I’m delighted
to be participating in author Maggie McConnon’s BEL,
BOOK, AND SCANDAL tour today in keeping with the Christmas spirit.
Maggie McConnon rings in Christmas in Bel, Book, and
Scandal, the third adventure for everybody’s
favorite Irish-American culinary artist turned amateur sleuth.
Bel McGrath tries her best to keep herself on the straight and narrow
but she just has a taste for trouble. This time danger arrives in the form of a
newspaper left behind by visitors to Shamrock Manor—and a photograph that jolts
Bel out of the present and back into a dark chapter from her past.
The person in the photo is Bel’s best friend Amy Mitchell, long gone
from Foster’s Landing, at a commune in upstate New York shortly after her
disappearance. The picture, and Bel’s burning desire to find out what happened
to Amy—and whether she may still be alive—is the catalyst for a story in which
old secrets are revealed, little by little…and certain characters are shown to
not be as genuine as Bel once thought.
Now here’s
an excerpt from this tantalizing story for your reading pleasure.
Chapter One
I was
wet, cold, and tired, but despite the fact that she was ready to kill me with
her bare hands for staying out all night, my mother addressed all three of my
immediate needs before saying anything else.
A towel
to dry my hair.
Clean clothes in the form of a pair of jeans, a T- shirt, and a
pair of socks. An Irish sweater, the most uncomfortable item of clothing ever
made—a hair shirt, really— but welcomed, and probably deserved, at that moment.
A bologna sandwich. It would be the last time I would eat
bologna, for many reasons, the most significant being that the smell would
forever after remind me of Amy. And how she had disappeared the night before
and would always be gone.
Mom was worrying a rosary in one hand, the other securely placed
in one of my father’s meaty ones. She turned and looked at me, asking me a
question she had already asked and would continue to ask, along with everyone else even vaguely connected to Foster’s
Landing. “Where is she?”
I
didn’t know. I didn’t think I would never know.
My brother Cargan, the closest to me in age and the one who had
found me beside the Foster’s Landing River, was across the room, looking out
the window, his violin strapped to his back; he had a lesson later that morning
and wouldn’t miss it for anything, even if Amy Mitchell was missing and never
to be seen again. No, he was gearing up for a big competition in Ireland and
nothing stopped him from his lessons or his practicing. Although the mood was somber
in the police station, I wouldn’t have been surprised if he had whipped the instrument
out right then and there and started playing a tune, a sad one, the type I had
grown up listening to.
My other brothers were out and about in town now. They, too, had
come running when Cargan first discovered me but were less concerned about me
now but had joined the hunt for Amy. It was another night for Bel, one said.
She was going to be in a lot of trouble, said another. They were both right: It
had been another typical night and now I was
in a lot of trouble, the last to have seen Amy alive with nothing to tell that
might lead to her whereabouts. They were a self-protective bunch, caring little
as to why I would be hauled into the police station, happy that, for once, they
were not the ones in trouble. Feeney, especially. He was always in trouble.
Derry and Arney, not as much, but both had a way of finding their way into
situations that were beyond their control. Feeney was a much more calculated
and deliberate hooligan.
Next to Mom, Dad let out a barely audible sob, the kind that
told me that he was, first and foremost, a father and one who felt the pain of
a missing child. He looked over at me, almost as if he wanted to confirm that I
was still there, and reached out the hand that didn’t hold Mom’s, patting me
awkwardly on the thigh.
“Ah,
Belfast,” he said. “Ah, girl.”
“It’s okay, Dad,” I said. “They’ll find her. They’ll bring her back.” I thought about those
words a lot over the years, wondering where that confidence came from. Youth, I
eventually decided. When you’re young and nothing bad has ever happened, you
think everything will always be better, every wrong will be righted. It’s only
with age that I realized that that wouldn’t always be the case and that
disappointments would stack up, like the layers of my famous mille-feuille
cake, the one with seemingly a thousand layers of goodness that cracked upon
the first dip of the fork. But even then, in my heart, I had a feeling it
wasn’t going to turn out the way we all wanted, something I couldn’t give voice
to at that moment.
Lieutenant D’Amato came out of the conference room at the
Foster’s Landing police station and looked at me, frowning. Behind me the door
opened, and his expression suddenly lightened, the sight of his only child, his
daughter, coming through the doors with a cup of coffee in one hand and a bag
of something delicious in the other, the greasy stain at the bottom indicating
that it was probably a Danish from the local bagel store. It smelled better
than my bologna sandwich, which I wrapped up in the wax paper that Mom had put
it in and stuffed under my thigh.
Mary Ann handed her father the food and then turned to me, tears
in her eyes. “Oh, Bel,” she said, and ran toward me, enveloping me in a hug.
She smelled good, not like river water and stale beer like I did, but more like
the soft grass that I felt beneath my feet when I ran from my house down the
steep hill toward the river. Beside me,
my mother’s silent reproach hung over me like a fetid cloud.
Why can’t you be more
like Mary Ann D’Amato?
I had heard it more than once in my seventeen years and hoped
eventually it would die a natural death as I got older and more accomplished,
setting off to take the culinary world by storm, another thing that left a
distinct distaste in my mother’s mouth. I was supposed to be a nurse. A
teacher. A wife, mother. Not a chef.
It was your idea to open a catering hall, I wanted to say. Your
idea to have me in the kitchen every moment I wasn’t studying or swimming on
the varsity team. Your idea to ask me how the potatoes tasted, if the carrots
needed another minute. Your idea to let my brothers learn the traditional Irish
tunes and put me in an invisible, yet highly important, role— that of sous chef
to you and a myriad of other cooks who had come through the doors of Shamrock
Manor, only to discover that yes, our family was crazy, and no, they didn’t
really care all that much about haute cuisine.
Mary Ann was going to nursing school; of course she was. She was
the daughter that my parents never had and she would make everyone in this town
proud.
Years later, in what could only be from the “you can’t make this
stuff up” files, Mary Ann would marry Kevin Hanson—my Kevin Hanson— and I would
cook the food for their wedding. We would all be friends and we would laugh
together and eat together and have a generally good time in one another’s company.
Before, I felt the lesser, but in the future, the now, I would be equal, the
one who had gone away and come back, realizing that my heart was in this little
village, at least for a time. But back then, Amy was still missing and everyone
thought I had the key.
“Where is she?” Mary Ann whispered into my curly hair.
“I don’t know,” I said. And I didn’t. Amy Mitchell was my best
friend, my confidante, my sister from another mother, and she hadn’t said a
word about where she would go after a night on Eden Island. My last words to
her, an angry sentence (You’ll be sorry.
. . . ), burned in my gray matter. I
don’t know where she is, I wanted to scream. It had been just fun and games
until I had seen her kissing my boyfriend, Kevin Hanson. We had been
celebrating our waning days at FLHS, and it was the best night we had ever had
up until that point.
I don’t know why she wouldn’t tell me where she was going, but
maybe I did.
Maybe of everyone here in the police station, she wanted me to
be the last to know.
I broke the embrace with Mary Ann and sat down again; I would
never smell a certain floral-scented shampoo again without thinking of that
morning. I would never feel the grass beneath my feet without thinking of the
smell and where it brought me in my mind. Mary Ann’s face, tear streaked and
pale, made me feel bad about my own: dry as a bone, not a tear in sight,
stunned, resigned. Amy was gone, and deep down I knew that she was never coming
back. How I knew it so well in the early morning hours I had no idea. Why I had
told Dad things would be fine was a mystery. But I knew it as well as I knew my
own name that it was over and wondered how everyone else was still clueless to
that fact. “Belfast McGrath?”
I looked up at a cop who clearly didn’t know who I was but whose
face told me he knew why I was there.
“That’s me,” I said, and
walked into the room where I would tell them everything and nothing.
BEL,
BOOK, AND SCANDAL is available at the following links:
For those
not familiar with Maggie McConnon, here’s a bit of background on her.
MAGGIE MCCONNON grew up in New York immersed in Irish culture
and tradition. A former Irish stepdancer, she was surrounded by a family of
Irish musicians who still play at family gatherings.
She credits her Irish grandparents with providing the stories
of their homeland and their extended families as the basis for the stories she
tells in her Belfast McGrath novels, beginning with Wedding Bel
Blues.
For more on
Maggie and her writing, visit with her on Facebook.
Thanks for
stopping by today and I hope I’ve enticed you to check out Maggie’s new
release, BEL, BOOK, AND SCANDAL. Are you reading Christmas themed stories?
