and we both knew it. She made a show of preparing her tea, tasting it finally to see if it was to her liking. It wasn’t. I could tell by the look on her face. American tea. Not as good as the tea back home.

  “Trudie, please. The more we know the easier it will be to find out what happened.”

  “Oh, we know what happened, Bel. Everyone knows what happened.”

  “We do?”

  “Yes. My son was murdered at a family wedding. That’s what we know.”

  This was getting me nowhere. “Do you have any idea who might have wanted to kill Declan?” I asked. “Any idea at all?”

  She sipped her subpar tea, grimacing. “Any number of those people. Your father. Your mother. That infernal Eugene.”

  I gripped my glass, the condensation seeping between my fingers. “My mother or father?” Uncle Eugene was such a wild card that it didn’t surprise me that he was included in this rogues’ gallery of potential murderers.

  She shook her head. “I’ve said too much. That was inappropriate. I’m sorry.”

  I leaned in. “Trudie, please. Tell me what’s going on. What happened to Declan? We need to know.”

  “I will put it this way, Bel: He knew the secrets. Where the bodies are buried.”

  Before I could ask, Real bodies? the waitress came back to take our order. “We need a few more minutes,” I said to her disappointed face. She wanted to serve us, turn over the table, and collect another lunch check; we were messing up that plan. I turned back to Trudie, waiting for an answer, but she was ready to leave, her purse in her hands, her lips in a grim line.

  “Good-bye, Belfast.” She started for the door. “I have a plane to catch.”

  I threw a twenty on the table, all I had, and raced after her, following her onto the sidewalk. She was hurrying somewhere, probably the B and B, even though it was clear from the way she was looking around that she didn’t really know in which direction her temporary accommodations were. I caught up to her and grabbed her arm. “Trudie, wait.” I was a little winded; the old gal could walk faster than I thought someone her age could or should. Must have been all of that traipsing around the little village where she still lived. “What is it that you can’t tell me?”

  She turned and fixed me with a look, part sad, part angry. “Ask your father,” was all she said as she set off.

  “You’re going the wrong way!” I called after her, my voice drowned out by the sound of a car whizzing past.

  I got back in the Volvo and drove in the completely opposite direction.

  Uncle Eugene was having lunch with my father when I arrived, the two of them ensconced at a wrought-iron table at the back of the Manor, a beautiful river view a backdrop to their meal. Dad sat up a little straighter when he saw me; whether t
he fact that he was up to his elbows in leftover canapés from the McCarthy wedding or that he had something to hide, it wasn’t clear. He pushed his plate away and threw his napkin on top of it while Uncle Eugene heartily consumed a pig in a blanket, a potato with caviar, and some duck liver mousse that I had covered with plastic and put in the refrigerator two days earlier.

  “You look mad as a wet hen, Belfast,” Eugene said, his eyebrow raised. “What have you gotten into now?”

  “I should ask you the same thing,” I said, standing next to the table, facing the river, the sun hot on my already red face. “Why does Trudie McGrath think that the two of you know more than you’re saying? That you know maybe why Declan was killed and who did it?”

  Dad hid his face in his hands. “Oh, Bel. Don’t go jumping to conclusions. Trudie is crazy.”

  “And so are you!” I said, pointing at my father. “And probably you!” I hooked a thumb in Eugene’s direction. “And everyone else on this godforsaken estate. You’re all nuts.” I pulled out a chair and fell into it. “Does that make one of you a murderer, too?”

  “Now what is this ridiculousness?” Eugene asked, not missing a beat with his food. He had a pint of dark beer, a Guinness with a thick, foamy head, a backup bottle next to the glass. “Bel, let the police do their jobs and keep to the kitchen.”

  Insults on top of dishonesties. It was almost too much to bear. Uncle Eugene had been a shadowy figure from my youth, someone the family saw on a regular basis until he moved back to Ireland, his “troubles”—something to do with guns—widely known but whispered about. A stint in some Northern Ireland jail, despite Caleigh’s contention that he was never convicted. A wife he had left. A son or two or three, the number always changing, left along with Eugene’s bad reputation in their sleepy village. But he was welcomed back always when he came here and greeted us when we went there, his “troubles” pushed under the carpet.