Bel of the Brawl--A Belfast McGrath Mystery

by Maggie McConnon

  “Belfast!” my father cried from the foyer. “Belfast McGrath!” he said again, as if I had forgotten my full name and that would bring me running. It had to have something to do with the Christmas tree that he put up in the foyer every year. My brothers, who were supposed to help with the ten-foot tree, had scattered into the wind like fallen leaves, making me the de facto trunk holder as Dad balanced precariously on the banister, trying to get the tree straight without the benefit of a level or a tall able-bodied man (ahem, Derry).

  I was in the kitchen at Shamrock Manor preparing for an upcoming wedding. I had taken over the reins as chef a few months earlier and while it never got easier to be in the midst of my family, I had found a certain rhythm—a certain peace—in the kitchen. It was now my own and everyone treated it as such, leaving me to do what I did best: cook. Dad poked his head in the door. “Been calling you, girl. What’s going on?”

  I waved a hand around the kitchen. “This,” I said, bringing his attention to a plate of macarons. “And that,” I said, brandishing a tray of raw cylinders of pie crust dough. “I hope you’re not implying that I’m slacking off, mister.”

  “Nah,” he said. “We’ve got a couple in the foyer, tall drinks of water, both of them, who just happened to be passing by on the Taconic and they think this might be the perfect place for his daughter’s wedding.”

  The old drive-by. One of my least favorites. The people who stopped in were usually just curious about what the old mansion looked like on the inside, the outside grounds spectacular and sitting beside the Foster’s Landing River. The inside had to be just as good, right? In my opinion, the inside was better than the outside, but who was I to judge? The place was keeping me gainfully employed and out of trouble—sort of, if you didn’t count the two murders that I had investigated both on my own and with the help of my soon-to-be-retired-cop brother—so I should have been more generous about what it had to offer. I looked down at my chef’s coat and decided that it was clean enough to greet a potential booking and headed out into the foyer.

  The couple was standing by the bust of Bobby Sands, Irish martyr, that Dad had sculpted, reading the plaque that he had put there. When I emerged from the kitchen, they both looked at me, a smile breaking out on the woman’s face and a worried one breaking out on the man’s. The woman, a tall brunette wearing clogs not unlike the ones I wore in the kitchen, along with a down coat and jeans, pointed at me.

  “Hey!” she said. “I know you.”

  She didn’t look familiar to me but that didn’t mean anything. Having worked in a New York City restaurant for years, faces came and faces went, and if you wanted to be remembered, you had to be a “special order,” someone whose favorite dish, their “usual,” resonated with me. A face meant nothing, but a fan of my lamb shank? That was the person I remembered.

  She started for me, her rubber-soled clogs squeaking on the glossy marble. “You’re Belfast McGrath, right?”

  “Well, if you heard my dad bellowing for me, you’d know that that’s my name,” I said. The woman was very excited to see me and I didn’t know why, two things that left me a bit wary.

  “No, the Belfast McGrath. The chef. From The Monkey’s Paw?” she said. She held out her hand. “Alison Bergeron.”

  Nope. Still didn’t know who she was. Her husband shoved his hands deep into his pockets and looked up at the ceiling; something told me that he was used to his wife’s enthusiastic, if misguided, outbursts.

  “Nice to meet you,” I said. “You were at The Monkey’s Paw for dinner?”

  “At the Monkey’s Paw for dinner,” she said, dropping her voice an octave, giving the words import. “That dinner.”

  And there it was. There had been three couples in the restaurant the night I had lost my cool, and she and her husband had been one of them. Max Rayfield, a reality-TV executive who desperately wanted to follow my every move, and her husband were seated with them. At the other table were the former President of the United States and his First Lady and unfortunately, an unexpected guest, a fish bone in his snapper that had nearly killed him. Not my fish bone, but the fish bone of my ex-fiance and sous chef.

  Alison grimaced. “I’m sorry,” she said, looking from me to my horrified father. “I shouldn’t have brought it up.”

  “Nope. You shouldn’t have,” her husband said, his eyes still trained on the ceiling. Although he seemed to be practiced in the art of not reacting to his wife, he had not perfected it.

  “But I have to say that it was one of the best meals I ever ate,” she said. “Later events notwithstanding.”

  Did she mean the broken bottle that I brandished at the celebrity owner, the famous award-winning actor? Or how I was “escorted” from the premises by some muscle the owner had called in? Either way, it had been the stuff of my nightmares, come to life, and certainly an event I was hoping to forget.

  “No offense,” she said.

  “None taken,” I said. I held my hand out to her chagrined husband. “Hi, I’m Belfast. But you already knew that.”

  “I did,” he said, and I started to wonder if he ever said more than three or four words at a time. Alison was chatty; he probably couldn’t get a word in edgewise. “Bobby Crawford.”

  The introductions made, Dad led the couple into the dining room, which wasn’t set up for a client visit but which was impressive nonetheless. The bank of windows facing the river offered a view that would never get old, even now in winter when the trees were bare, and a thin layer of ice coated what was left of the river, a drought the previous summer having brought the water down to a dangerously low level. It was because of that drought that the police had discovered Amy’s things, her remains, buried underneath the water for years, but not Amy. That was something else I was trying, and failing, to forget. We took seats at a round table next to the largest window, the couple facing the river, and Dad’s and my backs to it and the great lawn that rolled down to the water’s edge, the perfect view if you were trying to sell someone on what we had to offer.

  “So, your daughter is getting married?” I said.

  “His daughter,” she said, not unkindly. She set the folded newspaper that she had carried into the Manor on the table; an advertisement for the Manor was visible on one of the pages. That’s what had brought them here. “She has a mother. She’s just not me.”

  “Yes, my daughter. Erin.” Bobby Crawford looked at my father, beseeching him with his eyes, trying to telegraph something. He finally blurted it out, my father blissfully unaware of what he might be trying to convey. “She’s young. Twenty-four. Too young.”

  It didn’t seem too young but I didn’t have children so couldn’t fathom why the father-of-the-bride looked so bereft at the thought of his adult daughter getting married. “And her fiancé?” I asked. “Young, too?” I had learned along the way that in addition to booking parties, Dad, Mom and I also acted as therapists when the couple, or their family, had an issue. She was too young; he was too old. (Or, in the rare case, vice versa.) She was Catholic; he was a Protestant or worse yet, an atheist. She had a big family; he had only a few cousins on his father’s side and most of them didn’t speak to each other. It was a juggling act constantly, making the couple happy while keeping their parents—who usually paid for the grand event—from having nervous breakdowns.

  “You were barely out of your teens when you got married the first time,” Alison said to her husband. “We’ve had this conversation.”

  He crossed his arms over his chest. “Too young.”

  Alison turned to me. “We were driving around and happened to see this place. It looks perfect for what we have planned and in terms of location. We’ll have to bring the happy couple here, of course.” She looked out at the river. “Can’t beat that view.”

  She didn’t know that the view for me had changed since the discovery of Amy’s belongings.

  “When’s the wedding?” I asked.

  Bobby rolled his eyes. “Memorial Day.”

  As han
dsome as he was, he was crabby, too. He was my people, fitting the mold of almost every Irish man I knew and/or was related to. “Oh, that’s soon,” I said, making a note on the pad that I kept in my coat pocket. “So, I don’t know if you know anything about the Manor but we do traditional Irish service, right down to my brothers as the house band, if you’d like.” I watched as Alison’s face lit up and Bobby’s face fell. Right, she was clearly not Irish if she got that excited about Irish music. Only someone who hadn’t been exposed to years of traditional fiddle and accordion playing got that excited about jigs and reels. “Dad can give you a sampler CD. They play music besides Irish tunes,” I said. “My brother, Feeney, does an amazing Elvis impersonation.”

  “Even better,” Bobby said dryly.

  Alison looked at her husband and then back at me and Dad. “Would you excuse us for a second?” she asked, taking her husband by the arm and leading him to the back of the dining hall by the bathroom where I had discovered a dead groom a few months earlier. Dad and I tried to amuse ourselves with talk of the weather, the number of days until pitchers and catchers reported to Spring Training, anything so we didn’t overhear a rather spirited discussion between the potential clients for a Memorial Day wedding.

  When they were done, they returned to the table, Bobby’s mood considerably lighter, if not a little resigned. “Thanks for the information. Yes, we’ll take the sampler CD and a menu, if you don’t mind. I’d like to bring my daughter and her…”

  When words failed him, Alison jumped in. “Fiancé?”

  “Yes, fiancé. I’d like to bring them here to see the place, get a sense of what it’s like.” He smiled for the first time since walking into the Manor but it was strained. “It’s very nice here.”

  Dad clapped him on the back, the larger man lurching forward in his chair with the force of it. “Excellent!” Dad stood, gesturing toward the window. “You won’t be sorry if you choose Shamrock Manor. Belfast here is one of the best cooks in America, if not the world!”

  “Thanks, Dad,” I said, looking at the couple. “I can do whatever it is you’d like. As a matter of fact, we had a wedding here in October in which we served duck to the guests.” The father-of-the-bride looked at his wife, stricken at the thought of something besides a big hunk of meat being served at the event; it was written all over his face. “Not that I’m suggesting that,” I said. If I never had to poach another duck in my life, it would be too soon. “We have a large array of options for you. Bring your daughter and her fiancé and we’ll do a tasting.”

  “That sounds great,” Alison said. She poked her unresponsive husband in the ribs. “Right? Sounds great?”

  He made a little grunt in agreement.

  “Why don’t I give you a call when we can get Erin and Fez up here?” she asked.

  “Fez?” Dad said. “Is that a Christian name?”

  “It’s short for something,” Bobby said, his eyes wandering around the dining room. “We’re still not sure what.”

  Dad put his hand on Bobby’s back. “Come, lad. Let me show you around.”

  After they left, Alison turned to me. “You’re back home now. How is that going?”

  “I love it here. I love cooking at the Manor.” Even to my own ears, the words rang hollow but it was getting closer to being true than it had a few months earlier. “It’s where I need to be. Should be.”

  She cocked her head, confused. The words didn’t sound true to her either. “You’re an amazing chef. If I have my way, the wedding is here. But we’re contending with in-laws, the girl’s mother, Bobby’s intractability.” She rubbed her fingers together. “He’s a little tight.”

  When she saw my confusion, she elaborated. “With the dough. The bank. Moo-lah-di. Thinks we can do this whole thing with a hundred people and about two grand.”

  “Ah,” I said. “Probably not.”

  She shrugged. “To me, it’s a no brainer. With you, the Manor is the place to have this wedding. I could be wrong, though. We’ve got a lot of opinions to contend with.” She gave me a hug, completely unexpected. “I don’t know if it’s because of that night at The Monkey’s Paw, but I feel like I’ve known you a long time.”

  I let myself be hugged, and stopped myself from telling her how long it had been since I had had that kind of human contact. A bad breakup, followed by another bad breakup, had left me a little hollowed out and craving companionship outside of my brothers and parents. Moving back to the Landing had been the right thing to do at the time but I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that it was kind of lonely. One could only get so much comfort from talking to parsnips all day. “Me, too,” I said. “And please, don’t judge this place based on what you saw that night. That was a really bad time in my life.”

  “I’ll say,” she said, laughing. “But the broken wine bottle was a nice touch. And P.S., the former President blew me a kiss on the way to the bathroom when his wife wasn’t looking so I wasn’t terribly upset to see him choke, if only for a little while.” She put a hand to her mouth. “Jeez, did I say that out loud?”

  “You did,” I said. “But I can’t say as I blame you.”

  Outside on the front porch, Dad was extolling the virtues of a February wedding at Shamrock Manor, pointing out all of the evergreens that would be a backdrop to the photos of the wedding party. “Planted them all myself about a hundred years ago!” he said, his voice booming in the morning air. Without hyperbole, Dad was an empty shell. “Do come back with the happy couple. We’ll have lunch. Have a delightful case of Malbec in the basement that I’ve been saving for a special occasion.”

  He did? My next stop was the basement. He was holding out on me.

  Alison gave me another hug. “We’ll see you soon. Thanks for letting us drop in.”

  Dad and I watched them drive away. “I hope they come back,” Dad said.

  “Me, too,” I said but for different reasons. Despite Crawford’s unrelenting pessimism about the wedding, I liked them. I went back into the Manor and walked past the dining room door. The newspaper that Alison had brought in still lay on the table so I walked over and picked it up, ready to throw it into the recycling bin in Dad’s office.

  The paper fell open to a page of advertisements for various antique stores in the area, popular destinations for people from other parts of the Hudson Valley. At one of the places she had circled, I had found some antique cooking utensils that were in a box somewhere in my apartment over Dad’s studio. At another, with Amy, I had unearthed a prom dress from the 1950s that I had worn proudly, a photo of me and Kevin still sitting on the mantle in my parents’ living room despite my mother’s heartbreak that we didn’t go to Bamberger’s like every other girl and her mother in Foster’s Landing to buy a new dress. I smiled at the memory, sitting at the table in the dining room and flipping through the newspaper, a local journal that boasted of Christmas trees to be hand cut and craft fairs in the area.

  An article caught my eye, nothing more than a little blurb at the bottom of the third page, the photo blurry, the people in it barely recognizable. It was a story about a commune that had originated in the late ’60s and that was something of a legend in a town about an hour north of me before communes became a thing of the past and turned into “holistic healing centers” or better yet, “spas.” Living together and massaging one another—and the general public—was a convenient cover, not to mention a source of income, for people who come together during the Summer of Love and had stayed on cheap land until development began to encroach.

  Maybe I needed glasses. Maybe I was just tired. Maybe the weight of the last many years played tricks on my mind. But my blood turned to ice in my veins as I stared at the photo of the barns and large farmhouse on a big tract of Hudson Valley land and the image of one young woman, long blonde hair, her head turned slightly so you could only see her in profile. I traced a finger over the photo, trying to divine the symmetry of her face, the curve of her nose.

  The girl in the photo—Amy—smiled up
at me, as if to say, “See, you were wrong, Bel. I didn’t die. I lived.”

  St. Martin’s Paperbacks titles by Maggie McConnon

  Wedding Bel Blues

  Bel of the Brawl

  Titles by Maggie Barbieri

  Murder 101

  Extracurricular Activities

  Quick Study

  Final Exam

  Third Degree

  Physical Education

  Extra Credit

  Once upon a Lie

  Praise for Maggie McConnon’s first Bel McGrath mystery, Wedding Bel Blues

  “McConnon has a surefire winner in Bel: a saucy, funny, flawed protagonist that readers are guaranteed to fall in love with.”

  —Susan McBride, USA Today bestselling author of Say Yes to the Death

  “Don’t wait until St. Patrick’s Day to read this delicious mystery! McConnon creates fetching characters drawn with warm humor and an authentic Irish voice. Bel McGrath will leave you smiling.”

  —Nancy Martin, New York Times bestselling author of the Blackbird Sisters mysteries

  “McConnon blends humor and intrigue like no other.”

  —Laura Bradford, author of A Churn for the Worse

  “Spirited, fun, and as Irish as a shamrock, Wedding Bel Blues sparkles. A rollicking read.”

  —Carolyn Hart, New York Times bestselling author of the Death on Demand mysteries and the Bailey Ruth Ghost mysteries

  “With dark family secrets, old flames, mysterious strangers and the odd dead body or two, McConnon has delivered a perfect blend of villainy and intrigue with laugh-out-loud witty one-liners and lashings of Irish bonhomie. A jolly good summer read.”

  —Hannah Dennison

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  MAGGIE MCCONNON grew up in New York immersed in Irish culture and tradition. A former Irish step dancer, she was surrounded by a family of Irish musicians who still play at family gatherings. She credits her Irish grandparents with providing the stories of their homeland and their extended families as the basis for the stories she tells in her Belfast McGrath novels. Maggie McConnon is a pseudonym for Maggie Barbieri, who is the author of ten other mystery and suspense novels including the murder 101 series and Once Upon a Lie, Lies That Bind, and Lie in Plain Sight. You can sign up for email updates here.