Bel of the Brawl--A Belfast McGrath Mystery Read online

  CHAPTER Eighteen

  Even the city papers had picked up on the story of what had been found in the Foster’s Landing River, and one intrepid reporter had even had the temerity to visit our little town, hoping for the big scoop. She hadn’t found me yet but had been seen in the Dugout according to the gossip chain that started the minute she arrived in town. Amy’s disappearance had been news in the Hudson Valley all those years ago, but that was in the days before the Internet and the ability for anyone, at any time, to research any story they chose. Back then, the biggest thing that had happened was that the town had shot a segment for a show about missing kids and our little village had experienced a minute of fame, not unlike a shooting star that flashes across the sky and then disappears into the inky universe.

  But after all this time, the discovery of Amy’s belongings—her remains—things sort of frozen in time, as it were, was just too much to leave alone. It had all the hallmarks of a dramatic story: a gorgeous girl gone missing, a town that had never really recovered, a group of friends who had gone on with their lives (or had they?), a mystery that literally resurfaced when most everyone had decided that all hope of finding her was lost.

  I was in the kitchen of the Manor the next day flipping through a copy of Bon Appétit that Mom had left behind when a woman, around my age but bearing the signs of New York City living—black pants and black turtleneck, expensive messenger bag, a nice layered shag that surrounded her face in frosty highlights—appeared, looking around the kitchen as if she had just been beamed up from earth to an alien spaceship. “You can really do over a hundred covers in this kitchen?” she asked.

  So she was a foodie. Or had been in food service. One or the other. I closed the magazine and stood up.

  She held out her hand. “Duffy Dreyer. New York Times. I’m working on a story for the Sunday magazine. About unsolved cases. Mysteries of the Hudson Valley.”

  Name sounded familiar. “Duffy Dreyer?”

  She put the pieces of my puzzlement together. “Nope. No relation. He was Duffy Dyer,” she said.

  “I still don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Duffy Dyer? Catcher for the Mets? ‘Ya Gotta Believe’? Nineteen seventy-three?” she said. “My dad loved the team through thick and thin. That’s where I got my name.”

  Mom was a huge Mets fan. It was all starting to make sense. “Right. I knew it sounded familiar.”

  “I get that a lot,” she said. She pulled out a notepad. “I’m doing a story on Amy Mitchell. Her disappearance. What was found in the river. You were the best friend, right?” she asked.

  I felt a heat in the bottom of my feet start to climb through my body, alerting every nerve ending to trouble. I stayed silent. “The ‘best friend’? I was her best friend.” Big difference in my book.

  She pulled up a stool and sat down, placing her bag on the counter. “Can I ask you a few questions?” she asked.

  I shook my head. “No. You cannot ask me a few questions.”

  “I ate at the Monkey’s Paw once,” she said, referencing my former place of employment. “Best meal I ever had.”

  “Flattery will get you nowhere,” I said, but I couldn’t help asking, “What did you have?” Mentally kicking myself for continuing the conversation.

  “A hot foie gras. A piece of chicken that was absolutely sublime,” she said, rhapsodic in her description of the food I used to cook. “Some kind of cocktail with muddled blackberries…”

  “Queen of the Fairies.”

  “Pardon me?”

  “It was called ‘Queen of the Fairies.’ Vodka, curaçao, simple syrup, muddled blackberries. It was named after my mother, Oona.” Tart and never sweet. Just like Mom.

  She closed her eyes, remembering it. “It was just the right amount of whimsy.”

  “Have you been back?”

  She opened her eyes, which were the color and shape of a chocolate-covered almond. “Back where?”

  “The Monkey’s Paw.”

  She smiled. “Yep. It stinks now.”

  “Man, am I happy to hear that,” I said to her delight, her reporter’s spidey sense going off; there was a story here. “Off the record, of course.”

  She put her pen down. “Ben Dykstra is no Bel McGrath.”

  “That’s what I tried to tell the owner,” I said. “But he wouldn’t listen.”

  “You ever coming back to New York? The food scene?” she asked.

  “And leave the culinary hub that is Foster’s Landing?” I asked. “Never.”

  “No, really. You like it here?”

  I thought about it for a moment. Like it? That was a stretch. What it had been, what it was now, was a safe place to land. And that was something I couldn’t articulate to this snappily dressed beat reporter for the Times who had been named after a professional baseball catcher from long ago. “Why are you here, Duffy?” I asked, sitting back down on the stool. I pushed the Bon Appétit away and gave the reporter my full attention.

  “To figure it out. To see what I can find about what happened to Amy Mitchell,” she said.

  “That was a long time ago. We’ve all moved on.”

  “But have you?” she asked. “I spoke to Detective Kevin Hanson and he seems as raw and beat up as he might have been when it happened.”

  “Really?”

  “And his colleague, Jed Mitchell. Amy’s brother.”

  “I know who Jed is.”

  “He thinks she’s still alive,” she said, looking closely at me, gauging my reaction.

  “Well, she’s not,” I said. “If she was, we’d know. She would have contacted us.”

  I could tell that she agreed with me. “She’s been gone a long time, chef. Couldn’t have been easy for you to live with this.”

  I was going to cry but I couldn’t let myself, not here, not in front of her. I turned and went to the sink, ran the water, used the sprayer, anything to give me a chance to compose myself. “I’ve got a lot of work to do. Can you excuse me?” I asked from under the cover of a steady stream of water. In the office, I could hear Dad rumbling around, banging into things, slamming drawers. “I have to help my father.”

  She dropped her card on the counter. “You’ll call me if you want to talk?”

  “I will,” I said. But I wouldn’t. Want to talk, that is. “Who else have you spoken with?”

  “Hanson. Jed Mitchell.” She flipped through her notebook. “Francie McGee at the police station. And Brendan Joyce.” She looked up. “Know him?”

  “Just a little bit,” I said, before showing her the door. Not much of a reporter, are you? I thought as I watched her go.

  CHAPTER Nineteen

  The next day, after I had finished my preparations for the upcoming Saturday wedding, I walked down the long gravel path toward the village, the autumn sun still high in the sky and bathing me in a golden warmth that felt good after several stints doing inventory in the walk-in. I had made this walk countless times during my academic career in Foster’s Landing and knew the route by heart. There was the tree that Cargan had plowed into on his bike the day he decided he didn’t need training wheels any longer, and there was the ditch, now deeper and filled with more weeds than years ago, where Feeney had pushed me after I beat him in a foot race down the hill, breaking my wrist in the process. And there was the little stone wall where Amy used to wait for me to finish my chores on otherwise lazy Saturday afternoons, the hill up to the Manor daunting on her old three-speed bicycle. It was all there, a history of my life as I trudged along, every tree, stream, and bump in the road bringing up a memory long suppressed and hopefully forgotten.

  My phone vibrated in my pocket, the ring tone—a sassy Beyoncé song—scaring the bejesus out of me as I trudged along. I looked at the screen. “Hey, Car,” I said. “What’s shaking?”

  “I got a call from someone named Duffy Dreyer,” he said. “No relation to the Met.”

  “Yeah, I know,” I said. “I talked to her yesterday.”

&n
bsp; “I’m not talking to her,” he said. “Just so you know.”

  “That’s your decision.” I passed a group of kids running down the hill in front of the high school, one missing me by inches.

  “And I’ve talked Dad out, once again, of fronting the Casey tip money to me and the boys. He’s hell-bent on giving the staff the money anyway but I told him that we have a motto and it’s ‘family hold back.’ I hope you agree,” he said.

  “You know I do, Car. Mom and Dad need the cash flow, and if it kills me, I’m finding Pauline and getting that money back.”

  “You sound pretty sure.”

  “I am,” I said. And I was. I was putting every ounce of my energy into finding this girl and I wasn’t going to stop until I found her. There was too much at stake.

  * * *

  I arrived at the high school a few minutes later. The front door of the school was fitted with a fancy security system now and it wasn’t like the old days when you could walk right up, let yourself in, and wander around at will. I took a place on a bench in a small garden that had been created in honor of an art teacher who had passed a few years previously, the information about it all on the plaque affixed to the brick wall. I texted Brendan to let him know I was outside. All around me, kids raced around the parking lot, the front lawn, and down the front steps, happy to be done with their school day, ready to go to extracurricular activities and after-school jobs and, finally, home.

  A few teachers exited, two in particular chatting amiably. I recognized them from my time at FLHS as Troy Maloney, the phys ed teacher, and Sandy Parks, a guidance counselor and girls’ volleyball coach. Maloney took a step back when he saw me; we had spent many a morning at the local indoor pool training for swim meets.

  “Belfast? Belfast McGrath?” Maloney asked.

  Ms. Parks waved and then hurried off to a waiting school bus, a bunch of girls banging on the windows and getting psyched up for a volleyball match.

  “Hi, Mr. Maloney,” I said. When I was in school, Troy Maloney was young, fit, and the focus of more than a few crushes. Now, he was approaching fifty, wearing a wedding ring that looked as if it were cutting all the blood off to the rest of his finger, and sporting a potbelly that strained against his FLHS striped polo. “Yep, I’m back in the Landing.”

  “I heard something about that,” he said. “Back at Shamrock Manor? My wife and I got married there.”

  “I’m back at the Manor,” I said. “How are you? You got married?”

  “Yes,” he said, looking at the blue sky and smiling. “Going on fourteen years now. We have two little ones.”

  “That’s nice.”

  He looked back at me. “And you? What’s new in your life?”

  “Not too much. Was living in the city and am back now with my family,” I said, trying to inject a little enthusiasm into my brief recitation of my history.

  “You can go home again, right?” he said.

  “I guess so,” I said.

  He patted my shoulder. “Good to see you, Bel. Hope to see you around,” he said before walking off to the parking lot.

  I waved as he drove by in his pickup truck, a different truck than the one he drove when we were in high school but the same style. He waved back, his eyes in the rearview, studying me, it seemed, as he drove down the driveway to the street below.

  A voice whispered in my ear. “Bring back memories?”

  “Brendan, hi,” I said, getting up and giving him a hug. “I didn’t hear you come up behind me.” From across the parking lot, a group of kids let Mr. Joyce know that they were proud he had game, a girl.

  “Tell your story walking, Sweeney!” Brendan called back, taking my hand.

  “Can we take a walk?” I asked. “Somewhere away from the village?”

  We walked down the driveway and headed in the opposite direction of the center of town, finding a trail that I had forgotten existed and that created a nice flat path behind the middle school and down to a small body of water. We sat beneath a shady tree that hadn’t lost its leaves yet and I picked up some pine needles, letting them fall between my fingers.

  “You’re not here to break up with me, are ya, Bel?” he asked. “You know, taking me out to the woods like this. No one would hear my sobs of sorrow out here. Might be the perfect place for this to end.” He went dramatic. “Or kill me? Is that what you have in mind?”

  I laughed. “No, Brendan. I’m not. Why would you think that?” I asked.

  “Well, I haven’t been the best boyfriend,” he said. “I have lots of schoolwork and then I paint on the weekends…” He hesitated. “And then there was that day when I left you alone.”

  “I’m over that,” I said. But even to my own ears, the protest sounded hollow. I wasn’t over it completely and I wasn’t sure I would ever get over it although I told myself that I would try really hard.

  He smiled sadly. “You’re not, Bel. That’s clear to me.” He gripped my hand tighter. “But I will make it up to you. I promise.” He leaned over and kissed me. “Just tell me what to do.”

  “Never do it again,” I said. “Never keep a secret from me.”

  He looked aghast. “Keep a secret from you? I would never do that.”

  “Then why didn’t you tell me about Duffy Dreyer?”

  “The catcher for the Mets?” he said.

  “Stop it, Brendan. I already know. I met her.”

  He dropped my hand and ran his hands through his unruly curls. In the small pond, one that had once been much deeper before the drought and on which we used to skate as kids, a bird flew down and ducked in to see if there were any tasty morsels beneath the surface, coming up empty-billed and probably disappointed. Brendan lay back on the bed of pine needles and closed his eyes.

  “Why you, Brendan? Why did she talk to you?”

  “I don’t know, Bel. Jaysus. It was as much a surprise to me as it was to you. I had nothing to do with you, Kevin, or Amy back then. I guess she just looked for people of our age, in our year at school. I’m not hard to find.” He put his hands on his stomach.

  “Where did she find you? How did she find you?”

  “Craft fair at the castle in Grand Mill.”

  “She just walked up and started asking you questions?” I asked.

  “Yep.” He sat up again. “She bought a painting first. Said she loved my work.”

  So compliments were her stock-in-trade. God, Brendan was naïve but then again so was I. She had established rapport with me and I had fallen into her net, giving her more details than I should have.

  “What did you tell her? About then? About me?” I asked.

  “Nothing. Not a thing. There’s nothing to tell, Bel. I don’t have a lot of recollections to share. I just remember the sadness. The aftermath.”

  “Don’t talk to her again, Brendan,” I said. “Please. It’s enough that I was there that night, that I was one of the last people to see her alive, that we had an argument. I don’t want to be in this again.” But I was and always would be, Belfast McGrath, the best friend. Her best friend.

  He looked at me. “I don’t generally like being told what to do, Bel, but in this case, I think I’ll take your advice.” He leaned over and held my face. “I do love you, Bel. More than anyone I have ever met.”

  “More than the last Rose of Tralee you went on a date with?” I asked.

  “Much more than her,” he said. “She talked with her mouth full anyway.”

  It was my turn to lie in the grass and look up at the sky. I guess I had been the naïve one thinking that the discovery of Amy’s things beneath the water wouldn’t bring at least one reporter out of the woodwork to get the true story of what had happened that night. As much as everyone asked me, I didn’t know anything beyond that last ugly scene, the final words I ever spoke to her.

  You’ll be sorry.

  I thought of my brothers, looking for me that whole night. Had anyone looked for Amy the way they had looked for me? I didn’t know and it was too late to ask.<
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  Brendan was waiting for something from me, my reciprocal declaration of love. But this wasn’t the right time to say it so I left the words unspoken in the afternoon air, the idea that I might never say them again a thought that entered my mind as I watched the bird over the water looking for something she would never find.

  CHAPTER Twenty

  “Where’s Bel?”

  Where was I ever? In the kitchen, I wanted to call out into the foyer, but Colleen had figured it out on her own before getting an answer to her question. She came in the next day, dropped her purse onto the counter and let out a dramatic sigh. “I heard from her.”

  “Pauline?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “Said she’s had enough of the States. She’s moving back to Ireland.”

  “Really?” Based on everything I now knew and all of the things the girls had told me, Ireland was the last place that Pauline would want to be. “What brought that about? What about the abusive husband?” And most importantly, now that I knew she was safe, what about our money? The ten thousand she stole?

  “Dunno,” Colleen said. “But your da owes her money. A couple a weeks’ pay. She wants me to meet her and drop it off,” she said.

  “When?” I asked.

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “Because I’m coming with you,” I said, stripping off my chef’s coat and going into the office, which fortunately was empty. I went through Mom’s accounting folder and found the check, in an envelope with a little window indicating that it was addressed to Pauline. I went back into the kitchen. “Let’s go.”

  We took my car. Colleen took a look around. “Good thing the Health Department doesn’t check your domicile or your vehicle,” she said, sniffing. “This car is a disgrace, Belfast.”

  “I know! I know,” I said. “Do you see what I have to do during the week to get ready for a wedding?” I asked. “Oh, right, you don’t because you don’t help with prep.”