Wedding Bel Blues: A Belfast McGrath Mystery (Bel McGrath Mysteries) (23 page)

God rest his soul, as Mom would say.

Declan was a “bad seed,” according to Dad.

A “foul ball,” in Mom’s opinion, according to Dad.

“And how did you know that?” I asked. “You said you didn’t know him, that you were estranged from Trudie.”

“We heard things,” Dad said, looking at Eugene.

“And the wedding? Why was he there?” I asked.

Neither had any idea as to why he had shown up at the wedding. I don’t know what they were making their judgments on about him, what they had “heard,” based on the fact that they claimed they had never met the man before Caleigh’s wedding.

Dad and I stood in the studio after Uncle Eugene and Trudie left, me staring at him, waiting for an answer that it didn’t seem was going to come. “Spill it, Dad,” I said. “I want everything. The whole truth.”

“Oh, there’s nothing to tell, Bel,” he said, clearly exasperated with me and the entire situation.

The more I thought about it, the more I came to the conclusion that Declan had looked a lot like my brothers; I should have figured out sooner that he wasn’t a “third cousin, once removed” on Caleigh’s side as he claimed but a first cousin to me, no relation to Caleigh, thank God. That thought had danced around in my head—that Caleigh had slept with a cousin, albeit a distant one—since the wedding. One tragedy averted. My brothers all had gotten the recessive gene of the thick black hair that ran through Dad’s family while I was the only one who favored him and was a redhead. Declan had the same hair color and complexion as my brothers, making him a McGrath through and through. No one was sure exactly what color Mom’s hair actually was; she had been blond for as long as we all could remember and we were sure she had some kind of blood oath with her hairstylist not to tell ever what was beneath that shiny patina of golden hair.

“There’s a lot to tell, Dad,” I said. “Let’s start with the guns.”

His mouth opened, but nothing came out. “What guns?” he said, but his heart wasn’t in it. “The guns.”

“Yes, the guns,” I said.

The wheels inside his brain turned for a few more seconds before he came up with a big, fat lie. “I already told you. I’m doing a new installation.”

“Do I look like I was born yesterday?” I asked. “You had a box of guns and you want me to believe that you were going to use them for an installation?”

“Yes.”

“If that’s the case, where are they now?” I asked.

“Secret location,” he said, as if his using fewer words would make me believe this whale of a lie. “They are guns after all.”

Now it was my turn to be mad. Not as mad as the night I wanted to kill Francesco Francatelli, but mad enough. “Dad. Enough. This is getting completely out of hand. We have a dead guy, a box of guns, and now the dead guy’s mother who just happens to be your sister-in-law. What else is there? What are you not telling me?”

But he had shut down, nothing else to tell. He went into the back room and attempted to slam the door shut, but it had never been hung correctly and bounced back and hit him in the back of the head. So much for storming off, showing me who was boss.

Secret location, my ass. I went back over to the Manor and to the one place I had hated since I was small: the basement. The basement was where all McGrath detritus went to die, or at least be stored. I hadn’t been down there since I returned home but, even so, could probably do a complete inventory based on what I remembered from my youth: a broken Victrola; some of Mom’s pageant gowns, moth-eaten and threadbare; bicycles in various stages of disrepair; an inordinate number of tires.

The boys had told me various stories when I was small about what actually went on in the basement, what its main purpose was, the secrets it supposedly held. It was the repository of long-dead relatives, or so they told me. Mom kept the ventriloquist dummy down there that she had used in one of her pageants for the talent portion, and at night it came alive. (There was no talent portion and there was no dummy, I didn’t think.) There were wedding guests who had taken a wrong turn and gone down there, never to be seen again. Skeletons. Ghosts. Spirits. Paintings that came to life.

None of it was true, but that didn’t stop my heart from pounding just a little bit when I descended the steps, my hands feeling along the unpainted sheetrock that lined the walls along the staircase for the light switch. What was down there was far less thrilling or terrifying. In addition to the Victrola and the pageant gowns, there were also decorations for every season, extra banquet tables and chairs, moth-eaten tablecloths and napkins that Mom had never had the inclination to throw away. The woman had been born years removed from the potato famine but held on to stuff in the event something like that wended its way into our lives again, a depression-era mentality that confounded me.

I picked around the giant space looking for the box of guns and found them, tucked in the corner of the basement, right by the giant furnace that kept the mansion warm in the winter. I wondered about the intelligence of keeping guns next to a machine as big as the furnace, but I pulled the lid off the box and found that the guns had no ammunition in them and there was none in the vicinity.

What a day. I was starting to rethink my plan of staying here, helping Mom and Dad get the Manor back on its feet. This place was crazier than I thought, much weirder than I remember, my family something of a bunch of oddballs with a host of secrets that they would go to great lengths to protect. I replaced the lid on the stack of guns, which maybe really were being used for an installation if I believed my father, and turned around, preparing to head back up to the main floor of the Manor and, eventually, end up in my apartment, a giant glass of wine in one hand, the remote in the other. That was the only way to shake off what had been a very strange day.

I started for the stairs but directly in my line of sight, behind a stack of boxes that held the aforementioned moldy linens, their contents marked with black marker on the outside of each box, I saw a night table. And on that night table were a lamp, an alarm clock, and a book, which I could see from where I stood was
Love in the Time of Cholera
.

Cargan had a room upstairs, as did Mom and Dad. Eugene was in a guest room. No one, as far as I knew, lived in the basement, not even the myriad workers who toiled at the Manor, making sure the grounds were kept up and the building itself didn’t fall to the ground. I walked over to the bed and put my hand on the blanket, still warm from the body who had gotten up, probably at the sound of my footsteps, when the light had come on at the top of the stairs. The bed had been made with military precision and underneath it was a small suitcase with no identifying tags as to whom it belonged to, from whence it had come. I began to pull it out from under the bed and it got snagged under the bed frame. I lifted the frame with one hand and pulled the suitcase out with the other. The suitcase was locked. I looked around for something to jimmy it open, pulling open the drawer of the nightstand only to find a small piece of paper, a business card for a local exterminator.

And a gun.

The lights went out and my heart stopped beating.

CHAPTER
Thirty-one

Kevin’s flip-flops and Bermuda shorts didn’t lend themselves to an air of professionalism, but it was late and he was doing other things when Officer Penner, a nice cop who seemed to know at least one of my backstories judging from the judgmental crease in his brow, showed up to start the investigation into my discovery. It didn’t take long for them to get here, maybe ten minutes, and when they emerged from the basement, another twenty minutes later, it had been enough time for Mom, Dad, and Cargan to assemble in the office to await the verdict on my discovery and what it might mean. There was another cop outside sweeping the perimeter, looking for any indication that an intruder was on the premises, someone with great taste in literature.

And a gun. Let’s not forget that.

I had banged the heck of out of my shin when I started fleeing the basement, running straight into some piece that stuck out of the furnace, the sound not unlike something you might hear on a Saturday-morning cartoon.
Thunk.
I had stumbled up the stairs to the empty foyer and turned on every light I could, the memories of being in the black basement—with possibly a ventriloquist dummy that came alive at night—something that most definitely was going to haunt my dreams. Sitting in the office, I looked down and saw that I had quite a bruise forming.

But everyone else was still in the midst of their own ruminations about what I had seen, who could possibly be living in the basement. Dad’s shoulders sagged with the weight of a new set of issues for the Manor, while Mom—clad in a colorful silk kimono and backless, high-heeled slippers—allowed just the barest hint of worry to cross her unlined brow.

“What else can go wrong, Mal?” she asked.

But my father had no answers, slumped in one of the office chairs, his hand over his eyes.

Cargan held the ledger in his lap like a security blanket, saying nothing.

I pointed to my bruised shin. “Wow, this hurts,” I said, hoping someone would take the hint and get me a Baggie of ice from the kitchen next door, but Mom and Dad were arguing about the owner of the contents downstairs and just how they were going to explain a box of AK-47s to Kevin Hanson.

Turns out they didn’t need to. Kevin came up the stairs from the basement a few minutes later, coughing noisily, having ingested decades-old Manor basement dust during his walk-through. “The AK-47s, Mr. McGrath? Should we start with those?”

“A new installation,” Dad said, barely lifting his head.

“Fantastic,” Kevin said, and Dad smiled, tone-deaf to sarcasm, especially where it concerned his artwork.

I found it odd that Kevin accepted the explanation so readily.

“The barrels are stuffed with cement,” Kevin said, reading my mind.

Knowing that fact would have saved me hours of perseveration. I wished I had taken the time to look when I first discovered them, the hours spent thinking my father was an IRA gunrunner hours I would never get back. Or maybe the cement was a recent addition.

“So what did you find?” I asked. “Did you see everything? The night table? The alarm clock? The gun? The copy of the Gabriel García Márquez?”

“The ‘you look fantastic’ guy?” Kevin asked.

“It’s ‘you look marvelous,’ and no, not him,” I said. “The author of the book.”

“That’s Fernando Lamas,” Cargan said. “The ‘you look marvelous’ guy,” he added when no one seemed to know what Kevin was talking about.

Dad perked up. “Wasn’t he married to Ava Gardner?”

Mom shook her head. “No. Arlene Francis. From
Password
.”

Cargan looked dubious. “I thought he was married to Rosemary Clooney. And I think Arlene Francis was on
What’s My Line?
”

“That was José Ferrer,” Mom said.

“On
What’s My Line?
” Dad asked.

Kevin shot me a look—your family is crazy. I couldn’t disagree.

I clapped my hands together. “As fascinating as this walk down Hollywood’s memory lane is, I’d like to hear what Kevin found in the basement.” I looked at Mom and Dad. “You as well?”

Mom pulled her kimono tight around her slim body. “Of course. Continue, Detective Hanson. What did you find?”

It was Kevin’s big moment; it was written all over his face. “Nothing.”

“Well, how could that be?” Mom asked. “Belfast told you about everything down there.”

“No bed, no night table, no alarm clock. No ‘you look marvelous’ guy or the book he wrote. And definitely no gun,” Kevin said, shrugging. “We searched everywhere.”

I wanted to ask if they found a living ventriloquist dummy, even though 90 percent of me didn’t think one existed, but I kept my mouth shut. Cargan drifted out of the room and went to the kitchen; he returned a few minutes later with a Baggie filled with ice and handed it to me with a sad smile.

I closed my eyes, hoping against hope that what I was about to say was not the truth. “Please, dear God, tell me that that’s not where you were putting Trudie up? I know there’s bad blood—”

“Trudie?” Mom said. “Trudie is here?”

Dad nodded, not looking at her.

“Yes, Mrs. McGrath, Declan’s mother came to retrieve his remains,” Kevin said.

Mom looked at Dad and I was sure there was going to be more to this conversation after everyone left.

“Trudie is Declan’s mother,” I said, waiting to see what Mom would do. “But you already knew that.”

Mom surprised me by doing nothing, standing like a statue, willing her mouth not to move. I looked at Kevin.

“I know it all,” he said, not the least bit apologetic that he hadn’t told me that Declan Morrison was my cousin, not Caleigh’s.

“Well, that was a whole heck of a lot of nothing,” Dad said, standing. “Can we return to what we were doing, Kevin? Go back to normal here?” Based on Mom’s getup and his florid complexion, I had a feeling that we had interrupted a long-planned tryst with my emergence from the basement, the calling of the cops.

“What’s normal here exactly?” Kevin asked, the words out of his mouth before he knew it. “I mean, as soon as we look through Bel’s apartment we’ll get out of your hair.” He pulled something from his pocket. “But there is just one more thing I need to discuss with you.”

Guy was becoming like Columbo, dropping little tidbits in the midst of meaningless conversation. He pulled a long piece of wire out of his pocket, on the end of which dangled what looked like a tiny microphone. He screwed up his face, confused. It was the same look he got when puzzling over a piece of band music from back when we were in high school.

“It looks like the Manor is bugged.”

“Bugged?” Mom repeated.

“Yes. Bugged. Miked. Being listened to,” Kevin said when it was clear that Mom had other thoughts on her mind. Roaches. Mice. Something worse on the vermin scale.

Mom didn’t say anything. Dad let out a great gust of air that flooded the room with a garlic-tinged odor and Cargan went deep into himself to a place I wasn’t sure we would get him back from.