Bel, Book, and Scandal: A Belfast McGrath Mystery (Bel McGrath Mysteries) Page 13

  I should stop, I thought.

  But I can’t.

  I’m obsessed and it’s not healthy. It wasn’t that I had to clear my name; or was it? I couldn’t figure out what was driving me to do the things I was doing, but in my heart I wanted to find her because it would make everything right again.

  Alison recited back some letters and numbers to me: a license-plate number. “I don’t know what that might help with, but I have this thing about memorizing license-plate numbers. Call it my gift. There was only one other car in the parking lot, so we’ve got a fifty-fifty chance that it’s Dave Southerland’s car. Maybe we can find out something about him.” She passed a slow-moving Dodge in the right lane. “I’ll have Crawford run it on Monday when he goes back to work.”

  “You really think we’ll find something out about a small-time journalist from his license plate?” I asked.

  “Hard to tell, but we can try, right?” she said. “Or rather, Crawford can try.”

  “If he’s survived the trampoline park party,” I said, punching the numbers into a running list of items I kept in my phone, putting it right after “ham,” a reminder to myself to buy pork for the next wedding, a post-Christmas extravaganza that was coming up in a few weeks.

  We were almost to the Manor, having ridden in silence the whole way, when I turned my attention to a question I could get an answer to, something I could control. “A question for you.”

  “Yes, I think we try to find Archie Peterson again and I think we stop pussyfooting around this whole thing and ask Tweed Blazer what the truth is and why he lied.”

  “That’s not the question.”

  She pulled into the driveway of Shamrock Manor. “What else do we have?”

  “Are Erin and Fez any closer to making a decision on Shamrock Manor?”

  She burst out laughing. “Just driving into this place changes your whole perspective.” She pulled up into the driveway in front of the Manor. “Before I left today, I told Crawford that we need a decision. Memorial Day weekend is popular, and if they want their wedding here I don’t want them to lose it while they dillydally on the venue.”

  “The truth is if that I go inside and don’t have at least a kind-of answer from you, Cargan will hammer me until we get an answer. This is the kind of thing that keeps him up at night,” I said.

  “Wow, he takes his job seriously,” Alison said. “Let me go home, see how the trampoline park party was, and then I’ll get Crawford liquored up. That’s a good way to get him to get on it and get an answer from Erin.” Alison narrowed her eyes. “She’s a bit of a pill, if you want to know the truth.”

  “She wouldn’t be the first bride to be a pill,” I said. “So, you’ll be in touch. And so will I if think of anything else.”

  I went into the Manor and stood in the foyer, the place quiet, the smell of pine from the giant Christmas tree filling my nose. Cargan appeared on the second-floor landing, taking in my face and rushing down the stairs.

  “Where have you been? What’s going on?” he asked.

  “Alison and I had lunch,” I said, heading toward the kitchen.

  “Where?”

  “Grand Mill,” I said, mentioning a restaurant not too far from the Manor.

  Cargan followed me into the kitchen. “That garbage is smelling pretty ripe,” he said.

  “That’s your job,” I said, peeling off my coat and hanging it on a hook next to the door. I opened the oven and pulled out a sheet pan.

  “What did you eat?” he asked. “At the Grand Mill?”

  “Burger,” I said.

  He waited a beat before his reveal. “You were also in Hudsonville.”

  He was right; I was. “How do you know that?”

  “Don’t worry about that,” he said.

  But I knew. My phone had gone missing a few days earlier for about an hour and mysteriously reappeared right where I thought I had left it. He had engaged the location device and was following my every move.

  “Want to let me know what you were up to?” he asked.

  “Gosh, Cargan, you are worse than Dad sometimes,” I said.

  “Don’t change the subject,” he said. “You’re up to something and I want to know what it is.”

  I oiled the sheet pan, not sure what I was going to cook, but trying to buy myself some time.

  “Your new friend? Mrs. Crawford?” he said.

  “She goes by ‘Bergeron.’”

  “Whatever. She’s got a bit of a past, poking her nose in where it doesn’t belong.”

  “She’s okay,” I said. “Her heart is in the right place.”

  “She’s seen her share of dead bodies. More than any one college professor should.” He softened his tone. “Her ex-husband was dismembered,” he said. “They found pieces of him in two different jurisdictions.”

  “Gross.”

  “Please don’t let her be your Holmes.”

  I didn’t answer. The proverbial train had left the station.

  “Bel, I’m on your side,” Cargan said. “Tell me what’s going on. You know I can help you.”

  I put my hands on the counter and took a deep breath; he had loved Amy, too. “Amy’s alive, Car. Well, at least she was five years ago.” I told him what we had discovered, that the person in the photo from the Hudson Courier had been Amy for sure. “We can find her. I know we can.”

  My brother is contemplative and not the least bit impulsive. But I saw something flare behind his eyes, a spark that anyone rarely saw, no one really knowing what made him tick, what got him excited. I saw it now. This had him excited even though his face was a mask of composure. It confirmed for me that something was there, that we had something to go on. “The only thing I’ve got is the word of her ex-husband and a license-plate number.”

  “Whose license-plate number?” he asked. “And what made you think to get it?”

  “We’re not sure whose it is but probably Amy’s ex-husband.” I shrugged and smiled. “And Alison has a thing about license-plate numbers,” I said. “Not sure why, but she took it down and gave it to me. Maybe it will be helpful?”

  “Text it to me,” he said. “Who knows?”

  “She said she’d get her husband to look into it, too,” I said.

  Cargan grimaced. “I’m sure he’ll love that. Nothing cops like more than civilians trying to play sleuth.”

  “Does that happen a lot?” I asked, not believing that there was a cadre of middle-aged women running around New York trying to solve cold cases.

  He started for the door. “You’d be surprised.”

  “Hey, brother!” I called after him.

  He turned.

  “Any word from Feeney?” I asked.

  He smiled. “That’s one thing you don’t have to worry about, Bel. He’s fine.”

  “I have visions of him on the run. On the lam, as Dad would say.”

  “We’ll get this sorted out,” he said, going through the swinging doors that led to the foyer.

  I wasn’t sure what he meant, which part of the story he was referring to, but I hoped he meant both parts, for my other brother’s sake and for Amy’s.

  CHAPTER Twenty-seven

  Tweed’s voice let me know that he was happy to hear from me, and I was glad about that, our last meeting having taken such a weird turn. I told myself that whatever idiosyncrasies my family had, his was much stranger by a lot.

  “I’m hoping we can get a do-over on our last meeting,” I said.

  “I’d like that,” he said, his voice somewhat tentative but agreeable nonetheless. “Here’s the thing, Bel.”

  And here it comes, I thought.

  “Can we do it up here?” he asked.

  I let out a mental sigh of relief. “Of course.”

  “It’s just that I’m in the midst of my end-of-year accounting and inventory and things are crazy-busy right now.”

  “I understand,” I said, and I did. Although we didn’t have anything approaching formal end-of-year accounting or inve
ntory, there was sort of a buzz in the air at the Manor signifying that the year was coming to a close and a rethinking of some of our practices and habits needed to be reassessed. Or maybe that was just me. Everyone else seemed content to coast into the New Year with nary a thought of “best practices” or even the odd New Year’s resolution. “What works for you?” I asked. It was just past noon and I had completed my work for the day; I would head out in a bit to go to the egg farm, but otherwise my calendar was wide open.

  “You’re not free tonight, are you?” he asked, his tentativeness simmering down, his voice becoming more relaxed.

  “Well, I know there are some rules that say I shouldn’t say ‘yes,’ but yes, I’m free,” I said. According to Vashti, which I had skimmed after learning about it at the craft-beer place from Margaret, I learned that I should most definitely not immediately accept when a guy asked me out. The reasons were still unclear to me, but doing so was apparently a no-no.

  “Screw the rules,” he said. “I close at seven. Let’s meet at my house and then we can decide where to go from there. Do you remember how to get there?”

  “Give me the address again,” I said, jotting down the information.

  There was a long pause after that and I wondered if he had hung up, the plan set and our meeting time and place arranged. He finally spoke.

  “I know you met my father,” he said.

  Now it was my turn to be quiet.

  “It’s okay. I can explain,” he said. “I will explain.”

  “I’d like you to explain,” I said. I realized I had some things that needed to be clarified from my side, too. “I can explain, too,” I said.

  “Great. So seven thirty tonight. And we’ll both explain why…”

  “We lied,” I said. Might as well call a spade a spade. I hung up. I was getting closer.

  I did my errands and returned to my apartment to get cleaned up and dressed for a night in Wooded Lake. The door was unlocked, which wasn’t concerning because Mom came and went at her pleasure, leaving me “healthy” foods, which meant “things Bel would never eat,” and putting a new toilet brush beside my bathroom sink every two months, like clockwork. I walked in and looked around, my eyes finally settling on my bedroom, where I found Feeney on top of my down comforter scrolling through my iPad.

  “To what do I owe this honor?” I asked, taking the iPad from him and stowing it in my nightstand drawer. The last show I had watched on it had been a show about high-class call girls, and if he saw that he would most certainly tell the rest of my family and then my life would be over for good, any respect I had garnered since returning to the Manor evaporating in one fell swoop.

  “High-class call girls, Bel?” he asked, getting up. “And you have no food. What kind of chef are you?”

  “What are you doing here?” I asked. “Aren’t you on the lam? Shouldn’t you be hopping a train west to avoid the law?”

  “That’s why I came here,” he said. “I’m hiding in plain sight.”

  Kind of like Amy.

  “Good plan, Feen,” I said. “Now why did you cover my ex-boyfriend’s car in duck fat and break his mirrors?”

  If I didn’t want to kill him so badly, my heart would have melted just a bit at the umbrage he took at Brendan’s … well, what? Carelessness where my feelings were concerned? Lack of a backbone? It was hard to say. He looked at me, his eyes filled with sympathy for my situation, my two most recent loves failing to live up to any standards, let alone mine. “Well, I care about you, Bel,” he said. “You’re my favorite sister.”

  “I’m your only sister.”

  “That, too,” he said. I was touched nonetheless. And then, shattering any illusion that his heart remained firmly rooted in the right place, added, “Can we order a pizza?”

  “I’m going out,” I said. “Does anyone know you’re here besides me?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t think so.” He followed me into the bathroom, where I started brushing my teeth. “So can we? Order a pizza?” he asked.

  “Feeney, I’m going out and I won’t be back until later.” I knew that he couldn’t order himself, nor could he greet the delivery guy or girl at my door. Foster’s Landing was a small town, and by now anyone with a Twitter account who followed the police department—and that was just about everyone in the Landing, a town of nosy parkers if there ever was one—knew that they were looking for Feeney McGrath, middle-aged vandal. I finished brushing my teeth and ran a brush through my hair. “Look in my freezer.”

  “I did. You’ve got a bottle of vodka,” he said. “Well, you did have a bottle of vodka.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “When you’re out on bail, you can go buy me a new one.”

  “You can’t buy booze when you’re out on bail,” he said, the two of us in my bedroom, me picking out clothes from my closet.

  “And you would know,” I said, giving him a pointed stare. “Can you please get out of here?”

  “I can’t,” he said. “I have nowhere to go.”

  “No, not here,” I said, sweeping a hand around to indicate the larger space. “Here. My bedroom.” He stood, rooted to the floor. “And if Cargan has had access to your phone, he already knows you’re here. He’s tracking our every movement, apparently.” Based on our previous conversation, I was almost certain that Cargan knew where Feeney was, and while I would have expected him to find Feeney other accommodations, he had chosen to leave him right here, hiding in plain sight, as Feeney pronounced.

  “He doesn’t know where I am,” Feeney said. “I have a burner phone.”

  That took things to a whole new level. I had one brother who spied on all of us and another brother who was duplicitous enough to know that and take precautions against it. To what depths did my family’s insanity go? I wasn’t sure I wanted to find out.

  When he finally left my bedroom, I hoped to follow my suggestion that he cook up some of the pasta that was in the cabinet to the left of the refrigerator, I pulled out a black turtleneck and a pair of jeans from the closet, adding a pair of black boots. I grabbed a scarf from a hook on the back of the door and went into the kitchen, where Feeney had managed to put together a meal that looked appetizing enough to make my stomach growl.

  “You can’t stay here forever,” I said as he shoveled bow tie pasta into his mouth. “You can’t outrun the police department.”

  He arched an eyebrow in my direction. Sure he could. He was slick and the cops weren’t. An image of me and my brother—both old and with gray hair, still living in this apartment—flashed in my mind’s eye and I shuddered. This roommate situation could go on for a very long time indeed.

  “Tomorrow,” he said, his mouth full. “Could you go to my place and get me some clothes?” When I didn’t respond, he added, “Please?”

  “Maybe,” I said, when the answer was really no. I picked up my keys from the table next to the door and headed down the stairs to my car, never happier to leave Foster’s Landing and my family home.

  CHAPTER Twenty-eight

  I called Alison Bergeron on the way up to Wooded Lake. In the background, I could hear a child in full high dudgeon, something about the preparation of her macaroni and cheese not suited to her delicate palate.

  “Add a little milk,” I said. “Sounds like she wants it thinned out a bit.”

  “Bea! Hold on!” Alison said. “She can wait. It’s not life threatening.”

  “You may have a future chef on your hands,” I said, thinking back to my own protestations about my mother’s meals of the past. “God help you, if that’s the case.”

  She went to a quieter location, the sounds of her daughter, accompanied by the barking of what was definitely a large dog, fading into the background. “What’s happening?” she asked.

  “I’m headed to Wooded Lake. To see Tweed.”

  “Huh,” she said. “And how did this come about?”

  “He invited me up,” I said. The long highway stretched before me, the drive still boring, but with t
he promise of good food and conversation at the other end. Maybe some information about Amy. Maybe not. I had to calibrate my hopes where she was concerned; knowing she was alive possibly had quelled some emotions, aroused others. It was a lot to think about, more to process.

  “Will you call me on the way home? Let me know what happened tonight?” Alison asked. “Oh, wait, you’re younger than me and can probably stay awake after ten. I’ll never be awake. Call me tomorrow. God forbid Detective Crawford not get his beauty sleep. I’ll never hear the end of it.”

  “How was the trampoline park party?” I asked, seeing the sign for the Wooded Lake exit.

  “Oh, you know. Just how a four-year-old’s birthday should be. Fifty of the little special flower’s best friends, a bunch of parents, no booze, stale pizza.” She let out a gusty laugh. “He had a ball.”

  “Sounds like a blast,” I said.

  “Did I mention no booze?” she asked.

  “You did. Twice,” I said. “I’ll call you tomorrow. I’ll let you know if I find out anything further, but somehow I think we’ve hit a plateau.” Although I had been excited when I left Foster’s Landing earlier, I felt now as if I was wasting my time on both the mystery front and the romance front. I don’t know why, but I had a sinking feeling.

  “How so?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Just feels to me as if we’re going to be spinning our wheels for a while.” I remembered Amy. I knew Amy. If she didn’t want to be found, she wouldn’t be found. She had been right under our noses, practically, and still no one had located her.

  I was smart. She was smarter.

  I had to pull over and put Tweed’s address into my GPS, something I had forgotten to do before I left Shamrock Manor. According to my phone, I was exactly three miles from the cabin in the woods, and I followed the directions, missing one dirt road turnoff and having to double back to pick it up. Eventually, I was on the right road and followed it to the front of Tweed’s house. Behind it, the lake sparkled, a little sliver of moonlight hitting the still, mirrored surface of the water. I approached the house, one lamp lit in the front window, a floodlight coming on automatically as I approached the steps to the porch.