The Mulberry Tree

by Jude Deveraux

  “He probably gave her the diamonds out of guilt,” Patsy said.

  “As a matter of fact, he did,” Bailey said, and the three of them laughed.

  The idea of their buying the little shop in the tourist town seemed to grow with every minute. They were three women with too much time on their hands. Janice had two young daughters, but Bailey had found out that her husband’s mother lived with them, and the girls would just as soon be with their grandmother as with their mother. When Janice said this, Bailey saw something in her eyes, something she’d seen when she’d toured Patsy’s house, but Bailey wasn’t sure what it was. Anger, maybe. Or perhaps it was a sense of having surrendered.

  By the time they’d finished lunch, the women were talking money. They walked back to the shop, went inside, then began to rearrange it in their minds. At the moment the shop was one of many in Welborn that sold a little bit of several things but specialized in nothing. There were T-shirts that said “Welborn, Virginia,” on them, a couple of shelves full of candles, some cheap toys for the kids. The owner came out from the back and showed them around. There was the pretty little glassed-front showroom, and in the back was a three-room area that could be used for storage and work. “It used to be a florist’s shop,” the woman said.

  When she opened the back door and let them out into a big parking lot, for a moment the three women just stood there blinking in the sunlight, not quite sure what to do next. They knew that this was the turning point. Did they go home and forget about this, or did they pursue it?

  It was Janice who made the decision. “First we need to find out about the competition. Are there any other gift basket shops in Welborn? I’m not sure this area is big enough to handle two of the same business. And somebody needs to talk to the realtor about money. And we need a researcher to find out just how we go about running a gift basket shop—and even if that’s what we want to do.”

  Now, thinking about that afternoon, Bailey smiled. Janice was like a drill sergeant. Instantly, Bailey and Patsy had snapped to attention, and each woman had instinctively known what her job was. Patsy ran off to find out about other shops in the area, and Bailey went to the local library to see what she could find out, while Janice went to the real estate office to talk about money.

  By the time the women met again, it was six P.M., and they had a thousand things to report to each other. Patsy drove them back to Calburn, stopping on the way to go to the grocery, the women pushing their three baskets down the aisles while talking nonstop.

  And when they got home, they talked the same way to the men they lived with. Janice told Scott how she was going to keep the books for their new company, Patsy told Rick that she was going to be the creative director, and Bailey told Matt that she was going to look into renting a commercial kitchen so she could start producing her best-tasting products on a larger scale.

  “We don’t know what to call the business,” all three women said to their men. “Do you have any ideas?”

  Now, sitting in the same booth where she and Janice and Patsy had first talked about opening the business, Bailey looked at the brochure again. Yesterday the shop had been sold. But it hadn’t been sold to the three of them.

  So what had happened? Bailey wondered. When they’d driven home that day, they’d been on top of the world. Bailey, laughing, truly laughing for the first time in a long time, had said, “We are three very bored women.”

  That night, they’d been on the phone to each other, with Bailey receiving twice as many calls as Janice or Patsy because they would not get on the phone to each other, so Bailey had to tell Janice what Patsy said, and vice versa.

  And throughout those first days, all three of the men had been wonderful. Matt volunteered to renovate the shop. Scott said he’d donate two vans, each only two years old. Rick, who owned three service stations and who, according to Patsy, could fix anything in the world, was going to provide free gasoline for the vans, plus maintenance. Patsy said her sons—and the word volunteered was not used—were going to do the driving to deliver the baskets that were ordered.

  For an entire week, Bailey’s life had been very exciting, with constant phone calls and arrangements to be made, books to read, and Web sites to consult. With Matt’s help, she figured out how to use the Internet in record time. She had no idea how to use anything else on a computer, but Matt said he’d never seen anyone master the Web faster.

  But after the first week, things had begun to change. Janice had called Bailey on Monday morning to say that Scott was in trouble with the IRS, and he desperately needed her help in straightening out a few things. She was sorry, but Scott said that she was the only person on earth he really trusted, so she hoped Bailey would understand. Two days later, Rick had thrown Patsy a birthday party and given her a sewing machine that could be hooked up to a computer and programmed to sew pictures. Patsy started spending so much time with the new machine that she didn’t have time to talk about the shop.

  It was on Saturday morning that Matt told her his big news. He’d been asked by his old architectural firm to draw some house plans that could be sold on their Web site. In the past, plans sold through catalogs had had to be fairly bland, but with the introduction of the Internet to the world, people could have a wider selection.

  “What do you think?” Matt had asked Bailey.

  She was in the kitchen, and she was in a very bad mood. Janice and Patsy had given out on her. She’d wanted to spend today with them planning the new business, but instead, Patsy was trying to copy a tiger from a coloring book onto one of her son’s shirts, and Janice was deep into Scott’s finances from eight years ago.

  Bailey barely glanced at the sketch that Matt held out to her. “Hate the kitchen,” she said, then gave a brutal stir to the pot of soupe au pistou that was simmering on the stove.

  “Yeah? What’s wrong with it? It’s called a ‘gourmet kitchen.’ I thought you’d like that.”

  “Why is it that when it comes to kitchens you men think that ‘big’ equals ‘gourmet’?”

  “What have I done to deserve this ‘you men’?”

  Bailey knew she wasn’t being fair, but it was the men who’d taken Janice and Patsy away from the project that the three women wanted to do.

  When Bailey didn’t answer him, Matt said, “You think you could design a better kitchen?”

  “With my eyes closed,” she said, her lips tight, and that’s when Matt thrust a grid-lined pad of paper in front of her, and ten minutes later they were bent over the blueprint, and Bailey was redesigning the kitchen in Matt’s house plan.

  And that’s where they were now. Matt was considering doing an entire book of house plans, and creating his own Web site. If he could get hooked up with a big company like Home Planners, he could earn a living and remain in Calburn. He’d already asked Bailey to go into business with him as the kitchen designer.

  “Lillian?”

  “Yes?” Bailey said absently, her eyes still on the brochure.

  “It is you, isn’t it? When I first walked in, I knew I’d seen you before, but it took me a while to figure out who you were. Are you like me and here for a spa treatment? Ask for Andre. He’s marvelous.”

  In openmouthed horror, Bailey watched a woman from her past, Arleen Browne-Thompson, aka Baroness von Lindensale, slide into the bench on the other side of the booth.

  “I’m sorry,” Bailey said, “you must have the wrong person. I’m not—”

  “Sure, sure,” Arleen said, looking hard at Bailey. “You look great. Really, you do. How much did you lose? A hundred? More? And your nose! Removing that thing must have taken half a dozen procedures.”

  Bailey just glared at the woman, her head reeling with what the consequences of this meeting could be. Arleen could sell what she’d found out to a tabloid, and tomorrow Bailey’s front yard would be full of reporters. Or she could—

  “Would you stop looking at me like that?” Arleen said. “I have no intention of giving away your little secret. If you wa
nt to go about the country dressed like . . . that”—she didn’t seem to have words to describe Bailey’s cotton trousers and T-shirt—“it’s none of my business. Besides, you know a few secrets on me too.”

  At that Arleen gave a naughty little laugh, and Bailey was tempted to say, Not any secrets that anyone would pay to read about. Twice, Bailey had found Arleen in a compromising position with young men who worked for Jimmie. When Bailey told Jimmie, he’d howled with laughter. “The old bag must be a hundred and twelve at least. Good for her!”

  Arleen tossed a Gucci bag onto the table and began rummaging inside it. Bailey knew she was searching for a cigarette; this was the longest that she’d seen the woman without one. It used to be a joke whether or not Arleen had ever eaten anything in her life, as she seemed to live on booze and cigarettes. Her skin was dried-out, her body emaciated.

  “So tell me everything,” Arleen said once she had her cigarette lit.

  “This is a nonsmoking section.”

  “I just had sex with the owner, so he won’t throw us out,” she said, then laughed at Bailey’s expression. “Darling, you always were so easy to shock. No, I haven’t had sex with the owner. But it’s three in the afternoon, and you know how these Americans are, they’re finished with lunch by one, then they go back to the dreary little offices.”

  Bailey happened to know that Arleen had grown up in Texas, but she loved to pretend that she was a “citizen of the world,” as she called herself.

  “Everything,” Arleen said again. “Tell it all.”

  “I have no intention of telling you anything,” Bailey said, then had the satisfaction of seeing Arleen’s thin eyebrows lift slightly.

  “Then maybe you want me to tell you what’s happened to all your friends.”

  “The ones who called me after Jimmie died and said how sorry they were for my loss? Are those the friends you mean?”

  “My goodness,” Arleen said, drawing deeply on her cigarette and looking at Bailey through a haze of smoke. “When did you gain a tongue? You used to sit in a corner and say nothing. You just hung your head and waited for James.”

  Bailey picked up her handbag. “I think I’d better go.”

  “Then I’ll just have to tell my driver to follow you,” Arleen said calmly. “He’s former FBI, you know.”

  Bailey sat back down. “All right, what is it that you want?”

  “Some of whatever you took to make you look so good and get so angry.”

  “I’m not angry!” Bailey said, but then she looked around at the mostly empty restaurant and lowered her voice. “I’m not angry,” she said quietly, “and I don’t know what’s given you that idea.”

  “Let me see. You were married to a man who slept with everything in skirts, then he died and left you nothing. And now—”

  Again, Bailey grabbed her bag, but Arleen clamped down on Bailey’s wrist and held her. “Okay, I apologize. We don’t have to talk about what was done to you.”

  “You’re right. In fact, we don’t have to talk about anything.” Bailey was still half out of the seat, and Arleen still had her wrist in a viselike grip. “What is it you want, Arleen?”

  “Is it really true that Jimmie left you nothing?”

  “I see,” Bailey said. “You want money.”

  Arleen shrugged. “One has needs.”

  When Bailey didn’t sit back down, Arleen’s voice lowered. “Please,” she said, “sit and talk with me. I miss James. And I promise, no more cracks.”

  Bailey knew she should leave, but something was holding her back. For one thing, Arleen was familiar to her. Not by any stretch of the imagination had they ever been friends, but Arleen had been one of the hangers-on around Jimmie. He used to think Arleen’s bitchiness was amusing. “And she knows everybody,” Jimmie said.

  Slowly, Bailey took her seat again. “All right, what do you want to talk about?”

  “You,” Arleen said. “I really do want to know what’s made you look so good. Before, when you were with James, you always looked dreadful.”

  “Thanks,” Bailey said. “And the same back to you.”

  Arleen leaned back against the booth, drew on her cigarette, and looked at Bailey speculatively. “You really are angry. Were you always like this, or is it something new?”

  “I’m not—” Bailey began, but then she too leaned back against the seat.

  “Is it your new husband?” Arleen asked.

  “What makes you think I already have another husband?”

  That made Arleen give a dry laugh. She couldn’t laugh too hard because her lungs were so full of carbon that if she started coughing, she’d never stop. “You? You, dear Lillian, were made to be a man’s wife. And now you look like a pregnancy waiting to happen. We used to wonder if you even existed when James wasn’t around. Bandy—you remember him?—used to say that you were a ghost and James had paid someone to conjure you. He said a voodoo priestess had performed some ancient ritual and from it had sprung this woman who was what all primitive men like James thought a wife should be.”

  Bailey was looking at the woman in horror. She’d heard whispers and had been given looks, but when Jimmie was around, no one had dared say anything like this to her. “Go on,” she heard herself say. “What else did Bandy say about me?”

  “Oh, darling, it really was most amusing. You know how bitchy Bandy can be. He said that only a ghost that’d had its spirit removed could be a billionaire’s wife and still go around the world putting cherries into bottles the way you did. He said that you had everything, but all you really wanted was to disappear inside James Manville—of course, that’s what James wanted you to do. That’s why James sent all those chocolates every time you lost a pound or two.”

  “The chocolates were gifts from other people. Thank-you gifts, mostly. Jimmie said . . . ” Bailey trailed off because Arleen was looking at her as though to say, How could you be so naive?

  “Bandy was with him one time when he ordered the chocolates. Bandy said, ‘I thought Lillian was dieting,’ then James laughed. But you know how Bandy is, once he gets hold of something, he doesn’t let it go. He coaxed and wheedled until he got James to tell why he wanted a fat wife. James said he wouldn’t have a beautiful wife. I remember that night so clearly. We were on Jimmie’s yacht, that big one he had, what was the name of it?”

  “The Lillian,” Bailey said, her jaw clamped shut. She didn’t want to hear anything this woman was going to say, but at the same time she couldn’t possibly leave. “What did Jimmie say about me?”

  Arleen lit another cigarette off the first one. “It was one of those nights after you’d gone to bed early, but then, you always went to bed early, didn’t you, dear? One of the reasons so many people disliked you is because you made no effort to hide the fact that you despised them.”

  “You were all after Jimmie’s money,” Bailey said.

  “Yes, dear, we wanted his money. But you wanted his soul. Now, tell me, which one is more expensive?”

  Bailey wasn’t going to reply to that. “Tell me what it is that you’re dying to tell me,” she snapped.

  “Such hostility! My goodness. I never knew. If I had known, maybe you and I could have been friends.” At that, Arleen gave another one of her cackles. “Anyway, that night, as usual, we’d all had much too much to drink, and Bandy asked James to tell us his secret for a happy marriage. I’m sure you know that, usually, you were off-limits to the rest of us. When James was around, your name wasn’t mentioned. But that night, James talked. Maybe he was drunk, I don’t know. And, too, he was in a good mood because he’d just met that starlet, the one with the red hair and the heart tattoo on her arm. She couldn’t act, but she was divine looking. What was her name?”

  “Chloe,” Bailey said in a whisper.

  “Ah, yes, Chloe.” Arleen stubbed out her cigarette and lit another one. “So anyway, James was in a talking mood that night, and he said that the secret was in finding a girl who didn’t have anything, a girl—he said gir
l, not woman, I remember clearly—who was loved by no one on Earth, and had no ambition to be anything. ‘An empty bottle waiting for me to come along and fill her up,’ is what James said. ‘And if you fill her up with love, that’s all that’ll matter to her.’ ”

  Arleen paused to draw deeply on her cigarette. “And you know James. Once he started talking, he didn’t stop. Not that he ever told much about himself, but Bandy could get things out of him now and then. James said, ‘Now take . . .’ Oh, what was her name? That model before Chloe? That Italian girl?”

  “Senta,” Bailey whispered.

  “Yes, Senta. James said, ‘Now take Senta. She would make a dreadful wife. Too beautiful. Too ambitious. Too full of herself. There wouldn’t be room for me in there. Women like that, you use them for what they were made for, then you get rid of them when they bore you.’

  “ ‘But not Lillian,’ Bandy said, and I can tell you that we all held our breath. You know what James’s temper was like. He could put up with a person feeding off him for years, but then that person could rub James the wrong way just once, and James would never see him again, never speak to him, and—in my set, worse—never pay his bills again.”

  “What did Jimmie say about me?” Bailey asked, her voice so low she could hardly hear herself.

  “He said that he made sure that you had no one but him to love. He said that if you started to get bored and wanted to actually do something, he’d whisk you off to someplace new. ‘Lillian’s problem,’ James said, ‘is that she’s smart. She may not seem so with the way she doesn’t say much, but what you people don’t realize is that in the mornings while the whole worthless lot of you are sleeping off the night before, Lillian is in the kitchen with the chefs, picking their brains. Or she’s out with the gardeners, or with the mechanics. She likes to learn things.’ ‘But never gets to use them,’ Bandy said, then James laughed. He said, ‘That’s the key. If you marry a stupid woman, you have to live with her. If you marry a smart woman, in this day and age, she turns around and starts competing with you.’ ‘You mean a career,’ Bandy said. ‘But you couldn’t really think that Lillian could compete with you.’ ‘Not with making money, but a business would take her mind off of me.’ ‘Is that why you sent the man from Heinz away?’ Bandy asked.”