Wedding Bel Blues: A Belfast McGrath Mystery (Bel McGrath Mysteries) (2 page)

Caleigh read my mind. “This must be hard for you,” she said, showing uncharacteristic sensitivity. “I mean me, this gorgeous dress…”

“The wedding?” I asked. “This?”

“Yes, this,” she said. “You’ve always been good at compartmentalizing things, Bel. It’s your gift, I think.”

That was her nice way of saying that I could ignore the obvious, pretend that things that were happening really weren’t. That I could go to a wedding so soon after mine had been canceled and act, just for a few hours, like nothing had ever happened. We McGraths were good that way. Maybe it was a gift.

I turned to look out the window. “Who’s the guy down there?” I asked Caleigh, still fussing with her veil. “Tall, dark hair, good-looking?”

“You’ve just described every single one of our cousins,” Caleigh said. “Not a clue.”

“Nice suit? Fancy shoes? Shiny?”

“Him or the shoes?” Caleigh asked.

“Um, the shoes,” I said.

“Bel, I don’t know. Now could you come over here and help me?” she asked, her hands wound up in yards of tulle so diaphanous that it almost wasn’t there.

I took one last look at the guests below. The guy was cute. I’d have to find him later, ask Dad for an introduction. With my luck, the guy was my second cousin once removed.

“Please, Bella, some footage with the bride, please?” Jacqui asked, pointing to the phone in my hand.

“It’s Bel. And you want video footage of you and Caleigh?” I asked.

“Yes, please. For my Web site.”

Oh, now you need me, I thought. Jacqui and Caleigh preened for the camera, making small talk that basically centered around how gorgeous she was, how talented he was. He did some acrobatic photograph taking, jumping up and catching Caleigh as she did some supermodel turns, the requisite duck lips that graced every single photo of everyone on social media. If they kept it up I would be too nauseated to eat Goran’s famous pigs in a blanket that I saw circulating on trays below, and that did not make me happy.

Caleigh had declared professional videographers “tacky” and was only having still photographs. I was surprised by that. Maybe Francis Ford Coppola was busy today and that’s why there was no one filming every minute of what to me was a wedding nightmare.

Aunt Helen knocked and stuck her head through a crack in the door. “Caleigh, we’re ready downstairs.”

I adjusted the fake diamond necklace around my neck; Mom had lent it to me that morning, keeping the matching fake diamond earrings for herself. It had a habit of slipping, as cheap jewelry is wont to do, showing the clasp at the nape of my neck.

Uncle Jack had died two years earlier and since Caleigh was an only child, it was Aunt Helen’s duty to “give her away,” as the family said. Dad had volunteered but had been summarily dismissed, as he often was by Caleigh and Aunt Helen. I would gladly have given Caleigh away when we were children, but I was stuck with her, me an only daughter and she an only child. We were paired up from birth, our birthdays only a few months apart, and we grew up alongside each other, me getting brainer and chubbier by the day, she going from a not-so-ugly duckling into a beautiful swan who needed help with math. I kept my phone camera trained on her as she swept out of the room in her twenty-five-thousand-dollar dress and into the hallway, standing at the top of the stairs for a moment. She turned around and looked at me, forgetting I was filming.

“I’m doing the right thing, right, Bel?” she asked, her face under the mask of makeup she wore looking just like it had had when she was twelve and I was her best friend in the Landing. Or anywhere, for that matter, her e-mail pen pal in France, the presumed fourteen-year-old Jean-Louis, turning out to be a forty-seven-year-old guy named Darryl who lived in Poughkeepsie.

I put the phone down. I would have to edit that question out later so that Mark Chesterton never knew that Caleigh McHugh had doubts about him. Good thing I was a nice person. “You are, Caleigh,” I said. I didn’t want to marry Mark, but that didn’t mean that Caleigh shouldn’t. “He’s a great guy. You’ll be really happy together.” Okay, Bel, cool it, I thought; any more with the platitudes and she’d be on to me. “Second thoughts?” I asked, seeing her pale beneath the little spray of freckles across her nose, the bronzer on her cheeks. “It was a mistake. A onetime thing,” I said, referencing a secret she had begged me to keep, the black-and-blue fingerprints on my upper arm a testament to the force with which she had pleaded. We made our way down the stairs, through the foyer and to the door that led to the long aisle.

“No. No second thoughts,” she whispered, glaring at me as if I were the one who had professed doubts about marrying the guy standing at the end of the carpet runner that bisected the two sets of chairs for the guests: his on the right, hers on the left. I spied the cute guy who had been talking to my father, and he gave me a quick wink as a greeting. He was definitely not from these parts, as we say here in Foster’s Landing; the cut of his suit and his shiny black shoes gave him away as someone from the other side. The “old country.” Ireland’s 32. I smiled back and then turned my attention back to Caleigh, making sure my nervous cousin looked like the princess she always wanted to be on her wedding day, fixing her veil, spreading her train out behind her.

I gave her a hug and told her I loved her. Because I did, when all was said and done. We were family, and although we had had a bit of a rocky relationship over the years, I would do anything for Caleigh, even lie and tell her that what she had done two nights before was no big deal. Water under the bridge.

Caleigh smiled at me through her tears and I knew I had calmed her down. No one would know that she really looked like she wanted to vomit right before she stepped out the door of Shamrock Manor and that deep down, as she had confessed to me the night before over a bottle of really cheap white wine—okay, maybe two—she knew that she maybe had cheated on Mark, more than a little bit, just the night before.

CHAPTER
Two

I was watching the most raucous Siege of Ennis I had ever seen at any social gathering, let alone a wedding, with 100 percent of the bride’s side and 0 percent of the groom’s participating. The groom’s family watched in perplexed horror.

If you’ve never seen a Siege, it’s pretty amazing. Two lines of dancers face each other and advance and retire and advance and retire before each grabbing a person from the opposing line and spinning them around so hard that it’s not unusual to see an older lady or gentleman get winged into a bus tray, sending champagne glasses flying. The dance originated in county Clare in the west of Ireland and represents the battle that took place when Ennis was under siege. As always, the siege had something to do with Catholics, Protestants, and a dispute over land, which, if you know anything about Irish history, is the root of every problem in the culture.

That and flat beer.

Anyway, it was an epic Siege. It went on for twenty minutes, and when it was clear that the remaining dancers had worn themselves out and I could get across the dance floor without being whisked into a bus tray I headed straight for the bar, where I got a pint, found an empty table, kicked off my shoes, a gorgeous pair of fake Jimmy Choos that I bought used on eBay, and took a breather. Jacqui, I noticed, had taken the newly married couple out to the lawn and was doing some still shots in his patented
Night of the Living Dead
style, not a smile exchanged between man and wife.

Caleigh never told me whom she had slept with the night before and I didn’t ask. It seemed curious to me that she wasn’t dying to tell me, secret keeping not being one of Caleigh’s character traits. She liked to spill the beans and spill them often, which led her to tell my mother things about me over the years that I didn’t want my mother to know, ever. I had learned a long time ago that if you wanted the entire world to know something you told Caleigh. The fact that she had kept her paramour’s identity a secret was telling, in and of itself. I scanned the crowd, wondering if that person was here.

It was a little hotter in the room than I would have liked and, coupled with the mass of sweating Irish bodies, it was downright unbearable. I grabbed one of the busboys.

“Hey, Padraic. Go turn the air-conditioning down to sixty.”

The kid paled beneath his freckles. Mal McGrath was notoriously stingy when it came to creature comforts. “But Bel…”

“Just do it. I’ll take the heat,” I said. “So to speak.”

I found a napkin and fanned my cleavage vigorously just in time for the cute guy in the sharp suit to come over and have a seat next to me.

“How ware ya?” he asked, and I’ve been around enough people with thick Irish brogues to know that he was inquiring after my state of mind, not asking if he could don me like a raincoat.

“Grand, thanks,” I said, speaking his language.

“Declan Morrison,” he said, holding out his hand.

“Bel McGrath,” I said, thinking that I was correct: he was from Ireland and we were definitely related. He looked like my cousin Jimmy on my dad’s side, but then again, everyone looked like Jimmy. And me, a bit. Declan also resembled my brothers, who when together looked like they had just come from a casting call for
Riverdance
. “Caleigh’s first cousin on our moms’ side of the family.”

“Caleigh’s third cousin, once removed,” he said. “Do you know the groom?” he asked.

“I do,” I said, keeping mum.

He leaned in close and I got a whiff of the suave-guy odor. Musk. A little hint of sandalwood. Something else that made me swoon just a tiny bit. “Thoughts?” he asked.

I thought about it for a moment. “Nice. Smart.”

“And?”

“Well, there’s the family money and the incredible good looks, too,” I said. “It’s all good,” I added, more to myself than to the guy across from me.

He leaned back in his chair. “Fair enough.” He asked for a sip of my beer, a little intimate for a first meeting, I thought, but I had been engaged recently to a really cheeky guy, so I was used to it. As I sat here looking at this guy, I found myself not missing my former fiancé all that much. That was a good sign, the ever-present pain in my gut diminishing a little bit. “So, what do you do, Bel McGrath?” he asked.

“Chef,” I said, spreading my arms wide. “Currently on sabbatical.”

His eyebrows went up. Saying you’re a chef always impresses people. “Really?”

“Yep,” I said. I resisted the urge to tell him that I had won the Rising Star Chef of the Year from the James Beard Foundation ten years prior, because if I told him that then I’d have to tell him the real reason I was back in Foster’s Landing and why I was thinking about becoming a line cook at Five Guys.

“A chef?” It seemed my beer was now his and I watched as he made quick work of it. I don’t know why he was so surprised at what I did, but I have found over the years that people often mistake curvy redheaded females for jobs other than head chef. Bartender. Waitress. Busgirl. Nanny. “Been doing it a long time?” he asked.

“Cooking, yes.”

“And no job right now?” he asked.

“No. I came back to the Landing about two weeks ago, so I’m still looking.”

“Came back from where?”

We must be related. He was as nosy as any other McGrath or McHugh, curiosity running through his veins. “I was in New York City. Working at a restaurant.” I didn’t say which one. Even if he was from Ireland, he might have heard about the one-star Michelin restaurant where a former president of the United States had nearly choked to death on a fish bone that had inexplicably remained in his red snapper. And how the actor who owned the restaurant—a famous curmudgeon in his own right—had fired the chef on the spot.

And how that chef, a small redhead with a fiery temper that she had seemed to have since misplaced in favor of a dulled sense of not belonging, had—after apologizing profusely to the former president, who just minutes before had propositioned her in her kitchen—stormed out, telling the curmudgeonly actor that the Oscar he had won for playing a North Dakota farmer with the secret CIA past should have gone to another A-list actor for his role as Rambo’s grown, angry son in
Axis of Terror,
a roundly panned film despite the A-list actor’s performance, an acting tour de force.

And there was also a flipped table and a broken bottle, but I can’t actually say that I remember that part.

I do remember, however, the face of the restaurant critic for the
New York Times,
who between bites of my famous shepherd’s pie—the one made with foie gras—was greedily taking in every detail of the passion play unfolding before him
.

Not my finest hour.

The curmudgeon had always wanted a
Times
review. Now he had one. And a front-page story about the restaurant, the ending paragraph insinuating that the chef who had previously wowed diners with her artistry would never work in this town again.

I didn’t wait to find out. I was out of my apartment, and the New York restaurant scene, within days.

Declan’s eyebrows went up, almost as if he had read my mind and heard me tell the story out loud. “Sounds exciting. I’ve never met a chef.”

It was exciting. And thrilling. And life affirming.

And over.

“Yep,” I said, staring into the bottom of my empty glass. “But I’m back here now and…”

“… and so happy to be among family again?” he asked, knowing that that wasn’t the answer I was going to give.

“Right. Back in their loving arms.”

“Do they do anything here but weddings?” he asked.

“Not really. Just my luck,” I said.

“Why?” he asked.

“Not sure. I guess they like weddings,” I said. Sure, we had the odd bar mitzvah and one or two christenings, but weddings were Mom and Dad’s stock-in-trade.

“Not that,” he said. “Why just your luck that they only do weddings?”

“You really want to know?” I asked.

He smiled. “Sure, I do.”

“Broken engagement,” I said. I held his gaze, waiting for his reaction. People always had one, I had found.

Declan studied my face in turn. “Well, that stinks.”