Wedding Bel Blues: A Belfast McGrath Mystery (Bel McGrath Mysteries) (6 page)

I looked around The Dugout. The last time I had been here I had been wet, cold, and hungover. I had eaten one of the hot dogs and drunk one of the beers, even though it was barely eleven in the morning, but I had felt better instantly, pushing aside the fact that I couldn’t remember a lot from the previous night except that I had said something not nice to Amy, not knowing that I would never see her again. I had never figured out how I had ended up on an island in the middle of the Foster’s Landing River by myself or why I had been alone. But coming into the bar that morning, finding Oogie, made everything all better. For a little while, at least.

The longer she was gone, the more frantic he became. It was clear, soon after that, that she wasn’t coming back. To me, anyway.

Now, with the place frozen in time, the guys around me focused on their beers, it felt like the right time to come back. No one paid me any mind. Those railroad shifts were long and it was getting warmer, so all these guys wanted to do was drink their beers before going home to shower the smell of metal and solder off of themselves so that they could settle, clean, into their old recliners and drink a few more beers before drifting off to sleep and starting another day. When I thought about it, there was not a soul in this bar, except for one maybe, wondering why I had been gone for as long as I had.

The same knotty pine adorned the walls and the pool table still had a slit by one of the side pockets. Over the bar, there was still a shrine to Oogie’s daughter Amy, gone a long time now, her disappearance something it seemed he had never gotten over.

Me either, I wanted to say. But saying so might indict me, if ever so slightly, in her disappearance and that was something that had hung around me a long time, like a stench that had settled in and clung to every fiber of my being, the main reason I had left as quickly and suddenly as I had, hoping never to return.

“Ran away,” Oogie told everyone, touching the picture lightly when he said it, Cargan told me, even though everyone suspected that that wasn’t the truth. “I don’t know why.” But people like Amy Mitchell, popular, smart, going places, didn’t run away; rather, they jetted off in spectacular fashion, coming back to let everyone know that they had left and when they had landed they had arrived.

On the jukebox, Journey played, bringing me back to that time. Oogie eyed me from the end of the bar. “That you, Bel McGrath?”

I attempted a smile, but a pang of guilt traced my gut. I had nothing to feel guilty about, at least not when it came to Oogie, but I still felt it, deep inside like a heavy weight pressing on my diaphragm. “It’s me, Oogie Mitchell.” His name was Augustine, but he was and always had been Oogie. I wasn’t sure why and neither was anyone else. Like a lot of things in Foster’s Landing, it was just the way things were.

His wariness was reflected in his slow saunter to my end of the bar. As unprepared as I was for this visit, it seemed he was even more so. “What are you drinking?”

“How’s your Cabernet?” I asked, half-kidding.

He shrugged. “Tastes like dog piss. Probably is.” He reached under the bar. “Probably been under here since you left. We don’t get too many red-wine drinkers in The Dugout.” He poured me a glass, pushed it toward me. “But you’d remember that, I bet.” He gave me a hard stare and I expected a tough question. “You in a bridesmaid dress?”

“Maid of honor,” I said.

“Not your color. Redheads shouldn’t wear pink.” He winked. “You’re still a beauty, though.”

I ignored that. It felt weird to have a man old enough to be my father compliment me. “Caleigh got married.”

“That little pissant found a man?”

“Yep. A good one. Handsome. Rich. She’s moving to Bronxville.”

“Well, well. La-di-da,” he said. “She still can’t hold her liquor?”

“You could say that.”

Oogie had turned a blind eye to the fake IDs of our teenage years, and as a result I drank at Oogie’s most of my junior year and all of my senior year, the drinking age a few years beyond my eighteen and a forgery costing all of fifty bucks. Mine had been a doctored license that had once belonged to Jessica Ramos, someone I didn’t resemble in the least, but that hadn’t mattered to Oogie. I suspect he had a cop or two on his payroll, the Landing’s police inexplicably not all that concerned with underage drinking. Back then, Oogie knew I didn’t drive—the brothers always had one of the various cars that sat in my parents’ driveway—so after every evening my friends and I spent drinking cheap beer and eating bad hot dogs he would call out a helpful, “Walk safely!” to us as we navigated the dark streets of the tiny village where everyone knew everyone, but kids were brazen enough to do their underage drinking right in the middle of town. I still wondered if my parents really thought that I spent every Friday and Saturday night “in the library.” Maybe they had too many kids to care, the youngest getting the longest leash.

“Heard you lived in New York City,” Oogie said.

“Used to.”

“Like it there?” he asked.

“I guess,” I said. I did. I loved it. Every single minute.

“Heard you’re a chef?”

“Was.”

“Wouldn’t have pegged you for that,” he said. “You look like you’d be married by now. With a bunch of kids. Taking care of them.” He smoothed back his snow-white pompadour in the dingy mirror over the bar.

Thank you? “You have any grandchildren, Oogie?” I asked, thinking about Amy’s older brother, Jed, and her younger sister, Elaine.

Oogie didn’t answer, asking me another question instead. “Going to the candle lighting tomorrow?” he asked. “I’m giving a speech. Nineteen years tomorrow.”

I shrugged. I wasn’t sure I’d be welcome.

“Suit yourself,” he said, repositioning some liquor bottles behind the bar, in front of the dusty glass. “How’s the wine?” he asked. “Want a hot dog?”

“Wine’s good,” I said. “No hot dog.” I looked into the wineglass, magenta liquid with a few specks of something unidentifiable floating on the surface. “How you been, Oogie?”

He picked up a rag, ran it over a sticky spot on the bar. “Good, I guess.” He started away from me. “Wine’s on the house. If you stick around, don’t be a stranger,” he said over his shoulder.

I’d try. But these days, I wasn’t sure who I was, where I belonged. The past could do that to you, make you a stranger to yourself.

CHAPTER
Seven

“I brought you a cheeseburger.”

My mother was waiting for me when I walked in, having mounted the rickety stairs to the apartment over the garage in her high heels and dress before I got back home. She had a key and wasn’t above using it. How did I know that? Well, first, I always lock the door, my life in New York City and some sketchy apartments I’d lived in convincing me that the world wasn’t a completely safe place. Also, I now had a toilet brush and cleaner in the space where I had put a makeshift litter box, hoping that the feral cat would settle down and become mine completely, even though I was still at a loss as to what to call him. Or her. I could never get close enough to find out. My refrigerator was regularly stocked with salads and things made with lentils, otherwise known to me as “lentil crap.” Sometimes, even though I never made my bed, it was all arranged, new throw pillows at the head, when I returned home at the end of the day. Other times, my living room smelled like Febreze.

I made a mental note to change the locks the next day and then remembered that in order to do so I’d need to make money. And ask my Dad’s permission. With Caleigh off on her honeymoon, probably bemoaning how “her day” was ruined by a guy dying and how it “just wasn’t fair,” I couldn’t ask my cousin for a loan, even though, all told, she probably owed me close to a grand from her borrowing money over the years. Talk about “not fair.” Not being fair was the story of our childhoods, her rallying cry when she didn’t get her way. (Which wasn’t often.) I got a new bike while she rode last year’s model? It wasn’t fair. I got an A on the Geometry Regents and she had to repeat the test in August? Not fair. Everyone was paying attention to me because my best friend was missing? Totally unfair. Amy had been Caleigh’s friend, too. Had everyone forgotten how she might feel?

You know what wasn’t fair? Getting fired for something you didn’t do. That was the unfairest thing of them all. Knowing your fiancé had cheated on you repeatedly and lied to your face. Not having the wedding you thought would be the best day of your life.

All not fair.

Mom was sitting on my Ikea sofa, picking disconsolately at the fabric, her makeup still flawless even after the Siege and everything that had happened at the wedding, her thin legs crossed at the ankles. “Hungry?”

I opened the Styrofoam container and inspected its contents. With blood leaking out of the sides of the burger and ketchup covering the fries, all I could see was Declan Morrison’s busted head and not one of the best cheeseburgers the Landing had to offer. I closed it and thanked Mom. “Maybe later,” I said, kicking off my shoes and climbing onto the couch, finding myself curling up into the crook of her left arm, something I was much too old to do. “Did you meet Declan during the wedding?” I asked.

“Declan who?”

“The dead guy.”

“Oh, him,” Mom said. “I guess during the cocktail hour.” She kicked off her pumps, a beautiful pair of black sling-backs that never would have supported my thick ankles. Irish ankles, the kind that you get from taking ten years of Irish-dancing lessons, or that you were just unfortunate to inherit from your father’s side of the family, Aunt Finnoula the likely culprit. Mom had the legs of a Thoroughbred, but even that wasn’t enough to convince me to get me hooked up into one of her Pilates machines for a spell.

“He’s supposedly Caleigh’s third cousin or something?”

“Or something?” Mom murmured, a question mark at the end.

“But Dad knew him.”

“He did?” She shifted slightly, redistributing my weight. “I don’t think he did.”

Being as I was nestled in the crook of her arm, I couldn’t see if she had used her “tell,” licking her lips nervously. Turning around to see would have taken too much effort and I was exhausted.

She changed the subject. “Where have you been, honey? Work?”

“The Dugout,” I said, and could immediately feel her tense beside me.

“You didn’t eat one of those horrible hot dogs, did you?”

“No, I didn’t eat a hot dog.” I wondered why that was her only concern. I hadn’t been there in nineteen years and for one specific reason: I had been with Amy the night she disappeared. For a while, that made me persona non grata in town, as if I were hiding something. I wasn’t. I had no idea where she went but couldn’t seem to convince a lot of people of what was the God’s honest truth. “I did have a glass of crappy wine, though.”

“Just not the hot dogs, Bel. Those things will kill you,” she said. “Sorry. Bad choice of words.”

“It certainly wasn’t a hot dog that killed Declan,” I said. But what was it? I had replayed that scene over and over in my mind, trying to re-create the sound of the two voices I had heard—one of them certainly Declan’s but the other so muffled I couldn’t even tell if it belonged to a woman or a man—and the events leading up to the point where he landed at my feet, his head cracking open with a sound I wasn’t going to forget anytime soon.

My mind kept going back to Caleigh, spread out on the bed with the canopy, inches from where all of the action was taking place. Had she woken up? Had it been me, even totally inebriated, I would have come running when I heard the commotion, but the door to the bedroom at the top of the stairs never opened.

“Did you see Caleigh before she left?” I asked. “After Kevin questioned her?”

“I didn’t,” Mom said, and I was able to turn my head slightly, catching a glimpse of her tongue touching her upper lip.

Liar.

“Where’s Dad?” I asked.

“Painting,” she said, moving from in back of me and getting off the couch. She stretched, the top part of her dress coming up and exposing a sliver of belly that would rival a twenty-year-old’s. “I guess I’d better go find him and see how he’s doing. He was pretty unnerved by what happened.”

More unnerved than he should have been? I didn’t ask. Maybe I didn’t want to know. They were both acting strangely, and I knew there were things they weren’t telling me. “Thanks for the cheeseburger.”

She leaned over and kissed my head. “See you tomorrow?”

She’d see me every day unless there was some kind of miraculous event that spirited me far away from Foster’s Landing and back into the culinary world of New York City. Maybe that was a good thing. Maybe it would leave me with plenty of time to figure out just what I was going to do with my life, where I was going to go.

Or what I would be when I finally grew up.

“Did you give any thought to what you discussed with Dad?” she asked.

“Yes and no.”

“It would be a tremendous help, Bel. To us.” She smiled at me. “To you.”

“Let me sleep on it,” I said, knowing that there was really only one answer to the question. A vision of Mom from long ago, her hair tied up in a green scarf, stirring a huge pot of potatoes on the stove in the Manor came back to me. Although she wasn’t the best cook and didn’t profess to be, in the early going of the business she was always there, adding butter to this and salt to that, and smiling merrily the whole time. Those times were in the days before she became the “hostess” and steered the events of whatever wedding the Manor was having, a job she took to with steely determination, with less of the genuine happiness that had accompanied her kitchen duty. She seemed at home there. I guess the apple didn’t fall far from the tree after all.

After Mom left, I downloaded the snippets of video I had on my phone into my computer, and it was a lot of footage, more than I remember. I scanned it for any view of Declan Morrison. There he was, dancing with Bridie McKay, one of Mom’s cousins. And there he was again, a few minutes later, talking to a busboy about something. And still again, glad-handing a guy with his back to the camera but who was clearly one of the Protestants. (Don’t ask me how I knew. I just did.) And finally, there he was, the time stamp showing that it was moments before I spirited Caleigh up to the bedroom, talking to the new Mrs. Mark Chesterton, their noses practically touching, a tear running down Caleigh’s flushed cheek.