Wedding Bel Blues: A Belfast McGrath Mystery (Bel McGrath Mysteries) by Maggie McConnon Page A

think he did.”
    Being as I was nestled in the crook of her arm, I couldn’t see if she had used her “tell,” licking her lips nervously. Turning around to see would have taken too much effort and I was exhausted.
    She changed the subject. “Where have you been, honey? Work?”
    “The Dugout,” I said, and could immediately feel her tense beside me.
    “You didn’t eat one of those horrible hot dogs, did you?”
    “No, I didn’t eat a hot dog.” I wondered why that was her only concern. I hadn’t been there in nineteen years and for one specific reason: I had been with Amy the night she disappeared. For a while, that made me persona non grata in town, as if I were hiding something. I wasn’t. I had no idea where she went but couldn’t seem to convince a lot of people of what was the God’s honest truth. “I did have a glass of crappy wine, though.”
    “Just not the hot dogs, Bel. Those things will kill you,” she said. “Sorry. Bad choice of words.”
    “It certainly wasn’t a hot dog that killed Declan,” I said. But what was it? I had replayed that scene over and over in my mind, trying to re-create the sound of the two voices I had heard—one of them certainly Declan’s but the other so muffled I couldn’t even tell if it belonged to a woman or a man—and the events leading up to the point where he landed at my feet, his head cracking open with a sound I wasn’t going to forget anytime soon.
    My mind kept going back to Caleigh, spread out on the bed with the canopy, inches from where all of the action was taking place. Had she woken up? Had it been me, even totally inebriated, I would have come running when I heard the commotion, but the door to the bedroom at the top of the stairs never opened.
    “Did you see Caleigh before she left?” I asked. “After Kevin questioned her?”
    “I didn’t,” Mom said, and I was able to turn my head slightly, catching a glimpse of her tongue touching her upper lip.
    Liar.
    “Where’s Dad?” I asked.
    “Painting,” she said, moving from in back of me and getting off the couch. She stretched, the top part of her dress coming up and exposing a sliver of belly that would rival a twenty-year-old’s. “I guess I’d better go find him and see how he’s doing. He was pretty unnerved by what happened.”
    More unnerved than he should have been? I didn’t ask. Maybe I didn’t want to know. They were both acting strangely, and I knew there were things they weren’t telling me. “Thanks for the cheeseburger.”
    She leaned over and kissed my head. “See you tomorrow?”
    She’d see me every day unless there was some kind of miraculous event that spirited me far away from Foster’s Landing and back into the culinary world of New York City. Maybe that was a good thing. Maybe it would leave me with plenty of time to figure out just what I was going to do with my life, where I was going to go.
    Or what I would be when I finally grew up.
    “Did you give any thought to what you discussed with Dad?” she asked.
    “Yes and no.”
    “It would be a tremendous help, Bel. To us.” She smiled at me. “To you.”
    “Let me sleep on it,” I said, knowing that there was really only one answer to the question. A vision of Mom from long ago, her hair tied up in a green scarf, stirring a huge pot of potatoes on the stove in the Manor came back to me. Although she wasn’t the best cook and didn’t profess to be, in the early going of the business she was always there, adding butter to this and salt to that, and smiling merrily the whole time. Those times were in the days before she became the “hostess” and steered the events of whatever wedding the Manor was having, a job she took to with steely determination, with less of the genuine happiness that had accompanied her kitchen duty. She seemed at home there. I guess the apple didn’t fall far from the tree after all.
    After Mom left, I downloaded the snippets of video I had on my phone into my computer,