Bel, Book, and Scandal Page 11

  CHAPTER Twenty-two

  Alison listened to my tale patiently before saying, “Okay. Saturday. I’m coming up and we’re going back up there.”

  “Wait. What?” I pulled the towel off of my wet hair and shook it out, spraying water all over the bathroom; my hair wasn’t quite as dry as I thought it was.

  “Up there. Saturday,” she said. “Crawford has the day off and so do I, obviously.”

  We didn’t have a wedding, so I was free, too.

  She continued. “The big drama notwithstanding, from everything you’ve told me that Tweed guy is hiding something. Besides the fact that his father is definitely very much around.” She groaned. “Hey, does your back hurt from that yoga class?”

  “No,” I said, returning to the conversation we had been having before she decided that her muscles ached. “What do you think he’s hiding?” I asked.

  “That’s what we’re going up there to find out.”

  “What about your husband? Your daughter?”

  “You’re in luck: They have a birthday party at some trampoline park.”

  “You don’t have to go?”

  “I took her to see the last Disney movie in three-D. It’s his turn,” she said. “I had a headache for a week after that one.”

  “Sounds like he drew the short straw,” I said, putting the phone on speaker and placing it on the bathroom vanity while I dabbed some foundation over the dark circles under my eyes.

  “He loves it,” she said. “At least that’s what I tell myself. What fifty-year-old guy doesn’t want to be at a party with a bunch of four- and five-year-olds?”

  “Tomorrow afternoon it is, then.” I didn’t know what she thought we’d find, but it was worth a try. I had exhausted every other avenue, even going so far as to spend the morning on my computer, looking up everything I could about Wooded Lake and Love Canyon and finding one story after another that was long on speculation and short on facts. Before I finished, though, I sent another e-mail to Dave Southerland, the author of the original article, hoping that he would eventually write me back and tell me something I didn’t know, something that would help me close the chapter on Amy once and for all.

  Something that would give me peace or at least something that would tell me why Tweed would lie about his father’s presence in his life and on this earth.

  On the family front, Feeney was on the run, or so it seemed. Vandalism and criminal mischief—especially when you had a bit of a record—came with a hefty fine and, in Feeney’s case, possibly jail time. It all depended on how far Brendan Joyce wanted to take this whole thing and last night, with him covered in duck fat, it seemed that he wanted to take it as far as it would go. I hoped to get a glimpse of my AWOL brother while I was running errands this morning, knowing that I was better equipped to find him than the Foster’s Landing Police Department. Right before Kevin had left the night before, he had given me a look that told me that when it came to Feeney he wouldn’t be looking very hard for him, and for that I was immensely grateful. Justice, in the Landing, is meted out according to relationships and Kevin’s and my relationship definitely had its advantages in this case.

  I was out most of the day, running here and there, but there was no sign of him at his apartment, no sign of him at any of the local watering holes, and no sign of him at any of the places I frequented—the egg farm; the Whole Foods in the neighboring, swanky town; the local wine store; or even the Goodwill store, where I stopped in to see if they had any old serving dishes that I could repurpose for use in my own home. I was sitting down to a plate of dumplings at the better-than-average Chinese place in the middle of town, the one in the one five-store strip mall that had slipped through Foster’s Landing’s iron-fisted zoning board, when I saw not my brother in the parking lot, as I had hoped, but someone—and something—much worse. I bent my head over my dumplings, hoping that I hadn’t been spotted behind the big window that fronted the place, but it was too late.

  Brendan Joyce saw me. And Brendan Joyce saw me seeing him hug Janet Grace, a girl who had been in our high-school class and who now, like Brendan, taught at the high school. French, I thought. It had to be. I remember her wearing a scarf wound around her neck and holding a long, unlit cigarette most of our senior year, her attempt at looking “cosmopolitan” almost succeeding.

  The beret was just too much.

  Janet Grace got into her car, a sensible Honda Civic, and drove away; it seemed she hadn’t spotted me. Brendan turned and looked at me, moving into Janet’s vacated parking spot, his hands in his pockets. He jumped when a car behind him, waiting for a coveted space in the small lot, honked, breaking his reverie and making him move to the sidewalk.

  He stood out there for a few minutes while I alternately stared at my dumplings and back at him until he finally walked into the restaurant, greeting the hostess behind the counter by name; he was a regular even though we had never been here together. A post-breakup haunt? Dumplings to soothe the brokenhearted? Who knew? I watched as he strode over to my table and pulled out a chair, turning it backward and sitting down, almost as if he wanted the chair to provide another barrier between us.

  “Your brother is an asshole,” he said.

  “Nice to see you, too,” I said. “And how do you know it’s my brother?” I asked, stopping myself before acknowledging that yes, it was my brother Feeney, in some misguided sense of justice, who had gone out with a set of golf clubs and a container of duck fat, hell-bent on making Brendan Joyce’s life miserable, at least for a few hours.

  Brendan looked at me and in that instant I was sorry for everything that had happened between us, between him and Feeney, between him and my family, who now hated him with the heat of a thousand burning suns. The McGraths are a pretty genial lot … until they’re not. And they weren’t so genial when it came to Brendan Joyce. Heck, Kevin Hanson and I had broken me over fifteen years earlier and they still hadn’t forgiven him.

  He picked a dumpling off my plate and popped it in his mouth, his growling stomach always taking precedence over any other emotion he might be feeling. “Listen,” he said around mouthfuls of pork dumpling. “I am going to tell you this one more time and then I’m not going to tell you again.”

  I waited, the preamble taking the wind out of his sails, his voice dropping to a whisper at the tail end of the sentence.

  “I don’t know how that photo got into my wallet. I’m telling you the truth, Bel. I knew Amy about as well as I knew you in high school—that is, not really at all.” He put another dumpling in his mouth, warming to the story and my lunch in general. I noticed that the angrier he was, the stronger his brogue. Right now he had not a trace of it, defeat making him more American and less Irish. “I wish you’d believe me.”

  “So how did it get there? The photo?”

  “I have no bloody idea. How many times do I have to say that?” he asked. The brogue made another brief appearance. “Yeah, Bel, you know. I’m a coward. I left you by the river that day when they found her stuff after all these years. But I’m not a liar. I’m not someone who has been carrying a torch for a girl I barely knew for all this time.” He looked at the dumplings but decided against another one. “I had a crush on a girl once.” He looked up.

  Now it was my turn to look at the dumplings, anywhere but at him. The chalkboard with the various kinds of sake was interesting, too.

  “That girl was you, Belfast.” He got up and my eyes trained on the chalkboard; all I could see were his khakis, which also bore a smear of grease across the right front pocket. Duck fat was insidious and nasty; it was everywhere once it was somewhere. “But it seems like you’ve moved on.”

  “So have you,” I said quietly. “Janet Grace? Really, Brendan?”

  “She’s teaching me French.”

  “I bet she is,” I said, chuckling sadly.

  “I’m taking my ma to Paris for spring break.”

  “That’s an unusual spring break choice,” I said.

  “Not for a sev
enty-year-old woman and her bachelor son,” he said. “She’s teaching me French. Janet Grace, that is.”

  “And you hugged her in gratitude? It looked like a very close embrace.” Ever hear of Rosetta Stone? I wanted to ask.

  He made a sound, disgruntled, impatient, exasperated. “Not that you’d understand, but I think she has a little crush on me,” he said, his cheeks turning red. “Just remember something, Bel.”

  I finally looked up, making eye contact with him, his blue eyes watery and sad, eyes that I used to love looking into. “What’s that?”

  “I’m a coward. I admit it. But I’m not a liar. There’s a difference.”

  CHAPTER Twenty-three

  The last thing I wanted to do was go out with Mary Ann D’Amato-Hanson and her gaggle of women, but I had committed, responding with a thumbs-up emoji before I could think about it when Mary Ann had texted me the time and place. I don’t know why I did except that I hadn’t done a ton of socializing with my own gender since returning home and hanging around with my brothers and my parents was getting old. Even the driving up and back to Wooded Lake had lost its luster, and if the other night was any indication I’m sure I had seen the last of Tweed Blazer. After seeing the spectacle that was my enraged ex-boyfriend preceding my dopey high-school cop boyfriend into the kitchen, and hearing about my ne’er-do-well older brother, he had probably run for the hills.

  It made his lie about his father seem like small potatoes in the scheme of things, even if he was equally embarrassed by his paternity. That whole thing with the duck fat and Brendan’s car was something out of a surrealist drama, and if I had been Tweed I would have lost my number and any thought of pursuing even a casual relationship with me, the deliciousness of my dinner, barely eaten, notwithstanding.

  We were going to a local craft-beer place down by the river. I had never been there, but it sounded like just the kind of place that newcomers to Foster’s Landing enjoyed and that old-timers, natives as it were, eschewed. I put on a pair of clean jeans and a long sweater, winding a scarf around my neck before putting on a leather jacket. I couldn’t compete in the Mary Ann D’Amato-Hanson beauty department, but I could rock this vintage leather jacket like it was no one’s business. I looked at myself in my bathroom mirror and wondered aloud.

  “Why do you care?” I asked. “After all these years. You’re a grown woman. She’s a grown woman. So what if she’s thin and gorgeous and married to your ex-boyfriend? Who cares? So what?” It sounded convincing, but it wasn’t. There was something about that woman that had always left me feeling like a bull in a china shop, Hummels and little teacups and sugar bowls all around me, waiting to be toppled.

  Mary Ann, Hallie, and Margaret were all there when I arrived, and by the look on Hallie and Margaret’s faces you’d think that I had just returned from battle. They both leapt from their seats at the little table by the window that they had secured and encircled me in a warm embrace that I wanted to hate and make fun of but couldn’t. It was sincere and kind and they seemed truly happy to see me.

  After all these years and the circumstances under which I had left, I was shocked but tried not to let it show.

  We sat down and I caught up with them, ordering a beer. “So, how are you both?” I asked. “Mary Ann and I have had a chance to catch up since I got back home, and of course I was at her gorgeous wedding.”

  “She told us,” Margaret said. “We were both at the wedding with our husbands, but we didn’t get a chance to talk to you, Bel. It sounds like you’ve had an amazingly successful career.”

  Well, up until this point, yes, I thought. “It’s been fun,” I said.

  Hallie took a dainty sip of her beer, looking as if it were her first and she was twelve. “You must have stories to tell.”

  “I do,” I said. “Lots of stories.” There was that one time a former president almost died in front of me, but you already know about that, right? I didn’t say it. It didn’t have to be said. So I launched into a story about my time in Paris, describing the little apartment that I lived in, how the rooftops looked from the window that cranked open and didn’t have one thing to obstruct the view. I regaled them with stories of Italy and how I learned to make a branzino that became a staple at The Monkey’s Paw. It was after a breathless fifteen minutes when I didn’t come up for air that I realized I was dominating the conversation. I stopped abruptly. “Tell me what you’ve been up to.”

  “Nothing like that!” Margaret said, clinking her glass against mine. “I don’t know. Law school. Partner in a white-shoe firm by thirty. Gave it all up to come back to the Landing and be a stay-at-home mom.”

  “Do you miss it?” I asked. “The big-city life?”

  The look on her face told me she didn’t, but she smiled mischievously. “Every freaking day.” She hoisted her glass, pointing it toward Mary Ann. “Just waiting for this one to procreate so I have someone to hang out with during the day. Drink wine with before my husband gets home.” She turned back to me. “So, tell me. Are you dating?”

  “Are you interested?” I asked, trying to deflect. The last thing I wanted to talk about was my love life, or lack thereof.

  “Well, I read Vashti every day, so I know what it’s like for a single gal out there,” Margaret said.

  “Vashti?” I asked.

  “Oh, yeah,” Margaret said. “It’s an online magazine named after a kick-ass woman in the Bible. All sorts of stuff on dating, being single.” She raised her eyebrows suggestively. “Sex.”

  “Ah,” I said. “Sounds like something I should be reading if only to find out what sex is.” I was hoping that the discussion of my love life was over, but I was wrong.

  “So, you. Any guys?” Margaret asked.

  It was clear what had made her a partner at her law firm before the age of thirty. The woman really didn’t know how to let anything go.

  Under the table, I felt movement as Hallie Gatter, who was uncharacteristically not chatty, kicked Margaret, who tried in vain not to wince.

  “Sorry,” Margaret said. “I remember now that you had a broken engagement.”

  “And that I recently broke up with Brendan Joyce?” I said, figuring they had heard from Mary Ann but filling in some, but not all, of the blanks. A heroine in a Harlequin Romance I was not.

  Margaret grimaced a bit and that’s how I knew that she knew, that she had access to the town’s gossip pipeline as only a stay-at-home mom could. All those hours at playgrounds and at playdates must have yielded the juiciest tidbits, and even if I didn’t think that my love life was fodder in any way, let me remind you that Foster’s Landing is pretty sleepy. Not a heck of a lot going on here, if you didn’t count the two murders at the Manor.

  Margaret’s brief line of questioning brought the conversation to a halt and after talking about the great view from the bar, the controversy surrounding the new blinking stoplight in town (many thought it should be a traditional light and that had given birth to the “Light Movement” in the village), and the lack of water fountains at the river walk, we settled into an uneasy quiet, which led to another round of beers and then another. None of us, it would seem, would be driving home.

  I looked at my phone, thinking that we should wrap this up. “Do we have Uber in this town?” I asked.

  Hallie, mostly silent to this point, decided that now would be the perfect time to bring up the one subject that I tried never to discuss outside of the Manor: Amy. Without any preamble, she just let it fly. “A lot of people still think you know where she is. Where she went.”

  I didn’t feign surprise or confusion. The “she” in the sentence was always there, a memory that I carried and that prompted others’ memories as well. There was a time I was in the dark about where she went, but no longer. She went to Love Canyon. Where she was now was still a mystery, though. “A lot of people would be wrong, Hallie,” I said, holding her unwavering gaze. Whoever blinked first was going to lose; that was clear.

  “Just telling you what I know,”
she said. “What I’ve heard.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “That was a delightful public-service announcement.” I grabbed my bag from the floor and found some bills in my wallet to throw on the table. “This has been fun. Thanks for inviting me, Mary Ann.”

  I got up and went outside, the cold air hitting my face. I decided that texting Cargan would be my best bet; I was no longer in any shape to drive. I’d come back in the morning for my car. I was mid-text when Mary Ann appeared, looking chagrined.

  “Bel, I’m sorry,” she said.

  “It’s okay,” I said. But it wasn’t. I didn’t know why I would be forever attached to this story, why being Amy’s best friend made me suspect and not at all sympathetic.

  “I believe you,” Mary Ann said. “I always have.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “That makes one of you.” I hit send on the text to Cargan, adding No questions please in a follow-up message.

  “I thought this would be fun,” Mary Ann said. “I’m sorry it wasn’t.”

  “Me, too,” I said. “On both accounts.”

  She crossed her arms, warding off the chill. “Do you think she’ll ever be found? That we’ll ever know what happened?”

  The beer loosened my tongue, and although I didn’t plan on responding, the words fell from my lips. “I do,” I said. “I think we will figure it out, sooner rather than later.”

  “You do?” she said, shock registering on her face. “That would be amazing. What makes you say that?”

  I had enough presence of mind to shut up. I didn’t want Mary Ann to know because I didn’t want Kevin to know … yet. “Just some feelings, Mary Ann. Things I have heard since I got home.”

  “Like what?” she asked, a flush coming to her cheeks from the cold or the thought that this mystery might soon be solved.

  Cargan’s timing was impeccable, letting me off the conversational hook. He pulled up in the old Vanagon and motioned for me to get in. “Thanks, again, Mary Ann,” I said, giving her a quick hug. “This was fun.” I don’t know why I said it, but she had been kind enough to invite me, so it seemed only reasonable. My mother hadn’t raised a rude daughter and I hoped she knew that.