The Mulberry Tree

by Jude Deveraux

  Violet finished the last of her dessert. “Good dinner. Carol has me eatin’ six kinds of green things at each meal. I’m beginnin’ to hate that color! And her idea of dessert is sugar-free Jell-O.”

  “What happened on the thirtieth of August, 1968?” Matt asked softly.

  “Ah,” Violet said. “That’s when everything changed. That summer all six of ’em were here. My husband went from bein’ home every night to bein’ gone every night—and all day. All that summer they were callin’ me from the lumberyard and askin’ me when Burgess was comin’ to work. They needed decisions to be made, but they couldn’t find him.”

  “Why were they all here in Calburn?” Bailey asked.

  “Different reasons. That little fruit, Harper, said he’d come back to see his mother because she was dyin’, but he didn’t spend much time with her. Burgess told me Harper was a big-deal producer out in Hollywood and that he was givin’ up a lot to stay with his sick mother. I couldn’t stand the little creep, and I was sure he was lyin’, so I called somebody I knew in L.A. and asked some questions. It was just as I thought: Harper Kirkland was a nobody. He’d worked on a few sets as best boy—you know, he bangs the clapper”—Violet gestured as though clapping the board that shows the scene and the take number in a movie—“but the creep caused so many fights that he was always fired. He earned a living turnin’ tricks.”

  “Fights?” Matt asked. “What kind of fights? Fist-fights?”

  “Yeah. Whatever. He did bitchy stuff like tell one person one thing, then another somethin’ else. He loved to stir up trouble.”

  “And my father was home all that summer,” Matt said. “He’d broken a bone in his ankle and couldn’t drive.”

  “Yeah,” Violet answered, looking at Matt. “I only met your dad a couple of times, but he was a real nice guy.”

  “So nice he abandoned his family.”

  “So all the six were here, and Frank . . . ” Bailey said, encouraging Violet to go on.

  “Yeah,” Violet said. “On the thirtieth of August Frank shot his young, pregnant wife, then himself.”

  “And Gus Venters hanged himself in a barn,” Matt said.

  “And I wonder if Jimmie saw it all,” Bailey said softly.

  “My husband changed after that night,” Violet said. “After that night he became depressed, deeply depressed, and he stayed that way until his plane went down and ended his misery.”

  For a moment the three of them sat in silence, then Violet spoke and broke the spell. “After my husband died,” she said, “I found some scrapbooks he’d kept when he was a kid. You wanna see them?”

  “Yes!” Bailey said before Matt could answer, and fifteen minutes later they had the table cleared and the dishes in the dishwasher Carol had had installed. Bailey had to admit that Carol had done an excellent job of remodeling the old kitchen. She’d had the worn linoleum removed and the wide pine floorboards refinished. She’d had a cabinet by the sink removed so the dishwasher could be installed, but none of the other cabinets had been replaced. They’d been cleaned, and the worn-out old hinges replaced, but Carol had wisely not even repainted them. The sink, the old stove, and even the retro refrigerator had been cleaned and repaired but not replaced. In the end, the kitchen looked as it probably had when it was installed back in the 1930s. And Bailey had to admit that the effect was marvelous.

  “Here they are,” Violet said as she put three scrapbooks on the coffee table in the living room, then sat down on a newly upholstered chair. In this room too Carol had done nothing but return it to its original state, and again it looked great, perfect for the style of the house.

  For an hour, as it grew dark outside, the three for them drank coffee and liqueurs and went through the scrapbooks. Violet said, “I haven’t seen these in years,” as each person picked up a scrapbook.

  There was nothing remarkable in the scrapbooks, just the usual high school clippings and photographs, but when Bailey thought about what had happened to the laughing kids in the pictures, the books were rather sad. For the most part, the pictures were from when Burgess was in school in Calburn, not in Wells Creek.

  At one point, Matt pointed to a photo and asked Violet, “Is this Bobbie?” and she’d said yes in a way that made Bailey ask who Bobbie was.

  “Burgess’s older brother,” Violet said quickly.

  “Died when he was a kid,” Matt said just as quickly, then he looked back at the scrapbook on his lap. And the way he said it made Bailey know she was going to get no more out of him, just as she’d not been able to get more out of him about what Alex had found out from Dolores. All Matt would tell her was that Dolores had said that, yes, Jimmie had had her mother sign the paper, and he’d given the paper to “the person he trusted most in the world.” Other than that, Bailey could get nothing out of Matt, not whether Alex had liked Dolores or not, whether they were going to continue to have contact with each other, nothing. The only thing that Matt would discuss with her was the fact that she had been legally married to James Manville, and now all they had to do was prove it.

  “And figure out how to run a billion-dollar empire,” Bailey had mumbled, but Matt had just smiled at her.

  “What are these?” Bailey asked as she opened a big envelope that had been at the back of one scrapbook. Inside was a thick stack of carefully cut-out newspaper clippings.

  Matt looked at Violet. “She hasn’t read the book,” he said.

  Bailey narrowed her eyes at him. “I’ve been a little bit busy trying to figure out a way to support myself and spending hours in the kitchen trying to fill your growing belly.”

  “And doing a damned fine job of both!” Matt said with enthusiasm.

  Violet chuckled and nodded toward the envelope full of clippings. “After the paper named the boys from Calburn the Golden Six, Harper jumped on the bandwagon and wrote a bunch of articles about the boys that glorified them. The articles were half truth and half—What?” Violet looked at Matt for help.

  “Comic book,” he said, staring down at the book on his lap, his eyes wide.

  Bailey doubted if Violet noticed it, but she could see that Matt had seen something that interested him a great deal.

  Abruptly, Matt gave a great yawn and looked at his watch. “You mind if we borrow these and read them later?”

  Bailey could see from the way Violet grinned that she probably thought Matt had suddenly had a sex attack. “Sure,” Violet said. “Take your time. Those things have been stored in a closet for years, so it’s not like I need ’em.”

  Fifteen minutes later Bailey and Matt were in her car and heading home, the scrapbooks on her lap. She asked the question she was dying to ask: “So what did you see?”

  “Burgess’s social security number. It was on a copy of an application for his first job.”

  “So?” Bailey asked.

  “I can feed it into the computer and see what comes up.”

  “But what good will that do? The man’s dead.”

  “I don’t know what to expect,” Matt said, “but it’s a lead. If that ex-husband of yours did erase the past, surely he missed something somewhere. Maybe he didn’t erase all there was to know about Frederick Burgess.”

  As soon as they got home, Matt ran upstairs to his computer, and Bailey checked her phone for messages. There was seventeen, all from Janice and Patsy about the business. By the time she got off the phone to the two of them, it was too late to read the scrapbooks. Besides, Matt had already showered and was waiting for her in bed.

  She took a shower and slipped into his arms, and quite a while later, as she was drifting off to sleep, she murmured, “Find anything?”

  “I put his social security number into a search service. They’ll get back to me with what they have within twenty-four hours. Probably nothing,” he said. “There was nothing on the Turnbull name.”

  “Mmmm,” was all Bailey said before she fell asleep.

  The next thing Bailey heard was a distant shout, then Matt threw open the
bedroom door.

  “Look at this,” he shouted, shoving a piece of paper in front of her face.

  Bailey was too sleep-dazed to focus. “What is it?”

  “This is—” Matt had to take a few breaths to calm himself. “The search came through on Burgess’s social security number, and it gives addresses for 1986, 1992, and 1997.”

  Bailey pushed herself up in bed. “That doesn’t make sense. The man died in—”

  “Nineteen-eighty-two. But his plane was so burned that they found nothing, not even teeth.”

  Bailey grimaced. “It’s a little early in the morning—” she began, then her eyes widened as she looked up at Matt. “Are you thinking that Burgess could still be alive?”

  Matt held out the paper to her, and she looked at it.

  “I’m confused. These are addresses for a man named Kyle Meredith.”

  “It’s him,” Matt said.

  “What makes you think that? I know Kyle was your father’s name, but—”

  “Burgess Meredith, the film star, remember?”

  “Yes,” Bailey said slowly as she looked down at the paper again. “The last address is Meadow Acres Rest Home in Sarasota, Florida. Oh, heavens! There’s a telephone number.”

  “Yes,” he said, “and I’ve already called, but they don’t answer calls until nine A.M.”

  “Okay,” Bailey said, catching Matt’s excitement. “We’ll just have to wait until nine. What time is it now?”

  Matt didn’t have to look at his watch. “It’s seven-twenty-two.”

  “Okay,” Bailey said, “we’ll just be calm and wait. I’ll make crepes. They take forever.”

  She made four batches of them, burning one batch because her eyes never left the clock. Matt sat at the dining table with a newspaper in front of his face, but from the way he kept glancing at the phone, Bailey didn’t think he was doing much reading.

  When the clock clicked onto nine, Matt grabbed the phone and pushed the redial button. The call was answered on the first ring. Matt had to clear his throat to be able to speak. “Is a Mr. Kyle Meredith still living at your rest home?”

  “Yes, he is,” the receptionist said. “Who’s calling, please?”

  But Matt didn’t answer. Instead, he hung up the phone and looked at her. “He’s there.”

  She took a breath. “You make the plane reservations while I pack, and call Patsy and ask if Alex can stay with them.”

  “Right,” he said, then they nearly fell over each other as they started running.

  As she and Matt took their seats on the plane, he handed her the book by T. L. Spangler. “I think it’s time for you to read this,” he said.

  Bailey opened to the title page and read that the author had written the book to fulfill her requirements to obtain a Ph.D. in psychology.

  It didn’t take Bailey long to see that Ms. Spangler believed that the boys planted the bomb in the school themselves, and that they had planned the whole rescue mission. Spangler shared her theory right away, then went into what interested her the most: the psychology of the boys.

  Bailey began to read.

  The class system in any society is interesting, but in small-town America, it is more so. What happens when the class system is removed? When the rich woman and the poor man are marooned on an island, what happens? If the woman has a skill, such as sewing, she may, perhaps, be able to keep her status. But what if the woman has no skill and the man marooned with her is a carpenter? What becomes of their status then?

  The loss of a class system is what happened in 1953, in Wells Creek, Virginia. Six boys, who had grown up in nearby Calburn, Virginia, were well established as to who and what they were by the time they reached their teens.

  Kyle Longacre was from the richest family in Calburn. To display his wealth, Kyle’s father had built a mansion on a hill that looked down on the small town. As a result of his father’s money, in school in Calburn, Kyle was the prince. People in the hallways parted when he walked by; everyone wanted to know him, be with him.

  Frederick Burgess was the captain of the football team, the boy who led his team to victory—on the rare times when the team was victorious, that is.

  Harper Kirkland was from old money, with his family able to trace their ancestors back to the first settlers in Virginia. It didn’t matter in Calburn that Harper’s grandfather had wasted what money the family had left on the horses, or that he’d sold the family’s run-down plantation to buy his mistress a town house. And it didn’t matter that the only thing the family still owned was a tiny local newspaper. In Calburn, the Kirkland name was treated with reverence because people knew what it meant.

  On the other hand, in Calburn, Frank McCallum, Rodney Yates, and Thaddeus Overlander walked through the halls unnoticed. Sure, Frank was known to be able to “talk anybody into anything,” and people could see that Rodney was beautiful, and the teachers all knew that Thaddeus was smart, but these traits were overlooked in Calburn because of the boys’ parental origins. Frank and Rodney were cousins and had grown up in poverty. Nice girls in Calburn didn’t look at Rodney because he was a “hillbilly,” and Frank was shunned for the same reason. And Thaddeus, well, “Taddy” had parents who were of a religious sect that never allowed their son to participate in any social function. Taddy was the quintessential “nerd.”

  When the six boys were sent to spend their senior year at a school outside Calburn, their pasts were both erased and magnified.

  No one in Wells Creek knew about Harper Kirkland’s family being the oldest in that part of Virginia. He got no perks for being who he was. In Wells Creek, there were kids who had parents much richer than Kyle’s contractor father. And Wells Creek had several boys who were better football players than Burgess.

  By the move to another high school, these three boys were demoted.

  But the other three boys were promoted. In the first week in the new school, in speech class, Frank was assigned to give a “persuasive speech.” In Calburn, had he given such a speech, the response would have been tepid, after all, the other kids knew “who” he was. But in Wells Creek, Frank, probably for the first time in his life, was judged not on “who” but on “what.” He gave a speech that was so persuasive that he was given a standing ovation.

  Rodney, as handsome as any matinee idol, was ignored in Calburn because of his origins, but in Wells Creek, the girls giggled and fluttered their lashes when he passed them.

  Thaddeus, largely ignored in Calburn, was adored by the math department in Wells Creek because of his ability to do long, complicated calculations in his head, and the school body, unaware of his social standing, began to call him “the Whiz.”

  Perhaps it was the shock of finding himself on the bottom for the first time in his life, or perhaps he just needed to prove himself, but whatever the reason, within the first weeks of entering Wells Creek, Kyle Longacre began to make his way upward in the new school. Perhaps he wanted to prove that he didn’t need his father’s money to be “the prince” of the school and that he could attain such an accolade on his own. Even though he knew only a few people at the school, Kyle Longacre ran for president of the class. He joined the yearbook staff and the debating team.

  Burgess, perhaps wanting to be the star of the team as he had been in his hometown, began to arrive early and stay late for football practice, and it was said that because of his extreme effort, his game improved dramatically.

  Harper joined the newspaper staff, and at the end of the first month, when the boy who had been the editor of the paper for three years fell down the stairs and broke both legs, Harper took over.

  By Christmas, all six of the boys had made themselves known in Wells Creek. Three of them were on their way to establishing themselves in as high a position as they had been in Calburn. And the other three were beginning to enjoy a status such as they’d never before had.

  Perhaps it was the success of these “outsiders” that made the Wells Creek students so angry, for they too had their class s
ystem. Frank McCallum was taking the place of a student who had been known for his excellent speeches since he was in the sixth grade. That boy’s father was the richest in Wells Creek.

  The handsomest boy in Wells Creek High School began to hate Rodney Yates when the girls whispered among themselves that “Roddy” was a great deal better looking than he was.

  Jealousy. One of the most powerful emotions there is began to rear its ugly head in the small town of Wells Creek. And to combat that jealousy, the students of Wells Creek tried to get the status back in line. They decided to investigate these intruders and use what secrets they could find to return the social structure to what it had been.

  In small towns, everyone knows everything about everyone else, but, by unwritten law, it is often decided not to tell all. For example, sometimes everyone in a town will know that a child’s father is in prison, but the town will choose not to state this fact out loud in an attempt to protect the child.

  And while Wells Creek had its own code of protection, it had no such code of ethics to protect the outsiders from Calburn. Some industrious students went to Calburn, got the locals talking, and found out the “secrets” of the six boys from Calburn. They then told these secrets around Wells Creek High School.

  It was told at Wells Creek how Frank and Rodney had been raised in unimaginable poverty, and the name “hillbilly” was once again attached to them. In Calburn, it was an open secret that Kyle Longacre hated his overbearing father, who loved to flaunt his wealth. In Calburn people put up with Stanley Longacre’s bragging and generally obnoxious personality because they wanted to buy the houses he built. But when stories of Kyle’s father were told in Wells Creek, the students began to laugh at Kyle behind his back. The possibility of his becoming class president was abandoned.

  And although no one knew for sure, it was believed that Thaddeus Overlander wore long sleeves year-round to hide the bruises that his fundamentalist father gave him. Whispers went round the school about the odd religious services that Taddy attended.