Wedding Bel Blues: A Belfast McGrath Mystery (Bel McGrath Mysteries) (15 page)

“Fernando!” I said, spying him in the refrigerator. “What’s going on in that walk-in?” I asked.

“Nothing, Miss Bel,” he said, emerging finally. “I was just hot.”

I could imagine he was. All of those hours in the sun, roasting a pig, had taken their toll. Fernando was shaky and pale. “Sit down, brother,” Brendan said. “I’ll be right back.”

When the doors opened, I could hear my brothers tuning up, the sound of the drums, lots of cymbals, the most prevalent. Feeney was singing in a half whisper, something about how much he hated Arney set to the tune of “The Fields of Athenry,” but since his half whisper was amplified by an impressive sound system everyone could hear what he was saying. A few guests laughed while others stood in openmouthed horror. I leaned into the dining hall and when I got Feeney’s attention drew a finger across my throat.
Cut it out,
I mouthed. Cargan really was on the verge of breakdown now, his lips white and set in a grim line. Boy could never handle the drama of being a McGrath, having a pathological aversion to conflict. I looked at Feeney and pointed at Cargan, staring disconsolately at his fiddle as he plucked at the strings, and Feeney turned off the mike, turning around to clap a hand on our brother’s shoulder in an attempt to calm him down.

Feeney came into the foyer. “What?” he said, his whining not attractive on a grown man.

“I get it. You want to be a rock star. You want out of this one-horse town. You want a life separate from the extended family on whom your livelihood depends.” I gave him a little slap to the cheek and held a finger to his lips when he tried to protest. “Take a number, Brother,” I said before going back to the kitchen where Brendan was doing a great job tending to the potatoes bubbling in the giant pot of water. I’d mash them within an inch of their starchy lives and add a lot of butter and, with the roasted pig, would serve a dinner the likes of which no one at Shamrock Manor had ever eaten. The guests were working their way through the salad course, after which there would be some dancing and speeches, and then the entrée would be served.

Mom and Dad had been conspicuously absent from the kitchen since I had arrived and I wondered if that was standard operating procedure, given that Goran had been such a diva, or if they were afraid of meddling too much in my business and driving me out of the place as well. Everything under control, I went into the office, where Dad was having an animated discussion with someone over the presence of a bouncy castle at an upcoming wedding—Dad didn’t want the liability, but the customer was demanding it—so I backed out noiselessly and looked around for Mom, wanting to see if, from her vantage point, everything was going well. She was, after all, the hostess—the grande dame, as it were—of Shamrock Manor, the gorgeous face of a mansion that was starting to show its wear and age, unlike its female proprietor, who, for all I knew, had a fountain of youth in the basement. Or just great genes.

Or a great plastic surgeon.

Upstairs, the last of the police tape hung limply from the doorknob of the bedroom where I had last left Caleigh during her own wedding. A smudge of something—blood maybe or just red wine?—was on the doorjamb, which was slightly ajar. I got a whiff of Mom, Chanel No. 5, and knew that she was on the other side. I knocked gently.

“Just a minute!” she called out. “One second!”

I stood outside the door, but I didn’t have a lot of time to kill, what with the potatoes in the pot and the hungry guests and Brendan, a lovely art teacher but not a cook, helping out in the kitchen. I pushed open the door and found Mom at the mirror, dabbing under her eyes with a tissue and reapplying some under-eye concealer. On the bed was an imprint and a wrinkled comforter, the telltale signs that she had been sitting on the bed before I entered.

“Mom?” I said, taking a step into the room.

“Yes, Belfast?” she asked, turning to face me, the only sign she had been crying her red-tinged nose. “Everything okay in the kitchen? And who is that tall man in there with you?”

“Brendan Joyce,” I said.

“Paddy and Fiona Joyce’s boy?” she asked, adjusting her spine so that she was standing as straight as she could, her pageant-girl posture returning.

“One and the same,” I said.

“He was always a nice boy. Always carrying his sister’s hard shoes before dance class.”

“Were you crying?” I asked.

I could see the wheels turning in her head. “Well, yes,” she said, deciding not to lie. “I’m just a bit overwhelmed. Today’s wedding, what happened at Caleigh’s party, the state of the Manor.” She paused and crossed her arms over her chest, her voice catching a bit when she said, “That poor boy.”

“What poor boy?” I asked.

“Declan. Mr. Morrison.”

“That poor
man,
” I said, correcting her. “He was a man.” And not a very nice one at that, but I left that out.

“You’re right. He was a man.”

Behind her, outside, I could see the smoldering pit where I had roasted the pig, the river in the distance. “You lost an earring that day, Mom. The day of the wedding.” I watched her carefully. “I forgot to mention it.”

She touched her ears reflexively, making sure the earrings she had donned that morning were still there. “Yes. Thank you, Belfast. They were cheap. Plastic, really. I don’t care.”

“Any idea where you may have lost it? Did you retrace your steps?” I asked.

“No need,” she said. She sighed. “I’ll get more earrings.”

“We’ll get this place back on track, Mom. Don’t worry.”

“Yes, we will,” she said. “You’re here now, Bel, and that will help things tremendously.”

I didn’t know about that, but I let her indulge the fantasy. After all, she was upset. And I couldn’t bear to think of her, the rock of the family, feeling off her game or upset about the events of the past few months and last week. The Manor was in trouble and she felt as if she were to blame. It was written all over her smooth, unwrinkled face.

“Shouldn’t you go back to the kitchen?” she asked.

“Yes, I should,” I said. When hugging or any kind of emotional display of affection isn’t in your family’s repertoire, there’s not much else to do but move on, so that’s what I did. But before I got to the door, I turned around. “The man. Declan Morrison. Did you know him?” I asked for not the first, or last, time.

She did her best not to lick her lips, but she couldn’t help herself. “No. Never met him before in my life.”

CHAPTER
Nineteen

The next morning, the cat, whom I had named Taylor after the lovely Ms. Swift, made an appearance on the back porch. Mom had left me a pouch of salmon during one of her clandestine cleaning trips to the apartment, and even though I was starving when I got home the night before the smell of it gave me another idea.

I sniffed. “Cat food!” I put it on a paper plate and let the feline chips fall where they may.

It never occurred to me that leaving out the contents of a pouch of salmon would also attract an intrepid raccoon, his or her eyes glistening merrily as I walked past the glass door on my way to the bathroom in the middle of the night. He or she scarfed up most of the salmon before I shooed him or her away by shoving a broom handle between the door and the porch. I had lived in the city long enough that I had forgotten about raccoons. Rats, no. Pigeons, not them, either. But raccoons were denizens of the suburban rural environment and made their presence known, particularly when food was around, even if it was in the form of garbage.

The cat smelled the oil that had soaked into the paper plate, though, and that was enough to bring him or her up the steps, once the raccoon had retreated when daylight broke. I stood in the hallway, not daring to make a move, and got a glimpse of the animal I had been hoping to make my pet. Big, fluffy, white, with an orange spot on her mouth—I decided an animal this beautiful could only be a female—she regarded me from the other side of the glass door before loping down the steps to parts unknown. I made a mental note to buy more crappy salmon in a pouch and to research how to keep raccoons from arriving at your back door. I wondered if she liked her new name and if she would ever settle down and become a part of my life for real.

For the past few Sunday mornings since I had come home, my parents and I went through the same charade. They would creep up the stairs and rap lightly at the door and ask if I was going to Mass, to which I would reply that I couldn’t, citing “work” I had to do. I don’t know why we persisted in pretending that I would actually go to Mass—I was a grown-up and could tell them that Sunday Mass was not part of my routine anymore—or why they accepted my contention that I was so busy. It was easier that way for everyone, I guess. I had no friends—well, I sort of had Brendan Joyce, our bond stronger now that he had come to help at Shamrock Manor the day before—and I had less of a life. It was me, this apartment, and the phantom cat. Regardless, church was not part of my plans.

But making breakfast for Brendan, snoring loudly on my couch, was. Fortunately, the door to my apartment is at the back and as far away from the living room as you could get. Mom would surely paint me a harlot if she knew that I had a man in the place, even though the man hadn’t laid a single hand on me the night before, the two of us, exhausted from the O’Donnell wedding and its attendant messiness, sharing a bag of microwave popcorn before going our separate ways in my four-hundred-square-foot space. I didn’t have a team of cleaners to come in after me and make sure the kitchen was shipshape; that was all on me, so we spent several hours making the kitchen at the Manor spic-and-span so that the next time I came in it would look more like a professional kitchen and less like an Army mess hall.

But today Mom and Dad didn’t come up to ask me to go to Mass that Sunday and I was relieved. Maybe they had seen how exhausted I had been after the O’Donnell wedding. Cooking at the Manor was different from cooking in a restaurant kitchen and I was unused to being the sous chef, the line cook, the expeditor (Brendan, bless his heart, did his best, but it wasn’t good enough), and the manager of the waitstaff. I was glad my parents were going to Mass because with them occupied for an hour at the service and then again at the Cub Scouts’ pancake breakfast, something that Dad never missed in thirty-five years in Foster’s Landing and as a parishioner at Bleeding Heart of Jesus, I could make Brendan an omelet that would make him fall hopelessly in love with me in peace. Our plan the night before had been to share an exceptional bottle of Bordeaux that I had in my wine rack and that I had purloined from The Monkey’s Paw that night I left, but after one glass and a bellyful of popcorn Brendan was sound asleep, his big feet resting on my Ikea coffee table, and I headed to bed as well, feeling as if I had been run over. I had covered him with one of Mom’s crocheted afghans, one of an army of blankets that seemed to be recklessly reproducing, a new one appearing in my apartment practically with each passing day. This one was an homage to her beloved New York Mets, an off-center blue-and-orange logo the centerpiece of this particular monstrosity.

Before he fell asleep, a little punch-drunk, he said, “Is it my imagination or does this place smell like meat loaf? Or hot dogs? Or both?”

I couldn’t get rid of the smell or the ketchup stain on the couch, so I had given up. No amount of Febreze helped and Mom, when confronted, denied ever having been in the place.

I stared at Brendan on the couch, his mouth hanging open, his hair even more unruly than usual. He was cute. And sweet. A deadly combination for someone like me, someone truly on the rebound. Go slow, McGrath, I cautioned myself. You’re not that long out of a relationship.

His eyes closed, he spoke. “You shouldn’t stare at sleeping people. They may get the idea that you’re some kind of psychopath or something.”

“Not a psychopath,” I said. “Just your normal, everyday chef with amazing knife skills.”

“Oh, that’s heartening,” he said, opening his eyes. “Thanks for the blanket.” He pulled the afghan up to his chin and craned his neck to get a better look at the Mets logo. “A Mets fan?”

“Mom is.”

“Mom likes to suffer, eh?”

“Mom
loves
to suffer,” I said. “Don’t all Irish moms?”

“Good point,” he said, pulling himself into a sitting position. “Mr. Met looks like he’s had a stroke, though.”

“Mom is still learning the finer points of crochet.” The kitchen was attached to the living room, so I kept up my end of the conversation while I assembled the ingredients I would need for breakfast: a slab of pork belly that I had brought home from the Manor the night before, some eggs from a local farmer’s market, a loaf of store-bought bread. Milk. Cheese. All of the good stuff. I pulled some bowls down from the cupboard and recognized them as the free stoneware we used to get at the grocery store when we were kids, saving Mom’s receipts and figuring out which items we’d be able to get with our next order. Cargan was the last to get his own dinner plate and never let us forget it. I got the first full set because I was the only girl, the youngest, and, according to my brothers, the “most special” and “Dad’s favorite.” I wasn’t sure about that, but being the only female and younger than those hellions did accord me some privileges that they didn’t receive. Eating the last Oreo. Being believed when I said “he hit me first.” Or not having to sit in the way, way back of the Vanagon because I professed a profound car sickness that could rear its ugly head at any time, particularly when we were going over a particularly windy road that led to the bridge out of town.

I wasn’t carsick. Just spoiled. The boys were right, but I would never tell them that.

Brendan lumbered over to the counter and took a seat, watching me as I started to cook. After a few minutes, minutes in which he was awed by my skill, or so I told myself, he asked me a question.

“So what really happened?”

The fork that I had been using to beat the eggs slipped from my fingers and sank into the deep stoneware bowl, disappearing beneath a pool of viscous yellow fluid. I didn’t have to ask what he was referring to; the look on his face told me that he was asking about my former job and life and that he instantly regretted bringing it up.