Bel of the Brawl--A Belfast McGrath Mystery

by Maggie McConnon

  A man was dead, a waitress was missing, and I seemed to be one of a trio of people—the girls included—who was concerned about her disappearance. Kevin didn’t seem to notice and no one else at the Manor was particularly up in arms about it.

  I had been working with the girls for a few months now and I had gotten to know them pretty well even if I, too, occasionally mixed them up. I had seen them happy when a big tip came their way, stressed when a party was proving challenging, exhausted when we had finished service.

  But I had never seen them scared.

  CHAPTER Eight

  Kevin wanted to talk to Seamus, and while he did that, I found the girls downstairs by their lockers and asked them to come into the kitchen.

  “What gives?” I asked Eileen, who tried to pretend that nothing was wrong. “Where’s Pauline?”

  She clearly didn’t have the stomach for acting and gave up the whole thing. Thank God I was the one who had started with her instead of the police; she folded like a cheap suitcase. “She’s gone, Belfast.”

  “What do you mean ‘gone’?” I asked. “Where did she go?”

  Colleen had one explanation but seemed as concerned as her friend was. “I’m hoping she took off with the lad but I’m not sure.”

  “What lad?” I asked. “Help me out, girls. We have our second incident here in as many months and now one of our employees is missing. We need a little more to go on than she’s away with her boyfriend.” When they didn’t answer, I went further. “She left rather abruptly, don’t you think?” I looked at Colleen. “You’re her roommate, right? Doesn’t it seem odd that she wouldn’t tell you where she was going?”

  “Was,” Colleen said, her blue eyes flashing angrily. “Till she met the boy. Then everything changed. Technically, she still lived there but she was hardly ever home. Now, I’m left holding the bag on the rent.”

  I dropped my voice to a whisper. “Do you think she was picked up by INS?” I asked Colleen, and at the mention of the immigration organization, her face turned pale.

  Colleen gasped. “Don’t say that out loud!” she said. She thought about it for less than a second before coming to the same conclusion that I had. “Yes.”

  I chewed on that for a minute. If that was the case, I didn’t know how we’d track her down, what the process might be for springing her from a detention center.

  Colleen wept into her hands. “I can’t pay the rent without her.”

  Eileen sat atop one of the counter stools studying her fingernails. “That big tip from the wedding should help then.”

  Colleen nodded. “Sure, it should.” She frowned, her sadness turning to consternation. “If we ever get it.”

  She was right; in all of the fuss, Dad had never distributed the tip that Mr. Casey had left. Colleen looked around wildly, her missing roommate and her lack of funds making her attention wander.

  I snapped my fingers in Colleen’s face. “Focus, you. Where do you think she’s gone?”

  Eileen shrugged. “Maybe she’s just tired of working here, decided to try something else.”

  “Yes, maybe, Eileen,” I said. “Right. She worked here for years, seemed happy, loved my family, and then took off without telling anyone because she ‘decided to try something else.’ That makes the least sense of all,” I said, rolling my eyes. “You were the one who was so worried about her being in a detention center. Why the change of heart?”

  The girls exchanged a look. I wasn’t that far removed from being a millennial myself, but compared to these two, I was positively a middle-aged baby boomer, driving a sensible, albeit almost dead car and saving for retirement. Colleen seemed concerned, and while I had thought I had seen fear on Eileen’s face when Hanson entered the dining room, I could see now that I had been wrong. It had been boredom. “Who’s her boyfriend?” I asked.

  “Some guy named Connolly. She calls him ‘babe’ all the time so I don’t even know his first name. Moonlights at his pub occasionally.”

  That wasn’t a lot to go on but I wondered if he was related to the Connolly boys I had gone to high school with. “What’s the name of the pub?” I asked.

  “I dunno,” Colleen said. “We didn’t talk much.”

  “Why not?”

  “She’s secretive. Private. Perfect roommate, but we were never friends.”

  I tried a different tack. “Did you check her room in your apartment?” I asked.

  Colleen shook her head. “She has a lock on the door. I don’t have the key.”

  “That’s strange,” I said.

  “Is it?” Colleen asked.

  “Do you have a lock on your bedroom door?” I asked.

  “I don’t,” she said. “She put it on there right after we moved in. One of the boyfriends handled it.”

  “‘One of the boyfriends’?” I asked. “How many have there been?”

  Colleen shrugged. “I don’t know.” She looked at Eileen. “Three? What do you think?”

  “At least three.”

  I pulled a pad off the shelf over the sink and pushed it toward Colleen. “Names. Give me names.”

  “What are you going to do, Bel?” Colleen asked. “We need to find her. What if she didn’t go with Connolly? What if it’s something worse?”

  “Worse?” I asked. “Like what? What could have happened to her?”

  The girls exchanged a glance. Colleen finally voiced their fear. “Kidnapped. Dead.”

  “Kidnapped?” I asked. “Dead? Now what would make you go to those two scenarios?”

  “She was mysterious. Stayed out all night. Locked her bedroom door when she wasn’t around. You know. Stuff like that,” Colleen said. “It’s not normal, Bel.”

  I worked at Shamrock Manor with a bunch of insane people. I wasn’t sure I was the one to be judging what was “normal.”

  Eileen came back to life. “What if she’s been kidnapped? Then what?”

  The girls had hit on a narrative that they liked better than the deportation one. I held a hand up. “Stop. Not another word about that.”

  Eileen looked at me as if I had the answers. I didn’t want to tell her that I didn’t have a clue as to what to do, where to start. “What are you going to do, Bel?”

  Why was this my problem now? Oh, right. Everything that happened at the Manor was my problem. That had become clear since I had arrived home.

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “Just give me the names of the boyfriends and let me see what I can find out.”

  Kevin stuck his head into the kitchen. “Just wanted to say good-bye, Bel.”

  At the sight of him, the girls made excuses as to why they couldn’t stay in the kitchen—linens to be folded, silverware to be polished—and exited, leaving me alone with the guy, who at seventeen, I thought I’d spend the rest of my life with. I pocketed the list of names they had given me.

  “Get what you need, Kevin?” I asked.

  “I did,” he said. “Except I still wanted to talk to…” he said, looking down at his little notepad. “Pauline Darvey. Any idea where she might be?”

  I shook my head. “Sorry. No. I’m sure she’ll come back to get her tip,” I said. “When she does, I’ll tell her to call you, okay?”

  “Sounds good. Just covering all of the bases. Feeling a little exposed since you basically solved our last case,” he said. “You know, the dead guy at the wedding? The first one?”

  “Seems a little excessive for a guy who had a heart attack or something but I’ll leave it to you how you spend your time,” I said, smiling.

  He looked around the kitchen. “Well, this place looks so much better than before.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  He picked up a melon baller and tapped his palm with it before putting it down. Stalling. “How’s everything going?”

  “Everything is good. You?”

  “Busy,” he said. “Really busy.”

  “How’s Mary Ann?” I asked.

  “She’s busy, too.”

  Just when things
had become normal between us, Amy’s belongings had surfaced and with them years of hurt and sadness. We were back to being strangers and it didn’t feel good.

  “Anything on Gerry Mason? I asked. “It seems like it was a heart attack, right?”

  “Maybe so,” he said. “We’ll see. I’ll follow up with his doctor and see what it was specifically, but you’re probably right. We’re a little gun-shy, you know.” He had already explained himself on that one so I let it go.

  “Did you know he was a private investigator?” I asked. “I thought that was just a TV job. The Rockford Files. Magnum P.I.”

  He smiled. “Remember when we used to come home from school and watch those shows on reruns?”

  “I remember,” I said. I also remember Amy sitting between us, a package of cookies being passed back and forth, all of us trying to figure out the perpetrator of the crime before Rockford or Magnum did.

  He changed the subject. “Hey, I heard you’re making carrot-coconut shooters for the wedding on Saturday.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Seamus,” he said, smiling. “It’s the talk of the Manor, apparently.” He looked down at his shoes, fiddled with the tie in his jacket pocket. “Will you make those when I get married?”

  “When you get married?” I said, laughing. “You’d have to get engaged first, Hanson.”

  He blushed a deep red. “Well, I did.”

  “Did what?” I asked.

  “Get engaged.” He pulled the tie out of his pocket and wound it around his hand. “Last week.”

  It took all I had to not let the shock show on my face. He and Mary Ann D’Amato, a saint of a woman if there ever was one, had been dating for longer than any two adults had the right to. She had her own house and he rented a condo, propriety being her middle name, apparently. I had always wondered why they weren’t married; after all, everyone’s biological clock was ticking, not just mine. I chalked up their unmarried status to my own former boyfriend’s inability to grow up and commit to anything or anyone. He had been a fiancé in name only.

  Apparently, I had been wrong.

  “Um, congratulations?” I said. He didn’t seem like someone who was overjoyed at the prospect and, as a result, I wasn’t sure how to respond.

  “So, yeah. That’s happening,” he said, looking around the kitchen. “You’ll do the honors?”

  “Of cooking?” I asked. “Of course. When’s the wedding?”

  “Halloween.”

  “What year?”

  He looked confused. “This year.”

  “We’ve got work to do, then,” I said. “Have you talked to Mom and Dad about confirming the date? Making sure it’s available?”

  “I have,” he said.

  Curious. Neither of them had mentioned to me that the Hanson–D’Amato wedding was in the offing. We’d definitely be having a conversation about that.

  “Great. When you’re ready, we should talk about the menu,” I said.

  “That’s why I was talking to Seamus,” he said. “Mary Ann wants a specialty cocktail.”

  “Good luck with that!” I said. “Oh, sorry,” I said, seeing his reaction to my disloyalty to Seamus. “What did he say?”

  “He was noncommittal,” Kevin said as diplomatically as he could. “We’ll talk soon about it?”

  “Yes, talk soon,” I said, my heart feeling a wee bit broken, a feeling I wasn’t entitled to have.

  With nothing else to say, he left the kitchen, me standing there and looking around. In the office next to the kitchen, I heard my mother and father whispering furiously, probably figuring out what to do now that I knew that Kevin Hanson was getting married and I knew that they knew before I did. I went into the office, ready to talk about the Hanson/D’Amato wedding but Dad was in high dudgeon, more so than usual.

  He looked at me, red in the face. “Ten grand, out the door,” he said.

  “I’m not following, Dad.”

  Mom filled in the blanks. “The tip from the Casey wedding. It’s gone.”

  CHAPTER Nine

  Dad undertook the questioning of the entire staff, like a dog with a bone. There was no one on staff that we didn’t trust, all longtime employees devoted to my parents in a way that was almost unnatural. I gave Feeney a look as he passed in the foyer, asking him silently if he had taken the money, and he had glared back in a defiant yet disappointed way, making me immediately sorry that I had suspected him. Feeney always needed money, his earnings from weddings and the odd jobs he took to support himself not really doing the trick. There was only one person Dad couldn’t question and that was Pauline Darvey, a woman employed by my parents, who I now knew had overstayed her welcome in the U.S. and who seemed to be the likely culprit. Dad asked where she was, but his questions met with silence.

  There were hardly any other suspects as most of the people who worked at the Manor were either blood relations or family by default. The missing money coupled with the missing server pointed to her guilt.

  I couldn’t think of a better reason to look for her, if at least to throttle her for putting my parents in a very sticky predicament. I heard Mom and Dad discussing fronting the money themselves, but I told them to sit tight and wait it out; we’d get the money back, one way or another if I had anything to say about it.

  When my day was over, I decided that I really didn’t want to spend any time in my apartment alone. On my way out of the kitchen, I found Cargan walking across the empty dining room toward the back of the big hall; I followed him, my professional chef’s clogs making just the barest squeak on the highly polished floor. He stopped under the giant chandelier in the middle of the room and turned.

  “Following me?” he asked.

  “You always were a hard one to fool,” I said. “Where are you going?”

  “Ladies’ room,” he said. “I want to get rid of the police tape.”

  “That was a little excessive, don’t you think?” I asked. “It wasn’t a crime, just…”

  “Or something, as Dad likes to say?” Cargan said.

  I told him about my conversation with the girls. “I think Pauline took the Casey tip, Cargan,” I said. “That’s the only explanation.”

  “Well, that’s not very nice,” he said in his usual understated way.

  “Did you have plans for the money?” I asked.

  “Saving for a new kayak,” he said. “Fancy cleats. A few odds and ends.”

  We got to the bathroom and stared at the door.

  After he pulled all of the police tape off the doorjamb, he entered the bathroom. “I just want to take a quick look.”

  I put a hand on his arm, my mind still on Pauline. “Car…” I looked around the dining room to make sure we were alone.

  “I can go in,” he said, pulling the police tape down, letting it hang. “I’m a professional. Remember?”

  “No, not that.” I had learned, just recently, that the brother I had no secrets from had kept a huge secret from me for years. That he was a cop and had been a cop all along, not a professional musician. So, I had to find out about Pauline, about their relationship. “Cargan, what was going on with Pauline?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Seems like she’s gone.”

  “No. Not that. With you. And her.”

  He looked up at the ceiling. “Ah, that.”

  I waited. Having a conversation with Cargan is difficult in general, but touch on a topic that he didn’t want to talk about? That was the worst.

  “Well, we had a little attraction to each other.”

  “I heard you in the walk-in.”

  He looked at me and smiled. “Just a little attraction, Bel. Nothing else.”

  “She’s a lot younger than you,” I reminded him.

  “And that’s why it stayed where it did. It was just a little kiss, Bel. Nothing more.”

  But in his eyes, his manner, I saw something else, something that led me to believe that it had been more than a little kiss. He had a thing for her, and if t
he girls were to be believed, he wasn’t the only one.

  When we got to the stall door, he pushed it open, and I brought up the one thing besides the death at the wedding that was concerning me. “Car, Pauline hasn’t been seen since the wedding. The girls are really worried. Like something has happened to her.”

  If he was concerned, he didn’t let it show. Things like this—how he could subvert even the tiniest reaction, the smallest expression of emotion—was how he had been so successful at pretending to be someone else for so many years, how he managed to stay deep undercover. I knew the truth now, though. “Huh,” he said. “Now why would they think that? Something sinister?”

  “They’ve gone from deportation to kidnapping to murder,” I said. “They alternate between being really upset and then not caring. But there’s nothing to support any one of their theories.”

  “They have any other ideas? Anything to go on?”

  “Maybe off with her boyfriend?”

  “And who’s that?” he asked. If he was jealous, it didn’t show.

  “No first name. Just ‘Connolly.’”

  Cargan raised an eyebrow. “As in the local Connollys?”

  “Don’t know. Does one of them own a pub nearby? Pauline moonlighted at a pub, according to the girls,” I said. “They didn’t give me a lot to go on. I’d say yes, but who knows?”

  “Rough group, that family. Remember them from high school?”

  I did. I had a vague recollection of a quiet boy in my class with a bunch of older brothers who were trouble, the kind of trouble that ended up in the local newspaper with their names attached to general mischief and one or two garden-variety DUIs where no one had been hurt, but a mailbox or two had been sacrificed. Mrs. Connolly was a churchgoing, God-fearing lady who served with Mom on the Ladies’ Guild and I didn’t remember a Mr. Connolly on the scene, which may have contributed to the unruliness of the bunch but only partially. A bad seed ran through the Connolly crowd and at the mention of the family name and Cargan’s vaguely concerned face, it all started to come back to me. “Jamie Connolly was in my class,” I said. “Nice kid. Quiet.”