Wedding Bel Blues: A Belfast McGrath Mystery (Bel McGrath Mysteries) Read Online Free PDF Page A

seen her face when her filet mignon—a big, honking piece of meat—was served. It was utter despair followed by steely resolve. And a hasty exit to smoke presumably.) I looked up just in time to see the former man of my dreams, Declan Morrison, take a swan dive over the second-floor balcony, hitting the large resin bust of FDR that incongruously sat in the center of the foyer, breaking it—and his own beautiful head—into a million little nasty pieces all over the polished stone.

 
    CHAPTER Four
    Let’s look at the bright side. There has to be a bright side, right? I’m a McGrath; we were taught from a young age that whatever you were going through, someone had it much worse. At least I wasn’t thinking about my own broken engagement or the end of my very promising career anymore. No, I was thinking about death and blood and all of the horrible nightmares I was likely to have after seeing someone die.
    I hadn’t signed up for this, standing to the side of a dead body in the grand hall of a beautiful historic mansion, blood everywhere, ruining what appeared to be a very well-made shirt on a very dead guy. And being the only witness, except for whomever Declan had argued with prior to his dive over the balcony railing. I stifled a gag. There was no way I was letting Kevin Hanson, otherwise known as “the wanker” in my family, see that I was feeling a little under the weather and that if I were a different person, one who didn’t have complete control over her wonky digestive tract, I’d have spewed all over the place, ruining his precious crime scene.
    “Bel?” Kevin said, looking at me as if I had just beamed into the crime scene, as if I had no place being in my parents’ place of business at my cousin’s wedding. “What are you doing here?”
    Not much of a detective there, are you, Hanson? That’s what I wanted to say, but instead I smiled. He was probably the last person in Foster’s Landing to know I had returned and that didn’t bode well for the investigative skills the badge he displayed so proudly seemed to connote. “Just passing through,” I said, and that was true enough. I had just been passing through when I heard angry whispers and then the sound of wood shattering, along with one very handsome guy’s head. FDR was smashed to smithereens. And so was Declan Morrison.
    Kevin read my mind. He always could. He tried to affect some kind of nonchalance that he didn’t have the chops to pull off. He wasn’t excited to see me. Indeed, he seemed a little bothered by my appearance in his crime scene. “I’ll want to talk to you again,” Kevin said, still looking, in the final approach to middle age, like the boy he had once been.
    “That makes sense,” I said, my last word punctuated by a gag that stuck in my throat.
    “What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked. “I know what I’m doing,” he said, the implication being that I—or someone else—didn’t think he did.
    “Of course you do,” I said, swallowing hard, but I wasn’t so sure. Kevin wasn’t exactly what you’d call a brain trust, but he sure was cute. That’s what had gotten him over several academic humps in high school, his ability to charm his way into a passing grade.
    “Stay put. You’re our only witness,” he said as he gave me another once-over, still in my really uncomfortable raw-silk bridesmaid dress. He smiled even though the words sounded curt, insensitive, like I was the worst witness ever to see someone die. I was. Beyond the actual dying part, I could offer nothing more about what had happened prior to that event.
    Hard to believe that I once loved Kevin Hanson so much that I almost agreed to drop out of the the Culinary Institute for a stint at Ulster County Community College. So glad I listened to my mother, just that once. After I left, he started dating Mary Ann D’Amato, the Lieutenant’s daughter, and had been with her for years. She was someone whom I wanted to hate but couldn’t because