Read Wedding Bel Blues: A Belfast McGrath Mystery (Bel McGrath Mysteries) Online
Authors: Maggie McConnon
“Please stand up straight.”
Still residing in my childhood room in the Manor, I lay awake that night, wondering why everyone accepted Uncle Eugene’s disappearance with such nonchalant resignation. He was a bad guy; I think we had established that in a few different ways. Delinquent father. Possible gunrunner. Kind of an ass in general. So why did everyone go about their lives not wondering where he was, where he had fled? Clearly, they didn’t want to know.
Below me, in the main dining room, I heard the lilt of an Irish tune being picked out on a fiddle. I got up, leaving the room and walking the length of the hallway, peering over the repaired banister to see who might be having a midnight sojourn in the empty hall, the wedding having come to a spectacular close, with Feeney doing a more-than-passable Elvis impression in a medley that included “In the Ghetto,” which fortunately everyone forgot after he launched into “Burning Love,” the last song the boys played before everyone left. Although it would have insulted him to the core to hear it, I thought that maybe Feeney’s true calling might lead him to Vegas and a pair of stick-on sideburns rather than tormenting the rest of my brothers in the band here at the Manor, but I kept my opinion to myself in the name of family harmony.
The tables were bare, all dishes and linens having been swept away by the busboys at the end of the day, but a few candles burned on what had been the head table. Cargan, his back turned to me, sat with his feet up against the sill of one of the large windows that faced the river, idling on his fiddle, the notes of “The Dawning of the Day” familiar to me as it was one of the first songs he had learned and one that I had heard him play no fewer than a thousand times.
I started singing to his playing, “… Came a fearsome roar from a distant shore / On the dawning of the day.…”
He turned. “Ah, you can still sing like a bird, Bel.” He patted the seat next to him. “Come sit.”
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Waiting,” he said, picking at the strings on his violin. “It won’t be long now.”
“Waiting?” I asked. Outside, shadows danced on the lawn, the
Twenty-One Guns
installation standing guard over the shapes that the clouds made on the grass. The river, illuminated by the full moon, was alive and moving, the light reflecting off its little waves. “For what?” I asked.
Behind me, a familiar voice filled the almost empty hall. “Not what. Who.”
Cargan stood and turned, gently placing his violin on the table. “Eugene Garvey. I thought you might return.”
Uncle Eugene clomped across the floor until he stood on the other side of the table, regarding both of us with hostility. “Now why would you think that, Cargan?” he asked.
From his pocket my brother pulled out a passport. “You weren’t getting far without this.”
“Where did you get that, Cargan?” I asked.
“His room,” Cargan said. “It was convenient that he overstayed his welcome.”
Knowing he couldn’t reach over quickly enough to grab it, Eugene stood there, the look on his face vacillating between hopelessness and anger. “We underestimated you, Cargan. I remember your mother telling me that they gave you kids IQ tests in school and that yours was higher than everyone else’s, but no one believed it. Thought there was a mistake. I can see now that we were the ones mistaken.” He peered in the darkness at my brother. “How’d you pull off the moron act for so long?”
Cargan didn’t respond to that question. “It has nothing to do with intelligence, Eugene. It’s just common sense. You didn’t come back here for the wedding. It was never about that.”
I looked from my brother to Eugene and back again. I hoped someone knew what was going on because I was completely in the dark, both literally and figuratively, as one candle had blown out, the moon our major source of light now.
“My father is a good man, Eugene. But that’s what you were banking on, wasn’t it?”
I looked at Cargan, tried to discern his face in the moonlight. “Car, what is this?”
“I saved his life, lass,” Eugene said. “Back in those days, you didn’t tell the IRA that you weren’t interested in being part of their plan, of helping them move what they wanted to move in those big boxes that he packed his ‘art’ in. I got them off his back. And what does he do? Moves here.” He swept an arm out. “To this. To America. To the glorious Shamrock Manor.” He smiled at me, venom behind him. “I saved his life. And payback, as you Yanks say, is a bitch. All I wanted was for him to accept a shipment on my behalf. That’s it.”
“But he wouldn’t,” I said, knowing that Dad, as crazy as he was, had a very steady moral compass. I had doubted that once and that had been a mistake. “And not only did he not do it; he accepted you into his home, no hard feelings.” I wanted to know. “So why were you running, Eugene? Why didn’t you just stay, since you and Dad clearly had moved on?”
He pointed at Cargan. “The village idiot here. He knew the whole story. You,” he said, giving Cargan a look that was pure hatred, “bugged my room. Just what was the game in that?”
“Just curious, Eugene. You came back after a long, long time. I always had my suspicions about you, but I got what I … I mean what the police needed.”
Eugene shook his head. “I remember you taking apart radios. Putting them back together. Once I found the bug, I looked no further than you.” He moved closer to Cargan. “Now give me my passport, boy.”
“This passport?” Cargan said. “The one that was issued to Martin O’Mallory? If that doesn’t sound like a made-up name, I don’t know what does.”
I stood, not sure what to do. If Eugene was guilty of all of the things we suspected, we were in big trouble. But this was a man we had grown up with, whose home we had visited. Just how far would he go to get out of here? Was he capable of hurting two people he had known since they were little kids? Knowing now what I did about Cargan, I felt marginally safer. But in his baggy shorts and T-shirt I wasn’t sure exactly where he could hide a gun. And thinking about that, the limited possibilities, I decided I didn’t want to know.
Eugene played his last card, pulling a revolver from inside his jacket pocket. “Turn it over.”
“I knew you’d be back, Eugene,” Cargan said. “Martin O’Mallory. Or whoever you plan on being. It was just a matter of time.”
I had a theory and that was that Eugene wouldn’t kill us; he couldn’t. I could see in his eyes that he wasn’t bloodthirsty, that he couldn’t shoot us in cold blood and live with himself. It was all there on his face, evident by his shaking hands. He looked confused and broken and not sure what to do, he obviously went with a not-very-well-thought-out Plan B.
Dad has a lot of theories. One of them is that old people don’t fall and then break their hips; rather, their hips break and then they fall. It was hard to tell what happened in the case of Eugene when he made one quick move, the move that was going to catapult him over the table and into Cargan, but his hip did break, he did fall, and I’ll never be sure what happened first. All I know is that when Cargan called 911 we had the pleasure of greeting both an ambulance crew and a group of cops.
Denny Dougherty, an old pal from kindergarten, was now Sergeant Dougherty; he asked me upon arrival, after the usual questions about what had happened, if now, just this once, I could make him a bacon-and-egg sandwich. McDougall couldn’t stop talking about the fry-up I had made during one of the previous investigations and, apparently, my breakfast spread was the talk of the station house.
I looked at Eugene, on a stretcher and manacled. When I turned around, I saw other members of my family, all in various poses that summed up their personalities to a T.
Dad stood at the bottom of the grand staircase, tears on his face, his friend, the friend who had once saved his life, betraying him. Again.
Mom two steps above him, staring at Eugene as if she could kill him with her own bare hands, the story Eugene had told us just having been told to her for the first time.
And Cargan in the office, idling playing with the Rubik’s Cube, which someone had messed up and made a cluster of unmatched squares, putting it back together in record time, placing it atop the ledger, now filled with more black than red.
I stood in the foyer for a time, long after everyone else had left, processing what had happened and what was to be, coming to my conclusion:
This place is an insane asylum, but it’s my insane asylum. These people are all crazy, but they are my crazy.
I went into the kitchen and, despite the late hour, made Dougherty a bacon-and-egg sandwich and when that was done, started prepping for the next wedding.
The last unofficial day of summer was gorgeous. Bright, sunny, and cool enough for a stroll along the banks of the Foster’s Landing River with a handsome guy who seemed to think that I was the bee’s knees, as my father would say. I was happy to be out of the kitchen at the Manor. Brendan and I went back behind the mansion and down to the edge of what remained of the water. I spied a blue heron perched on one of the now-exposed rocks along the drought-ridden river, more dry dirt than water as far as the eye could see.
Brendan opened a bottle of my favorite Bordeaux and poured us each a glass in the plastic cups he had brought along. “If I’m not mistaken, I would say that this is our eight-week anniversary?” he said, not sure.
“Seven, but who’s counting?” I said. “There was that little break in there.” My relationship with him was easier than any other relationship I have ever been in. He was calm and kind and easy on the eyes. He took me for what I was and didn’t expect me to be someone else. So far, he hadn’t kissed my best girlfriend, but then again, I didn’t have any girlfriends here in the Landing, surrounded by men to whom I was both related and unrelated. He hadn’t run when things had gotten tough and secrets had been revealed; he claimed to have a few of his own, but I doubted it. The guy was as uncomplicated as a golden retriever. Feed him and he was happy. Rub his tummy and he was even happier.
He touched his plastic cup to mine. “Here’s to the next seven,” he said.
“Are you for real?” I asked before I had time to think. In the distance I heard sirens.
“I think so.”
“Good,” I said, and leaned in to kiss him.
The sirens got closer and the serenity of the afternoon was pierced by their high-pitched wail. In minutes the police cars reached the edge of the river, about an eighth of a mile west of us, all lined up. Finally, the police boat, a local vehicle with the FLPD logo painted on the side, started along the riverbed, right down the middle where there was still enough water to make its journey possible. I counted five cops, Kevin included, on the boat, heading toward Eden Island, if I had to guess.
I grabbed Brendan’s hand. “Come on. Let’s see what it is.”
He hesitated. “Do you think we should?”
“We’ll stay back. We won’t interfere.” We got up and walked along the north shore of the river, keeping the boat in our sights. “Stay close to the shore,” I said. “We have had enough go on. I don’t think we want an obstruction of justice charge leveled against us.”
“Or anything else for that matter,” he said. He blanced. “I don’t want to do this,” he said, but in spite of that protestation, he followed me.
Every now and again, along the shore, there was a puddle or a deeper pool of water, one that was in the shade and hadn’t evaporated in the drought. That’s where the birds dipped their heads in to take a drink but where there was no life evident. I wondered where all the fish had gone in the absence of a real river in which to swim.
Brendan lagged behind. “Come on,” I said, taking his hand, but he was reluctant to go farther. “Bel, I’d rather not,” he said. “I have a bad feeling about this.”
I left him finally at the shore, standing beside a puddle while I followed the sound of the sirens. Dust-like motes danced in the sunlight that splintered between the trees. After a few hundred feet, I found out that I was correct about the location of the activity. The police boat was parked in front of Eden Island and all of Foster’s Landing’s police department, or so it seemed, had gathered there. There were three young boys standing at the edge of the island, all being questioned at once by a uniformed cop.
I knew this river like the back of the hand. After all, I had grown up on it, since the Manor had the river as its glorious backdrop. I circled around to the backside of the small island where we had partied as teenagers and walked through the trees, the police too preoccupied with what was going on to notice me. I crept around, wondering where Brendan was, if he had gone back to our spot at the bottom of the hill in back of the Manor, why he wouldn’t follow me. He either had had a bad run-in with the law that he didn’t want to reveal or wasn’t as curious by nature as I was. Either way, I figured we would find each other after this little adventure and I would get the truth from him.
I hung back, as I was closer to the action than I originally thought. One of the cops, whom I recognized as Jed Mitchell, Amy’s older brother, turned from the scene of the action and walked directly toward me, not seeing me or anything else as he knelt and put his head down.
I remember later thinking what a beautiful day it had been to that point, how gorgeous and sunny. How happy I had been, my life finally coming together, my family finally revealing all of the secrets that they had kept close to their own hearts, not wanting to bring me any more pain or trouble than I had already endured since returning home.
I could see a bunch of items on the ground. I left the shore and waded into the shallow water, trying to get as close to the island as I could without revealing myself. Now up to my knees, I circled around the back of the island and crept ashore, staying low, the trees my cover. On the ground was an old, wet backpack, the remnants of a soggy blue-and-gold pennant—the colors of Foster’s Landing High School and all of its sports teams—hanging off its strap. It looked just like Amy’s backpack, the one she had carried everywhere, from school to home to the island when we partied. The sneakers, soaked and covered with mud, looked like hers as well. There were all sorts of things, things that someone had taken out of the backpack: A key chain. A host of plastic newspaper bags that Amy had used on her dog-walking jobs. A Foster’s Landing High School sweatshirt, which, when spread on the ground, revealed just enough so that we knew the name of the owner. An M. An I. And a TCH.