Wedding Bel Blues: A Belfast McGrath Mystery (Bel McGrath Mysteries) (17 page)

“Max doesn’t want to do the show anymore,” he said, finally revealing why he was really here.

“Of course she doesn’t,” I said. Max Rayfield was the reason there had been any discussion at all about a reality show about The Monkey’s Paw. She was a cable honcho and the restaurant was her favorite. It all came together except that it didn’t; I didn’t want to do the show. “She wanted to do the show with me, not some guy who can’t make a bordelaise.”

“She wanted a female chef,” he said, spitting the words out with a venom they really didn’t deserve.

“Well, that makes sense,” I said. “Male chefs are a dime a dozen. She’s no dummy.”

He got red in the face. “What did I ever see in you?” he asked.

“Beauty. Brains. Talent,” I said. “I thought that was obvious.” It sounded better and more confident than I felt, but that was okay, given the circumstances.

Kevin appeared at the back door. “I think you’d better go,” he said, and I wondered how anyone took him seriously. He looked like a kid playing dress up in his blazer and pants, his tie tight around his neck.

“You got it, Barney Fife,” Ben said, hustling down the steps. “You’re done in New York, Bel. You know that, right?” he called after himself before disappearing out of sight.

I leaned over the railing. “And you need to know how to make a decent demi-glace to make a bordelaise, something you could never do!” I called after him, but he was gone.

I didn’t look at Kevin until we were inside the apartment again, him assuming his position at the counter. I knew I was officially finished in New York. Thing was, I didn’t know if I cared.

CHAPTER
Twenty-one

Kevin was in cop mode when we finally got down to the business of why he was there. “So have you heard from Caleigh since she went on her honeymoon?”

“What kind of question is that?” I asked. “Would you call me if you were on your honeymoon in Bermuda?” He looked a little stricken, whether at the thought of being on a honeymoon or the thought of calling me while on said honeymoon I wasn’t sure. “Let me rephrase that. Do you think Caleigh would call anyone while she was on her honeymoon? Why would she?”

“So, you haven’t heard from Caleigh?” he said, jotting notes down in a little pad that I had seen on sale at the CVS for twenty-nine cents.

“No. I haven’t heard from Caleigh.”

“Mark?”

“Mark Chesterton has even less of a reason to contact me than my cousin. What’s going on, Kevin?”

He toyed with the idea of not telling me anything; I could see it on his face. But in the end, he probably realized that there would be no harm in telling me, Bel, the disaster, where the investigation was headed, and he spilled it. “We found Declan Morrison’s phone…”

Uh-oh.

“… and discovered that he was texting Caleigh during the rehearsal dinner and the wedding.”

I put on my best I’m ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille, face and gasped. “Really? On his phone?”

“On his phone,” Kevin said, my overacting lost on him. “Did you know him?”

“Never saw him before the wedding,” I said. Finally, back to the truth.

“But Caleigh knew him?” Kevin asked. “How could that be? You two are close. She never mentioned him? Never mentioned having a relationship with someone other than her fiancé? Her”—at this he started flipping through his CVS notebook—“third cousin once removed?”

“No, she never mentioned it.”

He looked at me and the years melted away and we were back to where we started: me, Kevin, and Amy, a trio of friends, one of whom went missing and never returned, the other two trying to forge new lives in her absence. “What, Bel? What is it?”

“It’s nothing, Kevin,” I said. “I didn’t know this guy and I didn’t know that Caleigh knew this guy.” My eyes went to the sugar jar on the counter, the one with the big shamrock painted on the front and the earring shoved deep down into the granules.

“Does she love Mark?”

That was a weird question, coming from Kevin. I thought about that for a moment. “I would say yes, but we have evidence to the contrary, don’t we?” I looked at the pork belly, pink and flaccid on the plate in front of me. “Is she a suspect? Caleigh?”

“Everyone is a suspect,” Kevin said.

“Well, Caleigh and Mark sure weren’t when you let them go to Bermuda.”

His face turned dark at the suggestion that I didn’t think he was good at his job. He wasn’t. Yes, they had had alibis, but maybe there was more to the story. Heck, there
was
more to the story and now one of the key characters in that story was sipping champagne and getting her feet rubbed at a five-star hotel somewhere in the Atlantic. “Everyone is a suspect,” Kevin said, his teeth clenched. “But they had alibis.”

Hers was rather thin, if you asked me. Passed out and alone. How convenient.

“Even me? I’m a suspect?” I asked.

He thought about that for a minute. “Well, probably not you. You heard voices. You saw him come over the balcony. You saw him die.” He studied my face. “At least that’s what you told me.”

It was the truth and I told him so. “I’ve never lied to you, Kevin,” I said, the unspoken words indicting him. He had lied to me, more than once, and all these years later it still hurt, though I wasn’t sure why. Lies. I thought about my mother, her lie about knowing Declan Morrison. The earring in the sugar, found right where the man had last been. “But everyone else?”

“Pretty much everyone at the wedding is a suspect,” Kevin said.

I started naming the least possible suspects. “Jonesy Chesterton?”

“Suspect.”

“Mark’s mother?”

“Suspect.”

I threw one out just to see Kevin’s reaction. “My mother?” I don’t know why I went there, but I did. Mom had been acting weird since that day, whether from the tragic event that had occurred or something else I wasn’t sure.

He didn’t answer, closing his notebook and standing. “Let me know if you talk to Caleigh before she comes back. Suffice it to say that we will be waiting for her upon her return.” He grimaced; he wasn’t supposed to tell me that. “But don’t tell her.” He rubbed a hand over his face. He was still getting used to this detective thing, obviously, finally realizing that the element of surprise would come in handier than the gun on his hip.

I walked him to the door. “Thanks for coming by, Kevin. I’m here to help in any way I can,” I said, even though I didn’t have a lot to offer in the way of information. What information I had once had and that I thought no one else knew was now in his possession. I hoped Caleigh was having a good time on her honeymoon, because it seemed like she was coming back to some unpleasantness, something that would make her little heart-shaped face crumble, her eyes fill with tears. Somehow, I imagined, she would get away with this, too. Just like she always did.

Kevin paused on the back deck. “One question, Bel?”

“Shoot.”

“What did you see in him? That guy. Ben.”

I chose not to answer, giving Kevin a little shrug instead. When he was gone and the only sound in the neighborhood was that of a dog barking in the distance I told Kevin the truth, even though he wasn’t there.

“He wasn’t you.”

CHAPTER
Twenty-two

Sunday dinner at my parents’ house was a standard affair, with the entire clan coming together for two hours starting at five. We had missed last week’s, for obvious reasons. I hoped everyone was in a good mood; the comments from the Damscott/O’Donnell wedding guests had been incredibly positive, bordering on glowing when it came to the food. One guest did remark that Feeney had sung off-key all night, but I hadn’t heard any evidence of that. There hadn’t been any events at the Manor that day, so after some basic maintenance—Dad hung a new painting in the foyer, a weird take on Vincent van Gogh’s
Starry Night
but with the faces of various relatives dotting the sky instead of stars—and another sweep through the kitchen to make sure we were ready for the McCarthy wedding the following Saturday, we all assembled at the big handcrafted table that Dad had built during a snowstorm from two boat hatch covers and some leftover wrought-iron legs that he had purloined from a junkyard.

I had gotten a text from Brendan Joyce right before going downstairs; apparently, he hadn’t been that put off by the morning’s events and asked if I was free for dinner the next night. I offered to cook at my apartment, the breakfast I had promised him that morning not having gone as I wanted. “It’s a date!” he had cheerfully replied, and I wondered if the guy was ever in a bad mood.

Before I went to dinner, I stopped by The Dugout and looked over Oogie’s menu. Amy’s brother, Jed, a local cop, was at the bar, eating a hot dog and drinking a pint of beer that was half foam.

“Hey, Bel,” he said. “I heard you came back.”

It wasn’t the friendliest of greetings, but Jed had never been much of a wordsmith or a conversationalist.

“I’m back all right,” I said, leaning against the bar. “Is your dad around?”

“In the back,” Jed said, nodding toward the kitchen door. “You’re helping him with the menu?”

“Sort of,” I said. What Oogie was capable of from a culinary standpoint would severely limit the changes I was able to make. I was hoping to get him up to speed on your basic BLT, maybe a turkey burger, some sausage and peppers if we ever got to the point of combining ingredients.

“Menu doesn’t need any help,” Jed said.

Here we go again, I thought. Just like the conversation I had with Cargan about the Manor’s menu, so would this conversation about The Dugout’s menu go. “Nothing big,” I said. “Just a few tweaks.”

Jed hadn’t looked at me up until this point, preferring to stare into his pint. “Doesn’t matter, Bel.”

“What doesn’t matter, Jed?” I asked. I was losing the thread of this particular conversation.

He swept his hand around the bar. “This. Food.” He turned and looked at me. “You. Your guilt.”

I could feel the flush starting at my feet and moving up my body. “I’m not guilty,” I said, but even to my ears it rang hollow, a little false.

“Sure you are,” he said, draining his beer and getting to his feet. “We all are.”

“I’ve got nothing to feel guilty about,” I said.

He smiled, but it wasn’t cheerful or pleasant, more of a grimace with some sarcasm laced into it. “Sure you do, Bel.” He walked out of the bar and onto the street, stopping in front of the bar and looking out at the village for a few moments before moving on.

I was unsettled most of the day but tried to put it out of my mind as I ventured into my family home. Walking into the part of the house in which I grew up, I was assaulted with the smell of red cabbage bubbling away on the stove. Cabbage of any kind had had a kind of resurgence a few years back, becoming the new kale, which had replaced arugula as the hot veg, but it was still one of my least favorite foods. I felt as if I had eaten more cabbage in my lifetime than any one person should. Mom always added too much vinegar and not enough salt, and the effect was briny and mouth puckering in intensity. The only thing that saved the meal was the way that Mom roasted meat and I could also smell a fresh ham in the oven, which mitigated my disgust at the prospect of the red cabbage.

Your perfect summer meal. If you were Irish, of course.

Cargan was mashing potatoes with a hand masher, no electric mixer good enough for this task. “Hiya, Bel,” he said. He was in his home jersey, his droopy shorts grass stained. “Great job on the O’Donnell wedding,” he said, as if we had never had the conversation about my fancy food and how it would be a disaster to serve. “Everyone loved it.”

I already knew that, having eavesdropped on the comments from the departing guests.

“And we won today,” he continued. “Eduardo was amazing in goal.”

“Excellent, Car,” I said. “You’ll have to let me know when your next game is so I can go.”

His face lit up. To the best of my knowledge, not one of my brothers had taken the time to see Cargan play soccer, so engrossed in their own lives and squabbles that they couldn’t focus on anyone else.

On the screened-in porch, which faced the back forty, as Dad called it, or the lawn that he tended to with the precision of a surgeon, were Arney and his wife, Grace; Derry and his wife, Maria, or the Eye-talian, as Uncle Eugene called her; and Feeney, with his latest conquest, a girl barely out of her teens and covered in tattoos with the bizarre moniker Sandree. “Her ma named her Sandy, but she didn’t like it, so she sexed it up,” Feeney had told me the first time we had met the lovely Sandree, she of the tattoo that ran up the length of her arm and was tribal in nature. When I had commented that she seemed a little young and perhaps “unfocused,” Feeney had let me know that she had a thriving career as a manager of the local Old Navy and that was she twenty-one, “almost twenty-two.” In eight months. Her birthday was in February, I had come to learn. That made her closer to twenty than twenty-two, but I let it slide. Feeney looked as happy as he could look when he was with her, and she certainly provided hours of entertainment, what with her “original guitar compositions” that she played for us after the first dinner we had together. She had Feeney’s punk sensibilities, the ones he had to tamp down when he sang the standards at the weddings. “Your Tats Are Sick” was my favorite composition of hers followed by “My Pit Bull’s Name is Red.”

Aunt Helen also arrived shortly after I did, Dad handing her a gin and tonic with a squeeze of lime, her signature drink, as she walked in the door. Frank the Tank was by her side, but if history was any indication we wouldn’t get much from him in terms of lively conversation. Helen collapsed heavily onto the wicker settee on the sunporch. She wasn’t as beautiful as my mother, and I suspected that had haunted Helen for her entire life by the way she sometimes behaved around her older sister. It also informed Helen’s treatment of Caleigh—the “pretty one” as she liked to refer to her when I was around and probably when I wasn’t—helping my cousin become someone who spent an inordinate amount of time on grooming. “Is this what it’s like, Oona?”

Mom was placing a plate of cheese and crackers on the round, glass-topped coffee table, and the boys and Sandree descended on it like a pack of vultures. “Is this what what’s like, Helen?”