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

and it was a lot of footage, more than I remember. I scanned it for any view of Declan Morrison. There he was, dancing with Bridie McKay, one of Mom’s cousins. And there he was again, a few minutes later, talking to a busboy about something. And still again, glad-handing a guy with his back to the camera but who was clearly one of the Protestants. (Don’t ask me how I knew. I just did.) And finally, there he was, the time stamp showing that it was moments before I spirited Caleigh up to the bedroom, talking to the new Mrs. Mark Chesterton, their noses practically touching, a tear running down Caleigh’s flushed cheek.
    I saved the entire raft of footage into a folder called “Recipes.” Anyone who knew me well, like Amy had once, would know that this was a dummy file. I don’t use recipes. I’m too good for that. Then, I edited out any footage that included Caleigh talking to Declan and saved the file as “Raw Footage.”
    I stared at the computer screen for a while, the picture of Caleigh talking to Declan a shadow on my retinas even when it wasn’t on the screen. I was good at a lot of things, I determined, but I was getting especially good at forgetting the past.

 
    CHAPTER Eight
    I hadn’t planned on going to the candle lighting for Amy in the village square the next night, but that’s where I found myself, moving wordlessly among a sea of people for whom the disappearance of Amy Mitchell was a singular focus, at least for one night every year. I had pushed my red hair up under a baseball cap and wound a gauzy scarf around my neck, taking out my contacts and putting on my glasses before leaving the house; maybe no one would know who I was and maybe no one would realize that I may have been the last person to ever see Amy.
    Earlier that day, I had attempted to go back into the Manor to see what awaited me in the kitchen should I take the head chef job, but the place was swarming with Foster’s Landing finest, led by Kevin and Mary Ann D’Amato’s father, Lt. Daniel D’Amato, our village’s chief of police and keeper of the peace. I was shooed out by a uniformed cop who I recognized as a classmate who had thrown up on me during one particularly laborious bus ride to a local farm when we were in the fourth grade and so, knowing about his delicate constitution, I made haste back to the apartment. Lieutenant D’Amato had caught up with me outside.
    “Sorry for your loss, Bel,” he said, referring to what I thought was my broken engagement and lost job. “Poor guy. A cousin of Caleigh’s?”
    “Oh, you mean the dead guy?” I said. “Yes, a shame,” I said, sounding far less troubled than I actually was. I was preoccupied by the thought that exactly nineteen years ago Amy Mitchell and I had had our first and only fight, after which she had disappeared, and that the event would be commemorated, as it was every year, with a candle lighting that night.
    “Anything else you want to tell me, Bel?” the Lieutenant asked, looking down at me, his bushy black eyebrows two question marks over his kind eyes.
    I thought about it. “Nope. I told Kevin everything.”
    “Are you sure?” he said, and in that question, asked in a kind voice, was the memory of a similar question he asked me a long time ago when Amy didn’t come home. “Are you sure there’s nothing else you want to say?” he had asked then.
    “I have a habit of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, Lieutenant.” I looked up at him, the kindly officer who had been a part of this town, my life, for as long as I could remember. “You know that,” I said, giving voice to the fact that I knew what everyone thought: I knew more than I let on.
    They’d be wrong.
    He rubbed his hands together even though it wasn’t cold. “Yes, Detective Hanson filled me in.”
    I did have something to ask him, though. “Why did he let Caleigh and Mark leave?” I asked. “You know, go on their honeymoon? Shouldn’t they be forced to stay around in case