Wedding Bel Blues: A Belfast McGrath Mystery (Bel McGrath Mysteries) (21 page)

I hadn’t. And wouldn’t.

“See what you know, maybe?” He stood. “We use someone great. A local. Beverly Dos Santos.”

“Bev?” I said. “From the Post Office? Beverly is a hypnotist?”

“And psychic healer,” Kevin said, as if he, or anyone, knew what that meant.

Before I could express more incredulity, Paul emerged from the conference room. “My client is ready to make a statement,” he said, his Hawaiian shirt looking even more preposterous as he made the statement. I hadn’t noticed the full-length hula girl that ran up the left side, looking expectantly at Paul’s bearded face, as if she were waiting for an answer to some question about hula dancing.

“Yes!” I said, blurting out the one word I hadn’t meant to say.

Kevin stopped midway to the conference room. “Yes?”

“Yes. I will be hypnotized,” I said, the look on Paul’s face, concern mixed with sadness, all I needed to see to convince me that if I could help in any way and that help involved being hypnotized by the lady who sold my mother stamps, then I was in.

“You will?”

I stood. “I will. Get Beverly over here.” I walked over to Paul and grabbed him by the arm, crushing the erupting volcano on his shirt. I whispered in his ear, “Hold him off. I don’t know what he plans on saying, but you don’t have much of a poker face, so what Cargan plans to say concerns me.”

“Okay, Bel.” Paul turned to Kevin. “There’s been a change in plans. My client would like to consult with me further, so we will need more time.”

Kevin looked a little stunned so I gave him a gentle push toward a desk with a phone.

“Call Bev.”

CHAPTER
Twenty-seven

I learned later that Beverly Dos Santos had been born Spring Lake Autumn Winter in Woodstock during the Summer of Love to Marcia and David Winter, two hippies from Massapequa who still lived close to where the epic concert had taken place. It was all right there on her Web site, complete with a list of things that she purported to be:

Pet Psychic

Crystal Healer

(Regular) Psychic [her parentheses … not mine]

Wholistic [
sic
] healer

Hypnotist

Nutritionist

[And finally and inexplicably] Clown

Thankfully, when she showed up at the police station she was not in her clown persona but in full-on hypnotist mode. Or maybe it was (regular) psychic mode. It was hard to tell. She studied my face for a minute.

“You have a lot of pain.”

“Not really.”

“You do. It’s in here,” she said, clutching her breast.

My breasts were fine, one of my best features, in my and several others’ opinion.

“Your heart,” she said, making the shape of a heart with her hands. “It’s broken.”

“It’s really not,” I said.

“It is. You just don’t know it.”

Now, I’m not the most self-aware person in the world perhaps, but my heart was no longer broken. It had been—two times to be exact—but right now it was whole and really kind of mended. And the mending was recent, but still, it was all better. Maybe.

“Someone still loves you.”

I looked at Kevin, but he looked away and blushed. She looked at him, too. I’d deal with that later.

“And the cat isn’t yours,” she said.

My mind flashed on Taylor. “I know she isn’t.”

“She will never be yours. And she’s a ‘he.’”

“Got it, Bev. The cat, a boy, isn’t mine.”

She studied me for a few more minutes, her long blondish-grayish hair hanging halfway down her back. I could just hear my mother if she came into contact with her knowing she felt a woman her age should have a short cut, a bob at the very least. My mother’s thoughts as to what “a woman her age,” basically anyone over forty, should be doing were well-known. “Shall we get to work?” Beverly asked.

Since the police station only had one conference room, and I use that term loosely, Kevin asked Cargan and Paul to move to a desk where they sat across from each other, Cargan looking forlorn and downtrodden and Paul punching away at his phone, probably sending Khan Academy links to one of the little Grant geniuses. Paul certainly didn’t seem interested in my brother or his sadness. I shot Cargan a look and put my hand over my mouth to telegraph, Not one more word. He gave me a little nod to tell me that he understood.

I didn’t have a lot of hope for the session, but I wasn’t beyond giving it the old college try. I settled into another of Foster’s Landing Police Department’s uncomfortable chairs and tried to arrange myself in a way that made me open to Beverly Dos Santos’s suggestions of “deep sleep.” Thoughts of onions flooded my mind.

The last thing I remember was Kevin’s look of concern, Bev’s instruction to relax, my saying, “This isn’t working,” and the clock on the wall ticking away, the time now five thirty. My eyes fluttered open again and the clock—which I was sure someone had messed with while I had my eyes closed—now said six seventeen and Kevin’s look had changed from concern to confusion.

Beverly looked at me. “How are you feeling?”

I stretched my arms over my head. “Wow. I feel great,” I said, letting my head roll around on my neck for a few minutes. Any fatigue or stress that I had had in my body prior to my session was gone and in its place was a languid, liquid feeling, a sense that everything was good again and that we could resume our normal lives, the ones that didn’t include a worried-looking brother in the police station and two irate parents. Outside the room I could hear my father bellowing and the lower tones of my mother’s voice, talking to either Paul, Cargan, or both at the same time. It didn’t sound like a particularly productive conversation, but then again, when Dad was involved there was a lot of bluster before there was resolution.

Beverly was leaning against the conference room table, looking me over.

“We’re done, right?” I said, standing. “Did I remember anything that’s helpful in any way?” I wasn’t sure which answer I wanted. “Yes” meant more questions for me and “no” meant no resolution for Cargan and his situation, whatever that was.

Kevin had shrunk back into a corner of the room, his arms crossed over his chest. Had I professed a lingering love for him? Said something totally inappropriate and embarrassing? The two other people in the room silent, the only sound the whir of the air conditioner as it kicked into life, I looked at both of them, searching for some indication of what had happened during my session, one that I was surprised had been successful in terms of my going into a trance, or whatever Bev and her fellow hypnotists called it. “What? What’s going on?”

Kevin, as I looked at him more, studied his face for an answer, paled. “Tell me everything you remember about that night.”

This was getting frustrating. We had been over it a thousand times, or so it seemed. “I told you everything, Kevin. Met the guy at the wedding. Found out later that he had crashed. Heard voices. Next time I saw him,” I said, willing my face not to turn red at the lie, “he was coming over the balcony at the Manor. He died. You came next.” Short and sweet—that’s how you had to keep these things. Otherwise, you’d get tripped up and the next thing you knew you were sharing a prison cell in the local police department’s jail with your brother, wondering why you hadn’t made two ham sandwiches.

“What else?” Kevin asked, and I knew the jig was up. He tapped the phone in his hand lightly to jog my memory.

“Oh, you mean the text messages?” I asked.

“Yeah, the text messages,” he said, not happy.

Bev looked at both of us, thrust into the middle of a drama that she was enjoying thoroughly.

“They were incriminating,” I said, rolling my eyes toward Bev. “Can we talk about this later?” I asked.

“Okay,” Kevin said, knowing the power of the Post Office gossip chain. “And what else?”

“The earring?” I said.

Kevin looked confused but shook his head. “No, not that.”

“Then what?” I asked. “What else is there?”

Whatever it was, he couldn’t say it.

Bev was the one who finally broke the silence. “Why did you tell Amy Mitchell twenty-five years ago that she ‘would be sorry’?”

CHAPTER
Twenty-eight

I guess my friendship with Amy and her disappearance was going to haunt me until the day I died. It had been pretty clear that that would probably be the case, but now I had hard proof. And if my subconscious was any indication, I was my own worst enemy in terms of not letting myself off the hook.

Out of respect for my family and our long affiliation with everyone on the police department and in Foster’s Landing in general, Cargan was also released, and the two of us began the walk home to the grounds of the Manor, both silent for most of the journey. When all was said and done, he hadn’t needed a lawyer, he didn’t know very much, and there was nothing more to say. Kevin was not curious enough to follow up on the earring I had mentioned, never asking what I meant.

Kevin knew why I had said what I had said that night; he just didn’t want to admit it. And by the look on his face, I knew he was covering his tracks and pretending like he was a good detective following up on a lead when, in fact, he was the reason I had said those things I had said to Amy on her last night. I still wanted to ask him why he had been at the river that night after I had eaten dinner at his house, but I didn’t think that doing so in front of Bev was the best idea, so I filed that away.

Kevin and I did discuss the text messages, and if I wasn’t who I was and so completely guilt ridden for doing what I did I think I would have been in bigger trouble. Caleigh’s responses to Declan’s messages were surely included in the ones on his phone but I didn’t know how much they revealed. I had deleted Caleigh’s messages so quickly that I hadn’t had time to read them. But whatever was on that phone, Kevin wasn’t saying, out of respect of me, Caleigh, or someone else, it was hard to tell.

Before Cargan and I reached the road that led to the mansion, I turned to my brother. “Why did you ask for a lawyer? What are you not telling me?”

He had already been through this with Mom and Dad; otherwise they wouldn’t have left the police station and driven away, leaving me and my brother to do the walk of shame back home, something I had done many times, usually in the middle of the night after a party somewhere in the village or out on Eden Island. He looked at me. “I did what you asked, Bel. I told them what I knew. But Kevin kept hammering away at me like I had more to do with that guy’s death and I got nervous.” He balled up his hands at his sides, his body stiff.

“There’s nothing to be nervous about, Car. You had nothing to do with this. You know that. Kevin knows that. And now that Paul Grant knows it, so will the entire village,” I said, trying to make a joke that ended up falling flat by the look on my brother’s face.

“This whole thing was a bad idea, Bel. I never should have listened to you,” Cargan said, walking away from me and starting for home.

“Why did you say he was your mate?” I called after him.

“It’s an expression, Bel. It means nothing,” he said before giving me a dismissive hand wave without turning around.

Was that true? An expression? I didn’t think so, but I let that go. I caught up with him and stopped him for one last discussion. “Cargan, Dad has guns in his studio,” I said, him being the only person I thought I could tell what I had seen.

“Guns?”

“Guns,” I said. “AK-47s.”

“And how would you know what an AK-47 looks like?”

Good point. “Just guessing.”

“Bel, you’ve been nothing but trouble since you got here. If I didn’t know better, I’d think that you thought that Dad was a gunrunner, or worse, and that the entire family is keeping some giant secret from you.” His face turned red. “There’s nothing going on. A guy at the wedding argued with the groom, probably being cut off at the bar. He died and the police will find out who did it.”

“You have more faith than I do, Cargan,” I said, attempting a joke. “If it wasn’t for you and your tutoring in high school, Kevin Hanson would still be in freshman algebra.”

“Dad is making some kind of cockamamie installation. He’s not a gunrunner or…”

“A murderer?” I asked.

“Oh, Bel,” Cargan said. “That’s awful. How can you even say that?”

He was right. How could I think it, say it aloud?

“We’re not keeping anything from you. Just leave everything alone,” he said, the disappointment on his face staying with me as he started down the hill again, leaving me to watch his back as he got smaller and smaller on the road.

I sat down and stretched my legs out in front of me, staring into the copse of trees on the other side of the road. Maybe he was right and I was wrong. It wouldn’t be the first time. I wished I had been hypnotized to forget everything unpleasant that had happened, but no, everything that had happened was now etched in my mind, as fresh as it had been the day it had happened, particularly when it came to Amy and our troubles. I remembered telling Amy that she would be sorry, but it was never as sinister as it sounded, not as dire as Kevin and Bev seemed to think it was. She was going to be sorry that she had lost me as a best friend, that she had committed the ultimate betrayal that night, as far as my teenage mind could see. She had kissed Kevin in full view of me and everyone else on the island that night, a drunken misstep that uncovered the truth of the situation, which was that we were rivals, not friends, and that she had seen me always as competition, not as a soul mate, not as someone on whom she could always count, always rely. As an adult, I could see the truth and the situation for what it was: teenage indiscretion fueled by cheap beer, a bad decision made worse by the things that were said afterward, and the fact that after that night no one saw Amy Mitchell ever again.

Kevin went from pale to deep red remembering that night, along with the fact that I had had to recount the whole thing in front of Bev, Post Office lady/psychic/hypnotist. Clown. He begged for her discretion, which she promised, but we couldn’t be sure that this juicy tale—the one involving a village detective, the chef at Shamrock Manor, and a missing girl—would not be retold thousands upon thousands of time to every single patron of the Foster’s Landing PO.