Read Wedding Bel Blues: A Belfast McGrath Mystery (Bel McGrath Mysteries) Online
Authors: Maggie McConnon
“How long?”
I told the truth. “Not sure, really. Two days? Maybe three?” I gulped down some wine. “Why? Is there something going on?”
“Might be,” he said. “We just need to question everyone again and see if any memories have been jogged over the past two weeks.”
“Isn’t the case growing colder by the day?” I asked, hearkening back to something I had heard while watching
Castle
with Cargan when I had first arrived home. “Isn’t it going to be harder to solve?”
“Yes. It’s getting harder by the day, but we have some new information—” he said, stopping himself from going any further.
“New information?” I asked.
“Never mind, Bel. It’s nothing.”
“Do I need to be questioned again?” I asked.
“I think we have everything we need from you,” he said, effectively letting me know that I was off the suspect list, if I had ever been on it. It would have been virtually impossible for me to kill Declan Morrison, run down the stairs, and then witness his death. Even Kevin could figure that out. He hemmed and hawed for a few minutes and it was clear he had something to tell me.
“Spit it out, Hanson. You were never good at keeping secrets,” I said.
“We have a search warrant,” he said, drinking his wine down in one gulp. “Two actually.”
“But you already searched the Manor.”
“Not for the Manor.”
“And you already looked around my apartment and the studios.” I thought about what it could be. “The bugs? Do you have something on that?” The wheels turned in my head. Cargan lived in the Manor and I thought a thorough search had been done of the premises, including his room and Mom’s office, as well as the bedroom where Caleigh had gotten ready. “Where else is there to look?” I asked.
He blurted it out. “We need to go back to the studios. The Pilates studio. Your father’s place.”
“Now what would you hope to find there?” I asked. “There’s lot of torture equipment in Mom’s studio and there’s just … bad art in Dad’s,” I said, regretting my honesty.
Kevin smiled. “It’s not so bad. His 9/11 tribute was nice.”
No, it wasn’t. Just ask anyone in the village. “What are you hoping to find?” I asked. “And didn’t you search the other night? The night you found the bugs?”
“Like I said: new information.”
I gripped the glass in my hand thinking of Dad talking to Declan at the wedding, looking chummy, running across Mom the week after his death in the wedding suite, crying. My eyes went to the sugar bowl on the counter, the one with the earring in it. They both had acted very strangely and that was saying a lot, because they were a bit strange on a normal day, a day that didn’t include a relative’s wedding and a murder. “And if you tell me, you’ll have to kill me?”
Like every joke I had told this week, this one fell flat, too.
“Just tell me, Kevin. Do I need to worry? Do my parents?”
“Not if they don’t have anything to hide,” he said. Outside the sun finally set completely, and the apartment was almost completely dark, so dark that I could barely see him. I switched on the overhead light in the kitchen, making him wince. He finished his wine.
“When?”
“Tomorrow morning,” he said. “We were going to come in tonight, but McDougall called in with a bout of scurvy.”
“Is he a pirate?”
“Nah. Just a hypochondriac.”
“He’d better get that looked at. Or have an orange.”
“He thought he had mange last year. It was poison ivy.” Kevin headed for the door. “Well, okay. Bye,” he said, looking at me like he regretted everything, everything he had said, everything he had done.
He was warning me. I didn’t know why and I didn’t care; obviously, he had no idea I was as nosy as I was and that the minute I knew he was out of sight, I would be out of my apartment and into the studios. I waited for the sound of gravel spraying, kicking up onto the lawn of the Manor, before I put my clogs back on and ran down the stairs to Dad’s studio, hoping against hope that I wouldn’t find anything that would incriminate him in this sordid case. We already knew that the guns weren’t anything to worry about, their barrels stuffed with cement and ready for an installation. Mom I wasn’t so sure about. She lived her life close to the vest, and if there were someone in my life to whom I needed to entrust a secret, something that I would want them to take to their grave, it would be Mom. All my life, and I don’t know why, I felt as if she was holding back, as if she was keeping something from me and maybe even Dad. I wasn’t sure I ever wanted to know what that was, if anything, but the stakes were higher than they had ever been.
The former Rose of Tralee, the mother of four boys (and me, of course, even though I never felt like it counted among her friends, the Irishwomen who thought that raising boys was akin to herding cats and worthy of a Nobel Peace Prize), the grande dame of Shamrock Manor.
My mother, the enigma.
Dad’s studio was clean.
Well, as clean as any place that housed used bits of scrap metal, oil-covered paintbrushes, and giant canvases splattered with the musings of what I suspected was kind of a tormented mind. There weren’t any more guns and there was no trace of firepower anywhere, no ammo, no clips, no shiny pieces of metal that seemed to be part of a larger, more deadly contraption. I crept across the small expanse of lawn to Mom’s studio, housed in another outbuilding, fronted with large windows that on a sunny day let in warm sunlight that bathed the place in a soft glow, the bodies glistening in the heat and under my mother’s watchful eye.
I had a key. Back when I had first arrived home, I had answered the phones for exactly three days but had tired quickly of looking at sinewy women dressed in expensive athletic wear. I had taken over for an “exhausted” Aunt Helen, who had needed some time off from the job and gratefully accepted me as her replacement for a spell. Once I left the position, Helen’s exhaustion dissipated and she returned, using the small office as her unofficial wedding planner central location, booking flowers, and ordering cake and making sure that everything Caleigh wanted Caleigh got. Within reason, of course. Caleigh still had her wedding at her aunt and uncle’s wedding hall, a place she associated with proms past and the Irish step-dancing recitals of our youth.
I didn’t dare put on a light; what with the large windows in the front everyone would be able to see me, get a gander at what I was doing. I had grabbed a small flashlight from one of the drawers in the apartment and held it in my teeth as I wrestled with the door, which always stuck and required a jiggle or two to open. In the dark, the studio was even creepier than it was during the day, all of those contraptions standing at attention, just waiting for my mother to bark orders in her low, “inside” voice to the grateful women who benefited from her physical ministrations. I broke out in a light sweat at the thought of the contortions that the women twisted their bodies into, all in the name of “health.” If that was health, leave me out. I’d continue with my foie gras, good wine, and delicious chocolate and die happy, probably at a much younger age than the women who came to the classes. I was okay with that, a life well lived and all.
I wended my way around the equipment and went back into the office. Mom had two desks—one for her and one for Helen—but a quick spin through Mom’s told me that she kept nothing here, one drawer containing only a few business cards, another holding a stash of pencils, and the last four used ChapSticks. Helen’s desk was a different story, the contents revealing just how different the sisters were from each other. Papers spilled from the drawers and it was hard to open them, even tougher to close them when I tried. Old client contracts, new client contracts, stuff that should have been filed but had never been, the history of Oona’s Pilates Studio right there in all of its messy glory. I riffled through the papers in each drawer, the flashlight still between my teeth, my mother’s voice in my head saying, Belfast! If it’s not food, don’t put it in your mouth. I had taken those words to heart, for the most part, but in the dark, and with so much to examine and read, I had only one option. The mouth it was.
I slammed the three desk drawers shut and turned my attention to the drawer that slid right under the top of the desk, the one where one would keep extra paper or pens and papers, paper clips. Not Aunt Helen. I pushed aside a half-eaten peanut-butter sandwich and dug around, feeling around in the drawer for anything unusual, something not a client contract. My fingers grazed a manila envelope, stiff and unyielding and, when opened, revealing a bunch of photographs.
Ireland, 1986. Or so said the inscription on the back, Dad’s mullet on display in the first photo, taken at JFK Airport, and Aunt Helen’s shoulder pads in the second supporting the date. I remembered that trip. It was years before the chicken pox vaccine was required for all kids and getting the virus was a rite of passage; everyone eventually got it, and if you had four brothers the chances were that you would be next in line once the last brother’s scabs had healed. The day we were to leave to visit the family in Ireland, I had broken out in it, my body covered with sores. Mom stayed home, canceling her ticket for the family trip, giving me flat soda when I had a fever, dabbing my body with calamine lotion when the itching got too much. I remember crying like I had never cried before when Dad and the boys drove away, Cargan the only one showing any sympathy for me, knowing, as he did, that I wanted to go on this trip more than anything. His face, staring out of the Vanagon, his fingers waggling a little good-bye to his sister, was an image etched in my brain.
I looked at the photos, the memories flooding back. My brothers were in one photo and Caleigh was in another. And as I looked at the last one, a photo of a handsome boy, good-looking in a dark-haired, dark-eyed way, a few freckles dotting his nose, it occurred to me how much he looked like Arney, a younger Feeney. I turned the photo over.
“Declan,” it read. “Age 10.”
In another photo, my father was crouched down in front of Declan, handing him something that looked like an envelope, the boy accepting it and smiling.
Mom was so quiet that I never heard her enter; that or I was so engrossed in looking at the photos that I wasn’t aware of anyone else in the room until I heard her voice. “Bel? What are you doing?”
I dropped the photos on the floor, the one of Declan Morrison/McGrath as a young boy going facedown, his image hidden from view. “You did know him. You all knew him.”
“Sit down, Bel,” Mom said, less angry than I thought she would be at finding me in the office of the studio.
“I will not sit down,” I said, my voice sounding like an extended hiss. “You all lied.” I shook off the hand she had put on my arm, the pressure not subtle at all. “Did you lie to the police? I thought you said that none of you knew him really, even though he was Uncle Dermot’s kid?”
By the look on her face, it was clear they had.
“The boys don’t remember him,” she said. “At least, I don’t think they do.”
“Cargan?”
“Definitely not,” she said. “He was too young when they met.”
“How do you know?” I asked.
She was silent. She knew just like she knew that not telling me had been a huge mistake.
“Mom,” I said as calmly as I could, “Kevin has a search warrant for this office and Dad’s studio. He warned me, essentially, because I can’t think of any other reason a good detective, which of course we are not sure Kevin really is, would let someone know about a search. You have to come clean. This is serious.”
“I know it’s serious,” Mom said. In the gloom of the office I got a glimpse of the woman she had been forty or so years prior, one with dewy skin and innocence in her expression, one who would soon meet my father and start a life with him, not knowing how mercurial he might become, how his “art” would become a singular focus, to the detriment of the business they built together. Even though the room was dark, I could see that she had tears in her eyes.
I went to bed, confused, a little sad, and a lot angry. If there’s one thing I hate, it’s being kept in the dark.
And onions. Thanks to hypnosis, I hate onions.
“Caleigh knew him,” I had said, the enormity of everything pressing down on me. My parents lying to the police, Caleigh disavowing any knowledge of a man she had met in Ireland a long time ago.
“She only met him that one time. And she was little,” Mom had said. “How old was she, Mal? Eight? Nine?”
And there began a heated discussion of how old Caleigh had been in 1986.
Finally, I ended the debate. “Who cares?”
Mom was beyond doing the math at that point. “I’m not sure she put the pieces together at the wedding.”
I wondered if Caleigh and Declan’s pillow talk had included his admission that they had played Ring Around the Rosie in Ballyminster back in 1986. I suspected not. But the idea that she had met him when they were children haunted me as I tossed and turned and tried to fall asleep. Was she really that dense? That dumb?
I decided, right before I fell into a dream-filled, tortured sleep, that yes, she was.
No one had even a guess as to why he had shown up to crash Caleigh’s wedding. He was a family member, so was he really crashing? Or just representing his side of the family?
When I woke up in the morning, just like he said he would Kevin brought most of the police department with him—sirens turned off, thankfully—and searched Mom’s Pilates studio and Dad’s art space. Mom had canceled the morning session the night before, so thankfully we didn’t have an army of taut middle-aged women stomping around the grounds, waiting to be tortured by Mom in her spandex leotard.
Mom and Dad seemed preternaturally calm about the whole thing, even going so far as asking me to whip up a buffet breakfast for the cops while they trampled through the various rooms at the Manor and its outbuildings.
“A little fry-up,” Dad said, ushering me into the kitchen when I emerged from the apartment.
“Should I whip up a pitcher of Bloody Marys, while I’m at it?” I asked.