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

I was happy to be rid of them, my toes cramped and stiff after a day in those suckers.
    I passed my brothers, still on the stage and standing at rapt attention, holding their instruments as if to say, We all have alibis! They did. They had been playing some mash-up of “The Girl from Ipanema” and what sounded like Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way” and everyone in the room had had their eyes trained on them. They had then segued into a version of Elvis Presley’s “Suspicious Minds,” which made me wonder if I was the only person who knew about Caleigh’s transgression. But then I remembered how Feeney had used to dress up as Elvis when we were kids, inking long sideburns down his chubby face, and it all made sense.
    I walked around the head table, where Aunt Helen was sobbing loudly into one of the linen napkins, her boyfriend, Frank the Tank, as we liked to call him, with his arm around her shoulders. Frank was a former firefighter and his size and shape indicated to me, at least, that he was the guy to call if I was ever trapped in a fire. I gave Aunt Helen a quick hug. Frank grabbed my arm, his hand shaking.
    “This. Is. Awful,” he said in a halting tone, his face pale. Poor guy had seen his share of death and destruction, but his reaction to the day’s events pointed to a sensitive nature his size and normally silent demeanor didn’t make apparent.
    “It is,” I said.
    He shook his head sadly. “And at a wedding.”
    There was nothing to say to that so I drifted off, looking for my parents. When I reached them finally, my mother threw her toned arms around me. She has never known quite what to do with a short, chubby daughter, wondering how she—a five-foot-ten lithe beauty—could have given birth to someone like me despite having the genetic capacity to wear the same jeans over a twenty-year period without the benefit of an elastic waist and an intrepid tailor. “Oh, honey,” she whispered into my hair. “That poor fella. What happened?”
    I broke the embrace and shrugged, trying to act like I saw accidents—or, worse, murders—every day. “He came over the balcony.” That was one way to put it. “Not sure how it happened without somebody seeing something.” Me, in particular. I didn’t want to go into too much detail because I wasn’t sure what I heard or what I saw besides his lifeless body on the floor.
    My dad leaned in, his arms crossed over his chest. “Maybe it was one of them,” he said, raising an eyebrow in the direction of Mark’s family. He dropped his voice to a whisper, which for him, on a scale of 1 to 10, is about a 15. “It could happen,” he said.
    Maybe. Probably not. Something told me that Mark’s family was incapable of that sort of violence, looking as they did, as if they had turned to stone, a phalanx of wedding guests pressed up against the windows at the back of the room. This looked a little more like a crime of passion to me, but what did I know?
    “Do you know what this is going to do for business?” my father asked, drawing a hand across his balding pate. “A murder at Shamrock Manor?” He shook his head sadly.
    Mom put a hand on his arm. “Let’s not go there yet, Mal. We don’t even know what happened.”
    “Officer Hanson on the scene?” my father asked, no love lost between my old boyfriend and my father.
    “Sure is,” I said, the three of us sitting down at the table. “And it’s Detective Hanson now.”
    “We were told we couldn’t leave,” my mother said. “By that officer over there,” she added, pointing to a trembling cop who looked like he had just graduated from high school. “He looks like he’s about to faint. I think I changed his diaper once at a church picnic.”
    He did look like he was about to faint. It wasn’t every day that you went to work thinking that you’d be answering calls related to shoplifting at the local grocery store only to find that you were now part of a team investigating a murder. Suicide was ruled