Bel of the Brawl--A Belfast McGrath Mystery

by Maggie McConnon

  Dad gave me a look: Don’t say it. So I didn’t.

  As I watched Domnall Kinneally go, taking his sad brand of lies with him, I wondered just what it was that made him feel like he couldn’t tell us one true thing about him or his situation. So here we were with Pauline’s abusive husband showing up, and her on the lam with ten grand that belonged to the Manor. I wanted to give him some advice: if you were going to lie, at least make the lies plausible. I didn’t have time to teach him the finer points of subterfuge. I had a girl to find. Again.

  CHAPTER Twenty-six

  After Domnall left, I found Cargan in the kitchen, staring at the walk-in.

  He turned and looked at me, his face a mask of sadness. “I think I loved her a little bit, Bel.” The appearance of Pauline’s real-life, all-flesh husband had brought out a little feeling in Cargan, this the biggest display of emotion I was likely to get.

  “I think you did, too.”

  “She was gorgeous.”

  “Is gorgeous,” I said. “She is gorgeous.”

  He ignored that. “And funny. And loads of fun.”

  “No one would blame you for falling for the girl, Cargan,” I said. I hearkened back to a conversation we had a few months before when he was recovering from a tragic, awful accident, and when he told me that he was lonely. And tired of being alone. “Did you date? Go anywhere with her?”

  “Yes, a few times. Not in the Landing, of course,” he said. “She kind of kept me at arm’s length. Said her life was ‘complicated.’”

  “She was right,” I said. “Maybe it was better this way.” He needed to meet an uncomplicated girl, someone who didn’t have quite so much of the kind of baggage that Pauline seemed to have. “Did you call Hanson?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “Nope. Changed my mind. I don’t think Mom and Dad realize just how much trouble they’ll be in if the INS gets wind of this. Which they will if the police get involved.”

  “And what of the fact that Pauline thinks Mason was poisoned? And that Casey was following her? What about all of that?” I studied my brother’s face for some sign that we were on the same page, that he was starting to become as terrified as I was. But there was nothing, just his usual placid expression. “I’m worried, Car.”

  He pulled off his bow tie. “Let’s keep this to ourselves for the time being. I have some work to do.”

  So did I, I thought, but didn’t tell him. Although I love playing Holmes to his Sherlock, I was ready to embrace my inner Nancy Drew and do this on my own. Things weren’t moving fast enough for me and I felt as if I were running out of time. I texted Brendan. “Exhausted,” I wrote. “Rain check?”

  His response was a smiley face, the perfect response for a guy who smelled like a ninth-grader. I felt bad lying to him, but the situation here at the Manor, with my family—with my brother in particular—was getting dicey. No more dancing around the issue. There was a missing girl and before he went to the nuclear option, going to the police, we had to try to figure this out on our own. Why was she running? Was she scared? Had she taken our money? Did she know Donnie was looking for her? Or was it something else? The whole thing stunk to high heaven.

  Cargan had gone back into the office to talk to Dad; Mom had joined the conversation and their hushed tones sounded as if a bunch of snakes had gathered for a meeting. I snuck past the office and across the foyer, going into a quick trot to my apartment, racing up the steps while opening my chef’s coat and undoing my pants. Once inside, I did a quick cleanup and let my hair loose from the headscarf in which it had been imprisoned during the wedding; I threw on some clean clothes and spritzed myself with some perfume. When I was done, I looked in the mirror, thinking that a shower would make things a hundred times better. But I had a plan and I wanted to get a jump start on its execution. My appearance wouldn’t really matter, or so I hoped.

  It would have to do.

  As I grabbed my purse from the counter in the kitchen, I noticed that several of the drawers were open. I didn’t remember not closing everything up; as someone who had worked in kitchens for a long time, I was meticulous about leaving things as pristine as I had found them. I pushed the drawers shut and left the apartment, thinking that I was either losing my mind or someone had been in my place, not the first time that that had happened. My money was on Mom; she had a tendency to poke around when I wasn’t home, making sure that I had enough Clorox to wash my whites or Swiffer dusters to … well, not dust.

  The old Volvo wagon that Dad had procured for me was on its last legs but it was fine for getting around the Landing and doing local errands. The odometer had just hit 310,000 miles and if I were a more creative type when it came to things like advertising, I would contact Volvo and let them shoot a commercial about me, a chef driving around in a really old car that they had painstakingly built in Sweden a couple of decades prior. Heck, maybe even before I was born. Alas, I didn’t have time for that and prayed that the car would hold together until I could buy something a little more suited to my personality and taste. I had a little less than a quarter of a tank but that didn’t matter; I was only headed into town.

  I pulled up in front of the Dugout, hoping that the person I wanted to talk to might have stopped by on his way home from work. There was no love lost between me and Jed Mitchell and I also hoped and prayed that he didn’t throw me to the curb the minute he saw my face. When I walked into the bar, almost empty on this Saturday afternoon, late in the day, I was in luck. He was there.

  But as I expected, he wasn’t happy to see me.

  “Where is everyone?” I asked, settling onto the bar stool next to his. He was as handsome as he had been as a teenager, some incredible genes running through the Mitchell family. Amy had been stunning, a long and lithe blonde, the perfect counterpoint to my shorter and chubbier redheaded self. We were Frick and Frack, Laurel and Hardy. Two opposites who had been best friends from the start. Jed’s hair was a little darker than it had been when we were in school but he retained the tight runner’s body that had propelled him from high school track star to state champion. He put his elbows on the bar and looked away from me, staring straight ahead.

  “You’re not welcome here, Bel,” he said. “I’m sorry, but you’re not.”

  “It’s okay, Jed. I understand.” The bartender, a young guy with the hearing of a bat, or so it seemed, had started down the length of the bar to take my order but turned suddenly, the jukebox requiring his attention. “What’s New Pussycat?” blared over a janky speaker system, Tom Jones a jaunty juxtaposition to the tension between me and my long-lost best friend’s brother. “How’s your dad? How’s Oogie?” I asked.

  “He was fine before you got here. Before you screwed everything up,” he said.

  “I’m sorry, Jed. I had nowhere else to go,” I said. Sad, but true. I had had to come home. It wasn’t my first choice, but with no job and no fiancé it was my only option.

  “He thought she was alive. All these years,” Jed said, shaking his head sadly.

  “It’s not my fault that she was found,” I said. “I had nothing to do with that. That was because of the drought.”

  He snorted derisively, taking a swig of his beer. “Right, Bel. The drought.” He turned and looked at me, something in his eyes. It wasn’t exactly hate but it was close. “I guess I should thank you for not pressing charges. For letting my old man off the hook for bringing a gun into your apartment. For threatening you.”

  “For accidentally causing my brother to be shot?” I asked. It was an accident, yes, but one that could have been avoided. Cargan had almost been killed and if anyone here should have been angry it was me. I had seen my brother in so much pain that he would make us all leave the room, hiding until it subsided, the scar on his side a constant reminder that he wasn’t supposed to be here except for the grace of God.

  He didn’t respond. “What do you want, Bel? My sister’s gone and my father’s in an institution—which everyone kindly calls ‘rehab’—for the foreseeab
le future. And then it’s house arrest. No coming back to the Dugout for him. What else could you want from me? I’ve got nothing else to give you.”

  “Pauline.”

  He looked into his glass of beer.

  “Tell me about Pauline.”

  He laughed, a cold sound that belied any merriment. “What do you want to know? That she took me for about ten grand?”

  Same amount as our tip. That seemed to be her sum of choice.

  “That my marriage is over because of her?” he continued. “That once she got my money, she was gone with the wind, as they say?” He finished his beer, pounded the bar to get the bartender’s attention. “What do you want to know?”

  “Where she is,” I said. When the bartender appeared, I ordered a beer, too. Jed gave me an angry look. “No one’s going to tell me where I’m not welcome, Jed. So get used to it.” I watched the bartender carefully to make sure that an errant finger or something more disgusting didn’t end up in my pint. “Where’d you meet?” I asked.

  “Where’d we meet?” he asked. “Where else do I go besides here?”

  “How long did you date?”

  “Three months,” he said. “Three long, tempestuous months.”

  “Nice SAT word, Jed. What do you mean by ‘tempestuous’?”

  “It was a crazy ride. One I had never had. So, I stayed with her and threw everything away as a result.”

  “When did it end?” I asked.

  “About a month ago. Found out she was ‘dating’ Angus Connolly, too,” he said, air-quoting the word. “Maybe others.”

  You couldn’t get two more different men than Jed Mitchell and Angus Connolly. And then there was my brother. I hadn’t looked into the other guys on the list yet.

  “And you haven’t seen her since?” I asked.

  “Nope,” he said. The radio on the bar next to him crackled to life. He picked it up and listened to it. “Another 911 from the nursing home. Now there’s a surprise,” he said.

  Gone was the lighthearted boy I had known in school and in his place was a cheating, jaded local cop who had lost everything because of an indiscretion. He stood. “I’ve got to go,” he said.

  “One more thing,” I said.

  He threw some money on the bar, just a tip; he drank free at his father’s place even if his father was no longer the present proprietor. “What?”

  “Why did you give her the money?” I asked.

  He picked up the radio. “So that she wouldn’t tell my wife.” He laughed again. “That didn’t work out so well now, did it?”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “She told her anyway. Cassie left me, Bel. Took my kids. Said I’ll never see any of them ever again.”

  I looked down at the bar.

  “Do you know what it’s like to have nothing, Bel?”

  “I do,” I said. I had once had it all but it all had been taken from me, the job, the fiancé, the life I loved. I did know.

  “I don’t think you do. It’s the kind of thing that could make you kill someone,” he said, giving me one last look before exiting the bar.

  CHAPTER Twenty-seven

  Jed’s words ringing in my ears, I texted Cargan from a spot on the sidewalk in front of the bar. “Where are you?” I typed.

  “In Hell,” was the response so I knew he was home and probably watching one of the celebrity dance shows that Mom and Dad found endlessly entertaining.

  “Wanna go for a drink?” I texted back. “Angus Connolly’s place?”

  “Um … sure? Do I want to know why?”

  “Just meet me at the bottom of the hill.”

  “But Hillary Duff is just about to dance the paso doble.”

  I stared at my phone and within a few seconds there was a ping announcing a new text. “Just kidding. On my way.”

  I drove back to the Manor in the gloom of the evening; it would rain soon and there was an eerie glow coming from between the tree branches, branches that were going to lose their leaves soon. Cargan was standing at the bottom of the hill, as instructed, poking at his phone. He jumped into the Volvo, looking into the backseat, which held a mess of reusable grocery bags. The car sputtered a bit when I put it into drive, something that caused a little twinge of concern in my gut. Old Phoebe wasn’t going to last much longer, that was certain.

  “I love what you’ve done with the place,” he said, his foot grazing an empty coffee cup on the floor of the passenger side of the car.

  “I’ve been busy,” I said, making a sharp left onto the main street.

  “What’s this all about?” he asked. “Not that I care. If I have to watch one more episode of reality television with Mom and Dad, there’s no telling what will happen to me. Next up was some group of housewives who are young but who have had so much plastic surgery that they look like old women trying to look young. I was thrilled to get your text.”

  I recounted my conversation with Jed Mitchell, and while I could tell he was curious about the conversation, I could also tell that he wasn’t happy that I had struck out on my own.

  “Bel…” he cautioned.

  “Oh, stop,” I said. “I’ve known Jed almost as long as I’ve known you. Nothing is going to come of this. I just wanted to find out what his relationship was with Pauline.”

  “He sounds pretty angry.”

  “At who?” I asked. He seemed pretty angry in general so it was hard to tell.

  “Pauline,” he said, picking up a paper bag and tossing it into the backseat. “You.”

  “Seems like he’s lost it all, Cargan. That’s not a happy place to be.”

  Connolly’s place was jumping when we arrived and the bar was three deep with thirsty patrons. We walked in and took a look around, wondering how Angus packed this place so tight given the food’s nasty reputation. A sign over the bar that touted dollar beers gave us our answer.

  “Car, I need the ladies’ room,” I said. “Order me a Pinot Grigio.”

  “But that’s more than a dollar,” my brother said, dead serious.

  I pressed a five into his hand. “You always were a cheap bastard,” I said, wending my way through the crowd and finding the small corridor that led to the restrooms. For a large place, the accommodations were scanty, just one toilet marked “Men” and another marked “Lasses.” The Lasses, as always, was occupied and after standing there for a few minutes, the inhabitant showing no signs of vacating the premises, I tested the handle on the door to the men’s room and, finding it open, went inside. Having grown up in a predominantly male household, I’m hard to shock in the lack-of-cleanliness department but this was one truly disgusting facility, the trash can overflowing, the urinal—pronounced “your-eye-nail” if you’re my dad—looking as if it had been installed before the last century. I held my nose and did my business, realizing that there were no clean paper towels on which to wipe my washed hands, so instead, I ran them down the front of my jeans, hoping that the bar was so crowded that no one would notice two large, wet handprints on my pants.

  I opened the door and came face-to-face with Angus Connolly whose good cheer from our previous visit seemed to have evaporated. I thought that the level of anger that showed on his face was a little out of proportion to my crime, being a female in a male-designated bathroom, but he was apparently pretty peeved.

  “Couldn’t get into the ladies,” I said by way of explanation, motioning toward the still-occupied lavatory.

  “You’re not Canadian, are you?” he asked, getting close to my face. “And that guy you were with, he’s not Canadian either, is he?”

  And not a mute, I thought, but I kept that to myself. Some things were better left unsaid, no pun intended. I wasn’t sure how to respond so I just stood there, a mute myself.

  “Why did you make up that story?” he asked. “I know who you are. You’re Belfast McGrath. You went to school with my brother Jamie.”

  “How did you put all that together?” I asked.

  “Never mind that,” he sa
id. “Why did you lie to me?”

  “Information. I am trying to find Pauline.”

  “That wench worked for your parents.”

  “She’s not a wench but, yes, she worked for my parents. And now she’s missing.” And may have witnessed a murder. And taken ten thousand dollars that didn’t belong to her along with the ten grand she extorted from Jed. I tried not to appear intimidated, but I was. He was bigger than I was and three sheets to the wind, as Dad would say, the smell of alcohol coming off him in stale waves, the kind that led me to believe that the drinking had started earlier and would continue well into the evening. This was professional drinking, not the stuff of amateurs. “And she could be in danger. Are you sure you haven’t seen her? Heard from her?”

  “No. Haven’t seen her. Haven’t heard from her. And don’t want to. She made a lot of trouble for me and my family,” he said, grabbing my arm. He pulled me down the hallway and into the dining room. “If I do see her again, I’ll…”

  I wrested myself from his grip. “You’ll what?” I said. He was the second person in as many hours who seemed to want Pauline gone. Or worse. I looked around the bar hoping to catch sight of my brother, but his back was turned to me, his attention on a baseball game on the giant flat-screen television over one end of the bar.

  “What do you want me to say?” he asked. “That I’d kill her?” He smiled his snaggle-toothed smile. “I’m too smart for that.” He pushed me forward, through the throng of people drinking at the bar. “Let’s go. You’re not welcome here.”

  “Why?” I asked. “What have I done?”

  “Not sure. I just don’t like the looks of you,” he said. “Now where’s your mute brother?” he asked, grabbing my arm again. “Canadian, my ass.”

  I squirmed beneath his viselike grip and let out a little howl as his fingers wrapped tighter around my upper arm, the skin beneath them becoming chafed and raw. I wriggled loose and started for the end of the bar where I had last seen my brother, but before I could get to him, I heard the crack of bone as someone’s fist made contact with Angus Connolly’s nose, the spray of blood prolific and widespread, customers ducking for cover, their hands protecting their drinks as several of them hit the deck.