Read Wedding Bel Blues: A Belfast McGrath Mystery (Bel McGrath Mysteries) Online
Authors: Maggie McConnon
It wasn’t like my life flashing before my eyes, more of an accounting of the last few weeks, an inventory really, and when I was done, in an instant, all went black, like someone had turned out the lights.
In my family, people never say, I love you, or anything approximating a nice sentiment. We don’t hug or kiss. We can’t have a truly playful time where everyone is laughing at once; someone is always mad even in the midst of hilarity, up in arms over some slight. We are a very sensitive bunch. But we do things to help one another and would have each other’s backs if the chips were ever down, even though afterward we would each tease the other about being weak or needing help.
There was unmerciful teasing and sometimes fisticuffs, but I knew I could count on my brothers to be there for me, to pick up the pieces or bandage the wound, both seen and unseen, and make me whole again.
We would take a bullet for a brother, or sister, if need be, putting our own safety second. It was kind of like being in a special secret service of crazy sisters and brothers.
It’s not perfect, but it works for us. I just never expected that anyone would have to take an actual bullet for me.
When the dust settled and then cleared, I realized that I was on the floor of my bedroom, the acrid smell of something foreign all around me; I later learned it was gunpowder, buried in my nostrils. My face was pressed into the Berber pile, a great weight on my head and my body. In front of me, the light in his eyes dimmed, was Cargan, looking at me as if to say, A hand, please? even though we were both prone and side by side, in the same predicament. One arm was thrown behind him, the other stretched out in front, a gun in his hand, his fingers wrapped loosely around its handle.
“Car?” I said, trying to reach out to touch him, my arm immobile. It took me a few seconds to realize that there was a piece of the ceiling on top of me, heavy and unwieldy, making every movement difficult, if not impossible. I touched my brother’s face and felt a waxy coldness and that was all I needed to feel as brute strength overtook the weight of the plasterboard that covered my body. I flung off first one piece and then another, the piece that had hit me in the head rolling off to the side, and stood, taking in the carnage in the room, my breath coming out in short gulps.
Oogie Mitchell lay across my bed, his face in my down comforter, one arm dangling off the side, the gun having dropped to the floor when he could no longer hold on. Great chunks of the ceiling were strewn about the room, letting me know that more damage had taken place after I had been knocked out. I knelt beside my brother, not caring if Oogie was dead or alive, and took Cargan’s face in my hands.
“Car? Cargan!” I said again, and not getting an answer, just that blank stare, I ran into the kitchen and grabbed my phone, calling Kevin’s cell and saying something, I don’t remember what, when he picked up.
I don’t know how my parents or anyone else on the property missed what was going on, but they only came running when they heard the sirens. I sat beside my brother, thinking he was still alive, hoping I was right, and holding his hand, cold and lifeless in my own. Kevin was the first person through the door, followed by a uniformed officer who had never seen such carnage, the look on his face indicating that he may have chosen the wrong line of work after all. Soon there were other cops and then people I recognized from various parts of my life and who were involved in the volunteer ambulance corps. I was shuttled about and moved to the living room, where I immediately stained my white slipcovered Ikea sofa with the blood from a wound I hadn’t remembered getting, didn’t know I had. I put my hand to my head and came away with a palm full of thick, red blood, my hair knotted and soaked with it.
It was all a blur, Mom next to me as Jane-Marie Bell, a girl from freshman algebra, combed through my hair until she got to the wound that was responsible for all of the blood, remarking at how I hadn’t changed a bit, how pretty I still was, asking if I liked being a chef, all in such a way that even I, in my addled state, knew that she was making small talk to keep me preoccupied.
A body on a stretcher came out of the bedroom, and then another one. I looked at Mom, but she was as she always is: Composed. Perfect. Poised.
She watched the activity by the door. “Guns. They will be our downfall.” She put a hand on my arm when Jane-Marie walked away to confer with her boss. “After we get through this, I’ll tell you everything.”
“There’s more?” I said. How much more? And what could it be? I wasn’t sure how much more I could handle.
“Just a little,” she said, and licked her lips.
I had to wear a head scarf to cover the part of my head where they had shaved my hair away and that morning, two weeks after everything, added a pair of giant hoop earrings to add a look of whimsy to the getup. I’d be a gypsy until my hair grew back. I had moved back into the Manor proper, temporarily, or so I told myself, while my apartment was turned from a crime scene back into a suitable place for living. We had gotten through the last two weddings with a little help from my brothers, who in addition to rehearsing for their performances, served as prep cooks in the kitchen in the days prior to the events, helping me silently when I gave them assorted tasks: chops these carrots. Trim this beef. Roll this dough.
Today, before I started prepping for the upcoming weekend’s wedding, I made a nice fry-up, as Dad would call it: Bacon, two eggs over easy, fried potatoes. Fresh orange juice. A grapefruit cut up with a little sugar dusted on the top. Two pieces of toast slathered with Irish butter. A strong cup of coffee laced with real cream.
I carried the tray up the stairs and knocked on the door to the bridal suite, the largest room in the Manor with an en suite bathroom, most suitable for someone recovering from a catastrophic injury. “Knock, knock,” I said before toeing open the door and peering in.
As he had been for the last week since he had been home, Cargan was sitting in the Queen Anne chair by the window, looking out over the barren Foster’s Landing River. “Hiya, Bel.”
“Hiya, Car,” I said. The doctor said that it was a miracle my brother was still alive, and credited his survival to what the doctor called my quick thinking and fast action. If he meant calling Kevin and screaming into the phone and that qualified as “quick thinking,” well, then okay. When I first opened my eyes that afternoon in the apartment, I thought for sure Cargan was dead, having taken a bullet for me, not knowing that his own quick thinking, and agility from years of playing soccer, had allowed him to move just enough so that the bullet tore through his side and exited out his back without touching a major organ or his spine.
That and his training.
The police had gotten there so fast because Cargan was one of their own. Deep undercover, but one of them, nonetheless, that deep cover blown when I had discovered the setup in the basement and Kevin the bugs all throughout the Manor. Kevin already knew about Cargan from that day at the station, the two of them enacting an incredibly convincing play for me that included Cargan asking for a lawyer and keeping up the façade that he was not as smart as the rest of us. Thing was, he was smarter. Way smarter. He had been pulled from the Police Academy—we had been told he flunked out—and put into a special anti-terrorism unit years before. His last gig had been so dangerous that he had been given a leave of absence and returned home to the Manor—the place he considered home base anyway—to figure out what he would do next. He didn’t need to wait long: he suspected Eugene was still in the gun business, a few clues dropped his way to indicate that he was correct, and the wedding, his living in the Manor, afforded Cargan the opportunity to figure out if that was the case.
Turns out that those years Cargan had spent traveling and touring “playing music” had been the years he had trained with a special unit of the NYPD that investigated terrorism in all of its nefarious incarnations. He was especially helpful in unmasking the leader of a rogue IRA group assembling in Brooklyn—a guy who was the head usher at a rather large church in Brooklyn while plotting to take out the royal family during a trip to the States—and averting tragedy for the British monarchy. Cargan had uncovered yet another group who wanted to assassinate the Pope when he had visited Yankee Stadium. People continually underestimated my brother and that made him perfect for the work. He was as close to a superhero as one could get while still maintaining the façade that he was the simple one, the one we needed to protect. What else he had done was a mystery and I wanted it to stay that way because the thought of my sweet brother, “the wee, poor soul” as I had heard Aunt Helen describe him once, struck a fear in me that would beat right alongside my heart.
Simple? Hardly. Wee, poor soul? You couldn’t be more wrong, Aunt Helen.
Eugene was in the weeds, and Cargan was seriously rethinking his plan to put in a good thirty years on the force, the hole in his side making him think long and hard about the life he lived, the loneliness he faced on a daily basis.
He pushed the food around on his plate before looking up at me, the bags beneath his eyes making him look a whole heck of a lot older than he was. “Thanks for breakfast,” he said as he did every day since he had come home.
“You’re welcome. Thank you, too,” I said, but I wasn’t referring to his enjoyment of the bacon, the eggs. It was for him being there when I needed him, just like I had been there all those time when he had needed me, but under far less critical circumstances. “How you feeling, Brother?”
“Like I’ve been hit by a truck, Sister,” he said.
“Every day is better, right?” I said, hoping the answer was a resounding “yes.”
He looked over at me and smiled. “Yes,” he lied. “Every day is better. Right.” He looked at his plate.
“Soccer soon?”
“Soccer soon.”
“I’ll come to a game,” I said, just as I had said all those times previously but still had never done.
“Good. You’ll love the guys. They play the game like they’re possessed.” He pushed the food around some more and looked out the window. “Some of them are single, Bel.”
I held up a hand. “Stop right there. I think I’m off men for a while.”
He smiled and pointed at the river. “The drought. I wonder when it will end.”
“Crazy.”
“It was a good time to add the eyelashes.”
“Huh?”
“I helped Dad add eyelashes to Mom’s eyes.”
“What do you mean?” I wondered if he was this obtuse with his colleagues. It was a wonder not all of them had died from cryptic communication.
“The village pool,” he said. “I snuck in with Dad and helped him add eyelashes to Mom’s eyes. On the mermaid.”
“Oh!” I said. “Well done. Brilliant, really. I saw them recently and they are spectacular, Cargan. The whole thing is really lifelike.”
He pushed the plate away, our small talk done. The joking over. “I want to meet someone, Bel. I want to have kids. I’m tired of being in basements and in vans. Of being with guys all the time, the kind of guys who can never tell the truth to the people they love. I’m tired of trying to figure out if Dad’s best friend is a gunrunner or just some rube with a fake leg.”
I sat on the bed, my hand instinctively going to the spot on my head that had been sewn shut, able to be closed, my brains staying where they belonged, thanks to my brother’s quick thinking. “I hear you, Brother. Now, eat your fry-up,” I said, at a loss to say anything else.
He told me that Mom knew; Cargan could never keep anything from her. That was the “more” that Mom had alluded to that day in my apartment. Like a good Irish son, he had kept Mom in the loop, despite his promise to keep his identity and his job a secret from everyone else. I made him promise that the Pilates studio, and the women who went in there daily, wasn’t a front for some secret MI-5 faction. He assured me that it wasn’t, but knowing what I did now, that the brother I thought I knew wasn’t that brother at all, made me rethink everything.
Those were a lot of fit women. If they put their heads together, God knows they could fight some kind of war, win some battle against something besides carbs. But most of them were too busy starving themselves to fit into jeans that were meant for women twenty years their juniors to be of any help to a paramilitary organization with peace and order on its mind.
“So what do you think?” I asked.
“About the fry-up? Great,” he said, turning his attention back to his food and devouring his bacon. He never could resist bacon.
“No. Uncle Eugene. Terrorist or rube with fake leg?”
He smiled and I saw a hint of my old brother, the one without all of the baggage and sadness, peek out from within. “I’d tell you…”
“… but then you’d have to kill me?” I was using that joke a lot lately.
“Something like that.”
We sat in silence until his plate was clean. “And Oogie? Did you know?”
He stared out over the dry river, not meeting my eye. “I had an idea that he was about to go off the rails. I was keeping watch.” He looked down at his empty plate. “On him. On you.”
Oogie had waved the gun around, but it was not in his nature to shoot. He had fired another warning shot into the ceiling, but instead of the bullet going straight up, it had hit the ceiling fan and ricocheted, hitting my brother in the side. Another thick chunk of plaster had hit Oogie in the head, and like me, he had been the recipient of a boatload of stitches. It was unclear what would happen to Oogie now, what charges, if any, would be pressed. Although everyone in the village was heartbroken by the turn of events, most agreed, from what I heard, that Oogie had been spiraling downward the past couple of years and my reappearance in town was the final straw, another reminder of that aching hole in his heart. I tried not to think about that as I lay awake in my bed at night, thinking that my original decision to become a hermit might have been the best one.
“We all knew something was coming,” Cargan said. “Oogie hasn’t been the same for a while.”