Wedding Bel Blues: A Belfast McGrath Mystery (Bel McGrath Mysteries) (3 page)

“It’s not so bad,” I said when, in reality, it was too painful to acknowledge. The thought of the wedding dress I had left hanging in my apartment’s closet, available now to the super, the landlord, or the next tenant, was something I had tried to banish from my mind. I focused, instead, on my lost career, the thought of never being in a New York City restaurant kitchen again. That was easier to think about, though difficult in its own way. It was a broken heart, but of a different sort.

“What have you been doing since you got home?” Declan asked, changing the subject in the nick of time.

“The first month, I hid,” I said. “And the second month, I got up and decided that my life was better than that.” I had also come to the conclusion that it was possible that no one in Foster’s Landing really gave a hoot about a formerly engaged, disgraced chef. They had their own concerns. I probably wasn’t even worthy of their gossip.

“Are you happy now?” he asked. “Is not being in hiding working out for you?”

Guy was a regular Dr. Phil. Caleigh’s third cousin once removed and wedding therapist. I could get behind that kind of guy. Or under, as the case may be.

“It’s as good as it’s going to get for right now,” I said, and that was the truth. I was living in an apartment over Dad’s art studio behind Shamrock Manor, feeding a cat that I didn’t own but who showed up every night for a bowl of milk and a saucer of Friskies, and stalking my former fiancé on the Internet, where I had come to find that he was dating a Victoria’s Secret model. Already. And likely starving to death if the photos of his newly trimmed physique were any indication. It had only been two months and he looked as if he had lost thirty pounds. He was on his way to becoming the celebrity chef now, sought after and desired. And I was the maid of honor at my cheating cousin’s wedding. Maybe it wasn’t as good as it gets and it could get better. Time would tell.

“Fair enough,” he said.

Realizing I had finished my beer, Declan went to the bar and came back with two more. “Thanks,” I said. “So are you that close to Caleigh that you made the trek from Ireland?” I asked. “She and I are pretty close. Kind of like sisters. How come this is the first time we’re meeting?”

“First time I’ve been here,” he said. “Caleigh came to Ireland a few times and that’s how we know each other. And her ma and my ma were very close.”

Being as her ma was my ma’s sister and I had never heard of this guy, I wondered about that. But he had a quick smile and a very unassuming air and there was no reason for me not to believe that there was a McHugh cousin from Ireland I had never met. That and he seemed to know my dad pretty well. Then again, the whole crew—Mom, Aunt Helen, Dad, Uncle Eugene—all came from the same little village in the north and stayed together like a tight-knit circle of friends, coming to America, settling in the Landing. I wondered if Dad knew Declan’s ma, too, and that’s why they were talking at the bar. After Caleigh and Mark had said their “I dos” I had noticed Dad and Declan at the bar, deep in conversation, my dad’s hands on Declan’s shoulders in a paternal gesture that suggested that this was not the first time they had met.

“Where’s your mom now?” I asked. I recognized almost everyone here.

“Oh, she stayed back home,” he said. “I’m representing the family today.”

“And my dad? How do you know him?” I asked.

“Trip to Ireland in the seventies,” he said, his attention diverted by a buxom guest in a strapless gown.

I looked around the hall, noticing that after a short break the dance floor had filled once again.

“You fancy a dance?” he asked, holding out his hand. No ring. Good sign.

“Oh, thanks. You’re sweet. But no.” Truth was, I was only a good dancer with half a bag on. I pointed to my feet. “Aching dogs.”

“Ah,” he said. “Too bad. Maybe a pint when all of this,” he said, waving a hand around the room, “is over?” He flashed that smile again and, I’m sorry to say, I was becoming kind of a sucker for it.

“Maybe,” I said, and downed my pint. Caleigh and Mark were headed back from the great lawn and it appeared that despite having suffered through one round of toasts, we were going to suffer through another.

I watched my brothers reassemble on the stage after a short break, the tension between Arney and Feeney palpable as they argued about which song they would now play now that some of the Irish-dancing stuff was out of the way. A line of people queued up to toast the happy couple. I noticed Declan Morrison somewhere in the crowd and he gave me a little wave, making a gesture that suggested we would be drinking another pint together when all of this was over.

Caleigh returned to the hall and I watched her dance with my father, the old guy sobbing like he was sending her off to Afghanistan rather than a five-bedroom house down county in Bronxville, complete with a full-time maid and groundskeeper. When they were finished, she grabbed me as she exited the dance floor, holding on to my arm to steady herself. Caleigh could never hold her liquor; I knew that from experience. My car had been detailed more than once after a night spent with my darling cousin, a trip to Eden Island in the middle of the Foster’s Landing River to party ending with a crying, nauseated Caleigh in the backseat.

“Why don’t I get you a glass of water, Caleigh?” I asked, extricating her hand from my arm. She had the brute strength of someone who was a devotee of my mother’s legendary Pilates classes. Around Foster’s Landing, there was a cadre of women who looked more fit than a team of Navy SEALs thanks to Oona McGrath’s torture sessions. “Oona” means “Queen of the Fairies” in Gaelic, but for my mother it meant “Queen of the Biceps.” At sixty-five, the woman could bench-press her body weight and then some.

“Cute, right?” Caleigh slurred, accepting the glass of water I had grabbed from a nearby table and slurping noisily.

“Who?”

“The guy you were talking to.”

“Yes. Adorable,” I said. “Apparently, you’re related?”

She didn’t answer, spilling the rest of the water down the front of her dress, missing her mouth completely. “I love you, Bel. You are the closest thing to a sister I’ve ever had.”

I’d seen this show before, too. This was the part where Caleigh had so much to drink that she turned sappy and sentimental. If I weren’t careful, copious tears would follow, sentimentality followed quickly by spiraling depression. I chose my words carefully. “I love you, too, Caleigh.” It was the second time I had said it that day, words that I had never uttered to Caleigh ever before.

“Like a sister?”

“Like a sister. Now let’s get you upstairs,” I said, steering her toward the exit. I looked around for Mark, but he was nowhere to be found.

“We’re best friends! Right, Bel?”

“Right. Yep. The bestest.”

I pushed open the door to the hall and escorted her out into the grand foyer of the mansion and toward the stairs, which hadn’t seemed so daunting when I wasn’t half-carrying a 110-pound bride. Now their wide expanse practically mocked me as I stood at the bottom, staring up at the Promised Land above, the second floor and the bedroom where Caleigh had gotten dressed.

“And you’ll never tell Mark, right?” she said, taking each step as if she were a baby calf, just born. Behind us I heard raucous laughter as the strains of a peppy hornpipe drifted out from behind the closed doors of the ballroom.

“Never,” I said. That wasn’t a lie. I wanted to forget what Caleigh had told me the night before and move on. I’m sure she wasn’t the first person to have a fling right before her wedding, but why did I have to know about it? I didn’t know who it was, but I knew that it had happened. I couldn’t unknow it and the thought of that made me queasy with anxiety that I might spill the beans one day, undoing this happy union with my loose tongue.

Maybe I was the one who would have to quit drinking, loose lips sinking ships and all.

We made it to the bedroom. Caleigh fell backward onto the plush bedding, her wedding dress flying up around her in pillow-like clouds of taffeta and silk. “I’m a good girl, Bel.”

“I know you are, Cousin.”

Satisfied with that, she smiled under a film of tulle veil. “I think I’ll take a nap,” she said, exhaling a piece of it off the front of her face, her snores immediate and labored.

“Good idea,” I said, hearing her phone, left on the dresser, trill merrily. I picked it up to silence it but ended up staring at the screen, a message from the man involved in the tryst letting her know how great a time he had had. As I looked at his words, I wondered why, of all the people in the world, Caleigh had to have slept with the one guy who had shown any interest in me since my broken engagement. His name—Declan—was displayed prominently on the screen of her phone. There was no last name, but really, did he need one? The only other Declan at the wedding was an eighty-year-old cousin of Jack McHugh’s, and I felt certain that Caleigh hadn’t slept with him.

It didn’t take me long to figure out her security password, unlocking the phone. “Caleigh922”—September 22 being her birthday. I texted Declan back as my recently betrothed cousin.

Please don’t text me again. I’m married now.

And then I proceeded to delete every piece of evidence that existed on her phone—photos included—of what happened two nights before Caleigh McHugh married Mark Chesterton.

CHAPTER
Three

If all weddings were going to have this much drama, I was never getting married.

I had had my fill of my own drama, and now that I was home again I eschewed it like the plague. I had come home to be invisible, to live a life without anyone mentioning what had happened at The Monkey’s Paw in Tribeca, to be seen around town without anyone mentioning Francesco Francatelli, otherwise known as the guy who had won the Oscar for playing the North Dakota farmer with the secret CIA past.

I left Caleigh napping, closing the bedroom door behind me and bumping into Declan Morrison, who, if I didn’t know better, seemed to have followed us up the stairs. Why else would he be standing in the second-floor hallway, close to the room where I had just put Caleigh to bed? The handsomeness I had seen earlier, knowing what I now knew, had drifted away and in its place was an oily suaveness that I hadn’t noticed before.

“She’s sleeping,” I said, keeping my hand on the door, him at arm’s length.

“Ah, just looking for a place to put my feet up,” he said.

I started toward the staircase, turning to ask him one last question. “How do you do that?”

“Do what?” he asked, still lingering by the closed bedroom door.

“Take advantage of someone right before her wedding and then actually attend the wedding?”

A smile spread across his face. “And how do you know it wasn’t the other way around?”

I thought about that for a moment. I didn’t. Although I liked to think of Caleigh as innocent and simple in her approach to things, I’m sure in the years that had passed since we graduated from high school and then college, the years where I had been cast in the role of her protector and de facto sister, she had matured into her own woman, someone who was completely capable of doing something like having a one-night stand with a mysterious wedding guest, someone I had never heard of and now never wanted to see again. My family had changed—heck, I had changed, too—the individual members turning into people I would have to reacquaint myself with over time, it seemed.

Caleigh’s third cousin once removed, my ass.

I didn’t answer him, making my way back to the wedding. I ran into Mark on the dance floor, dancing stiffly with his grandmother, Jonesy, a tiny dynamo in a St. John suit who had told me last night at the rehearsal dinner that the key to staying slim was a secret fifty-year smoking habit.

“Marlboro Lights. Best way to keep your weight down,” she croaked. “Every girl in my sorority smoked them.”

You know what also keeps you thin? Cancer. But I wisely kept my mouth shut and nodded gratefully for that sound piece of health advice. And the secret of her smoking habit was not so secret, I wanted to mention. A cloud of smoke followed her everywhere she went.

I pulled Mark to the side. “FYI, Caleigh is upstairs sleeping off the bottle of champagne she drank.”

He grimaced. “She can’t hold her liquor,” he said, some kind of indictment in his voice. Behind us, Feeney was revving up and a loud song with a cha-cha beat began, complete with accordion accompaniment. Thanks to Derry’s interest in diversity, The McGrath Brothers, my siblings’ unoriginally named quartet, now seemed to cover every ethnicity known to mankind, so much so that I wondered if Feeney would switch to a sitar right after a musical trip to Cuba.

“She’s all yours now, Mark,” I said, reminding him that his vows just a few hours ago made it so that I was no longer her caretaker and that he was.

“I know, Bel,” he said. “And that makes me the happiest man in the world.” His face broke into a smile so wide and sincere that my heart almost broke, knowing what I knew. Sure, Mark Chesterton wasn’t a guy I found attractive, but in that moment—more than any other moment so far—I saw that he adored her. And that was enough to make me feel better about the union.

He walked off, leaving me among a sea of dancers all hell-bent on making “Besame Mucho” seem like a new Siege of Ennis, the intensity of their cha-chaing rivaling my relatives doing their favorite dance. There wasn’t an Irish-Catholic person among them, leading me to believe that the Protestants at this wedding had all attended the Arthur Murray Dance Studio at some point and learned well.

I decided to get a breath of fresh air, choosing the front of the historic mansion for a little sojourn before the cutting of the cake, if that would even happen, given the bride’s inebriation. Although I should have been more interested in the goings-on in the kitchen, Goran was in charge and I had been warned to leave him alone, even if I thought his knife skills rivaled those of Jack the Ripper.

Out on the front porch rocking chairs faced a grand lawn that also had a view of the Hudson, and that was my destination. I had one foot in the foyer, its marble floor gleaming in the afternoon sun, when my attention was diverted by commotion overhead, somewhere in the vicinity of Caleigh’s slumber.