Bel, Book, and Scandal: A Belfast McGrath Mystery (Bel McGrath Mysteries) Read online

  “But everyone knows it by that name now, so too late to change it.”

  “Yes,” I said, dropping a tea bag into each mug. “Sugar?”

  He shook his head.

  “Anyone who comes here with a preconceived notion of what it should look like is blown away when they actually see it,” I said.

  “Speaking of preconceived notions…”

  The kettle began to blare. I poured water into both mugs and steeped the tea until it was the color I liked. I carried them into the living room and placed them on my old, scarred coffee table, a table better suited to a suite of college-aged boys than an adult woman with an actual job. Those sorts of thing didn’t matter to me, though; I would much rather have a four-hundred-dollar cleaver than a coffee table that suited my stature in life.

  “Yes?” I asked, sitting down in a chair next to the couch.

  “I assumed when I found you out at Mr. Blazer’s house that you knew more than you were letting on,” he said, immediately contradicting his assertion that I didn’t need a lawyer. This wasn’t a friendly visit at all; why would it have been? I didn’t think this older Jewish detective was interested in Shamrock Manor for his daughter’s wedding or grandson’s bar mitzvah. No, he was only interested in finding out what had happened that night.

  I didn’t answer, letting those thoughts play out all over my face.

  “I can see you’re suspicious,” he said. “You should be. But I can help you, too.”

  “You can?” I asked. “How?”

  “I did a little digging, Ms. McGrath. I know you’re looking for someone.”

  “You do?”

  He nodded. “I do. Wooded Lake is a small town. And I’ve lived there all my life.” He let out a small chuckle. “Right, I can tell you’re wondering. What’s a nice Jewish boy doing in a place like that?” He took a sip of his tea, grimaced. Not to his liking. “Well, that’s a story in itself.”

  “I’d love to hear it,” I said, buying time in my head, thinking about how much I wanted to tell him about my visits to his hometown.

  “Communists,” he said.

  “Who?”

  “My parents. My whole family, really. My father was a screenwriter for MGM in the fifties.” He rattled off a few films that I had heard of but never seen, films that any casual moviegoer would know of but that only a true cinephile would have taken the time to view. “We left the West Coast to protect him, so that he couldn’t be found. Ended up in Wooded Lake.” He pulled off his glasses, wiped the steam from his mug of tea that had gathered on the right lens on his sweater. “It was as good a place as any.”

  “That’s quite a story,” I said.

  “It is. Name used to be Goldschmidt. First name, Leonid.” He put the tea on the coffee table, placing it carefully on the one coaster that I owned. “Kind of like you. Belfast. It’s a dead giveaway for our parents’ sympathies.”

  “And now you’re Larry Bernard.”

  “Since 1952. Had a renaming ceremony and all. I was three. Don’t remember a thing about it but I’m sure there was a nice kiddush afterwards.”

  If he was trying to disarm me, he was doing a pretty good job with talk of Communists and post-renaming-ceremony feasts.

  “So that’s my story, Ms. McGrath. Belfast,” he said, testing out whether or not we were on a first-name basis. “I know you know from heartache. I also know that you lost a friend a long time ago.”

  “You’re a good detective, Larry,” I said.

  “I am,” he said. “Years of practice.”

  “Amy Mitchell. She was my best friend,” I said. “And she disappeared.”

  “And she reappeared in Wooded Lake,” he said.

  “I just found that out. Married two different men, one of them Tweed. Went by the name Bess Marvin.”

  He wrinkled his nose. “Why do I know that name?”

  “You have kids, Detective? A daughter perchance?”

  “Yep. Three girls.”

  “Do they like to read?” I asked.

  It dawned on him slowly. “Used to read those Nancy Drews to the oldest. Bess was the plump sidekick.”

  “Bingo.”

  “This Amy has a sense of humor. As well as a couple of ex-husbands.”

  “I just learned that the other night.” I braced myself for the answer to the next question. “You know Tweed. Did you know her?”

  “I didn’t,” he said. “I knew of her because of course I’ve known Tweed since he was a little boy, but she was on the scene and then she was off. Not sure what happened there. It was a quickie wedding and even a more quickie divorce, it would seem. Would have been impolite to ask what happened, so I didn’t.”

  “So you’re a gentleman and a detective,” I said.

  “I’d like to think that. Sometimes being a gentleman goes out the window when you’re trying to get to the truth.”

  “I haven’t seen her, Larry, since that night when we were teenagers. Honestly, I thought she was dead all these years and was trying to make my peace with that.”

  “That must have been hard,” he said.

  I noticed that he hadn’t touched his tea since that first, probably awful, sip. I was used to drinking tea, had started when I was a child. But if it wasn’t your beverage of choice, it took some getting used to. He was a kind man; I could tell. I felt bad for not having coffee in the house. Whether my sympathy toward him was part of a calculated move on his part of just because he seemed to be such a kind guy I couldn’t tell. I could tell, though, that he was shrewd and smart and it didn’t hurt to have him on my side.

  “Now that you know my whole story, do you have any other questions?” I asked. “You must want to know something else.”

  “I do,” he said. “I want to know where she is, too.”

  CHAPTER Thirty-six

  Everyone was a suspect.

  Even me, I was sure.

  And now so was Amy.

  Larry Bernard didn’t have any answers—at least any that he would share with me—about why Amy would suddenly want Tweed Blazer gone, but knowing what he knew about her and her disappearance from Foster’s Landing, and hearing my story about her, what she was like, he had moved her to the top of the list of suspects. She was a woman who wanted to stay gone and the fact that I was poking around, had learned a thing or two about her whereabouts, was making her desperate. That seemed to be Larry Bernard’s thought process, as far as I could surmise.

  The one thing that didn’t make any sense was how she knew. Was it that she, too, had seen the Hudson Courier? Knew that I had seen it? Knew that I would try to find her?

  She couldn’t know those things. There was no way. Maybe, like Feeney, she was hiding in plain sight and could see my every move, knew that I was in the mix now.

  Knew that I would stop at nothing to find her.

  I sat on my bed; I had hit a dead end. Sure, Larry Bernard was a kindly old guy, the kind of guy who, if he wasn’t a cop, you’d confess everything to because behind those eyes was a world of sage advice, of wise counsel just waiting to be dispensed. And lord knows, I was in need of some wise counsel right about now.

  I was in a deep reverie when Cargan appeared in the door of my bedroom. “Don’t you have some cooking to do or something?” he asked.

  “That cop from Wooded Lake was just here. Had some more questions,” I said.

  “What kinds of questions?”

  “Questions about Amy.”

  Cargan took that in, not at all surprised, though. “So does the detective know everything?”

  “I told him what happened, from the beginning. Now she’s a suspect. That I know.”

  “Did you ask him why?” Cargan said.

  “I did and he wouldn’t say much.” I came out of the bedroom and picked up the two mugs of cold tea that sat on the coffee table.

  “Amy was always smart, Bel. And shrewd in a way that teenagers shouldn’t be. There’s a lot more to this story and I’m not sure you should go any further with it,” he
said. More wise counsel.

  Not that I would take it.

  He was tense, refusing to sit down in his favorite spot on my well-worn Ikea sofa, the one that was held together with duct tape and string on one corner because this particular piece of furniture hadn’t come with all of its requisite nuts and bolts. “I do have one piece of news, though.”

  After his insinuation that this entire investigation was over, at least where I was concerned, I wasn’t expecting anything else related to Amy. “Did my tenderloin finally show up?” I asked, my beef vendor having a spotty delivery record.

  “No,” he said. “I heard something.”

  Cargan’s inscrutability, his inability to get to the point in any reasonable, timely fashion, had been a point of contention between us for years. “Cargan, you’re driving me crazy.” I came back into the living room. “What is it?”

  “I was out last night. For a bit. At The Dugout.”

  “And?”

  “I ran into Jed Mitchell.” Amy’s brother and I had a very tense relationship stemming from a few incidents. One involved his bar-owning father and his accidental shooting of Cargan a few months earlier and the other was related to Jed’s matrimonial strife stemming from his relationship with a girl who had worked here for years. I didn’t know how I had been given the blame for both of these acts of violence and betrayal, but Jed carried a real grudge against me, thinking that my return to the Landing had wrought all of this pain and hardship. Wrong. It was his screwed-up family, which was screwed up long before Amy left. I knew the stories about the Mitchell family, how Oogie, the sole proprietor and owner of The Dugout, had a slippery moral code and maybe more than one or two screws loose, and how Amy’s mother turned a blind eye to her own husband’s dalliances. Amy had triumphed in spite of a family low on emotional and maybe intellectual intelligence, the bright star among a family of misanthropes, Jed sometimes included.

  He was a cop in town now and newly single, thanks to his wife’s own departure with their kids, and he lived above the bar that his father had founded.

  “Does he actually talk to you?” I asked. “Because he hates me, for some reason.”

  “For some reason?” Cargan asked. “I think we know the reasons.”

  I rolled my eyes. “I feel as if I was collateral damage in all of that.”

  “Do you really want to be friends with Jed Mitchell?” Cargan asked.

  All of a sudden, and without warning, I had lost the thread of the conversation, something that wasn’t hard to do where my brother was concerned. “Wait. Let’s back up. You went to The Dugout. You saw Jed Mitchell. You heard something.” I waited, but he didn’t answer. “What was it?”

  “They know who was in Amy’s car,” he said.

  CHAPTER Thirty-seven

  Kevin was right: It was a girl from up the river just a ways who had disappeared the same night as Amy. But why she had been found in Amy’s car and who she was to us was still a mystery. I had never heard of her and googling her disappearance, complete with photo, could say with certainty that I had never seen her, either. Her name had been Kelly and she had looked a lot like Amy.

  A new wave of sadness came over me when I realized that there was another family out there who had been missing their daughter for as long as we all had been missing Amy. I wondered, in the midst of what was now their dulled grief, if there was any measure of comfort in knowing where she had been, how she had been encased in a watery tomb for all these years. Or was the grief still knife sharp and piercing, this revelation just succeeding in making it more acute, if that was even possible?

  The news, despite my not knowing this girl, took my breath away, making the mystery of that evening more complicated. The things I had been certain of once—that Amy was gone and that she was dead—were things I only thought I knew and now everything was new again, just another piece of a complex puzzle.

  I had been keeping what I knew close to my heart since I had found out that Amy was alive, but the time for secret keeping was over. Cargan was right behind me as I grabbed my keys, leaving my purse behind, and got into my car, him barely able to secure a hold on the passenger-side door as I started to drive away, jumping into the seat, one foot dragging along the gravel path in front of the Manor. I drove straight to the police station, not a word spoken between us, and parked the car illegally before going inside and striding over to Jed Mitchell’s desk, where he sat, a cup of coffee in front of him, the steam rising in curly tendrils. Amy’s brother was intent on his work when I walked through the front door, something taking his whole attention.

  Of course I had seen Jed throughout the years, more so in the months since I had been home, but I had never really looked at him closely, taken in his face. Though he had been handsome and athletic back in the day, the years had taken their toll, deep lines around his eyes and mouth, once a smoker’s mouth, but no longer. The nicotine gum on his desk was a testament to that. He looked up when I arrived, wariness turning to confusion turning to our old bond, our friend: resentment. “Bel McGrath,” he said. “To what do I owe this distinct non-pleasure?”

  “She’s alive, Jed,” I said. “Amy is alive.” I could tell by his reaction to that news that Kevin hadn’t told him about our conversation at the diner and I wondered about that.

  There were a few people in the station house that morning, including Kevin, who emerged from Lieutenant D’Amato’s office looking uneasy at my presence.

  “Bel?” he asked.

  Jed stood up. “If this is another one of your…” He searched for the right word before settling on, “… disruptions, you have to go. Please. I can’t take one more thing from you, Bel.”

  “It’s not a disruption,” I said.

  “That’s not even the right word,” Cargan chimed in.

  “It’s the truth, Jed. I know for a fact that she left here, went to Wooded Lake, and then disappeared from there again.” I pushed him out of the way and sat at his computer, pulling up the story from the Hudson Courier, which, oddly enough, existed online, despite the fact that the newspaper was a mom-and-son operation. I moved to the side and brought him closer, pointing at the photo of Amy.

  He stared at it closely, his breath leaving little wet marks on the monitor. Finally, he stood back and looked at me. “That could be anyone,” he said, defiance in his voice.

  “Then why are you crying?” Cargan asked.

  Jed straightened up and turned toward the long bank of windows that ran along the western wall of the station. He put his hands in his pockets and stared out the window for a long time, the station having gone silent as if in respectful mourning for this broken man and the sadness he had carried, along with many of us, for years. He coughed loudly, clearing his throat, turning back around. “Let’s go,” he said. “Outside.”

  I had been wrong; he hadn’t quit smoking. Once in the parking lot, he pulled a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and lit up, but not before proffering the pack to me and my brother, an offer we both declined. “Tell me everything.”

  I went through the story: the commune, the two marriages, the bad feelings she left behind. The Coffee Pot. Dave Southerland. Tweed Blazer.

  “You’re making that up,” he said.

  “Which part?” I asked, happy to be out in the sunshine, away from the prying eyes of the other officers and the smattering of staff in the station.

  “Tweed Blazer?” he asked. “What kind of name is that? Who does that to a kid?”

  “Some pot-smoking, commune-loving hippie,” Cargan said.

  I looked at Cargan. “Hey, 1950, we need our adjectives back.”

  “And this Tweed guy is in a coma?” Jed asked.

  “He is,” I said. “I didn’t see anything that night and whoever did that to him hit me over the head and knocked me out, too. I can’t even remember what I did remember, if that makes any sense.”

  “Nope,” Jed said. “It makes no sense at all. And the cop’s name up there? In Wooded Lake?”

 
“Larry Bernard.”

  He took a deep drag off of the cigarette and looked up at the blue sky, still vivid in the winter light. “She’s alive,” he said to no one, shaking his head. “You know we ID’d that girl? The one in the car?” He looked at Cargan. “I guess that’s something you couldn’t keep to yourself.”

  “Wouldn’t want to. It confirms what we know about Amy.”

  That seemed to bring up another emotion in Jed, something none of us had considered. “She’ll be a suspect. In that girl’s death.”

  In bed that night, the day having washed over me like a sooty, dirty rain, I thought about those words and the ones we didn’t speak.

  She’ll be a suspect.

  Because she may have killed that girl.

  And that would certainly explain why she left.

  CHAPTER Thirty-eight

  It seemed only fair to tell Brendan Joyce the identity of the girl in the car. After all, he had been with me that day when the car had been discovered, the drought dredging it to the surface of our small river, his first betrayal being that he had left me there by myself, too scared to confront what it was or why. We had worked that out, sort of, and then the photo had turned up.

  We had made a deal, though, and that was that I would believe him in return for him letting Feeney go free to do whatever it was that my brother did in his spare time. I didn’t really want to know, Feeney’s life a mystery I wasn’t interested in solving.

  I met Brendan the next evening at a small pub in the next town. He was already sitting at a table, nursing a beer, when I arrived my customary five minutes behind schedule. “Some things never change,” I said, sliding into the chair across from him.

  “And what’s that?” he said.

  “You’re early and I’m right on time,” I said, smiling.

  “You’re actually late,” he said, his brogue all of a sudden sounding like music to my ears, a soft and gentle lilt that took me back to all of the reasons I had fallen for him in the first place. A waitress dropped a glass of wine in front of me. “It’s a Malbec,” he said. “Your favorite, right?”