The Mulberry Tree

by Jude Deveraux

  “I’m sorry,” Bailey said, looking up at him, but he had turned his face away so she couldn’t see his expression.

  “It was a long time ago. So what about your parents?”

  She turned back toward the path. “My father died when I was fourteen, and my mother died last year, but I have a sister.”

  “In Kentucky?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said, and her curt reply told him that he wasn’t to ask any more questions.

  Matt didn’t let her tone bother him. “So if you didn’t grow up on a farm, where did you learn so much about plants, especially food plants?”

  Turning back to look at him, she opened her mouth to speak, then gave a great sigh. “Does everyone in this town ask such personal questions?”

  “Oh, yes,” Matt said cheerfully. “Everyone knows everyone else’s business. There isn’t a child in this town who doesn’t know everything there is to know about me.”

  Bailey laughed. “You mean about the bimbo you married?” she asked.

  “That’s Patsy’s version. She met Cassandra once and was snubbed. Patsy’s revenge has been to tell people that I married a brainless beauty.”

  “And was she?”

  Matt gave her a one-sided smile. “She lost me, didn’t she? She couldn’t have been too smart.”

  Bailey cocked her head to one side. “And a personal question not answered,” she said.

  “Touché,” he said, smiling. “Now, how about that peach cobbler? I’ve worked up an appetite.”

  “You’d better watch it, or you’ll get fat,” she said.

  “And what would you know about being fat?” he asked, and there was a hint of suggestion in his voice.

  “Nothing.” Her blue eyes were dancing with laughter. “I wouldn’t know anything at all about diets, or the endless frustration of hours of exercise with no food but still no weight loss. Nope. I don’t know a thing about being fat.”

  Laughing, she went back to the house, and Matt followed her. Minutes later, he was seated at the table in the living room and having his first bite of the peach cobbler. “What—” he asked, unable to complete his sentence.

  “Oh? You mean, why does it taste different from other peach cobblers you’ve had?”

  Matt could only nod.

  “Cherries and vanilla. Add a little of each, and it brings out the flavor of the peaches. And I put crushed almonds in the crust.”

  Matt told himself that he would not, could not, burst into tears. He pointed at his plate with his fork. “Where? How?” he managed to say.

  Bailey looked down at her hands, clasped on the table. She was eating nothing, just finishing her glass of wine, and she looked as though she was considering how much and what to tell him. “My husband had a cook and a gardener, and I spent a lot of time with them,” she said after a while. “I learned from them.”

  Matt sensed that she was telling about one percent of the truth, but that was better than no truth at all.

  It was when he was halfway through the cobbler that the Idea came to him. An Idea with a capital letter. Bailey was sitting silently, looking toward her right at the big, blank brown wall on the far side of the living room, and he almost slipped up and told her that there was a stone fireplace hidden behind it.

  “So what do you think of this house?” he asked.

  He watched her give a sigh of relief that he hadn’t asked another question about her past.

  “Awful,” she said. “When I was told that Jimmie had left me a farmhouse, I imagined something cute, something with a fireplace and a porch. A big, deep porch with rocking chairs on it. Instead, I get this thing with twenty bedrooms and those bathrooms. Have you ever seen anything like them in your life?”

  His plate clean, Matt wiped his mouth, drained the last of his wine, then stood up. “I have to get some tools from my truck, then I want to show you something. All right?”

  “Sure,” she said, a puzzled look on her face.

  As Matt left the house and walked to the road, he told himself to take this easy and cautiously. He knew that he’d have one chance, and if he messed it up, he’d blow it forever. As he opened the toolbox in the back of his truck and took out a crowbar, he closed his eyes for a moment and thought of Patsy’s meat loaf and this woman’s pigeon and peach cobbler. With cherries in it. And almonds in the crust. With an expression of absolute seriousness, as though he faced the most important moment of his life, he strapped on his tool belt, gripped his crowbar, and strode back to the house.

  Inside, he saw that she’d removed his plate from the table. For a moment he stood in the kitchen doorway, watching as she put a big pot of jam in the refrigerator. “Ready?” he asked, and she followed him to the front door.

  “When I was in school studying to become an architect, for a project, I took measurements of this old house, drew it as it was, then remodeled it on paper. The assignment was to keep the same footprint, but to change the interior.” Kneeling on the floor, Matt ran his hand along the bottom of the paneling. The only light in the dark room was from the open doorway. “It was Christmas, and I wanted to give Rick and Patsy time alone, so I spent a lot of time over here. And as I measured and began to really look at this house, I began to want to see what it had originally looked like. I could see that this paneling”—he said the word with a sneer—“had been added long after the house was built, so I began to inspect it. I pulled boards off the walls, looked under them, then nailed them back in place. Ah, here it is,” he said as he found a handhold under the dark wood, then inserted his crowbar in the opening. “Do you mind?” he asked before he pulled.

  “You can do whatever you want to that stuff,” she said with great sincerity, then jumped when one side of the paneling came away with a loud sound of nails being dragged through wood. Within seconds, the whole sheet was off, and Matt set it to one side.

  He turned to her with a smile of triumph, but all Bailey could see was the backside of the paneling in the next bedroom.

  “You don’t see it,” he said, sounding disappointed.

  “Sorry,” she replied.

  “See that?” He pointed to what looked like some sort of post against the outside wall.

  “Yes,” she said slowly.

  Matt lifted his foot, gave a kick to the back of the thin paneling in front of them, and sent it crashing to the floor of the empty bedroom. Then he turned to her as though to ask, Now do you see?

  “Two rooms made into one,” Bailey said. “Nice.”

  Matt put his hand on the big upright piece of wood he’d pointed out before. “Do you see what this is?”

  “A post of some sort, I guess.”

  “Right.” He was smiling at her. “Now, what kind of structures have posts?”

  “Mailboxes?”

  Matt laughed. “Think bigger. Something with rocking chairs.”

  “Oh,” Bailey said, then louder, “Oh. A porch?”

  “Yes.”

  “You mean—”

  “That’s right. This whole area is a porch. It goes around about a quarter of the house in an L shape. Somebody—some do-it-yourselfer, obviously—closed in the porch and made it into an entryway, two bedrooms, and a bathroom.”

  “A very ugly bathroom,” Bailey said.

  “If you take out these walls, lose the bedrooms and the bath, you have your porch back.”

  Matt was pleased to see that she looked too stunned to make any comment. Turning away to hide his smile, he walked back into the living room, and this time it was her turn to follow him like a trained dog.

  Part of the longest wall in the living room jutted out about three feet. “Stand back and cover your eyes—this may be messy,” he said. He hooked his crowbar under the sheet of paneling, but then he halted. “I better not do this. Dust’ll get all over your furniture.”

  “I have a vacuum,” she said quickly as she stepped back and closed her eyes, but opened them when she heard crashing. Matt had caught the sheet of paneling before it fell on her
furniture, but with it came a cloud of dust. When the dust settled, she saw stones.

  “It’s a fireplace?” she asked quietly as he leaned the paneling against the wall.

  “That’s right. It’s a fireplace. Made from native stone.” He stuck his head inside and looked up the chimney. “I don’t think it would take much to get it in working order.”

  “And you could do that? You could pull all this off and make the fireplace work? And the porch? You could bring the porch back to life?”

  She made him sound like a doctor who’d found a way to resurrect the dead. “Sure,” he said, trying to sound as though it were the easiest thing in the world. He wasn’t about to talk to her about structural damage or rotten overhead beams. Nor was he going to mention termites or dry rot. And right now he thought it was best not to tell her about the buzzing he was hearing inside the chimney.

  Trying not to seem as though he were frantic, he picked up the piece of paneling and held it against the studs that had been put in front of the fireplace, then, as fast as he could, nailed the sheet of paneling back into place. Under his hands, he could feel angry bees, or wasps, protesting the disturbance of their nest.

  “The kitchen,” he said loudly, pointing and moving both of them away from the fireplace. “I always thought that this wall should be torn out to make the kitchen and the living room into one big room. You could put an island here. You like marble or granite countertops?”

  “Marble?” she whispered. “Granite?”

  Again, Matt had to turn away to hide his smile, then he led her through to the bedrooms and told her how he could get plumbing fixtures wholesale.

  “You do plumbing too?” she asked in wonder.

  “No, but a high school buddy of mine is a plumber, so I’ll have him do it all.” He liked the furniture she’d put in her bedroom. It had a homey feel that appealed to him. Patsy liked furniture that was shiny enough to use as a mirror, and his ex-wife had liked antiques, the kind that cost so much you were afraid to use them.

  He managed to keep talking when he went through the other two bedrooms and the bath. She didn’t seem to notice that he took a bit longer in those rooms, or that he kept looking at how the bathroom wall was shared with one of the bedrooms. Yes, he could put a door through the wall and make a private entrance into the bathroom. At Patsy’s house, he shared a bathroom with her two sons—and they were slobs. Every morning Matt risked bodily injury as he stepped over wet towels and underwear that the boys left on the floor. Patsy said it wasn’t her bathroom, that she never went into it, so she refused to clean it. For the last six months, Matt had spent every Saturday morning scrubbing it down.

  “What?” he asked Bailey, still looking at the bathroom with longing. It was ugly, but it didn’t contain two teenage boys.

  “What about the attic?” she was saying.

  “Ah, yes,” he said, then led the way up the stairs. On the third tread, he shifted his weight. He didn’t like that; the stair didn’t feel sturdy. “Needs work,” he said over his shoulder.

  At the head of the stairs, he paused and had to take a deep breath before he could walk forward. He used to tell his little brother that the attic in the old house was haunted. The truth was that he wanted to keep the upstairs as his private place; the attic of the old Hanley house had been Matt’s sanctuary when he was a boy. It had been a place where he could escape when his real life became too much for him.

  “Are you okay?” Bailey asked, looking at him hard.

  “Sure,” he said briskly. “I was just trying to remember what I found out about this attic when I was here. I think that the floor on the other side of that railing has been put in recently. Beyond the railing, I think it used to be open to the room below, but somebody covered the opening, cut a hole in the railing and made a room. Probably—”

  “No!” Bailey shouted, making Matt halt. “Don’t walk on that floor.”

  When he looked at her, he could see that she was embarrassed.

  “I’m sorry, you’re going to think I’m crazy, but it’s just a feeling I have about it. I wouldn’t let any of the cleaning people near it. I know it’s silly of me, but . . . ” She trailed off with a shrug of her shoulders.

  “Let’s have a look at it,” Matt said, then bent and began to pry up the plywood sheets. After he’d removed three of them, he stepped back. “Good instincts,” he said, his voice full of admiration. “Whoever put this floor in didn’t know diddly-squat about construction. They might as well have used Legos.”

  Stepping closer to him, Bailey peered down into the cavity that he’d exposed and saw floor joists that were barely touching each other, unable to hold any weight.

  “If anyone had walked on that, he”—he looked down at her—“or she would have fallen through to the floor below.” His voice lowered. “Do you always have premonitions like this one?”

  “Not often,” she said. “But sometimes I . . . You’ll think I’m silly.”

  “Not likely.”

  “Sometimes I seem to know when things are right or not. It’s not like I know the future, but I know when something is what I should do. Maybe it’s what you said, ‘an instinct.’ ”

  “Whatever it is, it’s a good one.” It was growing dark outside, and there were no lights in the attic.

  Bailey started down the stairs, Matt behind her, but at the top of the stairs, he paused and looked at the room. He could almost see his computer and desk set against the wall. And over there, under the windows, would be his drafting table. If he built a little platform, he could raise his table so he could see out the windows; then he’d be able to see into that garden where she was growing all that food that she put into jars and onto plates. He could—

  “Did you see something else wrong?” Bailey called up to him from the bottom of the stairs.

  “No,” he answered, then turned and went down the stairs.

  When they were once again in the living room, she didn’t ask him to sit down, didn’t offer him anything else to eat or drink, and didn’t sit down herself. It was obvious that she was ready for him to leave. After all, it was a little past nine o’clock now, and she probably had things she needed to do.

  But then, so did Matt. He didn’t leave. Instead, he stood there and waited for her answer.

  “All right,” she said as she moved toward the front door. “I’m ready to hire you. Could you give me a bid? I need to see what I can afford to do. I think I’m going to have a lot of other expenses, and—” Glancing toward the kitchen, she gave a little shrug.

  Now’s your chance, Longacre, he said to himself. It’s now or never. “I have a proposition for you.”

  Immediately she took a step back, and he regretted his choice of words.

  “Business,” he said quickly, but she didn’t relax the set of her shoulders. “Look,” he said, “could we sit down and talk about this?”

  He moved toward the couch, but she stood where she was, looking at him cautiously. He sat down, took a deep breath, then looked back up at her. “I need a place to stay, and you have extra bedrooms, so I thought maybe I could rent a room from you. I’d do the remodeling of this house on weekends and charge you only for materials.”

  “I see,” she said, but she avoided his eyes. Slowly she walked around the couch and sat on a chair, as far as she could get from him without leaving the room. “So why do you want to move in here with me? Surely there must be other people in Calburn who have empty bedrooms.”

  “Lots of them, but—” He gave her a crooked smile. “They can’t cook, and they have a houseful of kids to drive me crazy, and . . . Please don’t take offense at this, but there’s something I like about you, something peaceful and calm. You don’t look like the type of woman who gets hysterical easily.”

  “No,” Bailey said slowly. “I can guarantee you that it takes a lot to make me hysterical.” She looked down at her hands for a moment. “Sooooo, what, uh, space would you take if you moved in here?”

  “I’d t
ake the larger bedroom in the back, the one nearest that green bathroom,” he said quickly, “and I’d need to use part of the attic room for an office. I do book work on weekends.”

  “You’d do book work in addition to freeing my porch?”

  “Right. Porch and fireplace. And the kitchen. Kitchen, most definitely.”

  “So what about food?” she asked.

  “I think you should cook.”

  “No, I mean, who pays for the food? You eat a lot. And what if you have guests? Who pays for the extra?”

  “I have an account at the local grocery in Calburn, so if you buy there, I’ll pay the bill. Is that fair?”

  “What if the food comes from my garden or roadside stands? And there’s the Cost Club.”

  Matt blinked at her. When he’d had this idea, his concern had been that she’d be afraid that he’d try to pounce on her in the middle of the night. “What do you have in mind that I should pay you for room and board?”

  “I’d say . . . six hundred a month, plus the price of groceries.”

  “What?!” he said. “That’s outrageous!” He started to get up, all the while looking at her out of the corner of his eye, but she didn’t flinch, just sat there in utter calmness.

  “If you got a motel room,” she said, “you’d pay more than that, and that’s without food, plus you’d have to cook for yourself. That means that if you moved in here, you’d be getting the services of a cook for free, and my cooking should balance out your carpentry, especially if you also do paperwork on the weekends. Actually, six hundred is too cheap,” she said thoughtfully.

  “I think you’re confusing Calburn with some big city. Prices are much cheaper here.”

  Bailey leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms over her chest. “Take it or leave it.”

  “I’ll take it, but I don’t like it,” Matt said, frowning.

  “Well, then, I guess that’s that. Should we sign something?”

  “I think that shaking hands will be enough,” he said, still standing and smiling down at her. “Unless you intend to charge me for that.”