The Mulberry Tree

by Jude Deveraux

  Bailey waved her hand in dismissal. “You want to pick a fight or listen?” She didn’t wait for his answer. “Arleen said that one night years ago Jimmie said something about ‘murders called suicides.’ ”

  “What exactly did she say?” Matt asked.

  Bailey put her hand to her temples. “She said that Jimmie said that all his money couldn’t right some wrong that had happened when he was a kid. Arleen said that he said something about ‘murders called suicides.’ ”

  Matt looked at her for a moment. “So how many suicides do we have now?” He held up his fingers to count them off. “Frank McCallum. Gus Venters. And Frederick Burgess.”

  “You think one of them was a murder?”

  “Yeah,” Matt said, “and I think that one of the murders has to do with James Manville and those two creeps who are selling everything off and converting it to cash.”

  Bailey took a deep breath. “And you don’t think Phillip Waterman’s death was accidental, and you think that my life may be in danger.”

  “Yes,” Matt said softly.

  Twenty-five

  It was three days later that Alex returned. During those three days, Matt neglected his designing job to search the Internet for information about Hilda Turnbull, Gus Venters, Lucas McCallum, Eva and Ralph Turnbull. He could find nothing.

  Bailey was trying to give her attention to the Mulberry Tree Preserving Company, but she was having a difficult time of it. Violet and Arleen were still with Carol and her children. Violet had called Janice once to tell her that they were sorting out Phillip’s possessions, and that Carol was taking it all pretty hard. “We’ll be back when we can,” Violet had said, then hung up.

  At dinner Matt told Bailey that he’d been unable to find anything about anyone, either on the Internet or in the town records. “It’s as though they never existed.”

  “Been erased, more likely,” Bailey said as she served Matt swordfish with a sweet-and-sour sauce. “I’m sure Jimmie did it. I know his biographers looked long and hard to find out what they could about his early years but they couldn’t find anything.”

  “But he couldn’t have erased everything everywhere,” Matt said in exasperation.

  Bailey just gave him a raised-eyebrow look, as though to say, Think not?

  With each day that passed, Matt was becoming more nervous, but he was trying to hide his worry from Bailey. What if she were recognized? What if Arleen or Carol made a slip and said something about Lillian Manville? Alex knew who Bailey was, and he was with Bailey’s sister. What if Alex told Bailey’s sister where Bailey was? What if Alex was as lowlife as his father, and the two of them plotted against Bailey?

  By the time Alex returned, Matt thought his head might burst from the worry.

  Matt was in bed beside Bailey, but unable to sleep. He’d had yet another frustrating day of finding out nothing. When he heard the low rumble of the motorcycle, he glanced at Bailey to see that she was sleeping soundly, then slipped out of bed and went outside.

  Alex had turned off the bike and was removing his helmet.

  “Where the hell have you been?” Matt snapped.

  “And it’s good to see you, too,” Alex said blandly.

  Matt calmed himself. “Sorry. Did you find her? We heard nothing from you all this time.” He couldn’t prevent himself from this reprimand.

  As Alex glanced toward the dark house, Matt could see from the porch light’s dim glow that the boy was exhausted, and the anger left Matt.

  “She asleep?” Alex asked.

  “Yeah,” Matt answered. “You look beat. Want something to eat?”

  “I could eat the tires off the bike,” he said, “but I need to talk to you in private. I think you and I need to decide what to tell her.”

  Matt knew that the ‘her’ was Bailey. He nodded. “I’ll get you some food and meet you in the barn. There’s a shower in the office if you need one.”

  Alex just grunted in reply, then turned and started walking toward the barn.

  Twenty minutes later, Alex was seated on a hay bale, his hair wet from the shower, wearing the clean clothes that Matt had brought him, and ready to talk.

  “I crashed it,” Alex said, his mouth full.

  “Crashed what?”

  “The bike. I didn’t want to waste time, so I asked a few questions in the stores around where she lives, found out that she lives alone, then ran my motorcycle through the front window of her house. When she said she’d call an ambulance for me, I made an attempt to leave, as though I was afraid of being found by the police. She loved it; invited me to stay so she could personally nurse me back to health.”

  Matt just sat there blinking at the young man in wonder. Words like audacious, fearless, and . . . stupid came to mind. He refilled Alex’s glass of iced tea. “If you wrecked the bike, how—” He nodded toward the barn door. Outside was the motorcycle that Alex had ridden up on.

  “New one. She bought it for me.”

  Matt’s eyes widened. “Where’d she get the money? I figured that when Manville died, her income would be cut off.”

  “I don’t know where it comes from,” Alex said, “but she’s got lots of cash. I couldn’t find out about her money in the little time I had with her, but I know that it’s not from a legitimate source. Lord! but that is one angry woman! She said that she has to keep her money in a dozen different accounts so nobody will know how much she has. And she whines constantly about having to live in a ‘dump’ like the one she has, when she can afford better. But ‘they’ won’t let her show her wealth.” Alex shook his head for a moment. “She has a six-bedroom mansion set on four acres that look like something out of a magazine. Her swimming pool could be used in the Olympics.”

  “Did you find out anything about Bailey and the marriage?”

  “Yeah, Manville got her mother’s permission.” When Matt opened his mouth to speak, Alex held up his hand. “But Dolores doesn’t know where the paper is. When she told me that, she laughed and said, ‘But they don’t know that I don’t know,’ then giggled like a kid.”

  Matt waited while Alex took a long drink of tea, then returned to the food. “I want to know every detail,” Matt said.

  Alex put his plate of food down on the floor, then lifted his shirt and turned around. On his back were deep scratches, the kind of scratches left by a woman in the throes of passion.

  Matt gave a low whistle.

  Alex picked up the plate again. “No wonder she’s lost three husbands,” he said. “I never saw a woman so full of hate.” He glanced toward the door of the barn. “And every bit of that hate is directed toward Bailey . . . Lillian. Dolores truly and deeply hates her sister. She believes that Lillian—I mean Bailey—took Manville away from her. But Dolores never even met the man until after he’d married her sister. Does that make any sense to you?”

  “Yeah, sort of. Go on.”

  “Dolores says she wasn’t there when it happened—the signing, I mean—or she would have stopped her mother. Dolores was onstage, singing. She says she was singing for Manville, but he was—”

  “Go on,” Matt said impatiently. “Tell me about the paper.” He was afraid that Bailey would wake up, find him gone, and start looking for him. He could already tell that he didn’t want Bailey to hear what Alex had to say.

  “Dolores said that on that day in hell—that’s what she calls it—three men in suits showed up with a type-written piece of paper and—get this—one of them was a notary public. Dolores said her mother didn’t have time to think, and that the ‘poor woman’ hardly knew what she was doing. Dolores said the notary asked to see her mother’s driver’s license, then one of the men ‘ordered’ her to sign the paper ‘if she knew what was good for her.’ The notary put his seal beside the signature, then all three of the men left with the paper.”

  “Her mother wasn’t given a copy?”

  “No. Dolores said her mother was so bedazzled—that’s her word—by it all that she didn’t even tell Dolores until
late that night.”

  “Didn’t Dolores wonder where her teenage sister was?”

  “Apparently not,” Alex said, looking into the picnic basket that Matt had loaded with refrigerator containers full of food.

  “Nice family,” Matt said. “Go on. What else?”

  “That’s it. Dolores said that the only time the paper was ever mentioned again was at their mother’s funeral. She said she got Manville alone and asked him what had happened to the permission slip. Dolores said she’d only meant it as a joke, but she said Manville got real angry. She didn’t understand why until it dawned on her that Lillian probably didn’t know about the paper. She figured Manville didn’t want his wife to know that he’d been so sure of getting her that before he even asked her to marry him, he’d had all the paperwork done. Dolores said she figures that she’s the only person who ever beat James Manville at anything. She said to him, ‘So, where’d you put the paper, Jimmie?’ Dolores said that, as far as she knew, until that moment, Lillian was the only person in the world who’d ever called him by the nickname. Dolores said Manville sneered at her, but it made her feel great. She said he told her, ‘I gave the paper to the person I trust most in the world.’ Dolores was gloating; she said she thought this meant he didn’t trust Lillian, and to Dolores, the fact that Manville left Bailey no money was proof of his distrust.”

  Alex took another bite. “I’ve sure missed Bailey’s cooking! Anyway, at the funeral, Dolores told Manville that she’d just seen the cutest little Mercedes convertible. It was white with a red interior. So the next week some guy shows up and hands her a set of keys to a white Mercedes convertible. With red leather interior, of course. And, after that, Dolores received a yearly six-figure allowance from Manville, and if she wanted anything extra, like a country club membership, Manville gave her that, too.”

  “But it wasn’t enough,” Matt said softly.

  “Not by a long shot. And now Dolores says that she’s tapped into the heart of all that should have been hers.” Alex swallowed, then said, “For the life of me, I can’t figure out how she thinks Manville was hers if she’d never met him.”

  “If you’re asking me to explain women, I haven’t lived long enough.” When Alex yawned, Matt said, “Come on, kid, you need to get to bed, and tomorrow, early, I’m sending you to stay at Patsy’s house. The less Bailey hears about the details of this, the better.”

  Twenty-six

  Violet called Janice again to let her know when she and Arleen would be arriving home. Janice told Bailey, so Matt and Bailey met the plane.

  Arleen seemed to think it was normal to have someone waiting to meet her and deal with her luggage, but Violet was suspicious from the first moment. She arranged it so she sat in the backseat of the Toyota with Bailey.

  “What do you want so much that you came all the way to the airport to get us?” Violet asked softly. In the front seat, Arleen was talking nonstop to Matt about the funeral and who had been there. “Mrs. Manville,” Violet added.

  “Who else knows?” Bailey asked quickly.

  “Just us, but it won’t be long before they find you.”

  “They,” of course, were Atlanta and Ray.

  “They grilled Carol pretty hard, but she told them nothin’. At one point Carol nearly got hysterical. She thinks those two had Phillip murdered.”

  Bailey drew in her breath. “Does Carol know why?”

  Violet looked at Bailey for a long moment. “No, but you do, don’t you?”

  Bailey hesitated while Violet waited in silence. The older woman looked much better than she had when Bailey first met her. She was dressing better, and the weight loss made her stand up straighter and move more easily. “There is a possibility that all Jimmie’s billions belong to me and not to them,” Bailey said at last.

  At that Violet leaned back against the seat and shook her head. “In that case, honey, you could hide in one of those caves in Afghanistan, and they’d still find you.”

  “And meanwhile, Atlanta and Ray are putting people out of work and—”

  “Oh Lord! a do-gooder. You better get out of Calburn before—”

  Bailey didn’t want to hear advice about where she should hide and how she should start running and never stop. It was only a matter of time until Atlanta and Ray found out where she was, but until they did, she was going to do what she could to find out all she could. “Why didn’t you tell me you were married to one of the Golden Six?”

  “What on God’s green earth that has to do with those two money-grubbin’ murderers is—” Violet cut off as she looked at Bailey’s face, then gave a little smile. “I see. You and that gorgeous man of yours are onto somethin’, aren’t you?” When Bailey didn’t answer, Violet smiled broader. “So what’s he like in bed? And don’t bother tellin’ me you don’t know. You two were givin’ each other looks hot enough to set the runway on fire.”

  Bailey narrowed her eyes at Violet. “I am not going to satisfy any of your sexual fantasies. I just want to know anything your former husband ever told you about Frank McCallum’s son.”

  “Frank’s son?” Violet said, puzzled. “I didn’t even know that Frank had a son. He— Wait a minute. Didn’t I hear that he had a retarded kid that stayed up in the mountains? Never came down. Nobody ever saw the kid.”

  For a moment Bailey looked out the window, and her stomach turned. Jimmie. A man as gregarious and as social as Jimmie hidden away in a cabin in the mountains. How many years? Was the isolation imposed on him or voluntary?

  Violet was watching Bailey intently. “Harelip,” she said softly. “Was the kid retarded or just deformed?”

  There was a lump the size of an orange in Bailey’s throat, and she couldn’t speak. The few words Violet had just said explained so many things about Jimmie. He couldn’t bear to be alone even for seconds. He craved being accepted by society. The first day she’d met him, he’d ridden the rides as though he’d never been on them before—and maybe he hadn’t.

  Violet patted Bailey’s hand as they pulled into her driveway. “Drop Arleen off, then come back. I’ll tell you what I know.”

  It was two hours later that Bailey and Matt drove into Violet’s driveway. They’d stopped by the grocery and loaded the back of the car with bags of easy-to-prepare food to leave for Violet, plus a leg of lamb and wine so Bailey could cook the three of them dinner. “You take Violet outside and talk to her about Carol while I cook,” Bailey told Matt. “Then the three of us will talk about the Golden Six.”

  “What’s bothering you?” he asked. “You’ve been too quiet ever since we picked them up at the airport.”

  Bailey almost said that there was nothing wrong, but she didn’t. Instead she told him that Luke McCallum was said to be retarded, and that he’d lived in seclusion in the mountains.

  “We’re not talking the Middle Ages,” Matt said. “The kid’s mouth could have been fixed. It was fixed.”

  “So why wasn’t it repaired when he was a child?” Bailey asked. “That photo of Jimmie was when he was a teenager. Even if there was no money for the surgery, there are welfare agencies. Surely, with a case like that one a doctor could have been found who would have done the work for free. Jimmie—” She stopped and took a breath. “Jimmie used to give a lot of money to doctors to perform free surgeries on malformed children.”

  Matt gave Bailey a soft kiss. “Eventually we’ll find out everything, and we’ll start by finding out what Violet knows.”

  But after Bailey had served them the lamb and a cold cucumber soup, as they sat outside and ate, she and Matt found out that Burgess had told his wife little.

  “When I met Burgess in California,” Violet said, “I had only recently escaped from a hardscrabble life in Louisiana. My mother had six kids, all with different fathers, and—” She waved her hand. “That doesn’t matter now. I was young and pretty, and I thought that if I could just make it to Hollywood, I’d instantly become a movie star.”

  Violet smiled at her naïveté. “Yo
u can imagine how that worked out. Four months after I got to California, I was doin’ the same thing my mother had done to earn a livin’. But even though I was doin’ rather well at it, I’d seen where a life like that led. I’d seen that I wasn’t always gonna be young and pretty, and I knew that someday I was gonna look like this.”

  She motioned down toward her own body, but neither Matt or Bailey smiled at her self-deprecating joke.

  “Anyway, one day my car broke down on some back road, and this big, slow-movin’ man from Virginia stopped to help me. I knew right then that I was at a crossroads of my life, and I decided to take the opportunity. I put on my best helpless-little-girl act, made up lots of stories about my past and my present, and a few days later Burgess and I were married, and we came back here to Calburn to live.”

  Violet glanced toward her garden as though to see if Carol really had cut down all her marijuana plants, but they were indeed gone.

  Bailey got up to get dessert, a mango-infused crème brûlée, and when she returned with two bowlfuls, one for Matt and one for Violet, she said, “Go on with your story. Did you like it here in Calburn?”

  Violet laughed. “It was all right. Borin’, but okay. I made an attempt at bein’ a housewife, and I did okay. Burgess was easy to please. Except when he told some long-winded story, he didn’t talk much, so I got lonely sometimes. He was a nice man, though.”

  “What did he say about the Golden Six?” Matt asked.

  “Not a word. In fact we’d been back here for months before I heard of them. Somebody at the grocery mentioned them and said that my husband had been one of them. I didn’t think anything about it except as a joke, so that night, I was sort of teasin’ him, sayin’ I’d heard he was a ‘Golden Boy.’ He shocked me because he got angry. Burgess never got angry. Never! But he did that night.”

  “And that made you curious,” Bailey said.

  “Nope. Curiosity ain’t one of my faults. I’d seen too many people with too many nasty little secrets in my life, so I wasn’t interested. If he didn’t want to talk about the Golden Six, I didn’t either.”