The Mulberry Tree

by Jude Deveraux

  “No!” the young man shouted. “Go down the mountain. Over there! That way! Get out of here! When he’s this mad, he’ll kill and ask questions later.”

  Bailey glanced at the narrow path between the trees where the young man was pointing, but she’d have to stop, then turn to reach it. Rodney could easily hit her from the rear. She kept going straight at the truck, gaining speed with every second. One of them had to move, or they were going to smash head-on.

  “Turn! Turn! Turn!” the boy shouted over and over.

  But Bailey didn’t turn. Rodney did. At the last second, he jerked the wheel of his truck to the right and missed hitting her by inches.

  “You’re insane, you know that?” the young man shouted at her.

  Bailey slowed the car and threw it in reverse while it was still rolling. “No. I’ve just spent a lot of my life with a man who knew how to play hardball.” She glanced at him. “You buckled up?”

  The young man grabbed the seat belt and buckled himself in.

  “We’re going down now,” Bailey said as she looked ahead and saw that Rodney was still turning around. She knew that he would come back for her, and this time, even if it cost him his life, he wouldn’t turn away. “You can use the element of surprise only once,” Jimmie had told her. “After that, you need to use brains and skill.”

  “Okay,” she said aloud. “It’s time for brains.”

  “Who are you talking to?”

  Bailey hit a bump that made both their heads hit the ceiling. “Somebody I used to know. What’s your name?”

  “Alex,” he said. “And where did you learn to drive?”

  “I think it was Bermuda.” So far, she’d been going down a meadow, but there was a fence ahead of them, and a boulder in her path. She veered so sharply that they turned on two wheels. “No,” she said. “It was in South Africa. Johannesburg.” There was an old road to her left, and again she turned sharply. “No, that wasn’t it. We were in—” In front of her was a stream with some fairly big rocks in it. If one of them hit the bottom of the car, it could tear out the whole underside, then they’d be stranded.

  Bailey turned right, then left, in midstream and missed the two big rocks. When she got to the other side, she said, “Actually, I think it was—”

  “Tell me later,” Alex said, holding on to the dashboard with both hands and casting sideways looks at her.

  “Do you by any chance know the way down to the highway?”

  “I thought you knew—” Alex began, but stopped. “Okay, slow down. There’s an old road along here somewhere, but it hasn’t been used in years. It’s probably covered with logs. Besides, I think you lost my dad a long way back there.”

  “Your dad?” Bailey said, looking in her rearview mirror.

  “Yeah, he—” Alex’s eyes widened as he glimpsed his father’s truck through the trees. “He knows which way you’re headed, so he’ll cut you off. He’s going to ambush us.”

  Suddenly, Bailey stopped the car, then backed up.

  “What are you doing now?” Alex yelled.

  “I’m going back the way I came. If he’s down there, then I’m going another way.”

  “But you can’t. You made it across that stream once by sheer dumb luck. You can’t do it again.”

  When she had the car straight and aimed down the hillside, she looked at him. “In or out?”

  Alex took a deep breath. “In,” he said as he braced himself.

  In the next second, Bailey floored the accelerator and hit the stream at full speed. And for the second time, she managed to twist the car around the rocks.

  When they were on the other side, Alex said, “I need a drink.”

  “You’re too young to drink,” Bailey snapped.

  “I’m too young to die, but that isn’t going to keep me alive.”

  Bailey jerked the wheel sharply and turned onto the road that she’d come up the mountain on. For a moment she almost relaxed, but then Rodney and his big black truck came roaring out from the trees, and Bailey went down the trail at fifty miles an hour.

  “What the hell did you do to him?” Alex yelled.

  “I don’t know,” she yelled back. “I mentioned Gus and Luke and the mulberry tree, and he went insane.”

  She swerved around a rock and nearly sent Alex through the windshield. “He’s getting closer,” she said as she looked in her rearview mirror.

  “Half a mile. If you can stay in front of him for half a mile, you’ve got it. He can’t drive on the highway. Too many DWIs, among other things. He steps out of these mountains and the sheriff will lock him up forever.”

  “Is there a shorter way out of here?”

  When Alex said nothing, she glanced at him.

  “Where?” she yelled.

  “It’s an old logging road. Impassable. You can’t go that way!”

  “Where?” she shouted again.

  Alex lifted his hand and pointed, and she could see an opening through the trees just ahead of them. “Hold on,” she shouted, then turned the car in a spray of gravel and headed down the old road.

  Alex looked out the back. “He won’t follow us this way. He knows he can’t make it. He knows—Holy shit! He’s right behind us.”

  “Watch your language!” Bailey said as she ran over a four-inch log and sent their heads banging into the ceiling.

  “We’re gonna die any second, and you’re telling me not to cuss?”

  “The Lord is my shepherd,” Bailey said. “I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in—”

  Alex turned to look at what she was seeing. There was a bridge that had been whole the last time he saw it, but now half of it was in the river. The deep, fast-moving river. “—in green pastures. He leadeth me beside the still waters. Yea though I—”

  “—walk through the valley of the shadow of death—”

  The next sound was their screams in unison as the car went flying off the bridge and sailing over the river.

  When the car hit the other side, they landed hard, and for a moment they were both too dazed to comprehend that they had made it, and they were alive.

  Alex recovered first. He looked out the back window and saw his father on the other side of the river, getting out of his truck—with his shotgun.

  Alex looked at Bailey, and Bailey looked at Alex.

  “—I will fear no evil—” they said together, then Bailey pushed on the accelerator, but the car had stopped. She turned the key, but it wouldn’t start. Alex leaned across her and looked at the gauges.

  “Lady, you’re out of gas.”

  Before Bailey could reply, Alex had grabbed her hand and was pulling her across the seat. Hunched down, they ran around the front of the Toyota, and stayed there until they heard two blasts of Rodney’s shotgun.

  “Now! While he reloads,” Alex yelled, then they started running.

  They didn’t stop until they reached the highway.

  “We’re safe now,” Alex said, “so you can slow down. By the way, what’s your name?”

  “Bailey James,” she said, and put out her hand to shake his.

  As they stood there beside the highway, eighteen-wheelers whizzing along behind them, they smiled at each other. Then they started to laugh.

  “I have never been so scared in my whole life,” Alex said.

  “Me neither.”

  “You! But you were great. Cool and calm. You must drive like that for a living.”

  “I’m a housewife,” she said, and that sent them into new peals of laughter. “I’ve probably driven a total of a hundred and fifty miles in my life.”

  “Then that explains it,” Alex said. “Anybody with any experience would have known she couldn’t have done something like that.”

  They walked along the highway, laughing together for about a mile, before Mr. Shelby happened along and gave them a ride to Bailey’s house.

  Eighteen

  When Matt got home that night, Bailey was asleep in a chair in the living room. She had on her
nightgown and bathrobe, her hair still damp from a shower, and he thought she looked about twelve years old. Lately, things between them hadn’t been going the way he wanted them to. It seemed that no matter what he tried, she pulled back from him.

  She was involved in something secret with Janice and Patsy, and honestly, he didn’t blame her. Scott and Rick had laughed about how they’d distracted their wives from their “silly little ideas” about opening a business.

  “My wife is mine!” Scott had said. “I’m not having Calburn say that I can’t support my family.”

  And half a dozen mistresses, Matt had wanted to say, but didn’t.

  Rick had been milder, but just as adamant. “Patsy seems to have forgotten how tired she was when she had to get up every morning and go to work.”

  “And when she went to work every day, you got stuck with half the housework,” Matt said, feeling no compulsion to hold back from telling his younger brother what he thought.

  “That has nothing to do with it,” Rick said. “I just think it’s better if Patsy stays home with the boys.”

  Matt had had to stand by and watch the men stop their wives from opening their business, and because of the unwritten male code, he couldn’t tell Bailey what was going on. But she knew. And, worse, when Matt asked for her help with his design business, he knew she thought he was doing the same thing as Scott and Rick.

  Matt knew that he was losing ground with Bailey, but he didn’t know how to show her that she could trust him, that he wouldn’t betray any of her secrets—or undermine whatever she wanted to do with her life.

  He walked quietly across the room and touched her hair. He wanted to make a pass at her, wanted to make love to her, but with the way she was feeling lately, he was sure she’d turn him down. And he didn’t think his pride could stand that.

  Quietly, he bent and picked her up in his arms. “Ssssh,” he said when she started to waken. “It’s just me.”

  She snuggled against his chest and went back to sleep, but when he tucked her into bed, she awoke enough to catch his arm. “I did something today,” she said.

  “Oh, and what was that?” He sat down on the edge of the bed and smoothed her hair back from her head.

  “I met Rodney Yates.”

  He paused in smoothing her hair. “You should have told me you wanted to meet him, and I would have gone with you.”

  She gave a big yawn. “Mmm. Sorry. I should have. He’s kind of crazy.”

  “Very much so. Go to sleep now, and you can tell me everything in the morning.”

  When he got to the door, she said, “Matt?”

  “Yes?”

  “I brought one of Rodney’s children home with me. Just for a while. Is that okay?”

  “It’s your house,” he said, but when she started to say something else, he smiled. “Sure, it’s okay. I think it’s time someone did something about those kids anyway. Maybe we can find them foster homes. Together. It’ll be something we can do together.”

  “Yes,” she said softly, her eyes closing. “Together. The three of us.”

  The idea of him and Bailey and a child made Matt smile, and as he closed her bedroom door, he thought that maybe everything was going to work out all right after all.

  The next morning, Matt awoke to a nightmare. It was as though he’d been transported back to Patsy’s house. The bathroom was a pigsty. Every towel in the cabinet was wet and had been slung across every surface. The tub was rimmed with greasy gray scum. There was hair in the sink, and the mirror was speckled with what looked like shaving cream.

  When he left the bathroom, he nearly tripped over a box in the hallway. Suspicious, he investigated and found out that all his storage boxes, at least fifty of them, had been removed from the spare bedroom and put into his attic office. He couldn’t get to his computer, or his drafting table.

  Downstairs again, he flung open the door to the extra bedroom and saw that all his things had been cleared out so completely that all that was left was the bed and . . . well, all the furniture that Bailey had put in there originally.

  Calm down, he told himself. She told you that she’d brought home one of Rodney’s kids, and you can’t expect a kid that’s been brought up like he was to keep a bathroom tidy. Poor child has probably never seen an indoor toilet.

  But still, it hurt to see all his possessions removed and put elsewhere, as though he was no longer living there.

  In the kitchen, Matt went to the jar that Bailey kept filled with her homemade granola, and found that it was empty. He looked in the oven. There was no scrumptious omelet waiting for him. In fact, when he looked in the refrigerator, there were no eggs. And no milk.

  Bailey walked into the kitchen, and she looked better than he’d ever seen her. There was a light in her eyes that he’d never seen before.

  “Good morning!” she said brightly. “You got in late last night.”

  “Yeah, I—”

  “I put it in the wash,” she shouted over her shoulder, cutting Matt off from what he’d been about to say. She looked back at Matt. “Oh, sorry. Alex was looking for his shirt, but I told him . . . But then, you heard what I told him. Are you okay? Do you need something?”

  Matt gave her a helpless, little-boy-lost smile that had made a few women weak-kneed. “Breakfast?”

  “Oh, yeah, sure, but you’re going to have to fix it yourself. Alex and I have to leave. We have to . . . uh . . . do something.”

  “Oh,” Matt said, keeping the smile plastered on his face. “But I couldn’t find the cereal.”

  Bailey opened a cabinet and pulled down a box of Cheerios.

  “From a box?” Matt said, shock in his voice.

  “Sorry, but Alex ate all the granola I made. Have some eggs.”

  “There aren’t any.” He was having to work hard to keep smiling.

  “Oh, that’s right. I made Alex and me an omelet last night.”

  “There were a dozen eggs in there yesterday.”

  Bailey shrugged. “Were there? I guess so, but Alex and I were very hungry last night, so I guess we ate all of them.”

  “How can a kid eat an entire dozen—” Matt began, but stopped when Alexander Yates entered the room. Matt had been expecting a child of nine or ten, but in walked a fully grown young man—and he had a look in his eye that said he knew exactly what Matt was thinking . . . and feeling.

  Matt wanted to remain cool, but he didn’t. “What are you doing here?” he snapped.

  “I’m her partner in crime,” Alex said, then he and Bailey laughed together. In fact, Bailey laughed so hard that she had to sit down.

  “Did you see—” she said.

  “When you ran straight at him, I thought it was my last minute alive,” Alex said, laughing just as hard, collapsing in the seat beside Bailey. “And I didn’t even realize that I knew that Psalm.”

  “You were perfect on every word.”

  They looked at each other and said in unison, “And I will fear no evil.”

  “When that window opened, I thought I’d fallen—Oh, Alex.” Bailey clutched his arm; she was crying with laughter.

  When Alex looked up to see Matt scowling at him, he gave a little shrug, as though to say, What can I say? The ladies love me.

  Bailey wiped her eyes, and got up to go to her bedroom to get a tissue.

  Matt was close behind her. “Do you know who that kid is?”

  Bailey was having a hard time sobering from the laughter. “He’s one of Rodney Yates’s children. I told you about him last night. By the way, it was very nice of you to carry me into—”

  “He is not a child; he’s a man. You brought a strange man—not a child, a man—into this house, a man you don’t know anything about—and you let him spend the night here. You’re even feeding him. Don’t you realize he could be dangerous?”

  Bailey blinked up at Matt. “My goodness, but you’re right. But then I didn’t know you, and I let you sleep here, didn’t I? And I feed you and, gee, I think you’re a bi
t more dangerous-looking than he is. No danger of tripling his rent, is there? Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some things I need to do.” With that, she closed her bedroom door in his face.

  Matt kicked a dirty towel that was lying in the middle of the hallway.

  Nineteen

  The next month flew by, and during that time, Bailey was so busy that the Golden Six never crossed her mind. And the truth was that she was fed up with them. Alex asked her repeatedly what she’d said to his father to send him into a rage like that, but what Bailey told him made no sense.

  “He only gets like that when his latest wife says she’s divorcing him,” Alex said thoughtfully. “So I wonder what it was about what you said that sent him off.”

  Bailey looked across the breakfast table at Matt, but Matt wasn’t speaking to either of them. And Bailey had to admit that Matt’s jealousy of Alex felt good.

  It turned out that Alex was living in Calburn with one of Rodney’s sisters and had only been at the cabin for a few days while he visited his half siblings. Bailey wasn’t sure how it happened that Alex moved in with her and Matt, but he did. Later, when she was told that Rodney’s sister was taking care of six grandchildren, and they all lived in a two-bedroom, one-bath house, she didn’t blame Alex for taking advantage of the situation. But it was all right because Bailey enjoyed his company.

  “He’s a nice kid,” Bailey told Matt. “He works after school in Wells Creek, and he saves all his money to give to his family. If it weren’t for Alex, they’d have nothing.”

  Matt had muttered a reply.

  Even though Alex had a job and made good grades in school, he still found time to rehearse for the school play. His teacher told Bailey in an adoring voice, “Alex is a natural at acting. All he has to do is read through a scene once, and he’s memorized it. He doesn’t need much rehearsal. He could just show up the night of the play and be perfect.”