The Mulberry Tree

by Jude Deveraux

  Matt had gone with Bailey to see Alex act.

  Afterward, she and Matt were in his pickup on the way home. “Alex is a very good actor,” she said. “All through the play I was thinking that I might call a man I used to know and see if he could get him a screen test in Hollywood.”

  “What a great idea!” Matt said enthusiastically. “How about calling him tonight? You could arrange a screen test for the kid tomorrow. I’ll pay for his flight to Hollywood.”

  Bailey laughed.

  “No, really. I’ll charter a jet for him,” Matt said, making Bailey laugh harder.

  Carol had flown in the day after Bailey called her, and she was eager to work. Oddly, she and Violet hit it off well, and Carol moved into Violet’s house. Two days later there were eight trucks outside the house: carpenters, plumbers, electricians, painters, landscapers, appliance delivery, furniture, and a cleaning crew. Three days after that, Carol’s daughters, aged eight and twelve, flew down with their nanny for the weekend, but they didn’t return home on Monday. Instead, they stayed with their mother, and Carol enrolled them in the local school.

  And as though she knew that only work would keep her sane, Carol wrote a one-minute TV commercial to promote the Mulberry Tree Preserving Company, then used Phillip’s money to buy time during a collegiate football game that would be shown in three states. After she had the ad scheduled, she went into a frenzy of production design that had Patsy’s sewing machine running twenty hours a day. And Carol recruited nearly every person Bailey had introduced her to in Calburn to have some part in the commercial.

  At the beginning of the second week, Arleen showed up on Bailey’s doorstep with twenty-eight suitcases.

  “How did you find me?” Bailey gasped.

  “You can hide from the world, but everyone in this town knows where you are. Don’t give me that look. They don’t know who, just where. So, dear, where’s your guest room?”

  “I have three bedrooms, and two men are living with me, so—”

  “Oh, my, you have changed,” Arleen drawled.

  Bailey had six pots of jam on the stove and four crates of strawberries that needed to be capped, so she didn’t have time to exchange bon mots with Arleen. “You’ll have to stay in a hotel.”

  “Can’t, dear. I’m broke. Flat.”

  Bailey started to tell her that that was no problem of hers, but then she had an idea. It was a long shot, but she thought Janice and Arleen might like each other. Janice was always trying to overcome her background, so Arleen might impress her. Years ago, Janice had pushed her husband to buy the Longacre place, the enormous house that Matt’s grandfather had built to show the town how rich he was. “The house that bankrupted my grandfather,” Matt had said. Scott had bought the run-down house for next to nothing and remodeled it. “A never-ending process,” Janice had said.

  “Let me make a call,” Bailey said, and ten minutes later, a wide-eyed Janice had appeared in her Mercedes and taken Arleen away with her, along with as much of her luggage as they could get into the car.

  After Arleen arrived, and Carol immediately cast her in her commercial, there was no possibility of keeping what the women were doing a secret. But by that time they were so deeply involved in starting the business, they didn’t have time to listen to anything a man said to dissuade them.

  Besides, there was strength in numbers, and there were six of them.

  The women spent several evenings together calculating how much money they could raise. Patsy held a huge garage sale, and Arleen sold two Paris ball gowns to a Richmond shop. Each woman did what she could to contribute to the communal bank account; then, with nervous hearts, they prepared to make an offer on a factory in Ridgeway. But before the offer had been written up, the realtor gave them the astonishing news that the owner had dropped the price by a third. Bailey was sure that this new price had something to do with a meeting that Violet had with the owner, but she knew better than to ask for details.

  Janice was up to her neck in setting up the books, getting licenses, and researching codes for running a canning factory.

  “For a woman of aristocracy, Arleen sure knows how to deal with money,” Janice said in admiration. “She’s better than a calculator for adding and subtracting in her head. And brother! can she bargain. I’ve never seen anything like it. She got the decorator to put up silk curtains in my dining room for half what I was told that cotton curtains were going to cost. And I don’t know where she got those rugs, but—” Janice put up her hands in amazement. “And what she says to my mother-in-law has to be heard to be believed. I thought the old hag would run and tell Scott that her ladyship would have to go, but the old bat eats it up. The nastier Arleen treats her, the harder my mother-in-law tries to please her.”

  Patsy was having a wonderful time hiring all the women who had worked for her years before, women she’d had to lay off because the canning factory was closing. And she loved that she now had an excuse to give her husband and sons most of the housework to do. “Like the old days,” she said dreamily. “When I had a job.”

  At one of their tasting meetings at Bailey’s house, they talked of designing a brochure to send out to small groceries and wholesalers, but here they were stumped. Not one of the six women was an artist or knew anything about computer design or Web sites.

  “You know who you should get?” Alex asked one morning at breakfast. “Carla.”

  Bailey had to think where she’d heard that name before.

  “Opal’s daughter,” Matt said.

  “You mean the girl with the multicolored hair and the various body piercings?”

  “See?” Alex said. “Right there, you can see that she’s an artist.”

  “Actually . . . ” Bailey said.

  Matt looked at her. “You get Carla involved in this, and her mother will find out, and Opal’s the biggest gossip in Calburn.”

  “It’s okay,” Bailey said. “The only people we wanted to keep it a secret from were you three men.”

  She’d meant to make Matt laugh, but instead she saw red rise on his neck. “I’m not your enemy,” he said, then got up and left the table.

  The next day at school, Alex asked Carla to come home with him, to Bailey’s house, and Bailey was amused to see that Alex couldn’t quit looking at her. Bailey had been afraid that Carla was going to be as sulky as she had been in her mother’s salon, but she wasn’t. She was enthusiastic and had some good ideas—and she seemed to know everything about how to create a Web site. In no time she had put together a good-looking brochure, then recruited Alex and Patsy’s twin sons to address envelopes.

  “How does she do it?” Bailey said to Matt. Carla had three gorgeous young men obeying her, but as far as Bailey could tell, she wasn’t interested in any of them.

  “Same way you do,” Matt said as he left the room to go upstairs to the attic. He’d cleared the boxes out and was now spending most of his time up there. But then, since the house was filled with people working on the Mulberry Tree Preserving Company, there wasn’t much room for him downstairs.

  For some reason, they began to receive orders even before the brochures were mailed.

  “Did you notice that all these orders are from men?” Patsy asked. “Directly from the men. Am I just old-fashioned, or don’t most company presidents have secretaries?”

  “Violet,” Carol said as she licked an envelope. “She called in a few favors.”

  Bailey started to ask a question, but when Patsy and Janice gave her a hard stare, she closed her mouth. “Okay, so which do you like better, the cherry or the blueberry?”

  Three days before the commercial was to air on TV, the phone rang at 3:00 A.M., waking Bailey.

  It was Phillip, and he was in a noisy bar; she could hardly hear him.

  “Bailey, I don’t have much time,” he said. “I just paid fifty bucks to some guy to use his cell phone so no one can trace the call back to me. I’ve got to warn you—except that I don’t know exactly what I’m warning yo
u about. Atlanta and Ray are scared of something. They’re liquidating everything, putting it into cash, and moving the money out of the country. You’ll probably see something about it on the news.”

  “Phillip,” Bailey said, “I don’t mean to be negative, but what does this have to do with me? It’s their money, and they can do anything they want with it.”

  “Bailey, are you sure James didn’t get your mother’s permission to marry?”

  “He couldn’t have. He didn’t even meet my mother until after we were married. You know that we eloped.”

  “Yes, of course. But are you sure?”

  “Why are you asking me this?”

  “Because Atlanta and Ray have been asking me questions about you—a lot of questions. I said that when you were told I was taking a job with them, you walked out, and I don’t know where you went.”

  “Phillip, none of this makes any sense, except that Atlanta and Ray are crazy and always have been. My marriage to Jimmie wasn’t legal, plus his will left me nothing, and Atlanta and Ray are his only living relatives.”

  “Are they?”

  “What? I can’t hear you.”

  He didn’t say anything for a while, but the noise lessened, so she thought he must have moved to a quieter spot. “Are they his relatives?”

  “Of course they are! Jimmie hated them. Why else would he put up with them unless they were his relatives? No one would put up with friends as repulsive as Atlanta and Ray.”

  “I don’t know anything for sure, but I wonder if maybe they knew something about him that he didn’t want others knowing. You know how secretive he was about his past. What if they knew something horrible? Something James had done? And, Bailey, I’ve been thinking about a lot of things. James wasn’t the kind of man to overlook details. It’s hard for me to believe that he didn’t know you were just seventeen when he married you. And if he knew that, he would have obtained your mother’s permission.”

  “But he didn’t know, and he didn’t get any permission. He would have told me.”

  “But you didn’t tell him. Maybe he was waiting for you to confess to him. But you didn’t, did you?”

  “No, I didn’t. If I had, we could have married legally. But it’s okay, Phillip, stop worrying about me. I’m okay. Very okay.”

  “Bailey, listen—” There was a beep in the phone. “Oh, no, the battery is dying. Listen, Bailey—what if, somewhere, there is a permission slip from your mother? What if you and James were legally married? What if Atlanta and Ray aren’t blood relatives of his? That would mean all those billions are yours, not theirs. And what if the person who knows that you were legally married has come forward with that information? Maybe that’s what’s stirred Atlanta and Ray up now.”

  “But Jimmie’s will—”

  “The will states that the money goes to his brother and sister. If a court were shown that they weren’t his relatives . . . Bailey, have you seen anything since you’ve been there that would link Atlanta and Ray with James?”

  Bailey didn’t want to tell him about seeing the photo in Matt’s shoe box. She didn’t want to get involved. It was better to put Atlanta and Ray and even Jimmie behind her.

  “You’ve heard something, haven’t you?” Phillip said. “What is it?”

  She sighed. Even over the phone she couldn’t get away with a lie. “Nothing. I just saw a photo of some kids, and I think they might have been Atlanta and Ray.”

  “Oh, God!” Phillip said. “Bailey, you don’t know how important this is. You must find out anything you can about them. If I could prove that they aren’t blood relatives of James, I might be able to stop this madness. And if you know anyone who would know if you were married or not—”

  “I don’t want all that money!” Bailey said, and her voice came out as a shriek. She could feel the flashbulbs, hear the reporters asking her how she felt about anything and everything.

  “This isn’t just about you!” Phillip shouted into the phone. “Those two are shutting down and selling off all of James’s businesses. Thousands, maybe millions, of people will be affected by this. Can you find out anything at all?” There was another beep on the phone. “Promise me that you’ll find out what you can. Swear to me. It’s very, very important.”

  “All right,” Bailey said reluctantly. “I’ll—” She stopped; the phone had gone dead in her hands. “I’ll do what I can,” she said, then grimaced.

  She put down the receiver, then looked up at a soft tap on her door. “Yes?” It was Matt.

  “Everything okay?” he asked. “I heard the phone.”

  “Yeah,” she said, but Phillip had upset her. Lately she’d come close to forgetting that she’d ever been James Manville’s fat wife. It had been days since “what Jimmie said” and “what Jimmie did” had run through her mind. She’d been very worried about Arleen or Carol making a slip, but they were used to keeping secrets. One afternoon Carol had said, “Do you think I want them to know that my husband works for billionaires?” The way she said it made Bailey laugh. She made “billionaire” sound as though it were a contagious disease.

  “No,” Bailey said to Matt, but she didn’t look at him. “Just an old friend. Celebrating. It’s his birthday.”

  When Matt didn’t move, she knew that he knew she was lying.

  “Yeah,” he said coldly. “Or maybe it was a wrong number.” He didn’t give Bailey a chance to say any more before he closed her door, and she heard him turn and go up the stairs to the attic. He wasn’t going back to bed but upstairs to work.

  Bailey tried to go back to sleep, but Phillip’s call had upset her too much. Why hadn’t he asked about Carol? she wondered. Or his daughters? Surely he knew that his entire family was in Virginia with Bailey. Or did he?

  An hour later Bailey got up, dressed, and went to the kitchen. By the time Alex got up, she’d made a six-inch-tall stack of crepes, with four different sauces. Matt came to the table, but he didn’t eat or say much.

  Even when Alex said, “Good thing you’ve lost your appetite, old man. Men your age put on weight real easy,” Matt didn’t respond.

  “What’s wrong with him?” Alex asked when Matt left the house to go to work.

  “Just . . . adult things,” she said, sounding as though Alex were five.

  “Ah, sex,” he said, smiling at her. “You’re right. I have a father like mine, and I have no idea about sex.”

  “It isn’t sex,” Bailey said with heavy sarcasm. “Not between Matthew Longacre and me. I can assure you of that.”

  “Yeah?” Alex said, rolling up another crepe and filling it with ricotta cheese and orange-infused sauce. “What’s the matter? Old Matt can’t? Because that’s the only reason, if he isn’t.”

  “Whatever are you talking about?”

  “Lust, Miss B. Old-fashioned lust. The kind that causes wars. That man is so hot for you that he’s about to come apart.”

  “You’re crazy, and you’re going to be late. Stop eating and go!”

  “If you don’t believe me, you should go up to him and put your hand down—”

  “Out! Get out of here! And do try not to become like your father.”

  He grabbed his books and ran toward the front door as she heard the school bus stop in front of the house. “I’m too beautiful to ever end up like him,” Alex called, then grinned when Bailey laughed.

  Twenty

  The commercial was a great success. Everyone gathered at Bailey’s house to watch it, and she had to admit that the men, once they realized the women were going to open a business no matter what they did, had given in graciously.

  “I’ve been so excited about all this that Rick and I’ve had the best sex of our lives,” Patsy confided to Bailey. “He wants me to open two businesses. What about you and Matt?”

  “Three,” Bailey said quickly, then smiled when Patsy giggled.

  Bailey had set up food outside, but they were so nervous that none of the women could eat anything while they waited for the commercial t
o come on. For a moment Bailey stood back and watched everyone. Mother Theresa once said that what hurt people more than poverty or illness was feeling that they weren’t needed. And now, looking at the people gathered under her mulberry tree, she was sure that Mother Theresa was right. All the women there today, herself included, had changed in the last weeks, and it was because they felt that they now had a purpose in life.

  The biggest change had been in Arleen. In all the years that she’d hung around Jimmie, Bailey had never been able to stand her. She was a parasite. But Arleen had turned out to be a great asset to them, and in the last weeks she’d put on weight as she’d tasted and retasted Bailey’s recipes. She nixed half the designs that Carla proposed, saying that they looked as though they were intended for “trailer trash.” “Careful,” Bailey had said, “your origins are showing.” In the end, it was thanks to Arleen that they ended up with a simple label that conveyed that the product was classy and elegant, but also affordable.

  Carol had been a good influence on Violet; the older woman had dropped twenty pounds, and Bailey hadn’t seen her with a joint in her hands for days.

  “It’s time,” Carol said, and everyone halted for a split second before they all ran toward Bailey’s back door. Alex and Patsy’s twin sons became jammed in the doorway—with Carla in the middle.

  “Stop that!” Patsy said as she swatted her nearest son with a rolled-up catalog.

  Laughing, the boys moved back and let Carla go ahead of them.

  Bailey sat on the couch beside Matt, and they all held their breaths as the football game took a commercial break. Without a thought, Bailey took Matt’s hand in hers and held it.

  In the commercial, a woman and her two children (Carol, her youngest daughter, and Carla) were sitting in their family room watching TV. The room was a mess, and all three of them were wearing sloppy, everyday clothes. Suddenly, the husband (Alex wearing a mustache) burst into the room, saying that his boss and his wife had come home with him and were expecting dinner. “I’m sorry, Hon,” Alex said, “but I told him what a great cook you are.”