The Mulberry Tree

by Jude Deveraux

  Lord! but the woman could cook!

  He was halfway through the plate when he again began to wonder where she was. On impulse, he opened the door to the big pantry off the kitchen, then drew in his breath. Yesterday the room had been empty, but tonight there were many jars on the shelves, all filled and labeled. Stepping inside, he ran his hand along them. On the shelf under the window was a big glass jar filled with cherries, looking as though they’d just been picked and swimming in a clear liquid. “Cherry Cordial,” the label said in her neat lettering. On the shelves against the wall were jars filled with a dark liquid and labeled “Blackberry Liqueur.” There were jars of carrots surrounded by whole spices and a rich-looking liquid. “Jam,” “Conserves,” “Green Tomato Chutney,” he read.

  Matt backed out of the pantry, unable to comprehend what he was seeing. It was Pioneer Woman meets Julia Child.

  In the kitchen again, he finished his plate of food, then removed the bowl from the oven and took off the foil. It was bread pudding, one of his favorite things in the world. There were fat raisins in the bread, and a warm, custardy sauce floated on top. He took one bite and thought he might swoon, then laughed at himself for thinking of the old-fashioned word. Would he have to be revived with cherry cordial?

  With his bowl full of pudding in his hand, he pushed open the screen door and went outside. It was early in the year yet, but soon it was going to get hot. He looked up at the mulberry tree. “Know where she is?” he asked, then smiled when a breeze blew the leaves and they seemed to point down the path. Looking through shrubs and low-hanging tree branches, Matt could see a bit of yellow near the fishpond. Bailey’s shirt.

  “Thank you,” Matt said, smiling up at the old tree as he followed the twists and turns of the stone path down, and there was Bailey, bent over an empty raised bed. She was planting some little green things she pulled from a bunch.

  For a moment he didn’t say anything, just stood behind her and watched her work. She was a very desirable woman. Very. But not in the way that most people would think of as “desirable.” There was something about her that made him feel good. She wasn’t the kind of woman that would make a man go wild with lust. No, she was the kind of woman that made a man think of quiet evenings in front of a fireplace. She made him think of coming home from work and telling her everything that had happened. She made him think of . . . well, of kids and catching fireflies in jars, and of grabbing her and them and rolling down the hill on the grass.

  Matt had never liked to tell anyone his innermost feelings, so he couldn’t tell Patsy that he had to go slow with this woman, because this woman was too important to make a wrong move with.

  “Dinner was delicious,” he said softly, and was pleased to see that the unexpected sound of his voice didn’t make her jump.

  “Glad you liked it,” she said. “You probably know that Mr. Shelby raises catfish in a big tank in back of his house.”

  Matt sat down on the grass not far from her and noted that somebody was going to need to mow the big lawn and the patches of grass here and there. He thought he’d better do some research on lawn mowers. “I can’t say that anyone around here knows much about Shelby. The shotgun tends to keep people away.” He noticed that she started to say something, but didn’t, then turned back to her planting. “What are you planting?”

  “Strawberries. I got the sets from Mr. Shelby. Everbearing over there and June-bearing in this bed.”

  “What’s the difference?” he asked.

  She didn’t look up. “Take a guess.”

  Matt laughed. “Let’s see, those bear strawberries all season, and those just produce berries in June. So how’d I do, Teach?”

  “Perfect.” She moved on to the next row. “And before you ask, canners want all the berries to be ripe at once, so we can make great vats of preserves.”

  “So where’d you learn to make all that—” He waved his hand in the general direction of the house.

  “As a kid. My grandmother canned out of necessity, and I do it because I like to.”

  He waited for her to say more, but when she didn’t, he sat there and watched her. He didn’t know her very well, but she seemed to be thinking hard about something. “Did Violet tell you something that upset you?”

  Bailey sat back on her heels and wiped mud off her hands. “I guess I’ll have to get used to small-town ways again. So everyone knows that I went to see Violet Honeycutt?”

  “I’m sure they do. But I take it you weren’t there to buy grass, although her stuff is good. The best I’ve ever—I mean, I’ve heard—” He gave her a crooked smile and filled his mouth with the last bite of the pudding.

  Smiling, Bailey moved to another place, bent forward, and began planting again. “Did you know that a man hanged himself in my barn?”

  “Yes,” Matt said softly. “It’s not going to spook you, is it?” And make you move away, he wanted to add but didn’t.

  “No,” she said, “but I keep thinking about that poor, unhappy man. I know how he feels. He loved the soil and what it produces. But then to have it taken away from him . . . ” She paused. “Poor man.”

  “Yeah, there’s been lots of tragedy in Calburn.”

  “Oh, yes, I got an earful of your Calburn Six.”

  “Golden Six,” Matt corrected automatically.

  “There!” Bailey said, turning quickly to look at him. “There it is again.”

  “What?” he asked. “There what is again?”

  “That tone of voice. Have those boys been canonized? At the hairdresser’s—no, it’s the beauty parlor, I’ve been told—I thought Opal was going to accuse me of heresy for not knowing about the Golden Six. Were those boys that important?”

  Matt almost said, To me they were, but he didn’t. “People in Calburn have become suspicious. They’re afraid of what outsiders will say about the town. That book, The Golden Six, hurt Calburn. It didn’t sell well, but it got some attention from the critics when it came out, and for a while Calburn had some tourists here asking questions.”

  “It seems sad that anyone would write about such tragedy.”

  “Yes and no,” he said. “I guess it depends on how you look at all of it. In Calburn, people tend to think that they were six magnificent young men, but their luck changed.”

  “And the other side of it is?”

  “That it was all a hoax made up by some imaginative boys. Whatever the truth, for a while, everything they touched seemed to turn to gold, but after graduation, it seems that their luck ran out. Or maybe their luck was attached to Calburn.”

  “But I thought they all lived here.”

  “Some did; some went away. But they were all in Calburn in the summer of 1968 when Frank killed his wife and then himself.”

  “Do people know why he did such a thing?”

  “More or less. He’d been in a car wreck four years before and lost the use of his right arm. For about three years afterward, he was out of work, but finally he got a job as a night security guard and seemed to be doing all right, but . . . ”

  “Violet said his wife was pregnant.”

  “Yes. The autopsy showed that she was. Everyone guessed from that that maybe it wasn’t Frank’s child. He was a proud man, so maybe he didn’t want the humiliation.”

  “So he shot her, then himself.”

  He didn’t answer her redundant question. Instead, he looked at her. “Why are you so interested?”

  “I’m not. I mean, that sounds callous, but I wasn’t interested in them at all. Actually, I was asking Violet about this farm, about who owned it, that sort of thing. Opal sent me to Violet, and I was told about the Golden Six.”

  “Opal hates Violet. She wouldn’t have sent you to her,” he said.

  “Right. Sorry. Her daughter Carla told me. Or rather wrote me a note. Why does Opal hate Violet?”

  Now that they were on a different subject, Matt relaxed again and leaned back on his arms. “Violet didn’t always look like she does now.”
/>   “So?”

  “Take a guess.”

  “Ah. The great equalizer: sex.”

  When she said the word, Matt was pleased to see that, for the first time, she looked at him—looked at him as a woman looks at a man. He guessed she liked what she saw, because her cheeks turned a bit pink. The light was fading, but he saw her blush, then look back at her strawberries.

  “Why do you want to know about the farm?” he asked.

  He listened while she told him the story Patsy had already told him, that her husband had died and left her the farm. But as he listened to the words, he listened harder to her tone of voice. When she said, “my husband,” she didn’t sound as though she were talking about a man who was dead. She was talking about a man she seemed to expect to walk down the path at any minute.

  “May I confide in you?” she asked, turning to look at him in the deepening twilight. “You won’t—” she began, but his expression stopped her from asking if he’d tell the whole town.

  For a moment he hesitated, and it occurred to him that she was sitting on one very big secret and that she was considering how much she could tell him. He could have reassured her, but he didn’t. He wanted her to make up her own mind.

  “I want to know about my husband,” she said at last. “I was married to him for years, and I thought I knew him, but he was always silent about his childhood. It was something missing between us. Yet after he died, I was told that he left me this.” She gestured at the farm. “It doesn’t make sense to me. Why did he refuse to tell me anything when he was alive, but then give me this place and leave me a note asking me to find out ‘what really happened’? If he wanted me to know about him, why didn’t he sit down with me and talk about it while he was alive?” For a moment she looked down at her hands, then back up at him. “It’s so strange to have been so close to a man, then find out that we weren’t close at all. In the weeks after his death, nothing showed up about this place, not a photo, a piece of paper, nothing.”

  He watched as she tried to get her emotions under control—and as he tried to control his own. He disliked himself for it, but he was jealous of this dead husband of hers.

  “How much do you know about computers?” he asked, then saw that he’d startled her.

  “About as much as you know about strawberries.”

  “Nothing about the Internet?”

  “Well, actually,” she said, smiling, “Jimmie’s lawyer’s wife showed me how to order things over the Internet.”

  Matt groaned. “Come on, help me up, and we’ll go upstairs and set up my computer and see what we can find out about this place.”

  “Find out?” she asked, her eyes wide.

  “Yeah. Let’s see who owns the title to this farm.”

  “But—” she began, then stepped away from him.

  “All right,” he said, still sitting and looking up at her. “Let’s get one thing straight between us. I may have been born and raised in a small town, but I don’t tell everything to everyone.” He raised his right hand. “I swear to you that what we find out will stay between us. I don’t care if we find out that you’re Lizzie Borden’s granddaughter.

  “What?” he said when she began to laugh.

  “It’s nothing. It’s just a thought I had today.”

  “So tell me and share the laughter.”

  She took a moment as she seemed to decide, then she told him about being glad her husband hadn’t left her a farm in Lizzie Borden’s hometown. “Those high school boys are bad enough, but can you imagine Lizzie Borden?”

  Matt was having difficulty with the Golden Six being reduced to “those high school boys,” but when he recovered himself, he smiled. And then, for the first time in his life, he laughed about something that had to do with “those high school boys.” “All right,” he said, “are we in agreement?”

  “Meaning, do I trust you not to tell Patsy or Janice anything you may find out about me?”

  “About you or your former husband?” he asked, teasing.

  “Both,” she said. “We’re the same.”

  Matt took a moment to digest that statement. “I swear it on all I hold sacred,” he said at last.

  “And what if Patsy asks you point-blank?”

  “I will lie point-blank,” he answered. “And it won’t be the first time. Now, are you going to keep asking me questions, or are we going to start searching? Hey!” he said as she slapped his forehead.

  “Mosquito,” she said, but her eyes were laughing. “Come on, let’s go.”

  He made an attempt to get up, but there was a pain in his leg. Groaning, he sat back down.

  “Are you injured?” she asked, concerned.

  “It’s a wonder I’m not dead. One of my idiot nephews helped a girl get a cat out of a tree today.”

  “And?” Bailey asked.

  Matt looked up at her. “He used a ladder to do it.”

  “And?” she asked impatiently.

  “It was my ladder. I was on the roof of the garage—and the cat was in a tree three blocks away.”

  “You aren’t telling me that one of your nephews knew you were on the roof, but he took your ladder and left you stranded, are you?”

  “He said he thought I was in my truck, but I think he was getting me back about the water.”

  When Matt made a second failed attempt to get up, Bailey reached out her hand. He took it, then made a great show of standing up.

  “You might have to help me walk,” he said.

  “Here, I have a hoe, you can lean on that,” she said quickly.

  “Spoilsport,” he said, laughing and limping as he walked behind her toward the house.

  Bailey had her hands full of gardening tools. Turning around, she began to walk backward. “What did you do with the water?”

  “Took it away from them,” he said as he put his hand on his lower back and hobbled.

  “You’re not going to tell me this story unless I beg, are you?”

  “Begging . . . Hmm, not a bad idea.”

  “You know what I found that had been left in this house?” she asked. “A recipe box.”

  “Yeah?” Matt asked, interested but wishing she’d wanted to hear his story.

  “Yes,” Bailey said. “It was full of recipes I’d like to try, things like chicken-fried steak, fried chicken coated with cornflakes, spaghetti sauce made out of Campbell’s tomato soup, and something called ‘surprise meat loaf.’ ”

  The last item made the hairs on the back of Matt’s neck stand straight up. “You win!” he said quickly. “I took my nephews’ drinking water away from them because they were spilling it all down the front of themselves.” He could see that she didn’t understand—and he hadn’t meant for her to understand. They had reached the house, and she had her hand on the door.

  “Spilled their drinks?” she asked, puzzled. “You mean, like a child?”

  “Here, let me demonstrate,” he said as he reached over her head to open the door. “Wait right here and try to remember how you felt when you were sixteen or seventeen.” He went into the house, got the tallest water glass he could find, then filled it at the sink. He knew that what he was about to do was shameless, but, well, all’s fair, etc. He unbuttoned his shirt, took it off, and dropped it on the corner of the kitchen counter. On one hand, he hated the backbreaking labor of construction, but on the other hand, what climbing ladders and lifting concrete blocks had done to his body was something he did like. He flipped the switch that turned on the light over the back door, then stepped outside.

  He pretended he didn’t see her eyes widen at the sight of his bare chest as he raised the glass to his lips. “The girls were across the street, and my nephews were bare-chested and drinking. Like this,” he said, then he let the cool water dribble down his chest, all while running his free hand over his chest slowly. “See?” he said when the water was gone. “That’s what I had to put up with all day today.”

  “I see,” she said in a way that made him feel fool
ish. “You know,” she said, “I was up late last night, so I think I’ll pass on your offer of helping to set up the computer. In fact—” She gave a jaw-cracking yawn. “Oh, sorry. In fact, I think I’ll turn in right now.”

  With that, she went inside the house, and Matt was left outside, shirtless, with the front of his pants wet and at least eight mosquitoes stabbing him between the shoulder blades. He wasn’t quite sure what he’d done wrong, but it was something.

  With a sigh, he went into the house, turned off the porch light, then made sure all the doors were locked. It was too early to go to bed, so he picked up his shirt and buttoned it as he went upstairs to the attic. With any luck, he could get a search service to find out who had bought the house from the widow of the man who’d hanged himself. Maybe if he found out that for her, it would get him back into her good graces.

  Nine

  Bailey didn’t sleep very well that night. She kept having dreams of seeing Matthew Longacre standing in the yellow light of the outside lamp, water cascading down his bare chest. Why hadn’t she acted like a modern woman and taken him up on what he was obviously offering? She was a widow; he was unmarried. They were two mature adults. What was wrong with her that she’d acted like a prim and proper old maid, feigned fatigue, and gone running into her bedroom? Alone.

  She got out of bed slowly. The house had a feel about it that said Matt was either asleep or not inside. “Probably ran off to a honky-tonk and got himself a real woman,” she muttered, then smiled at sounding so country-and-western.

  She showered, dressed, and did the best she could with her hair. She was used to hairdressers who did it for her, but then coiffed hair didn’t seem very important in Calburn.

  She opened her bedroom door so it didn’t creak, then tiptoed toward the kitchen, but as she reached the bottom of the stairs up to the attic, she went up to have a look. Matt’s computer equipment was no longer in boxes, the components of his desk no longer in pieces. The desk had been reassembled in the corner of the room, and on top of it was a big white computer screen, with various other pieces of equipment to one side.