Wedding Bel Blues: A Belfast McGrath Mystery (Bel McGrath Mysteries) (8 page)

It’s just temporary, I told myself.

I can leave any time I want.

I would never make Dad cancel an event because he didn’t have a chef when a perfectly good one lived in the apartment over the studios.

I walked away from the porta-potty and over toward the water, my decision made. Heck, that was easy. And before I could change my mind, I pulled out my phone and sent a group text to my family that was comprised of one word.

Yes.

I waited for a response, but none came. Dad thought texting was the Devil’s handiwork, and while he read the ones sent to him, he never responded, afraid to touch the keypad with his response. “Where does it go?” he would ask and while no one could really tell him the answer, we laughed nonetheless. As for the other ones, the boys, I wasn’t sure why I didn’t hear back immediately, but after a few minutes the pinging on my phone indicated that they were responding, the messages revealing that they were happy. The breeze that lifted the hair from my neck felt like a collective sigh of relief from the entire family.

The ground was damp from the tide, but I sat down anyway, holding my shoes in one hand, my knees bent. I was surprised to see that even though there had been no rain, the drought prolonged now, there was still some water in the normally shallow parts of the river, a few birds pecking below the surface looking for fish. Out past the highway overpass was Eden Island, the place where I most wanted to be right now. My last visit there was full of unanswered questions, while my visit here today was filled with different questions, one of them already answered. I looked around, noticing a pair of eyes staring at me from the other side of the put-in area. A man now, he had been a boy when I had first met him. When Kevin stood, I could see that he still had the loose-limbed physicality of a teenager, scrambling over the rocks, a sandwich tight in one hand, a bottle of water in the other. He looked far more anxious to see me than I was to see him, probably because he knew that he had acted like a pompous jerk two days earlier. Or, after all these years, alone with me, he was still a little afraid of me after what he had done.

“Bel?” he asked, making his way over. “What are you doing here?”

Even though I knew that he was a detective now, since I had followed his ascendance from afar, it still surprised me. If there had been a category in the yearbook—“Most Likely to Become the Village Detective”—he would have been my last pick; he was more of a musician/stoner type than law enforcement, but the same could be said of me and my creative pursuits. I had won the math award in high school—much to Caleigh’s chagrin—proving that I could effectively use both sides of my brain, something she always contended wasn’t possible, a myth. I pointed over my shoulder. “Just thinking.” I looked out to the water. “You?”

He hoisted the sandwich. “Lunch.” He sat down next to me, careful to keep his shoes out of the water. “I can’t stand lunch in the station. It takes Loo about twenty minutes to decide on what he wants and then he usually sends one of us out to get it. I’d rather come down here and be by myself for a few minutes.”

“I hear you,” I said. I kept looking straight ahead, still a little sore from our encounter at the wedding, when he acted like me not seeing enough of what had happened prior to Declan’s dive off the balcony was a supreme inconvenience to his detecting skills. No time like the present to clear the air. “So, the wedding. The way you acted. Was that for the other cops’ benefit or did you really mean to humiliate me in public? In the middle of a crime scene?”

He blushed deeply, something I remembered from our time together. His old sensitivity, a trait that I would have thought had disappeared over the years of him being a small-town cop, making itself known. His red cheeks. His shaky hand, palming his face. The last time I had seen him blush like that was when he told me that he had fallen for Mary Ann D’Amato, the Lieutenant’s gorgeous and lovely daughter. “I’m sorry, Bel. I get around those guys and…”

“You turn into an asshole?”

“You should be a detective,” he said, smiling. He held out the sandwich he had brought. “Hungry?”

I shook my head. Although it looked delicious, there was no way I was going to share a sandwich with Kevin Hanson, the wanker, the guy who broke my heart until the next guy broke it all over again with a different form of duplicity.

“You sure?” Kevin asked, taking a bite of his sloppy sub, oil and vinegar running down his arm. He switched the sandwich to the other hand and knelt down, rinsing his arm off in the little pool of clear water that inexplicably remained. He smiled at me, letting me know that he still thought we were kindred spirits, the onetime swim team captain (me) and the former standing bass player in the school band (him). Truth is stranger than fiction, they say. I guess enough time should have passed that seeing him in this casual setting should have been just that: casual. But after everything that had transpired in my life over the course of half a year, seeing him again felt like just one more sucker punch. “You sticking around?” he asked.

“I think so.” Saying it aloud made it seem more likely. I didn’t have anywhere else to be, in truth.

“Want to grab a pint at The Dugout sometime?” he asked. “Well, maybe not The Dugout,” he said, remembering that I might not like to go there. “I owe you one.”

You owe me more than one, but who’s keeping score? “Maybe.”

We stayed at the water’s edge for a while and I finally took a bite of his sandwich, two old friends for whom no time had seemed to pass. “Where are you living?” he asked.

“My parents’. Over the garage. Behind Shamrock Manor.”

He looked at me out of the corner of his eye. No comment.

“Still scared of my mother, huh?”

“She’s terrifying,” he said, laughing. “All those muscles on a woman that age. It’s unnatural.” He took a swig of water. “What does she bench-press? A buck fifty? Two-ten?”

The easy banter almost made me forget that I hated him once, but maybe it was the old him, not the guy sitting next to me. “Probably two-fifty.”

“What about you?” I asked.

“Apartment in Mystic Bay,” he said, referencing a pricey condo complex. “Before you get any ideas, I live on the side that faces the train station. No river view for me.”

“I see. But you’re close to it and that’s good enough.”

“I guess,” he said. “Where have you been since you got here? Why haven’t I seen you before this?”

“My parents’. Over the garage.” You could have found me if only you had looked.

“Hiding?” he asked.

“Maybe.”

“Glad you’re out in the open now.”

I wasn’t so sure about that, if I was as glad as he was. “So, the dead guy at the wedding,” I said. “What do we know about him?”

Kevin hesitated.

“Heck, I’m your only witness,” I said. “You can trust me.”

“It’s a weird thing,” he said. “We think maybe he crashed.”

“The wedding?”

He nodded. “Not on the guest list. Mrs. McHugh didn’t know him.”

Oh, but Caleigh did, I thought but did not say. I wondered again where they met up, what made her decide that two nights before her wedding was the best time to get to know him. “He was Irish. Said he was one of Caleigh’s cousins, albeit a really distant one.” I decided to keep my mouth shut for the time being, my mind going back to the messages I erased from her phone.

“I got that. The Irish thing,” Kevin said. “And it wouldn’t have been hard to figure out anyway. Wasn’t everyone at the wedding Irish?”

“Just about. My cousin Seamus married a woman from Scotland. She was there, too.” I watched a bird swoop in and grab a little fish out of the water, flying away with it in its mouth. “And Mark’s family is…”

“Protestant?”

I nodded.

“And the guy with the one leg?” Kevin asked.

“You mean Uncle Eugene?”

“Was there more than one guy there with one leg?” Kevin asked.

He had a point. “Uncle Jack’s cousin.” He still looked confused, so I elaborated. “Caleigh’s dad. Uncle Jack McHugh’s first cousin. So, he’s Caleigh’s uncle.”

“Aha,” Kevin said. “You McGraths, McHughs, et cetera, are hard to keep straight.”

“He used to live here, but he’s been in Ireland for years.” I splashed some water on my feet; it was getting hot. “Why?” I asked. “And how did you know he had one leg?”

Kevin didn’t have an answer for that, or if he did he didn’t want to share it with me. Maybe he was a better detective than I gave him credit for. “Really. We should grab a drink,” he said.

I pulled a pen out from his shirt pocket and took his hand, just like I had done when we were kids, writing my number on his palm. I folded his hand over and held it tight. “Call me.”

“Oh, and if you remember anything else, let me know,” he said.

I licked my lips, remembering something else: the texts from the phone. I prayed that Declan’s phone had been destroyed in the fall, realizing at that moment that while I had deleted his texts to Caleigh, the originals were still on his phone. I licked my lips again. Jesus, I was developing Mom’s tell. “Got it.”

“Why’d you come back?” Kevin asked after a few moments of silence, the implication being that once I had escaped the Landing I should have stayed escaped. “You were always the one who wanted to get away from here.”

“Had to.” I didn’t want to go any deeper than that; that was the truth. Where do you go when you’re out of money, out of a job, and practically left at the altar? Out of your world, the world you thought you knew? You go back home. “I guess you don’t read the paper. The
Times
?”

“Nah, I’m a
Post
guy myself. Something happened?” he asked, concern crossing his face. Although it was impossible not to know, or so I thought, he didn’t seem to have a clue. This was a village that loved its gossip, loved the tale of the fall. But then again, maybe I was only the center of my universe and what happened sixty miles south in some pretentious restaurant with an even more pretentious name was no one in Foster’s Landing concern. Something told me, however, that Kevin hadn’t lived under a rock, that he knew exactly where I had been and why I was home.

“I’ll tell you when we get that pint.”

I looked over at him, seeing the boy I used to love, the one who had a different idea of success, who thought that staying in Foster’s Landing and making good—showing everyone just what he was made of—was the definition of “making it.” For me, it was leaving and never coming back. Well, one of us had achieved their goal. In his smile was the memory of the fun we used to have, why I would have left everything for him at one time in my life. “You have a job?”

“Funny you should ask.” I held out my hand. “Nice to meet you. Bel McGrath, the new head chef at Shamrock Manor.”

“Really?”

“It’s a job,” I said. Technically, it was. But I still didn’t know what I was getting paid, if I was getting paid at all.

He nodded as if he understood, but I knew he didn’t. If what he had shown me at the Manor was indicative of his character, the person he had become, part of him probably thought that I was there because he was. Rather than disabuse him of that notion, protesting too much and all that, I got up, dusting off the back of my pants, dislodging a few loose stones from the fabric. “Oh, and Kevin?”

He looked up at me, squinting into the sun.

I said something I hoped I wouldn’t regret. “I kind of missed you. This guy. Not the other one, the cop,” I said.

I shoved my hands into my pockets and walked away. It was true. I did miss him. I just hadn’t realized it until now.

CHAPTER
Ten

After my visit to the river, I climbed the stairs to my apartment, hearing what sounded like a chain saw when I passed my dad’s studio. He really was getting into what he called installations now—he had just done one for the river walk at the end of our street commemorating 9/11, his second since the swordfish—and was using pieces of old scrap metal and fallen tree limbs to create “art.” I knew that art came in many different forms and was subjective, but my dad’s installations were just plain weird. For instance, the swordfish had a face. And not just a face, a face that looked like Aunt Finnoula’s—she of the “cankles”—husband, Gerard. Made no sense. Made me wonder if he was starting to lose it, if just a little bit.

In the apartment, no sign of my feral cat, a guy (or gal) who really needed a name, I sat down at my computer and poked around, seeing if there was any information on the mysterious Declan Morrison. Turns out that there were lots of men with that name on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and the like, but none were my Declan Morrison.

If I hadn’t seen him with my own eyes, heard him say his name, I would have thought he never existed. Then again, Declan Morrison may have made up his name, in which case he could have been anyone.

I stared at the computer screen for a few minutes, finally pushing away and taking out a leftover container of lo mein from the refrigerator, not bothering to heat it up. From beyond the sliding glass doors at the back of the house I heard a meow, and I found the cat—name unknown—standing on the deck, the one that was two stories above the ground.

I glanced into the living room before going out onto the deck, noticing that there was a pillow on the floor, a stain on the white slipcover of the couch. Looked like ketchup that someone had desperately tried to clean up, but the mark was there nonetheless. I didn’t take Mom for the type who would eat a meat-loaf sandwich on my couch, but that’s what the place smelled like and the ketchup stain indicated. I couldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth—I was living here rent-free—but why my mother felt the need to spend so much time in my living space was beyond me. I looked at the stain and decided to deal with it later, heading out to the porch and the cat.

“How did you get up here?” I asked, bending down to pet him/her and losing the container of lo mein in the process, the noodles spilling out onto the deck. The cat dove into the old Chinese food and made a meal of it, me wondering how far I had fallen when the thought crossed my mind that I could scoop up whatever hadn’t been touched by his sandpaper tongue and salvage it for my lunch.