The Mulberry Tree

by Jude Deveraux

  Bailey grimaced when she read that. There was no mention that his wife was having an adulterous affair and had ordered her husband to get out.

  She continued reading.

  Also on the night of Frank McCallum’s death, one of the Golden Six left town and hasn’t been seen since. It was revealed at McCallum’s funeral that Mrs. Kyle Longacre had managed to keep her husband’s disappearance a secret for three days. But when Kyle Longacre did not attend his friend’s funeral, wasn’t there to be a pallbearer, the town knew that something was wrong. A man like Kyle Longacre would not have missed his longtime friend’s funeral unless something was badly amiss.

  This reporter was told by an anonymous, but reliable, source that Mrs. Longacre is the daughter of the socially prominent Winfield family of Philadelphia. However, there has been no contact with her elite family since Mrs. Longacre quit college just months before she was to graduate to marry the charismatic Kyle Longacre. The same source told this reporter, “I guess they didn’t think that a son of Stanley Longacre was good enough for their family.” Longtime residents of Calburn will remember that Kyle Longacre’s father was the wealthiest man in several counties before he lost everything in 1958, and drove his car off a cliff, with his wife of thirty years in the car beside him. Their grave marker reads “Together in death as well as in life.”

  Due to the financial reverses, Kyle was forced to leave his prestigious northern university before he graduated. He returned to his hometown of Calburn and began to make a living as a traveling salesman. Soon after he returned home, the young society lady he’d met at school defied her family, married Kyle, and lived in Calburn with her husband, whose work kept him away for much of their married life.

  But that great romance seems to have ended just three days ago. This reporter was told that Kyle Longacre wrote a note to his wife—the contents of which she would not reveal—then left town. He leaves behind his wife and two young children, Matthew, aged five, and Richard, three. When questioned, Mrs. Longacre said that she planned to take her children and go home to her family in Philadelphia.

  Bailey leaned back in her chair. Matt’s mother hadn’t gone home, or if she had, she’d returned to Calburn. What happened? Bailey wondered. Had Matt’s mother appeared on her family’s doorstep, her two young boys with her, and been refused entrance?

  That poor woman, Bailey thought. Her family had disowned her for marrying the man she loved; then they’d kept to their word even when she’d been abandoned.

  And poor Matt, Bailey thought. All his life he’d been fighting to regain what should have been his.

  Bailey rummaged in her bag for a notebook and a pen. At the top of a page she wrote: “30 August 1968,” then she began to make a list.

  Gus Venters hanged himself

  Frank and his wife—murder-suicide

  Matt’s father left town forever

  Jimmie’s birthday—1959

  Bailey put down her pen. But was that the date of Jimmie’s birthday?

  Jimmie hated clairvoyants and anything to do with fortune-telling. Bailey had lived with him for years before she understood that it wasn’t that he didn’t believe in them; it was that he feared what they might see. At a dinner party a woman, minor aristocracy, had happened to be an amateur astrologer. She’d asked Bailey when Jimmie’s birthday was. But when Bailey said it was August 30, the woman had said, “I don’t think so. He’s not a Virgo. No, James Manville is anything but a Virgo. Can you get me the true time and place of his birth?” she’d asked. “I’ll do a chart for him.”

  Bailey hadn’t told Jimmie what the woman had said, and she certainly hadn’t asked him where and when he was born—she knew she’d receive no truthful answer. And, worse, he’d wheedle it out of her who had asked such a question. Then, Bailey knew, she’d never see the astrologer again, and she rather liked the woman. “Don’t mention your . . . hobby to anyone here,” Bailey said quietly, and the woman had nodded in understanding.

  Now Bailey remembered looking up once to see Jimmie staring at her intensely, as though he was trying to read his wife’s interest in the old woman, who was wearing enough fake diamonds to fell a smaller person. That night, Jimmie had asked her what she’d found so interesting about the woman, and Bailey had chattered inanely about finding her so very interesting because she’d traveled all over the world. Jimmie had looked at his wife with one eyebrow raised, and she knew he’d known she was lying. But she stood her ground and didn’t tell him the truth. That was the last time she ever saw the countess.

  What Bailey remembered most strongly about the astrologer was that she had said she’d stake her life on a bet that James Manville had not been born on the thirtieth of August.

  Now Bailey looked at her watch. It was after three, and if she was going to get home to make Matt’s dinner, she’d better leave. But as she reached for the wheel to rewind the film, she saw a note at the bottom of the article: “See reprint of original story starting on page B2.”

  There was no way on earth that she could resist turning the film to the second page of the second section of the newspaper.

  The truth was, until today the whole idea of a group of high school boys who were called the Golden Six had seemed like a joke, some local event that had happened long ago and far away. She hadn’t even been interested enough to read the book Violet had given her. Until today, she didn’t think she knew anyone who had a connection to the young men. Now she’d learned that Janice’s father was one of them, and so was Matt’s. Why did Matt’s father abandon his wife and two children? Was Kyle Longacre so devastated over the murder-suicide of his childhood friend that he could no longer bear his hometown?

  Bailey read the story of what had happened in 1953, the event that had given the boys the name of the Golden Six, and by the time she finished, she had to admit that what those boys did had been pretty heroic.

  The first part of the article recounted the story Violet had told her, about the fire at the high school and the students being bused to Wells Creek.

  But the reporter hadn’t just reported. She’d spent some time researching, and she’d interviewed several people, so she was able to present not just the facts but a story. She told how the parents of Calburn had so driven the school board crazy about which schools they wanted their children bused to that in the end, all the students’ names had been put into a hat and drawn out. It was because of this random assignment that all girls were sent to one school while another received only two girls. And it was because of the drawing that six boys who had grown up in the same town but not really known each other came to be together.

  The reporter told a little about each boy, and although she tactfully never said that the boys came from different social classes, it was definitely implied. She said that the boys were from such different backgrounds that they never would have become friends if they hadn’t been isolated together.

  There was Thaddeus Overlander, a studious boy with born-again Christian parents. “Taddy” had never been allowed to attend so much as a basketball game at Calburn, much less participate in a social life. Frederick Burgess, called “Burgess” by all, was an athlete, a great hulk of a boy, who found studies “difficult.” Harper Kirkland lived alone with his mother, the last of the family that had founded Calburn and, according to the reporter, had once owned it all. But Harper’s grandfather had sold the land off bit by bit, then frittered away the money until all the Kirkland family owned now was the small Calburn newspaper.

  Frank McCallum and Rodney Yates were cousins, raised in the mountains of Virginia in a hardscrabble existence. They were attending high school in Calburn because they were staying with one of Rodney’s seven brothers, a young man who’d quit school when he was in the sixth grade. Rodney and Frank had wanted to do better for themselves, though, so they were determined to finish school.

  The reporter described Frank as a persuasive speaker who had a part-time job selling ads for the newspaper.

  “And one has only to
look at Rodney Yates to see what his talent is,” the article said. At that Bailey turned through the film to see if there were any photos, with no luck. She went back to the article. “Rodney is an extremely handsome young man,” the reporter wrote, “and it’s rare to see him without several young ladies nearby.

  “And then there’s Kyle.”

  When she read that, Bailey drew in her breath. What was Matt’s father like? What was the true nature of a man who could walk out on his wife—a wife who had given up her heritage and her family for him—and his small children?

  “Kyle is the golden boy,” the reporter wrote. “Everyone in Virginia and probably several other states knows of Stanley Longacre and his incredible success. They’ve seen the mansion where Kyle lives, the mansion his father built. But then a great many people in Virginia live in houses built by Stanley Longacre. It seems fitting that a man who has produced so much should produce a son like Kyle: handsome, athletic, a straight-A student, on the debating team, the yearbook staff, elected class president by his fellow students every year since the fourth grade.”

  “But he abandoned his wife and children!” Bailey muttered in disgust, then began to read again.

  On that autumn day in 1953 someone, a man with an “ominous voice,” had called the school and said he’d planted a bomb somewhere and that “they would never get out alive.” Less than a minute later, black smoke began filling the corridors of the school. In the ensuing chaos, it had been the six boys from Calburn who made sure that every student got out safely.

  When the reporter arrived, all the students were outside, the fire department and the police were there, and several of the students were crying. She wrote that at first she’d assumed that fear was causing the tears, but a couple of girls said, “We’ve been so mean to them,” so the reporter began to ask questions. She was told that the students of Wells Creek had not wanted the extra students from Calburn, so they’d made them unwelcome. “Dead rats in their lockers,” she wrote. “Hazing, name calling, ostracizing at every opportunity. It must have been horrible for the students from Calburn, but, in the end, they stepped above their treatment and risked their lives to save others.”

  Bailey read the account of what happened that day. Taddy told reporters that after they were told to evacuate the school, he’d glanced out the window of his classroom and seen smoke coming out of the gym. He saw a couple of the football players banging on the door, so he thought maybe they were trapped inside. Since the door to his classroom was blocked with students scrambling over each other to get out, Taddy climbed out a window, went down the fire escape, and opened the door for the football players to get out. Some of them were being treated for smoke inhalation, but thanks to Taddy, none had been seriously hurt.

  Rodney said he heard screams from the girls’ locker room, so he ran that way. The outside door to the locker room was bolted. He couldn’t get it open, so he went around to the windows. The locker room was in the basement, and the windows were also locked, but shop class was nearby, so Rodney ran in, grabbed a crowbar, and wrenched open the windows. The girls climbed up on the benches and slid out through the windows to safety.

  Here the reporter recorded her interview with Rodney verbatim. “Isn’t it true that some of the girls were naked?” she asked Rodney.

  “Yes, ma’am, they were.”

  “And you gave them your own clothing to cover themselves, is that right?”

  “I gave them my jacket, my shirt, T-shirt, and my trousers.”

  “And that’s why you’re now wearing only boxer shorts, and your shoes and socks?”

  “Yes, ma’am, that’s why.”

  Bailey couldn’t help smiling at the interview. She could imagine the beautiful young man standing there wearing little because he’d given his clothing to cover some frightened girls.

  The article went on. “But it was Kyle Longacre who was the superhero. There was a gas mask, a souvenir of WWI, in a glass cabinet. Kyle broke the glass, grabbed the mask, put it on, then leaped onto a desk and climbed up into the attic of the old building. He told this reporter that when he saw the smoke coming out of the ceiling, he knew that whoever had planted the bomb had probably put it in the attic. He said that he didn’t think about what he was doing, he just pulled the stairs down and went up them.

  “And you got the bomb?” the reporter asked.

  “Yes,” Kyle replied, and the reporter said that he seemed reluctant to talk about what he’d done.

  The reporter went on to say that while Kyle was being interviewed, a fireman said that what Kyle had done was the stupidest thing he’d ever heard of in his life, and he didn’t know if the kid should be given a medal or locked away for his own good. Then a woman came over, shook Kyle’s hand, and said that he’d saved her daughter’s life. The woman went on to say that she lived in a house built by Kyle’s father in the Golden Sixty development, so called because the land had once been sixty acres of broccoli that had gone to seed and covered the field with yellow flowers.

  The reporter concluded the article by saying, “I don’t know about the Golden Sixty, but these boys are sure the Golden Six.”

  “And that,” the newspaper editor had added at the end of the article, “is how they got their names.”

  Fourteen

  Bailey pushed the food about on her plate. Again, she hadn’t had time to cook anything special for dinner, so she’d stopped at Boston Market and picked up a couple of pot pies, hoping that Matt would think she’d made them. But Matt was eating in silence and seemed to be deep in thought about something—as Bailey was.

  Her mind was full of what she’d read that afternoon. Those six wonderful boys! They were just high school boys who’d been made to feel miserable by the other kids, yet when there was danger, they’d risked their lives to save the other students. What kind of kids cared that much?

  She could imagine what bookish, unsocial Taddy must have been like. She had no doubt that the football players of the school had tormented him mercilessly. Yet the boy had climbed out a window, shimmied down a drainpipe, and rescued them all.

  And Kyle had grabbed a gas mask and gone directly toward the bomb. What if it had gone off? He’d had time to get out, so why didn’t he run for his life? What interest did he have in a school where the other kids hazed and ridiculed him?

  How could a young man like that later leave his wife and children?

  “Why didn’t you tell me your father was one of the Golden Six?” Bailey asked quietly, but she didn’t look up at Matt. When he was silent, she raised her head and saw that he had eaten little and now was moving bits of chicken about on his plate.

  “It didn’t seem important,” he said after a while, then put down his fork and leaned back in his chair. “I could have picked these pies up for you,” he said, letting her know that he knew she hadn’t cooked them.

  “I was busy,” she said, “and I didn’t have time—” She cut herself off, realizing that he’d changed the subject. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Since when have you been interested in the Golden Six?”

  His tone was hostile, and she knew that he was trying to put her off, but Bailey didn’t back down. “If I’m going to live in this town, I think I should know more than I do. Today I offended Janice. I made a crack about the Golden Six, and she was furious with me. Patsy told me that your father and Janice’s were part of them. I guess I thought it had all happened so long ago that it had no connection to today. But it does.” Looking at him, she said softly, “Do you know what made your father leave?”

  Matt didn’t answer, but got up and left the room.

  Bailey gave a great sigh. Today seemed to be her day for offending people. She got up, cleared the table, and put the dishes in the dishwasher. When she was finished, she turned around, and Matt was standing there, a shoe box in his hand.

  “Want to see some pictures?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said, smiling in relief that he wasn’t angry as she followed him
into the living room.

  He sat down on the couch, then motioned her to sit beside him. They had developed unwritten rules between them that said she took the couch while he took the big easy chair. But tonight they sat side by side, and Matt put the shoe box on the coffee table.

  “I don’t have much about him,” Matt said as he lifted the lid. The box was old and worn; it was for a pair of children’s shoes, size eight. “My mother threw these photos away about a year after my father walked out on us. It was only by chance that I saw them and fished them out of the garbage.”

  Matt didn’t say so, but she had a feeling that he’d never shown the contents of this box to anyone. His hand shook a bit as he lifted the lid. “I was crazy about my father. He was hardly ever at home, but when he was, he was the center of everything. He was . . . ” Matt hesitated. “He was . . . don’t laugh at me, but he was glorious. He could do anything. He read a lot, mostly nonfiction, while he was on the road, so he knew a lot about how the world worked. I was only five, but maybe because, for most of the time, I was ‘the man of the house,’ so to speak, I was an old kid, and I had a lot of questions. My father never brushed me off as I saw other fathers do.”

  Matt reached into the box and pulled out a photo. It was one of those wallet-size heavily posed photos that fill high school yearbooks.

  Bailey took the picture and looked into the eyes of a younger, slighter Matt. “I can see you in him. He’s a good-looking man.”

  “Was. He’s dead now.”

  Bailey wanted to ask questions, but she felt that if she was quiet, Matt would be more likely to tell her about himself. He handed her another photo. It was of six boys standing in front of a car with the round fenders of the 1950s.

  “They’re—” he began.

  “I can guess who they are, but let me see if I can guess who is who,” Bailey said, holding the photo closer to the bulb in the floor lamp. “This one in the letter sweater is your father, of course.”