The Mulberry Tree

by Jude Deveraux

  Turning slowly, she looked toward the slithering sound and saw that it was just two branches rubbing against each other. But finding the source of one noise didn’t alleviate her fears. Around her were more noises and more places where people and animals could hide.

  She did her best to put some steel into her backbone, then turned and ran toward the barn.

  Four

  When Bailey awoke the next morning, she didn’t at first know where she was. As she’d done for half of her life, she reached out for Jimmie. When she didn’t touch some warm part of him, she didn’t worry. He was often away on a business trip, away making all that money—and spending it, he liked to tell her.

  It was the sound of a truck that brought her more fully awake. Turning over, she looked up and saw the window high above, and slowly her memory came back to her. Jimmie was gone, and she was alone. Absolutely and totally alone.

  Outside, she could hear birds calling, the wind in the trees, and that truck in the distance, its wheels heavy on gravel. It had been a long time since she’d heard any of those sounds. The houses Jimmie bought tended to have acres of lawns surrounding them, or many hundreds of feet of stone terrace, or the ocean. Gravel roads weren’t something that Jimmie tolerated.

  The movers had set up a bed for her. Incongruously, looking like an ad for linens, her pretty new bed—white-painted wood, artificially aged to look as though it had been used for many years—rested smack in the middle of the big front room of the barn. She’d had to look inside six boxes before she found the linens; then Phillip had helped her dress the bed in white cotton sheets, a fluffy white duvet on top, and half a dozen pillows at the head. When it was finished, they’d all laughed; it did look like a setting for a commercial, with the white-on-white bed in the midst of the hay bales.

  After the men and Phillip left, Bailey had gone back to the barn and climbed into the bed. What have I done? she asked herself, and at that moment, if she’d had a cell phone, she would have called Phillip and asked him to come and get her. And she would have said yes, she would fight Atlanta and Ray for a share of the money. She’d buy herself a nice house somewhere and—

  Bailey stopped her thoughts. The truck seemed to be getting closer. In the next minute, she heard the unmistakable sound of air brakes. Had the movers returned? she wondered as she threw back the covers and slipped her feet into her shoes.

  It took a few moments to get the big barn door to slide open, and she thought, Oil can, putting it on her mental list of things she’d need to buy. She ran down what was now a wide path between the house and the barn, then stood in front of the house to watch a big white truck pull into the driveway. Viking Industrial Cleaners was written on the side of the truck, beside a picture of a muscular man wearing a horned headdress and holding a mop.

  The truck door opened, and a man wearing navy blue overalls and carrying a clipboard jumped down to the ground. “You Bailey James?” he asked.

  It took her a moment to remember that that was now her name. “Yes,” she said, rubbing at her eyes, “but I didn’t order any cleaning.” Two more men got out of the truck on the other side.

  The first man looked at the house. The door was flat on its back inside; there were several broken panes of glass in the windows and through them could be seen rooms full of dirt-encrusted cobwebs. “Maybe you just wished so hard, your fairy godmother sent us,” the man said.

  She wasn’t used to such flippancy from service people, so Bailey stared at him in disbelief. Then she saw a twinkle in his eye, something that she’d been seeing rather often in men’s eyes lately. Like Phillip, this man was teasing her. “Does this mean that you believe you’re Prince Charming?” she asked, deadpan.

  Had she said this to a man a month ago, she knew that he would have frowned and walked away, but now the three men behind him guffawed in laughter, and this man seemed to think that whatever Bailey said was okay by him.

  “Whatever you want, we Viking men deliver,” he said, then held out his clipboard to her.

  “Ordered by Phillip Waterman” was written at the top of the page. Dear Phillip, Bailey thought as she signed at the bottom. Maybe he hadn’t bought her dinner, but he had ordered a cleaning crew. Part of her thought she ought to send them away and assert her independence, but another part of her didn’t relish spending weeks on her hands and knees scrubbing.

  She signed and handed the clipboard back to the man.

  “Yo, Hank!” one of the men called from the front porch. “What do we do with this stuff?”

  Bailey stepped out around what looked to be an unpruned butterfly bush to see what the men were referring to. To one side of the front door, on the ground, were some boxes and bags. There were also several pieces of paper stuck into the frame of the window to the right of the fallen door.

  Turning, the truck driver looked at Bailey for the answer.

  Quickly, she went to the pile and began to examine it. Inside one box was what looked to be a tuna noodle casserole in a Pyrex dish. “Welcome,” the attached card said, and it was signed “Patsy Longacre.” There were two roast chickens wrapped in foil, no card. A greasy paper bag held about half a pound of nails. “Thought these might come in handy,” read another note torn off the bottom of a page of lined school paper. Another bag held four apples, each one carefully wrapped in newspaper. A quart jar with an old zinc lid held homemade bread-and-butter pickles. The name Iris Koffman was on the label. On the windowsill were three bunches of wild-flowers, each one tied with string. An old, rusty hoe was leaning against the wall. The unsigned note on it read, “You need it, and heaven knows my husband never uses the thing.”

  In the window frame (which had a half-inch gap in it, so there was plenty of room) were business cards and brochures. There was a card for an insurance man whose office was on Main Street in Calburn. There was a well digger, and a real estate agent. “If you want to sell, call me,” was written on the back. There was a card for a handyman. Bailey kissed this card, then stuck it into her jeans pocket.

  “Hey! I got a card,” one of the cleaning men standing in front of her teased.

  She had no reply to his teasing, so she said, “I’ll take care of these things. You can start cleaning in there.”

  One of the men was looking through a dirty window. “I’m real sorry we left the flamethrower at the last job.”

  Bailey gave them her best Get busy! glare, but they didn’t react as men did when Jimmie gave them that look. Instead, laughing, they went back to their truck and started removing machines and supplies.

  She pulled down a big envelope that was stuck in the window and opened it. Inside was a welcome package from the Calburn Chamber of Commerce, the president of which was Janice Nesbitt. There was a map of Calburn, showing Main Street and the three streets running off it. Yesterday Phillip had driven her to the house from the opposite direction, so she’d not seen the town, and now she wondered what stores were there, and what services. At the far corner of the town map was an arrow pointing to somewhere off the map. “Your house is this way,” someone had written.

  “The middle of nowhere,” Bailey muttered to herself, then looked up to see one of the cleaning men holding out an empty box toward her. Smiling her thanks, she took the box and put all the items that had been left by the townspeople inside. Odd, she thought, but when she’d . . . well, when she’d looked different, men hadn’t been so thoughtful as to offer her boxes to put her things into.

  Smiling, Bailey carried the box back to the barn. She was hungry, and she wanted some privacy to eat, and she wanted time to ponder the idea of living in a town where people left gifts of welcome on her doorstep. But she wasn’t to have any privacy as someone started blowing a horn, and she instinctively knew that she was being called. With a chicken leg in one hand and an apple in the other, she ran down the path, then stopped at what she saw. There were three trucks in her driveway, another two parked on the road, and four more behind them looking for space to park. There were eight men walkin
g toward Bailey, clipboards held out for her signature.

  “Would you guys mind?” said a man in a FedEx uniform. “I need to get out of here. Are you Bailey James?” he asked, then barely waited for her nod before handing her a letter pack and a clipboard.

  She signed, then, not quite knowing what else to do, pulled the tab and opened the package. Inside were two envelopes, both of them with Phillip’s return address on them. “A housewarming gift,” the note inside the first one said. “And don’t worry, they can afford it.” Bailey smiled. Obviously, Phillip was somehow charging everything to Atlanta and Ray. The second envelope held a stack of crisp, new fifty-dollar bills clipped together. “I know how you like to tip,” he’d written.

  Smiling, Bailey looked up—and saw what looked to be now about a dozen men, their faces impatient as they waited for her to sign their papers.

  “Who’s first?” she asked, then held out her hands and started signing. When she signed without reading the papers thoroughly, she knew that Jimmie’s spirit was somewhere frowning at her.

  “You want to show me where the gas lines are?” a man asked.

  “And where do you want the telephone jacks?” asked another.

  “Where’s your fuse box?” asked a third.

  “I don’t really know,” Bailey said, looking at the house. “I haven’t been inside yet.”

  That announcement silenced them. It was her house, but she’d not been inside it. The men looked at each other. “Crazy dame,” seemed to silently pass between them.

  “I’ve been here twenty minutes, and I still haven’t seen the place,” a man walking toward her said. “It’s such a jungle that I’m afraid I’m gonna step in quicksand. I’m from Spenser’s Landscaping Service. We were told to clean up and prune and mow—and we’re to do it all in one day. I’ve just sent one of the men back to get the chain saws and his brother-in-law’s threshing machine. You have any special instructions for us?”

  Bailey could only stare at him; she couldn’t think of any instructions to give him concerning a garden she’d barely seen. She shook her head no, but as he turned away, she called after him, “Don’t hurt the mulberry tree.”

  Glancing back at her, but still walking, he said, “Does that mean I can’t saw out the man the thing ate?” He didn’t crack a smile.

  “He’s needed for fertilizer,” she returned in the same serious tone. “Just add his wake to the bill.”

  “Will do,” the man said, then gave her a mock salute and turned back around. Smiling at the exchange, the other men walked away too, and Bailey followed them inside for her first look at the house that Jimmie had left her.

  As she walked across the fallen door, she closed her eyes a moment and offered up the word charming to any listening guardian angels. She really hoped that the inside was a great deal better than the outside.

  But after only four steps, she figured her guardian angels and her fairy godmother were all on holiday. She was standing in a small, windowless, airless, lightless room that was covered on all four sides with very cheap and very ugly brown paneling, made out of material that wasn’t wood, wasn’t plastic, wasn’t anything at all. Cut into the wall in front of her was a narrow doorway that led into a large room covered with more of the dark, scarred, and dented paneling. There wasn’t a window to the outside in the room, but there were five doorways leading out of it.

  Cautiously, she opened one door and saw a long, narrow room, again covered in dark paneling. There was an aluminum-framed window high up on one wall, but little light came through it. She went back into the big room, then stepped over the cords of the men’s vacuum cleaners, whose roar was deafening, to open another door. It was another bedroom, again with windows that were too high for her to see out of.

  The third door led into a bathroom that had been done in pink tile with ugly little flowers on it. In fact, every surface in the room had a pattern on it: the ceiling had great swirls of fake plaster; the walls had flowered foil wallpaper above the flowered tiles, and the floor had more tiles that had been—what? she thought. Bred to look like leather? They must have grown for, surely, no one had actually designed the things.

  When Bailey closed the door behind her, she looked to see if there was a lock on it. She didn’t want anyone else on earth to see inside that bathroom. A weaker heart than hers might not live through it.

  The fifth door out of the big room led into a small, narrow kitchen. There was a little window over the sink, but it wasn’t enough to alleviate the darkness that filled the room. The kitchen cabinets were old, cheap, dirty, and falling off the walls.

  “I can’t do anything about them,” said a man from behind her. He was from the cleaning service, and he was nodding toward the kitchen cabinets. “I can try to clean them, but I ain’t no carpenter.”

  “Do what you can,” Bailey said, then walked toward the door at the end of the galley-shaped kitchen. When she opened the door, she gasped, for it was the only room she’d seen that was what she’d imagined a farmhouse to be. At the end was a tall window with old-fashioned wooden panes in it, and below it was a stone sink set into a thick wooden slab, the top scarred from use. Beneath the top were heavy turned legs, and stored below were stone jugs and pottery crocks, the kind that were used to make pickles and sauerkraut. Both sides of the room were lined with shelves that had been painted white.

  The shelves were filled with dirty, cobweb-encrusted kitchen equipment. There were old canning jars and big enamel kettles, funnels and racks to hold dripping cheesecloth bags. There were several tongs and stacks of yellowed tea towels that had nests of spiders on them. But what made Bailey’s heart nearly skip a beat was a battered old metal box, “Recipes” printed on it.

  “You want me to throw all this stuff out?” the man asked, again coming up behind her. “This is the only room with things in it. The rest of the place is empty. We could take all this trash to the dump for you.”

  “No!” Bailey said, then calmed herself. “No, just leave it. Clean in here, but don’t throw out anything. I want to keep everything, every jar, every lid—” She reached up to touch the bail of an old Ball jar. They didn’t make jars like this one anymore. “Everything,” she said, looking at the man. “Clean it, but leave it all here.” Then, on impulse, she grabbed the metal recipe box.

  “Aye, aye, captain,” he said, smiling, then smiled more as Bailey squeezed past him in the narrow space.

  Outside the kitchen was a closet that held an old avocado-green washer and dryer, then a door to the outside. She opened the door cautiously, fully expecting it to fall on her head. When it creaked, she released the knob, covered her head, and waited. But the door held on its hinges, and she looked outside. The yard behind the house now held what looked like a colony of men, muscular-looking women, and machines. A huge green tractorlike machine with a man sitting inside a glassed-in room was cutting down the vegetation from the house to—well, she thought, to wherever the property led. Hadn’t she read on the deed that it was ten acres? A workman was removing dead branches from an old apple tree, and she could see another one high up in an ancient maple tree, wide leather belts between his legs, as he cut out dead wood from its upper branches.

  Leave it to Phillip to find the best and the most, she thought as she closed the door on the noise outside, then went back to the men, noise, and machines in the big, central room. When she opened the last door out of the big room, she saw that it led into a little hallway with several doors leading off it. Before her was a staircase, and she could see light streaming down toward her. To her right she found a large bedroom with a bathroom off it. There was a separate shower, plus a tub, and there was even a walk-in closet. The bedroom had a little step-out on one wall and more of the tall wooden windows, such as she’d seen in the room off the kitchen. It was obviously the master bedroom and where Bailey would be sleeping.

  Although the proportions of the room and the windows were beautiful, unfortunately, all the walls were covered in the awful dark
paneling, and the tile and fixtures in the bathroom were too ugly for her to comprehend. There was a dark brown bathtub, a white toilet, and two sinks that were the color of dried blood.

  With a shudder, she turned away and went back into the hall, where she found two more rooms and a third bathroom. There were also a number of closets.

  Without exception, all the rooms were paneled in the dark fake wood, and the bathrooms seemed to be a study in how many patterns could be put into one room. The third bathroom had been tiled in a green faux marble; another type of faux marble had been put on the countertop, and yet another one was on the floor. There was wallpaper above the tile, a pea-green foil version of marble.

  “I’m going to be sick,” Bailey said as she closed the door behind her.

  She took a deep breath as she looked up the stairs. More bedrooms? she wondered. So far, she’d counted five of them. Had the previous owner had many children? Or if this place had been where Jimmie grew up, knowing him, maybe they’d had a lot of guests.

  Slowly, testing each step to make sure it was safe, she went upstairs to the attic. As soon as she entered it, she smiled. Sure, there were two holes the size of her fist in the roof, and someone had placed buckets under them to catch the rain, but under the dirt, Bailey could see that the room was lovely—at least, one side of it was. The steep pitch of the roof cut into the room on two sides, but on the side where the stairs were, a row of windows had been set into the roof, and they let in sunlight. They were high windows, but not too high for her to see out. Setting down the recipe box, she turned the rusty crank to open one, and fresh air rushed into the room. Without the dirty glass blocking it, more sunlight came inside. Turning back, she looked around the big, open room.

  In the middle was a waist-high railing, looking as though it had once been a divider in the room. Someone had sawed an opening in the center and removed a piece of the railing; she saw it leaning against the far wall.