The Mulberry Tree

by Jude Deveraux

  “I have no idea, but I have a pencil right here in my hand.”

  Bailey gave Carol the address, hung up the phone, and managed to sit still for half a minute; then she jumped up and started dancing. “Yes!” she said as she grabbed a branch of the mulberry tree and kissed it. “You old sweetheart,” she said, as she grabbed her sketchbook and went inside and upstairs to Matt’s fax machine. Now all she had to do was persuade Janice and Patsy that this was the right name for their company.

  Bailey photocopied her sketch and sent her idea to both Janice and Patsy. To Patsy, she said she wanted her to sew a label like her sketch. Janice faxed back that everyone would think they sold only mulberry products. Then Patsy faxed that most Americans have no idea what a mulberry is.

  “This could go on forever,” Bailey muttered. Jimmie always said that he hated any decision that everyone agreed with.

  “Good!” she faxed back to them. “If they don’t know what a mulberry tastes like, they won’t have any preconceptions. If either of you have any better ideas, I’d like to hear them.”

  For an hour there was silence from the fax machine, then Bailey received two notes, both of which said, “Okay by me.” Since the wording was identical, she knew that, somehow, the two women had communicated with each other and come to an agreement.

  “Thanks, Jimmie,” Bailey said as she smiled at the faxes. Now she needed to go to the kitchen and start making some prototypes for the Before and After part of their brand-new company.

  Bailey was experimenting with a strawberry-cherry mixture in which she used no alcohol. How could she make the sauce taste as good as though it was flavored with kirsch without using the liqueur? She’d found out that selling food flavored with alcohol involved obtaining a liquor license, something that none of the women was ready to take on. Janice said, “Let’s save that as a goal for 2005,” and the others had agreed.

  Maybe if she extracted the juice, boiled it down, and added a little almond flavoring, she would create the flavor she wanted. With that thought, she went into the pantry to look for her chinois, the conical strainer set in a frame. It took nearly ten minutes before she saw the chinois on the top shelf of the pantry.

  “Matt!” she muttered. He’d put the dishes away last night, and for some odd reason, he’d obviously thought that the strainer should be put on the highest shelf, a shelf that was at least three feet above Bailey’s head.

  There was a ladder in the barn, and she knew that she should go get it, or even get a chair, but it all seemed so time-consuming, and the fruit was bubbling. Bailey stepped onto the lowest shelf and held her breath to see if it would hold her weight; then she remembered that she was no longer heavy enough to break shelves.

  Holding on to the shelves above, she stepped up until she could reach the strainer. But as she grabbed it, she saw something sticking out of the boards at the back of the shelf. This room was the only one that hadn’t been remodeled. Bailey had refused to allow Matt and his beer-drinking friends to touch its perfection. It had been cleaned, and that was all.

  Curious, Bailey put the chinois on a lower shelf, then stepped higher to reach the tiny piece of paper sticking out from the boards. Hanging on with one arm, she slowly pulled on it, and out came a rectangle of white. Bailey knew instantly that she was looking at the back of a photograph.

  Slowly, she turned the photo over, and what she saw made her draw in her breath. In the foreground of the picture were two people. One was a giant of a man, blond, with eyes that didn’t look too intelligent. But he had a smile on his face that was so sweet Bailey almost smiled back at him. He had his arm playfully around the neck of a boy who looked to be about fourteen or fifteen.

  The boy had a horribly deformed cleft palate.

  Slowly, Bailey got down from the shelves and walked closer to the window to look at the photo in the light. The boy in the photo was Jimmie. She’d recognize the set of those shoulders anywhere, and the eyes were the same. And she was sure that the blond giant was the man who’d once lived in her house, the man who had hanged himself in her barn.

  She looked at the photo in the sunlight. In the background were three other people, a woman and two men. The face of the woman was clearly visible. She was small and thin, and not particularly attractive; her face was long and pinched-looking. Since she was openly sneering at the back of the big man and Jimmie, her disapproval plain to see, Bailey was sure she had to be the adulterous wife.

  The men in the background had their faces turned to profile and were a bit out of focus, so Bailey couldn’t identify them.

  Who would know who these people are? she wondered. Matt? No, he was too young when this photo was taken. It didn’t have a date on it, but she guessed by the clothes that it was late 1960s or early 1970s.

  “Violet,” she said aloud, then she went back into the kitchen, turned off the pot of simmering fruit, put a dish towel on the glass shelf in the refrigerator, and set the hot pot on top of it. As she ran toward the front door, she grabbed her car keys, and fifteen minutes later she was at Violet’s house.

  Violet was sitting on her front porch, her head back, snoozing.

  Bailey didn’t bother with any preliminaries. “Who are these people?” she asked as she thrust the photo at Violet.

  Violet awoke instantly, unstartled, as she looked up at Bailey. “And nice to see you too,” she said as she took the photo. “Go get my glasses. They’re in there somewhere,” she added as she nodded toward the door.

  It took Bailey ten minutes to find Violet’s reading glasses, and another five to wash them. By the time she got back outside, Violet was asleep again, the photo on her lap. “So tell me,” Bailey said loudly, holding out the reading glasses.

  Slowly, Violet put on her half glasses and looked at the photo, while Bailey took a seat across from her. “I don’t know who the two in front are. They’re—”

  “I know who they are. I want to know about the people in the back.”

  Violet raised her eyebrows at Bailey. “Know who they are, do you? You’ve been doing some research. Is the kid in the front, the one with the lip, the guy you were lookin’ for?”

  “Never mind that. Who are the people in the back?”

  “What do I get out of it?”

  Bailey narrowed her eyes at Violet.

  Violet laughed. “Okay, let me look. I don’t know who the woman is, but that one is Roddy, and the one way in the back is, I think, Kyle.”

  “The Golden Six,” Bailey said under her breath. “So he was involved with them.”

  Violet stared at Bailey hard, then lifted the photo and looked at it again. “The big guy must be the man my friend told me about, the guy who hanged himself in your barn. Isn’t that big ol’ tree in the back the one that’s at your house?”

  “Yes,” Bailey said absently. “That’s my mulberry tree.”

  “If you want to know about this kid in the picture, why don’t you ask him?”

  “He’s dead,” Bailey said before she thought, then looked up at Violet with wide eyes.

  “You better be careful there, or you’re gonna start givin’ away information instead of pullin’ it out of ever’-body else.” Violet laughed when Bailey looked away, hiding her face. “What I meant is, why don’t you ask him?” She pointed at the photo.

  “Who?”

  “Rodney.”

  “He’s alive?”

  “Honey, ’sixty-eight may seem like a long time ago to you, but it wasn’t. Roddy is still alive, married to a girl less than half his age, and he’s still poppin’ out kids. Janice didn’t tell you that she has half a dozen half brothers and sisters?”

  “It seems that people in Calburn tend to leave out the more interesting parts of their history,” Bailey said softly.

  “Unlike you, who are so open and honest and tell everyone everything about yourself,” Violet said.

  Bailey got up, took the photo from Violet, and started to leave.

  “What is it you gals are plannin’ to do
that you’re so all-fired secretive about?”

  Bailey drew in her breath. Did everybody in Calburn know everything?

  “Don’t look at me like that. I think your secret’s safe around town, it’s just that I hear more than other people do. I have a lot of friends around here.”

  For a moment Bailey looked at Violet speculatively. As far as she could piece together from what little she’d been told, in her younger days, Violet had been the local prostitute. And now she was the local drug dealer—or at least marijuana dealer. Bailey had had enough encounters with people of Violet’s generation to know that most old hippies didn’t consider marijuana a drug. “You wouldn’t know anything about making a film, would you?”

  Violet gave a little smile. “Before I came here, I lived in L.A., and I was a production secretary for sixteen years.”

  “Does that mean you typed, or you were on the set?”

  “Let’s just say that a lot of the time the director was too drunk or too busy with his love life to do his job, so I took over. What kind of film you plannin’ to do? Porno?”

  “With you as our star,” Bailey shot back at her.

  Violet laughed. “In my younger days . . . Okay, I’ll stop the smart cracks. What do you need?”

  “A TV commercial. Something simple. We have an idea about what we want to sell, but we don’t know how to sell it.”

  “So tell me what’s in your head. I’ve done enough script rewriting that I think I could do a one-minute script on my own.”

  “Think you can get along with Janice and Patsy and not start a war?”

  “Maybe. How badly do you need a script written?”

  Bailey wasn’t going to say that they were desperate to find people who knew something about anything. She shrugged as though she could take Violet’s help or leave it. “Do you know how to draw a map?”

  Violet took her time in answering. “A map that shows you how to get to Roddy’s house up in the mountains?”

  “Yes,” Bailey said.

  “You won’t like it up there. And you’ve got ‘money’ written all over you. He’ll try to get it. And you’re too pretty to be around him.”

  “I’ll take my chances. So how much do you charge for your help?”

  “I got weeds in my garden that are taller than the plants.”

  Bailey tightened her lips. “Vegetables, but no hemp plants. I draw the line at illegal substances.”

  Violet laughed as she heaved her bulk out of the chair. “Come on. You can make us some lemonade so we’ll be cool while we talk about whatever it is that you’re tryin’ to sell. And you can tell me how Matt is.”

  Bailey’s head came up. “You and Matt didn’t— You haven’t—”

  “Not him or his daddy,” Violet said as she walked past Bailey and into the house. “But I sure did want to!”

  Seventeen

  As Bailey drove up the gravel road toward Rodney’s house, she was still feeling guilty about Matt. She wasn’t a good liar, and she wasn’t a good actress. Last night she’d been jittery and nervous about what she was planning to do today, and she knew that she was keeping many secrets from Matt. It wasn’t that she had to tell him what she was doing, but he didn’t deserve all the lies and evasions she was giving him.

  At dinner last night she’d tried to be carefree and happy, and to make light conversation. But the truth was, she was pumping Matt hard for information. She wanted him to tell her all he knew about Rodney Yates, and about the man’s situation now.

  “Why ever didn’t you tell me that one of the Golden Six was still alive?” she asked as she dumped mashed potatoes on Matt’s plate. “It was such a shock when Janice mentioned her father. I was so embarrassed that I didn’t know he was still alive.”

  “That’s enough,” Matt said softly.

  “Oh, sorry,” she said when she glanced down at the eight-inch-high pile of potatoes on his plate. She turned back to the stove.

  “Janice didn’t mention her father to you or anyone else,” Matt said with conviction.

  Bailey had to close her eyes for a moment to recover. Caught in a lie! She dumped green beans and almonds into a bowl. Brazen it out, she thought. “Okay, so I stopped by Violet’s today, and she told me that Rodney was alive.”

  “From what I was told, you drove through Calburn doing sixty, and you spent all afternoon at Violet’s.”

  Bailey knew that if she answered that, it would be angrily, and if she got angry, she’d reveal more than she wanted to. She sat down at the table, picked up her fork and looked at him. “I now live in this town, so I’d like to know its history. I offended Janice once, and I don’t want to do it again. Could you please tell me about her father?”

  Matt kept his head down for a few moments before he looked at her again. “You want to tell me the truth about why you’re asking so many questions of everyone in town?”

  Bailey made no reply to that; there was nothing she could say.

  “All right,” Matt said when he saw that she wasn’t going to answer. “You win. Janice despises her father, has nothing to do with him. He’s an old lech, an alcoholic. He’s had money, but he drank it all. Janice’s mother and Patsy’s were identical twins, daughters of the town’s doctor. Patsy’s mother married a dentist, and Patsy has had a nice house and nice clothes all her life. But Janice’s mother fell for the beautiful Rodney and married him. Rodney spent all the money her father left her, ran around on her, and made her short life miserable.”

  Bailey could hear the anger in his voice. “And Scott?” she asked softly.

  Matt leaned back in his chair and pushed his half-full plate away. “Sure you want to hear all the dirty little secrets about Calburn?”

  Bailey did and she didn’t, but she couldn’t stop herself from nodding yes.

  “Janice was determined not to do what her mother did, so the minute she graduated from high school, she moved to Chicago and got a job in an exclusive men’s clothing store, a place where she could meet rich men. During the two years she was there, she was engaged twice but she broke it off both times. They weren’t what Janice was looking for. But then one day Scott Nesbitt walked into the store. He was the youngest son of the richest man in a little town about twenty miles from here. He was young, handsome, charming, and, most important, malleable. Scott never had a chance. Janice went after him, married him within six months, then persuaded him that he never should have left Virginia. The truth was that Janice wanted to return to Calburn and throw her newfound wealth in people’s faces.”

  Matt took a breath and looked around the room for a while. “Janice made Scott what he is today. She worked twenty hours a day, and she took a lazy, spoiled young man and made him into . . . well, made him into the person you know.” Matt glared across the table at her. “Is that what you wanted to hear?”

  She was taken aback by his hostility. “Yes. I mean, no. I just thought that—”

  Matt didn’t let her finish her sentence as he got up and left the table. “I’ve got some work to do,” he muttered as he climbed the attic stairs, but he paused halfway up. “Oh, by the way, my brother’s birthday was six months ago.”

  Bailey put her head in her hands. She wasn’t doing very well at “no involvement.”

  Now, in the car, she glanced down at the map that Violet had drawn for her and saw that, if she was following it correctly, she should reach Rodney’s house soon. But there were no street signs on the dirt roads that led up into the mountains, and twice she’d made wrong turns and had to turn back. She’d had to drive her four-wheel-drive across a shallow stream and around a fallen log. Her driving lessons hadn’t prepared her for this kind of terrain.

  By the time she reached the cabin she felt as though she’d been on a safari. She parked under a tree and looked up the hill at it. “Don’t let it shock you,” Violet had said. “It’s dirt poor, and Rodney makes it that way.”

  Bailey drank from her bottle of water as she stared at the cabin. It was difficult to believe t
hat the same planet could hold this place and those houses of Jimmie’s. The whole structure was about to fall down, with one side of the porch already collapsed. One corner of the roof had a hole in it.

  In front of the cabin was dirt, trampled hard by many feet. A few scrawny chickens wandered about, then, as Bailey watched, a couple of dirty children ran out from under the porch and chased each other across the hard-packed ground.

  A third child, older and a boy, scrambled out from under the porch, then halted when he saw Bailey’s car. She wondered why they hadn’t heard her drive up, but when she turned off the engine, she heard shouting coming from inside the house.

  “Maybe now’s not the right time,” she said aloud. “Maybe I should go back and ask Matt—”

  She didn’t say or think anything else because, suddenly, a man appeared on the porch with a shotgun—and he was aiming it at her.

  “You want to get the hell off my property?” the man shouted.

  “Yes, I do,” Bailey yelled out the window, then grabbed her keys from where she’d tossed them onto the passenger seat. “I’m going now,” she called as she put the key into the ignition—then dropped them on the floor.

  There weren’t any curse words vile enough to express her annoyance as she ducked under the dashboard to search for the fallen keys.

  But she didn’t find them before the door to her car was thrown open.

  “You try to serve me any papers, and I’ll blow your head off,” came the voice outside the open car door.

  Bailey came up so fast she banged her head on the dashboard. “I have no papers for you,” she said frantically. “I came to ask some questions.”

  Feeling like something out of a gangster film, she held both hands straight up in the air, to the roof of the car. Standing outside the car was a man with a heavily lined face; he looked to be a hundred years old, but his movements were that of a younger man, and he was holding the shotgun aimed directly at her head.

  “Questions about what?” he said suspiciously.

  “The—” What could she say that she was sure wouldn’t offend him? “About the Golden Six,” she said quickly, then closed her eyes tight in preparation for being shot.