Read Wedding Bel Blues: A Belfast McGrath Mystery (Bel McGrath Mysteries) Online
Authors: Maggie McConnon
Mary Ann shook her head sadly at the idea that I couldn’t help with the investigation, my mind so full of holes that it was just a crying shame. “Maybe you should be hypnotized?” she said, brightening at the thought.
I felt the pasta in my mouth turn to a grainy paste at the thought. “Hypnotized?” I asked, choking down the once-delicious food. I had been hypnotized once to quit smoking, so I knew that I was highly suggestible, because I no longer bought cigarettes. But I also had developed an inexplicable aversion to onions, once a staple of all of my recipes and now gone from my culinary repertoire, the mere thought of them making me gag.
Kevin looked at Mary Ann as if she had discovered the cure for cancer. “Brilliant! That’s a great idea.”
“That’s not a great idea,” I said, putting my napkin to my mouth. “That’s not a great idea at all.” A Vidalia onion, all papery and yellow, popped into my head.
“Why not?” they said in unison, studying my face for an answer.
How would I tell them that if they were going to hypnotize me to see if I could remember anything the likelihood was that I would spill what I really knew: that Caleigh had not been the gorgeous, blushing bride everyone thought they saw but a two-timing woman who wasn’t sure that the guy who adored her was the right man for her. That before walking down the aisle and pledging her troth to Mark Chesterton she had given Declan Morrison—if his texts to her were to be believed—the night of his life.
I didn’t go back home right away, making a left out of Kevin’s street and heading toward the train station, at the end of which was the kayak put-in that I had visited two days before. Rather than sit at the water’s edge, I elected to take a seat, carefully, at a weather-beaten picnic table, hoping that I wouldn’t add insult to injury and put a butt splinter on the list of complaints I now had related to my life.
The last thing I needed or wanted to do was go back to Kevin’s to have Mary Ann play find-the-splinter-in-Bel’s-butt.
I hadn’t planned on coming here, but I felt like Amy’s name had come up more in the past few days than ever before, her presence like a whisper in my ear. This is where we were last together, where we had had the first, last, and only fight we would ever have, me leaving in a huff, she standing by the water’s edge, her own car parked in its usual spot by the trees. How could I have known that that was the last time I would see her? That my last words—“you’ll be sorry”—were words I had never strung together since and that I wished, daily, that I could take back? Like the footage I had left on the cutting-room floor, so to speak, from Caleigh’s wedding, I had left those words out of my statement to the police when they came to my house, questioned me, and insinuated I knew more than I was telling. I didn’t know more. I knew less than they thought. But I had said those words and they could have been some of the last words she had heard.
Sometimes I wondered what her killer had said to her before he took her life, because I was sure she was dead. We had a kind of telepathy, a two-hearts-beating-as-one connection, and a few days after she went missing I was convinced that it was so, that my heart had started to beat alone.
I had left my car back by the train station, under a streetlight, walking the short distance to the water. More rocks were visible at the put-in now, the water having receded to the lowest point that I could remember. This drought was no joke, the real deal. Even in the dark, lights from the train tracks the only thing illuminating the area, I could see that this was serious. If we didn’t get some rain soon, there would be no water at all in the small river.
Behind me, I heard a car driving over the gravel that separated the paved train station parking lot from the sandy area where cars parked at the put-in. Its lights off, the driver drove slowly over the uneven ground, pulling right up to what was once the water’s edge but was now exposed rock and silt. At the picnic table, in relative darkness, the lights from the train station not extending as far as the area I was sitting, I was protected, hidden from view. I sat perfectly still and waited, wondering why I now had company, who it might be, and what he or she had planned.
Just out for an evening swim? I’ve got news for you: no water.
The car stayed at the edge of the put-in, the motor running, the lights off. I couldn’t see what kind of car it was, but it looked like a small SUV, a Honda CRV or a Toyota Rav4, something of that ilk. The driver’s side door opened and someone got out, someone tall, thin, and who moved like a teenager, scrambling more than walking over the rocks and into what remained of the river, many feet in the distance. Whoever it was, and it seemed to be a man, wasn’t wearing shoes; that was evident by the way he picked his way gingerly over the rocky ground and into the water. There was nothing to suggest that another person was there except for my shallow breathing, something that sounded loud to my ears but which I suspected couldn’t be heard in the still night. I couldn’t see much except for the outline of a figure out in the water, the gentle waves lapping at his ankles. He stood and stared out at the dwindling river, the phragmites bending in the breeze, a duck or two gliding by, not realizing they might have to migrate sooner than they thought if the drought continued.
Minutes passed and the person continued to stare. A train barreled north, chugging by the trestle bridge that spanned the Foster’s Landing River and the adjacent Hudson, its headlamp casting a glow over the whole area. I ducked back, not wanting to be seen.
But just before the light faded, glancing over me to light up the tracks going into the station, it lit up the person standing in the river and I finally saw who it was.
I wondered why Kevin was staring out toward Eden Island.
On Thursday, I did more prep for the wedding on Saturday, still dismayed by the sad stock of ingredients that I was presented with in the underwhelming kitchen. But I was a chef and it was my job to make it wonderful for the happy couple, their guests, and my parents, who would be the harshest judges of all.
After putting in a tray of bacon-wrapped scallops that I would serve to Mom and Dad for their take on them before putting them on the menu, I took a few minutes to poke around the Manor, seeing what had changed since I had last been here. Heck, who was I kidding? I wanted to go upstairs and see what the crack detective squad—aka Kevin—had missed in his investigation after Declan’s death. There had to be something. I knew it wasn’t the right thing to do, but I did it anyway, making sure no one was around, slipping under the police tape that was still draped across the door to the bridal suite and letting myself into the room where I had last seen Caleigh draped across the bed, passed out drunk. I closed the door behind me, stepping over a mess of police tape in a pile by the floor, all wadded up and waiting to be disposed of.
I had a pair of plastic gloves in my coat pocket and slipped those on as I poked around the bridal suite. I got on my hands and knees and pulled up the dust ruffle around the four-poster bed, making a mental note to tell Cargan that whoever he had cleaning the guest rooms was doing a piss-poor job of it and that in addition to getting rid of the police tape, they needed to acquaint themselves with a vacuum and its purpose. I ran my hands under the bed and came out with a face full of dust but not much else. I opened every drawer of every dresser in the room, finding nothing, and pulled open the armoire to see if there was anything in it or behind it.
Nothing.
I stood in the center of the room with my hands on my hips and surveyed the space. The windows were spotless; that was something, I guessed. But if we were going to up our game around here—something I wasn’t convinced the rest of them wanted—then we were going to have to do a massive overhaul of the place to bring it into at least the twentieth century, if not the twenty-first. Baby steps.
I covered every surface of the room visually before crawling around and seeing what I could find beyond the dust bunnies that were stuck in every corner, behind every piece of furniture. I stifled every sneeze, knowing that Mom, Dad, and Cargan were lurking in the Manor somewhere, preparing for the next wedding by taking stock of the chairs, overseeing the ironing of the tablecloths and napkins, and making sure the dining hall was in good shape after Saturday’s debacle of a wedding. I was on the other side of the bed, my ass sticking up in the air, my torso under the bed frame, when someone entered the room. Along the wall under the headboard, taped to the molding, was a long wire. I couldn’t figure out where it went or if it was attached to the landline on the nightstand, but I didn’t have time to find out, my brother’s voice interrupting my investigation.
“What are you doing?” Cargan asked, his voice recognizable despite my burrowing in under the bed.
I slithered out, bringing a trail of dust with me. “Has this place been cleaned in the last five years, Car?” I asked, showing him my gloved hands, filled with under-bed detritus and nasty fluff.
“Why are you wearing gloves?” he asked.
I stood up and wiped my hands on my pants. “I was in the kitchen. Cooking.” In the distance I heard the timer go off that I had set to alert me when the scallops were done. “And I have to go,” I said.
My brother blocked my path to the door. “What are you doing?” he asked again.
“I was looking around.”
“Did you see the police tape?” he asked, pointing to the yellow tape hanging listlessly in front of the open door.
“How did you know I was in here?”
“This is a crime scene, Bel,” he said. “You shouldn’t be in here.”
“You always were the rule follower, Car,” I said, starting for the door. My eyes landed on the pile of police tape discarded outside the door, something glittering in between the adhesive and elastic. I picked it up on my way out. “I’ll get rid of this,” I said, my hands burrowing into the tape and feeling for the shiny object that had become stuck in its web.
“I don’t know if you should,” he said, but I was already headed down the stairs, the tape in my hands.
In the kitchen, I took out the scallops. They were perfect. I would bring a tray of them into the office and show Cargan that my mind really was on cooking and nothing else. I pulled the tape from my pocket and, making sure no one was around, unspooled it as quickly as I could, looking for the thing that was buried beneath all of that caution tape.
There it was. I held it up to the light.
I wondered where Mom’s earring had fallen off, when, and how. And why, up until this point, it had gone undiscovered.
The next night, I stopped in Dad’s studio before starting the short walk to the Grand Mill Saloon to meet Brendan Joyce. All I could hear when I entered was a banging coming from one of the side rooms, this one with a door that never closed tightly, the frame slightly bent from one or other of the times Dad had failed to measure one of his paintings or installations before trying to stow it in the room.
“Measure twice, cut once,” Feeney used to say to Dad, a statement that was met always with my Dad’s face flaming as red as his hair.
It was like being back in high school. I was going out for the night and had to tell my father where I was going, what time I would be back. And the weird thing? I was getting kind of used to it. No, this would never do. I couldn’t get comfortable here. I had to remind myself that I wanted to get out, to not be beholden to eating with my parents every Sunday, another day with the whole clan, pushed together in the kitchen, still fighting over the last drumstick, the last piece of pie stuck in the tin and misshapen.
I’d tell them after I got things up and running at the Manor that they should start looking, with seriousness, for a new chef, a new Goran. Or maybe the old Goran. Maybe enough time had gone by that he had forgotten his blood oath to never return to the cursed catering hall.
I walked over to the door and pulled it open. My father was bent at the waist, drilling nails into the side of a large wooden box that had “ART” stamped on its top, as if it would be anything else. When he heard me, he stood up quickly, hitting his head on a low beam in the A-shaped overhead space, staggering backward, the drill still operating at top speed, Dad waving it around wildly as he grabbed at the top of his head.
I ran to the outlet and pulled out the plug, watching the drill whir its last revolution. “Dad, are you all right?” I asked. I took the drill from his hand and placed it on top of the box.
“Bel! You scared the bejesus out of me,” he said. “What do you want?” But his angry tone was a result only of the blow to the head, the consternation at his pain. He rubbed his head vigorously, hoping to rub it into a painless state. “I’m fine!” he said even though it sounded like he was anything but “fine.”
I pulled his hand away from his head to check the knob that was forming. No blood. That was good. “I just wanted you to know that I’m going out. Please tell Mom that the apartment is clean and that she shouldn’t take my absence as an invitation to go up there and vacuum.”
He stood next to the box, his hand on the top, an almost protective gesture. “She’s just trying to help.”
How did my letting my father know that I was going out turn into a defensive conversation about my apartment, my dust bunnies? “I know, Dad. I just don’t want her to go to any trouble.”
“You just don’t want her to invade your precious privacy,” he said, his hand going back to his head.
This wasn’t going the way I had hoped. All I could hope for at this point was a hasty getaway with no further damage done to my father and his sensitive head.
“We’re all set for tomorrow,” I said. “All of the potatoes are peeled and I created a few new canapés for the cocktail hour.”
Dad raised an eyebrow. “What kind of canapés?”
“Nothing fancy. Just your standard wedding fare,” I said, and it was the truth. I didn’t want to rock the boat too much, not with what I actually had planned.