Wedding Bel Blues: A Belfast McGrath Mystery (Bel McGrath Mysteries) (11 page)

I arched an eyebrow in his direction. “About what?”

“About you. About how you’d come back here and want to change everything. About how you think you’re better than we are because you lived in the city.”

“That’s not true,” I said. “I don’t think I’m better. I just want to
make
things better.” I didn’t know if that clarified my intentions. By the look on his face, I would say the answer was “no.”

“It’s fine here, Bel. It always has been.” He leaned down and pulled at his sock, finally giving up and letting it fall to his ankle. “We don’t need your help.”

“Then why did you hire me?” I asked, the office now almost completely silent now that the printer had gone to sleep and the fax had ceased chirping. All I could hear was my brother’s shallow breathing, a panic attack coming over him at the thought of conflict with his younger sister, and the sound of my own heart beating.

He looked at me, not wanting to answer the question but knowing that I wouldn’t leave until he did. Cargan couldn’t tell a lie. He was incapable of a half-truth, let alone a full truth. “Because you were our only choice,” he said as if it was the most obvious answer of all.

And it was.

I knew that was the reason, but I didn’t know that I was going to be hamstrung—no pun intended—by our traditionally minded clientele, my parents’ adhesion to cuisine of Ireland circa 1964, by our “catering manager’s” intractability, by everyone’s collective inability to change.

“Well, okay then,” I said, feeling stupid and overdressed in my chef’s coat. Thankfully, I had left my toque at home. If I had been standing here in a high hat, a trademark of my profession, in front of my brother in his droopy socks and soccer uniform, I would have felt more foolish than I already did.

He closed the ledger with such force that a stack of papers flew around the desk before landing everywhere. I walked over to help him pick them up, but he stopped me. “Go. I’ll do it. I have practice in a few minutes, but I’ll be back later,” he said, and I could tell he was on the verge of tears, for what I wasn’t sure. For everything, I guessed. He placed the Rubik’s Cube on the desk, its colors all neatly matched up and perfectly aligned.

Before the book closed, I had seen a lot of red, a lot of minus signs. Not too much black to indicate that Shamrock Manor was thriving, that everyone involved was making money, supporting themselves in grand fashion. Rather, without anyone having to tell me, it had become apparent that things were a little worse than they had seemed and I, in my prolonged fugue state, had failed to realize it.

You want ham? I thought as I walked back to the kitchen.

I’ll give you ham.

CHAPTER
Thirteen

I returned to the apartment after putting a long day in in the kitchen, getting it as ready as it would ever be for the O’Donnell wedding and any future events in the Manor. The door to my apartment was unlocked, as it usually was after one of my mom’s visits; she always forgot to lock it and that’s how I knew she had been up there. I checked around. No smell of Febreze. No lentil crap in the fridge. No Dustbusters, or new mops, or a broom I hadn’t had before.

I went into my bedroom to change and noticed that Mom had been in here as well, a new development. She usually kept to the living areas. I’m not sure what she thought she might find in my bedroom, but up until now she had eschewed that space lest she come across something that didn’t suit her Puritan sensibilities. My copy of
Fifty Shades of Grey
maybe. A thong that had “YOLO” affixed to the front in sequins I had bought during a drunken night while watching Home Shopping Network. The vibrator that someone had given me at a bachelorette party and that might cause the immediate death of Mom or Dad should they happen to come upon it standing proudly on my nightstand, the pink rubber phallus waving jauntily from side to side. I shoved it under my bed.

My bed had a depression in it where someone had been sitting, my yearbook out and open to a page that showed me and Amy at a pep rally, my mouth wide open in some kind of cheer and her sitting next to me wearing a huge smile. My yearbook had been in my closet, so it had taken some searching to unearth it, but apparently Mom had done that.

I wondered why.

I put it back under the pile of chef’s pants that I kept on the top shelf of the closet and made sure that it was well hidden. Mom was slipping. Usually the only signs that she had been in the apartment were the things she left behind for me. I hadn’t thought she had taken to snooping, but the open yearbook on my bed led me to believe that she was looking deeper into my life by poking around. There was nothing to see here, really; I had nothing to hide. And right now I was just too tired to be angry at Mom. It just wasn’t worth it.

My phone vibrated in my pocket. Kevin.

I know it’s short notice, but would you like to have dinner tonight?

It took me a few seconds of nail biting and mental gymnastics before I thought, What the heck? and texted him back that yes, I could come, falling asleep moments later with the phone on my chest.

That night, after my confrontation with Cargan and my surreptitious preparations for the O’Donnell wedding, I thought about Mark and Caleigh on the beach in Bermuda, sunbathing, not a care in the world unless you count the fact that a wedding guest had come to celebrate their union and was dead before the cake cutting.

I was going so insane that I almost couldn’t wait for Caleigh to come back from her honeymoon. Maybe, I thought, Mark Chesterton would reveal himself to be a really good egg, someone with whom I would bond. Be the brother I always wanted to have, not the ones I did have. Right. That was insane.

I had a few more texts from Kevin, who seemed to enjoy this mode of communication more than any other. According to him, Mary Ann had made “gravy,” or what we Irish Americans call sauce, which we liberally coat with “sprinkle cheese,” otherwise known as Parmesan, for her family dinner and there was a lot left over. She had also made fresh pasta. And tiramisu. All while tending to the children in the pediatric cancer ward at a local medical center.

I looked at myself in the mirror, running a comb through my red curls. “You are so not worthy, Belfast McGrath,” I said, riffling around in the drawers of the vanity that my father had crafted from the reclaimed deck of a boat that was found floating, empty, in the Foster’s Landing River. I found a lipstick, something I remembered wearing to dinner at Ben Dykstra’s apartment for our fourth date—the one when he had said, “I love you,” and I had believed him—opened it up, and then closed it. I tossed it in the garbage. A tinted ChapStick would have to do. I would never wear MAC “Razzledazzler” ever again, despite it being the perfect shade for a redhead. It landed in the bottom of the garbage can with a little ping.

My wardrobe was sorely lacking and I was at a loss as to what to wear. When you work—nay, live—in a uniform like I had for much of my adult life, you don’t spend a lot of money on clothes, and my closet was evidence of that fact. I spent way too much time thinking about it, staring at my choices before finally settling on a tunic I had bought in a bazaar in Istanbul, jeans, and some silver bangles. I was a little upset to find that the tunic wasn’t quite as flowy as it used to be, hugging my curves with a little more seriousness. I guess a steady diet of takeout from Happy Life/Hunan Style wasn’t a recipe for being svelte. Still, it wasn’t enough for me to even consider a morning of Pilates with Mom. I still had some standards.

Mary Ann lived in the Hadley section of town, a short drive from where I had grown up and now lived again. Her house was a tiny Tudor on a tidy street with a variety of different house styles, all old, all immaculately tended. The front door was red and the lawn was manicured within an inch of its life. Everything about the place was perfect, just like Mary Ann D’Amato, whom, if I wouldn’t hate myself for feeling it, I wouldn’t like at all. But I couldn’t go there. She was just that wonderful.

She opened the door, still in her scrubs from work, her shirt adorned with dancing bears. She wore clogs on her feet and her gorgeous mane of jet-black hair was pulled back into a sensible bun. A stethoscope hung around her neck. “Bel McGrath,” she said, pulling the heavy door open wider. “So good to see you!” she added, pulling me into a hug.

I so wanted to be the woman who had an archenemy, but even I—of the vivid imagination and highly suspicious nature—couldn’t cast Mary Ann D’Amato in that role. I wasn’t Catwoman, after all. If I had to be honest with myself, my relationship with Kevin was over long before Mary Ann had reappeared after getting her nursing degree. She returned to the Landing after graduating, moving back in with her mom and dad and commuting to her job at the hospital. I guess during that time she, on the one hand, had saved for a house, like a smart woman would. I, on the other hand, after dickering and negotiating with Kevin about what our life would be like if we did stay together, couldn’t convince him that my new job, which had crazy hours, would be conducive to a marriage. Kids. All those things that he seemed to want yet still didn’t have.

That fact gave me pause. Maybe it wasn’t the circumstances of my new life back then that had been the final nail in the coffin of our relationship. Maybe it was just me.

I stood in the foyer of the well-appointed house, a bouquet of flowers in my right hand, a bottle of wine in my left, and waited for instructions. So this was what it looked like to live like an actual adult. Even when I had lived in the city, my house had that just-ransacked look that someone who worked day and night could identify with. There were boxes from my move years previous and a coffee table that doubled as a bar, dining table, and sometimes seat. I look around Mary Ann’s and wondered if someday I would be someone who had a cut-glass vase of gerbera daisies sitting jauntily on a polished foyer table.

I didn’t think so, but time would tell.

Mary Ann excused herself to change and Kevin appeared from the back of the house, taking both of my offerings. I bit my tongue, not asking the question that seemed most obvious: Why aren’t you married to this woman? And if you don’t to marry her, can I?

He held the wine up to the light to get a better look at the label. “Rosé. Mary Ann’s favorite.” He gave me a little chuck to the shoulder with the flowers. “You done good, McGrath.”

Stepping into the house was like taking a walk through a Pottery Barn catalog. A little rustic chic here, a little French country there. Kevin led me to the back deck, where potted plants and assorted greenery dotted the perimeter and tasteful wind chimes hung from the eave over the back door, signaling to me that this was a place of calm, not conflict. It was a little different from what I was used to at Mom’s. For all of her “
namaste
” this and “universe” that—words she tossed around but that were at odds with her devout Catholicism—the house I had grown up and now had dinner in every Sunday with my brothers and their families was about as calm as Grand Central at rush hour.

“I could get used to this,” I said, realizing, too late, that I hadn’t meant to verbalize that aloud, looking around at the lush expanse of garden, the water falling gently from a rock formation. Maybe I was the one who should have taken up with Mary Ann D’Amato. Maybe she was actually the catch and he had partnered “up.”

Mary Ann emerged a few minutes later with three glasses of the wine that I had brought on a silver tray, bending over to hand me one. Not only was she gorgeous and nice, but she smelled like a newborn baby’s breath, just a hint of something sweet and lovely. Her hair was now down, swinging behind her as she walked. Whereas I felt like I had been rode hard and put up wet, as they say, she looked like the teenager I remembered from growing up, the first female altar server at our church, someone for whom piety came easy. I, sitting in the pews sandwiched between my brothers, prayed that church would be over in under an hour; that’s how I rolled back at BHJ. “Thank you,” I said, resisting the urge to add, I love you! I just hadn’t realized it until now!

She sat across from me on an Adirondack chair, sipping her wine. Finally, after several minutes of uncomfortable silence, during which time the back of my fancy tunic became soaked with my sweat, she leaned in, a concerned look on her face. I was starting to worry. Was it natural to sweat this much at my age? Was I entering perimenopause? “Did you go to the candle lighting, Bel?” Mary Ann asked.

“For Amy,” Kevin added unnecessarily.

“No,” I said, lying. “You?”

“We go every year,” Mary Ann said, taking Kevin’s hand. “It’s beautiful. The whole Landing coming together. Supporting Oogie and Margaret. Just candlelight. And silence.”

Sounded like a whole lot of weird to me. And it had been.

“Where do you think she went, Bel?” Mary Ann asked, studying my face for an answer.

“Amy?” I asked.

Mary Ann nodded. The solemnity of this occasion, one that I thought might include some laughter in addition to amazing spaghetti sauce, was throwing me off my game a little bit.

I didn’t want to say what I thought had happened to Amy, because if I did it would be out there and I’d never be able to take it back. She’d been taken and murdered. That was the only answer, because I had been her best friend—her sister from another mother, really—and she would have told me where she was going if she had left on her own. All I said, an unsatisfactory answer at best but the same answer everyone else gave, was, “I don’t know.”

Over dinner, Mary Ann’s sauce living up to its reputation, I asked Kevin what he knew about Declan Morrison, if the investigation had turned up anything else about the mystery guest.

“You’ve heard nothing, Bel?” he asked, going back to one of the first questions he had asked me after he had come into the crime scene. “Now, after a few days, you’ve got nothing that would help me with this?”

I thought that was
his
job. I sincerely hoped that what I heard in his voice wasn’t accusatory, like I was holding something back—which I was—or I was so addled that I had forgotten everything until this very moment. I was still sitting on Caleigh’s interaction with the handsome Celt, but other than that, I had nothing to offer. “Just some muted voices on the landing, Kevin. Nothing else.” I told you, I wanted to say, but sitting here at this beautiful, candlelit table, with the beatific Mary Ann sitting across from me, it didn’t seem appropriate to get snippy. I wanted to ask if Kevin had Declan’s phone and, if so, what might be on that phone, but I didn’t want to tip my hand in that direction.