Wedding Bel Blues: A Belfast McGrath Mystery (Bel McGrath Mysteries) (7 page)

I saved the entire raft of footage into a folder called “Recipes.” Anyone who knew me well, like Amy had once, would know that this was a dummy file. I don’t use recipes. I’m too good for that. Then, I edited out any footage that included Caleigh talking to Declan and saved the file as “Raw Footage.”

I stared at the computer screen for a while, the picture of Caleigh talking to Declan a shadow on my retinas even when it wasn’t on the screen. I was good at a lot of things, I determined, but I was getting especially good at forgetting the past.

CHAPTER
Eight

I hadn’t planned on going to the candle lighting for Amy in the village square the next night, but that’s where I found myself, moving wordlessly among a sea of people for whom the disappearance of Amy Mitchell was a singular focus, at least for one night every year. I had pushed my red hair up under a baseball cap and wound a gauzy scarf around my neck, taking out my contacts and putting on my glasses before leaving the house; maybe no one would know who I was and maybe no one would realize that I may have been the last person to ever see Amy.

Earlier that day, I had attempted to go back into the Manor to see what awaited me in the kitchen should I take the head chef job, but the place was swarming with Foster’s Landing finest, led by Kevin and Mary Ann D’Amato’s father, Lt. Daniel D’Amato, our village’s chief of police and keeper of the peace. I was shooed out by a uniformed cop who I recognized as a classmate who had thrown up on me during one particularly laborious bus ride to a local farm when we were in the fourth grade and so, knowing about his delicate constitution, I made haste back to the apartment. Lieutenant D’Amato had caught up with me outside.

“Sorry for your loss, Bel,” he said, referring to what I thought was my broken engagement and lost job. “Poor guy. A cousin of Caleigh’s?”

“Oh, you mean the dead guy?” I said. “Yes, a shame,” I said, sounding far less troubled than I actually was. I was preoccupied by the thought that exactly nineteen years ago Amy Mitchell and I had had our first and only fight, after which she had disappeared, and that the event would be commemorated, as it was every year, with a candle lighting that night.

“Anything else you want to tell me, Bel?” the Lieutenant asked, looking down at me, his bushy black eyebrows two question marks over his kind eyes.

I thought about it. “Nope. I told Kevin everything.”

“Are you sure?” he said, and in that question, asked in a kind voice, was the memory of a similar question he asked me a long time ago when Amy didn’t come home. “Are you sure there’s nothing else you want to say?” he had asked then.

“I have a habit of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, Lieutenant.” I looked up at him, the kindly officer who had been a part of this town, my life, for as long as I could remember. “You know that,” I said, giving voice to the fact that I knew what everyone thought: I knew more than I let on.

They’d be wrong.

He rubbed his hands together even though it wasn’t cold. “Yes, Detective Hanson filled me in.”

I did have something to ask him, though. “Why did he let Caleigh and Mark leave?” I asked. “You know, go on their honeymoon? Shouldn’t they be forced to stay around in case there’s anything else that comes up?”

Behind him, I saw Kevin poke his head out of the Manor’s front door and then, seeing that I was talking to his boss, quickly disappear again. “Well, Mark was on the dance floor with his aunt,” Lieutenant D’Amato said, “and Caleigh was in the bridal suite.”

“Alone,” I said.

He frowned and it occurred to me that while I was only speaking the truth, I had just implicated my cousin unintentionally. I don’t know why it mattered to me that she was on her honeymoon and we were all here; that was the way it was supposed to be even before Declan had died.

So, she and Mark had alibis. It got me wondering who didn’t.

I don’t know what made me go to the candle lighting, but I was here now and took a look around. I recognized several of our old classmates and Amy’s brother and sister in the crowd, as well as some of the parents of people I had grown up and gone to school with. The McNultys. The Blakes. The Cozzastanzas. They were all there. It seemed like the whole town had come out.

When Amy first disappeared, I had lain low, my sadness over the loss of my best friend turning me into a hermit that summer before I left for college. Not to mention all of the people who thought I should have known more about what happened that night. My parents had hovered and worried over me until it got to be too much and I took leave of my self-imposed exile and spent too much time out and about, drinking and carousing, looking for any way out of the deep pit of despair in which I lived.

People hadn’t been kind, alternately trying to insert themselves into the tragedy by becoming nicer to me than they had been before or shutting me out, not wanting to be associated with one of the last people who had seen Amy. Kevin—and no one else really, if memory served—hadn’t had the same experience, seeming to rise above all of it, remaining as popular as before, as normal in his dealings with the people in town. Maybe it was me. Maybe I had become different in my mourning and that’s why people treated me the way they did.

My parents sent me to Ireland later that summer, hoping that a change of scene would do me good. It had. It was so great that I hadn’t wanted to return, but return I did.

As I looked back, it seemed as if every decision I had made, every place I had run, had been as a result of that night, the night my best friend had looked at me and heard me say the words “you’ll be sorry” without feeling a bit of remorse.

I left the crowd and went and sat on the hill behind the Bleeding Heart of Jesus—or BHJ, as we proudly wore on our Catholic Youth Organization’s basketball uniforms—a huge Gothic church, too big for this little village, looking out over the crowd that had assembled in the square below. Amy’s father, Oogie, spoke, beseeching his daughter to return. Jed, her brother, stood next to Oogie, and next to Jed was Elaine, his and Amy’s younger sister, looking exactly as she had when we were kids. She was the one who tagged along with us in that annoying fashion that younger siblings had. The candles bobbed and danced in the encroaching darkness until that was all I could see, hundreds of lights blending together into one.

“She’s dead,” I whispered to no one, knowing that that statement would be received with gasps. Sad sighs. But to me, it was the truth. I didn’t know it for sure, but it had to be. People like Amy Mitchell didn’t just disappear into thin air.

I sat there for a long time, long after everyone else left. I hoped that wherever Amy was—whether she was dead or alive—she wasn’t sorry but very happy, bobbing and dancing in the darkness like the candles that were lit in her memory.

I got up finally after an hour or so and began my trek home. I passed all of my old haunts, purposely staying on the opposite side of the street from The Dugout as I made my way through my hometown, stopping to look in the window of what used to be a five-and-dime and which was now a fancy coffee shop. I caught my reflection in the window and, behind me, the silhouette of someone else, someone a little stooped, thin, with a shock of white hair, his appearance startling me. I turned.

“Oogie,” I said. “I didn’t hear you come up.”

“Sorry, Bel,” he said, reaching out to touch my shoulder, to steady me. “Didn’t mean to scare you.” He backed up a bit, taking his hand from my shoulder. “I thought you said you weren’t going? To the candle lighting?”

“Changed my mind,” I said. Behind me, the interior of the coffee shop was full of activity, people having streamed in there after the ceremony in the village square, grabbing cups of decaf, specialty coffees with steamed milk floating on top. “I hope that’s okay.”

“It was fine,” he said. “Listen, don’t be a stranger. In The Dugout. There’s no hard feelings. Just so you know.”

I bristled. “Why would there be? Hard feelings?”

“Because of that night,” he said as if I would know. “Because you were the last one to see her.” He paused. “You were, weren’t you?”

“That was a long time ago, Oogie. I don’t know what to say about that,” I said, taking a step in the direction of the Manor. “I’m still really, really sorry about everything that happened. About Amy not coming back. I hope you know that.”

“Everyone is sorry, Bel. Not just you,” he said.

I didn’t know what that meant, but I let it go. I drifted farther away until he grabbed my arm, this time more forcefully than the touch on my shoulder had been.

“If you remember anything…,” he started.

“I don’t,” I said. “Whatever I remember I told you and the police that next day and the day after that and the day after that. There’s nothing else, Oogie. There never was.” But that wasn’t completely true; my version of the events was sanitized to keep everyone blameless and without the hint of scandal surrounding them. Doing what I had done then reminded me of what I had done recently by deleting the texts from Caleigh’s phone.

I left him standing on the street in front of the coffee shop.

Only time would tell if anything I had done was right. Or wrong.

CHAPTER
Nine

The next morning, I started the day clearheaded and with a plan. All those years ago, when my parents had sent me to Ireland, I had met a bunch of girls. All distant relatives but a lifeline for someone so adrift in an ocean of grief and anxiety. One of them—Annie O’Dell—had taught me how to laugh again after so many months spent in abject sadness. I looked in a box that I had stashed in the closet when I moved in and found a recent Christmas card she had sent me, which contained two things: one a photo of the two of us in front of a pub and the other her phone number. It was late enough in Ireland to call, so I dialed her number, hoping she was home in Ballyminster, a place she had wanted to escape but had never left.

“Annie? It’s Belfast. Belfast McGrath,” I said when she didn’t immediately recognize my voice.

“Belfast!” she shouted, not out of surprise but to be heard over the din in her home. “Frankie, put that down! For the last time, Jaysus save me, I will put you in your room and you will never come out!” She moved to a quiet place, the sounds of a herd of boys disappearing in an instant.

“Where did you go?” I asked.

“Toilet. It’s the only safe place around here,” she said. “Five kids, three of them boys. It’s not for the faint of heart.” I heard the lid of the toilet close. “I’m happy to hear from you, Bel. What’s the occasion?”

I gave her the Reader’s Digest version of what happened at Caleigh’s wedding and heard her sharp intake of breath. “A murder?” she asked. “That’s awful.”

“It was horrible. I saw the whole thing,” I said.

“The whole thing?”

“Well, not exactly,” I said. “I saw him die, though.”

“Oh, good lord, Bel. That’s terrible.”

“It was,” I said. “But listen, Annie, you grew up in Ballyminster. Do you remember anyone named Declan Morrison?”

“Ah, let me think. It’s Ireland, Bel. Lots of Declans. And Dermots. And Donals.” Someone banged on the door to the bathroom. “Don’t make me come out there!” she hollered. “There’s Declan McDonough and Declan Scurry and Declan Martin and Declan O’Keefe,” she said. “That last one was a bit of a rogue,” she said, chuckling.

“But no Declan Morrison?” I asked.

“Not that I remember,” she said.

I gave her my e-mail address and promised her a lengthier chat in the future, one that would encompass what I had been doing since the last Christmas card that I had sent, five years previous. I looked around the quiet apartment and thought that maybe a week here, away from what seemed like a brood of unruly kids, would be just what the doctor ordered for my old friend Annie.

That phone call was a dead end, so I got dressed and set out for a little wander. I wended my way through the train station parking lot and headed toward the water, something I had done time and time again when I lived here as a kid. Those were the days when we all had kayaks and would spend hours on the river, traveling to a little place called Eden Island where we really weren’t supposed to go but did anyway. In those days, the local police didn’t have a fancy boat—or the staff—to cruise up and down the river and disperse crowds of teenagers who pulled their kayaks up to the edge of the island and decamped for the better part of the weekend. When I was a teen, everyone decorated their boat as they liked and eventually they were all banged up from going out at low tide, when rocks poked through the water’s surface and scuffed the bottom of your boat.

I pulled the car into a spot normally inhabited by kayakers and noticed that you could now rent them there, something that wasn’t possible when I was a resident. Oh, that’s right, I thought: I
am
a resident. Again. As much as I tried to convince myself that I was just visiting, the two months I had been here told a different story. I had a resident parking permit for street parking and a village ID. Yep, I was a Foster’s Landing resident again, despite my protests to the contrary.

I got out of the car and walked to the water’s edge, which was farther in the distance now, a months-long drought making its presence known here. I watched a group of swans float slowly toward me from the north end of the river, the spot right before it dumped out under the trestle bridge of the train and into the Hudson. I looked for other people, but all I saw was a smooth expanse of water, a couple of geese, and nothing else.

I walked around, looking for signs of my old life. The initials we carved into the tree when Kevin and I first started dating. The old picnic table that was used by the local fishermen, its top splintered and worn. It was all still here, just like it had been years before, and in that was a small measure of comfort, the familiar wrapping itself around me like a warm blanket.

Here’s where I was now. Maybe it was time to think of an exit strategy. But the only things I could think of were the sad faces of my brothers and my parents as they watched Goran stride down the gravel path, carrying on about Shamrock Manor being cursed along with the rest of us.