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

  I was a little off my game.

  My father came into the kitchen, all piss and vinegar today, and snapped at the pretty Irish waitress standing by the expediting area.

  “Colleen!”

  “That’s Pauline, Dad,” I said, taking a damp dish towel and wiping the edge of one of the plates to be served. “They have been here a long time. You need to get it straight. Pauline has dark hair, and Colleen is a blonde.” And Pauline kisses Cargan when she thinks no one is looking.

  “I’m Eileen,” the girl said, and when I looked up, I saw that it was indeed Eileen and not Pauline or Colleen, the trio of servers at Shamrock Manor. “By the way, Mr. McGrath, the best man grabbed my ass.”

  “Language!” Dad said. “This is a wedding, not a rodeo.”

  “The best man grabbed my posterior, too, Mr. McGrath,” Pauline said, flicking her long ponytail over her shoulder; her look was definitely Irish Katy Perry. She looked as if she spent more time in my mother’s Pilates studio than she did waiting tables, her legs long and lithe, her stomach taut and flat. Gracefully muscled arms hoisted a tray of plates with ease, despite the fact that she probably weighed only a buck twenty soaking wet, and it was not lost on me that even my married brothers—Arney and Derry—blushed a bit when she breezed by the stage as they were playing.

  “Now, that’s better,” Dad said, not as concerned with the infraction at hand as he was with what he perceived as foul language. “Clearly, he is not the best man with that kind of behavior.”

  “Filet mignon all day, Bel,” Pauline said, realizing she wasn’t going to get anywhere with my dad. And what could he do exactly? Ask the best man in the middle of the wedding to unhand our serving girls? Dad was never good at handling conflict.

  I kept it moving until there was no moving left to do. Everyone was fed; the girls had told me so. I leaned back against the counter and studied my hands, nicked from one knife that needed sharpening, an oily patch staining one of my palms. It wasn’t fifteen minutes later that the boys—as my grown brothers were still called—started playing the song they always played when the bride and groom cut the cake, sensibly titled “The Bride Cuts the Cake and Then the Groom Cuts the Cake.” Cargan had written it in the early days and they had never learned anything new to replace it.

  As the bride and groom looked at each other adoringly, feeding each other cake with as much class and decorum as they could, their fingers covered with icing, Pauline came into the kitchen with another tray of dirty plates. “Pauline, where did this mushroom come from?”

  She was flustered; it was the busiest time of the wedding, the clearing of plates, the serving of cake. “Who knows, Bel? Probably some rogue vegan out there brought their own food. Couldn’t tolerate the thought of eating something prepared with butter or stock.” She led me to the kitchen door to look out the window, pointing to a woman dressed in head-to-toe hemp or some other natural fiber, fair-trade sandals on her feet, her hair a mess of dreadlocks cascading down her back. “My money is on her.”

  The woman was twirling on the dance floor in a way to give Stevie Nicks a run for her money. She seemed to be enjoying my brothers’ music immensely.

  “I’ve seen it all, Bel. And spend a few more months here, and you will, too,” Pauline said, pushing through the kitchen door and back into the dining room.

  I followed her into the dining room to see how things were going in general. Every table appeared to be eating cake—the girls who worked for us were pros after all—and coffee was being poured at every seat, regardless of whether the guest wanted it or not. I was on my way to the restroom when the groom stopped me at the back of the dining room.

  “Just wanted to tell you that this has been fantastic, Belfast,” Gerry Mason said, putting a hand on my shoulder.

  Gerry’s card was in my pants pocket and I had been looking at it since we last met. Was I ready to take this step, take matters into my own hands? “Gerry,” I said, “when this is over, I’d like to discuss something with you. If you don’t mind?”

  “Anything, Bel,” he said. He wasn’t as drunk as some of his guests but he was getting there, a high flush in his smooth, pale cheeks. “Whatever I can do for you. You have made me and Pegeen so happy today.” He looked down at me, the picture of wedded bliss. “Why don’t you tell me now? Then we can talk more when I get back from our honeymoon.”

  I looked around. Things were fairly under control if you didn’t count the frenzy on the dance floor and the dozens of empty bottles of Chardonnay that were rolling around behind Seamus the bartender’s feet. “I had a friend. My whole life. She disappeared when we were teenagers.”

  I knew this was a bad idea. Gerry’s face clouded over and the previously happy groom was now concerned for me, someone who would say something like this on the happiest day of his life. I shook my head. “I’m sorry,” I said. “This is the wrong time to be discussing this.”

  “I can help you, Belfast, but you’re right, not now,” he said, smiling sadly. “When I come back, okay?” He did a little jig to the music my brothers were playing. “I love a good case, though. What was your friend’s name?”

  “Amy Mitchell,” I said.

  It could have been my imagination—surely it was—but I thought I saw his face cloud over.

  I waved a hand, trying to dispel the bad energy that I had brought to the conversation. “Forget it,” I said. “Later. Enjoy your wedding.” I winked. “And of course, your honeymoon.”

  I looked at him, a kind man with a happy wife, a woman who appeared to be having the time of her life at her own wedding, something we at Shamrock Manor always tried to achieve but rarely did. The food was sometimes cold. The beer was warm. The music was too loud. The speeches couldn’t be heard. It had rained. But today, for the first time in a long time, people were drinking and laughing and dancing and having a ball, and everything was perfect.

  I stood at the edge of the dance floor and watched Gerry Mason find his new wife, the center of his universe it would seem, kiss her heartily as people clinked the knives against the glassware, and spin her around the dance floor as my brothers started to play a disco number. Whatever we had done today was what we needed to do every time, the thought of murders past and my missing friend gone from my mind as I entered the center of my universe, my kitchen.

  The walk-in was open and I mentally slapped myself; a few more minutes and the warm seeping into the cold would become a real problem. I headed over to it, starting to push the heavy door closed when I heard a happy groan, a giggle. The sound of my brother’s name, Cargan, being whispered into the frosty air, the lilt of an Irish brogue wrapping the word around the tongue of its female owner.

  I stepped back, leaving the door ajar, hoping that whatever was going on in there didn’t defrost my shrimp. Behind me, Eileen and Colleen entered, leaving the identity of the girl in the walk-in to be none other than Pauline. I hurried the girls out of the kitchen with some loud orders, letting my brother and his paramour know that it was all clear, that it was safe to come out. When I returned to the kitchen a few minutes later, Pauline was leaning against the counter studying her manicure and Cargan, an escape artist if there ever was one, was back on the stage, his violin under his chin, beautiful music coming from his instrument.

  Like nothing ever happened. I would remember that later when things started to fall apart.

  The wedding winding down, Dad came into the kitchen. “Good job, people,” he said to the two of us. “Mr. Casey was very happy with the event.” He slapped a fat envelope against his palm. “Time to divide the tip.”

  “Hold up, Dad,” I said. “I need to visit the ladies’ room.”

  The dining hall still held a smattering of guests, and Eileen and Colleen were clustered together by one of the big windows, deep in conversation. I put my fingers to my mouth and whistled. “Big tip, ladies. Meet Mal in the office.”

  I ducked into the first stall of the ladies’ room and fumbled with my chef’s pants, the drawstrin
g knotted at my waist and bunching up beneath my fingers. “Damn it to hell,” I said as my bladder made its uncomfortable presence known. I pulled my pants down forcefully, ripping one side at the hip, and sat down. I thrust my hand into the toilet-paper dispenser only to find that the Caseys and Masons, raucous and randy and a bunch of drunkards, had also used every square inch of toilet paper in this stall, which had been stocked to the rafters with tissue prior to the wedding. In the stall beside me, I heard a noise not unlike the air being let out of a balloon, but the stalls were so close together that I couldn’t get a gander at the person’s feet.

  “Hey, a little help here?” I said “Could you pass me some toilet paper?” I asked, the request met by silence. I banged on the shared wall between the stalls. “Hello? Toilet paper?”

  Nothing.

  I rooted around in my pants pocket and found an old napkin that would do just fine. “Thanks for nothing.” I said to the person in the next stall, landing on the thought that maybe they were one of the drunk Caseys, left behind to sleep off the liter of beer or wine they had consumed at the wedding. They weren’t responding because they couldn’t. That had to be the answer.

  I went to the sink and washed my hands, studying my face in the mirror. Was I the kind of person who left a person, passed out cold, in a bathroom stall in a catering hall? I went back and forth in my mind and decided, ultimately, that I wasn’t. I dried my hands and knocked on the door to the stall. “Hello? Do you need help?”

  But whatever I had heard before, a little passing of air from someone’s lungs, had ceased and all that was left was me listening to the hum of the air conditioner as it whirred to life above me, cold air rustling the hair that had fallen out of my head scarf. I pulled at the stall door, convinced it would be locked, surprised to find it wasn’t. The door swung open, almost hitting the sink—another example of the architectural issues that existed at Shamrock Manor—and I took in the sight of our groom, his pants around his ankles, his face turning blue as he took what would be his last breath.

  CHAPTER Four

  “It’s like déjà vu all over again,” Kevin Hanson said, rubbing his hand over the bust of Bobby Sands as if for good luck. He would need it. He wasn’t the best detective I had ever met, but then again, the only detectives I knew were on TV, and most of them were mind readers, geniuses, and prognosticators. They would be a collective tough act to follow.

  I had run screaming from the ladies’ room, finding Cargan first. It was my favorite brother who called 911 and then constructed a story to keep the remaining wedding guests, along with the bride, from entering the back of the Manor and mucking up the bathroom, somewhere that Kevin would want to investigate, if only to figure out why a man was in the ladies’ room.

  I sat on the fourth step of the grand staircase in the foyer, holding my pants together. The rip that had occurred when I had forcefully pulled them off earlier had left me one false move away from being naked from the waist down, the underwear I had thrown on that morning not the kind you wanted other people to see.

  Mom emerged from the office, a sewing kit in her hand, which she shoved into my chest. “Here. There are safety pins in there,” she said. “Stand up.”

  While I didn’t want to do this in front of the entire Foster’s Landing Police Department, it seemed I didn’t have a choice. Mom hoisted me to my feet and pulled up my chef’s coat, pulling my pants tight and pinning the two ragged edges of the waistband together after riffling through the sewing kit. “Thanks, Mom,” I said, sitting back down on the step.

  * * *

  Dad raced through the foyer, passing Kevin, who grabbed his arm. “Mr. McGrath, and Mrs. McGrath, for that matter, this is potentially a crime scene,” he said, asking Dad to take his place beside me. I think he was overstating that but since we had had a murder at the Manor not a few months before, I guess he was covering all of his bases. “All McGraths and McGrath employees. Stay where you are,” he said, acting as if he were herding cats and not talking to a group of adults who could follow directions. Well, maybe he was right. We were the McGraths and following directions may not have been our area of expertise.

  “It was a heart attack,” Cargan called after Kevin. When Kevin ignored him, Cargan dropped his voice to a whisper. “Or an aneurysm.”

  That’s what it looked like. Cargan had dragged Gerry Mason’s body out of the stall and done CPR and mouth-to-mouth but it was too late. The guy was gone, his face going pale quickly, the light that had been in his eyes, just minutes earlier, starting to fade.

  On the staircase with the rest of my family, I tried not to think about it. I looked around, hoping to find something else to take my mind off what I had seen. The boys were here, Feeney still wearing his guitar, and the waitresses and busboys were there, too, or so I thought. I looked behind me and saw Colleen and Eileen but no Pauline. I had seen her earlier when we assembled and now she was gone. I mouthed the question to Eileen. “Where’s Pauline?” but she only shrugged in reply, her mouth set in a grim line, her arms crossed over her chest.

  Something about her stance and Colleen’s tear-filled eyes told me all I needed to know: they were nervous about the cops being here and not because there was a scintilla of suspicion on anyone’s part that they had anything to do with Gerard Mason’s situation. He had had a heart attack; that was clear. Or an aneurysm. Something that had happened quickly and without warning while he was in the ladies’ room, a place he wasn’t supposed to be. The girls had other secrets that they didn’t want to share, namely of the immigration sort. I had always suspected, but now I knew.

  The dining room doors swung open and a stretcher with the body of the dead groom in peaceful slumber atop it made its way through the foyer, pushed by an EMT.

  Mom leaned over. “Is that EMT the McNulty boy?” she asked. “The one that punched Cargan during the CYO basketball championship in the fifth grade? For missing that foul shot?”

  “I don’t know,” I hissed back. “Does it matter?”

  “It does,” she said in her stage whisper.

  “That was thirty years ago, Mom,” I said. “People change.”

  “Not that much,” she said. “Little bastard.”

  But he was a big bastard now, and pretty adept at hoisting a stretcher into an ambulance.

  When it was my turn to go into the office and give the police a statement, I was glad that my mother had pinned my pants so that I didn’t have to manually hold them up, but not delighted by how tight they were. My muffin top was more of a soufflé hanging over my waistband and I asked if I could stand instead of sit, the thought of folding myself into a chair in front of Mom’s desk, the desk at which Lieutenant D’Amato now sat, making me light-headed.

  “This is awful,” I said. “How is the family doing?”

  Kevin nodded. “We sent them to the station. Taking it about as well as you’d expect.”

  “A crime scene? He had a heart attack or something. I saw it with my own eyes.” I looked at Kevin. “I don’t think this has anything to do with crime.”

  Kevin nodded. “Leave it to us, Bel. Given the history of the Manor, we need to cover all of our bases.”

  “Our history is that there was one murder,” I reminded him. “That’s not much of a history.”

  “You don’t think one murder is one more than necessary?” Kevin asked. “Now, anything else to tell us?”

  I leaned against the wall and folded my arms. “I’ve told you everything I know,” I said, and I had. I left out the part about no toilet paper but that was it. The rest had all been revealed. The bathroom, the little breath of air that had been released, the silence on the other side of the stall otherwise.

  Kevin was beside the lieutenant, sitting on the edge of the desk. “Not that, Bel,” he said.

  “Then what?” I asked. “I’ve told you everything.”

  They looked at me expectantly and my mind flashed on the events of a few days earlier, of Eden Island and my missing friend, of the discovery,
all these years later, of some of her personal belongings. My mind went to the backpack that had been found, the sneakers alongside it, both coming to the surface when the current drought depleted the river of most of its water. It was different now than it was then; whereas that spring had brought us torrential rain, something that had hidden Amy’s belongings, dragging them down into the depths, this summer had brought drought and, with it, the opening of a case long closed.

  I also thought of Brendan Joyce, the guy who had pulled me out of my funk upon my return to the Landing. Everything was going so well, and then that afternoon, one minute he had been beside me and the next he was gone. I hadn’t heard from him since but I kept that inside, not wanting Kevin to see the disappointment on my face, the fact that I realized that when the going got tough, Brendan Joyce got going.

  It had been such a gorgeous day, Brendan and I sitting by the river, enjoying each other’s company, when our reverie was interrupted by the police, some firefighters, and what turned into a massive investigation.

  “I told you,” I said. “Everything I told the cops all those years ago still applies. We had a party on Eden Island. Amy and Kevin,” I said, not looking at Detective Kevin Hanson, now a man, “kissed.” The lieutenant and Kevin looked at the ceiling, the ground, anywhere but at me. Each other. Kevin was in a long-term relationship with the lieutenant’s daughter and even though what had happened had been a long, long time ago, it was still uncomfortable. I left out the part where my best friend had looked at me like she had finally done the one thing she had been waiting her whole life to do. “We were teenagers. I got mad. Amy and I had words. I don’t remember much after that except that I woke up, alone, on the island, and had to practically swim to shore because there had been so much rain and the river was so full.”