The Mulberry Tree

by Jude Deveraux

  “Make a battle plan,” Bailey said out loud. “And figure out who my soldiers are.”

  Smiling, she went into the house. She had to prepare dinner for Matt.

  Thirteen

  It was Patsy who gave Bailey the idea.

  It was two days after she’d seen Arleen in the restaurant in Welborn, and Bailey had been going crazy trying to figure out what she wanted to do with her life.

  Absently, she had cooked meals for Matt, and when he showed her his latest house plan, she barely looked at it. “A penny . . . ,” Matt said, but Bailey didn’t respond. Her mind was fully occupied with the questions of what and how and who.

  Finally, it was what Patsy said that made the bells in her head start ringing. It was Patsy’s turn to have them over to her house, and Bailey had shown up with a carload of food. She’d reached the point that she couldn’t bear one more of Patsy’s tasteless dips-and-chips.

  “My problem with food,” Patsy said, “is that I don’t know what to serve before or after.”

  Bailey’s mind was elsewhere. She’d been reading all that she could find about marketing what the industry called “specialty items,” and it seemed that every avenue of the market was filled. There were gourmet jams everywhere, plus every conceivable sauce, mixed spice, and pickle; and as far as Bailey could tell, every country on Earth had a couple of lines of their products out. All she could see to do was repeat what others had already done. But what she really needed was a hole that could be filled.

  “Before?” Bailey asked absently.

  “You know, before the meal. What do you serve before the meal?”

  “Hors d’oeuvres,” Bailey said, not understanding what Patsy meant.

  “I know that,” Patsy said in disgust. “I know what the name of the food is, but I don’t know what to serve.”

  “You can—” Bailey began, but Patsy cut her off.

  “I know that I can make little puff pastry shells and fill them with some divine lobster concoction,” Patsy said, her voice heavy with sarcasm. “I’m not stupid. I watch those TV cooks just like everyone else does, but I don’t want to do that. Nobody seems to understand that there are people out here who really and truly hate to cook. We just want to get in and out of the kitchen as fast as possible. But we’re all supposed to pretend to want to be Martha Stewart.”

  Bailey was having such a difficult time understanding what Patsy meant that she was coming out of her reverie to listen. “Pretend to be Martha Stewart?” Bailey asked. “What do you mean?”

  “All those cooks on TV tell us that it’s easy to make fabulous meals. All we have to do is add a little of this and a little of that, and bam! we have a great meal. What they don’t tell us is that we have to, first of all, think of what we’re going to end up with, then we have to go to the grocery and buy all that stuff, then we have to create it. I don’t have a brain that works like that. And I don’t have the time to do all that! I buy a chicken, throw it in the oven, boil some vegetables and pour a canned sauce over them, and I can add water to some instant mashed potatoes, and eventually I can come up with a passable meal. When company comes, I want to do more, but I don’t know what to do for befores and afters. You know, hors d’oeuvres and dessert other than ice cream.”

  Bailey stood there blinking at her. “ ‘Befores and afters,’ ” she said softly, and her mind seemed to go round and round. Pickled mushrooms on a platter. Chopped olives served on rounds of toasted bread. A packaged pound cake with brandied cherries poured over it.

  “Befores and afters,” she said again, then she smiled. Then she smiled more broadly. Then she threw her arms around Patsy and hugged her.

  “What’s going on?” Scott called from across the yard. “Can anyone get in on this?”

  “Girl stuff,” Patsy yelled in his direction, then she lowered her voice. “You wanta tell me what’s in your head?”

  “Top secret,” Bailey said. “You have just given me the idea for my new business. Are you in or out?”

  “In,” Patsy said instantly.

  “Then don’t say a word to anyone, especially to anyone male,” Bailey said quickly as she saw Matt approaching.

  Ten minutes later, Janice said quietly to Bailey, “What are you up to?”

  “I’m going to start a business, and I’m going to do it in secrecy. I’m not letting any man know what I’m doing for fear that he’ll somehow, some way, talk me out of it. Are you in, or do you want to search your husband’s tax records back ten years?”

  For a moment Bailey thought she’d gone too far and that Janice just might throw her drink in her face. But when Janice spoke, her voice was so low that Bailey could barely hear her.

  “I found a bank account,” Janice said, her eyes on her husband, who was laughing at something Rick had said. “He doesn’t know that I found it, and he doesn’t know that I know what it’s for—or should I say, who it’s for? But I’ve diverted the interest, and I’m going to start diverting the principal. By the time he finds out about it, I’ll have enough to leave.”

  Bailey caught her breath. She knew that she didn’t like Janice’s husband, and she’d often thought how she wouldn’t like her mother-in-law supervising her children, as was the case in Janice’s life, but Bailey had never seen anything that made her think that Janice wanted out. “I can’t guarantee we’ll make a profit,” Bailey said. “We might lose our shirts.”

  “His shirt,” Janice said. “We might lose his shirt.” She then turned and walked away, but Bailey thought that Janice’s shoulders were straighter and her head a bit higher.

  By the next day, Bailey had figured out that the first order of business was to try to get Janice and Patsy to work with each other. First, she tried being sensible. “We can’t open a business together if two of the partners don’t speak to each other,” she said after they’d ordered lunch. Both women looked at her with faces of stone. It was obvious that they had no intention of budging on this issue.

  Bailey thought about playing therapist and asking what the root of their not talking was, then trying to fix it. But that thought lasted about thirty seconds. She didn’t have time to start two careers.

  That night Bailey served Matt grilled shrimp and steamed vegetables for dinner. It was a quick meal; she hadn’t had time to cook something more elaborate. “When Patsy is going somewhere, and she wants Janice to go with her, how does she ask her?”

  “Letters,” Matt said as he bit into a shrimp.

  “Letters?” Bailey asked, sounding as though she’d never heard of one.

  “They don’t speak, but they write to each other. Of course they don’t address the letters to each other, but Patsy uses green stationery and Janice uses blue, so everyone knows who the letter is to. In fact, the whole thing started because of—”

  Bailey held up her hand to stop him. “Don’t tell me why they don’t speak. I just need to know how to get them to communicate with one another now.”

  “Oh?” Matt said. “Speaking of which, what were you three discussing so seriously yesterday?”

  “Food,” Bailey said quickly.

  “Patsy was talking about food,” he said flatly, then watched as Bailey turned her face away so he wouldn’t see how red it got.

  “Yes, we were,” she said, her back to him.

  “I see.”

  Bailey turned back to him. “Letters are too slow. Do you think they’d do e-mail? How about a fax machine?”

  Matt was looking at her hard. “What are you up to?”

  It was on the tip of her tongue to tell him that it wasn’t any of his business, but instead she smiled. “We’re planning a surprise birthday party for Rick,” she said. “And Patsy wants me to make a truly fabulous dinner for him. I think she’s planning to invite about a hundred people.” For a moment she stood there blinking at him, her breath held. Would he swallow this? And when exactly was Rick’s birthday?

  Matt grunted as he picked up another shrimp. “You’d better get a wiggle on then, bec
ause his birthday is in just three weeks. Let me know if I can do anything to help.”

  Bailey didn’t say anything but went outside to cool off. She’d never been good at lying, and she was terrible at doing things in secret. “What you’re thinking is written all over your face,” Jimmie had said to her more than once. But now, she smiled. She had just told a whopper of a lie, the sky hadn’t fallen on top of her and, what’s more, it seemed that Matt had believed her. She looked up at the mulberry tree and grinned. She had just taken her first step on the road to becoming a devious, underhanded sneak—and by golly, it felt good!

  Although Bailey got past Matt without too many problems, she almost destroyed their fledgling company before it began when she offended Janice. It was their first private meeting, held in Patsy’s sewing room. “No man will bother us in here,” Patsy said. “Not after what I did to Rick.”

  “Okay,” Bailey said, “I’ll bite. What did you do to your husband?”

  “Embroidered pink bunnies on all his underwear. He didn’t know it until he was in the station changing his clothes, and a couple of the guys saw him. I think they ribbed him pretty hard.”

  “Was he angry?” Bailey asked.

  “Oh, yeah, but I cried and told him that I’d made a mistake because I had too many interruptions while I was sewing. I couldn’t concentrate. Then I showed him the new pattern I had accidently put on one of his expensive new shirts.” Patsy held up a man’s denim shirt. Across the pocket was embroidered a mother duck with four little ducklings behind her. Patsy put the shirt down. “No matter what they hear coming from this room, and no matter how much time we spend in here, neither my sons nor my husband will bother us.”

  Bailey looked at Patsy in admiration. Her methods were cruel to the point of inhumanity, but they worked.

  But it was Bailey who caused the problem. They were trying to come up with a name for their company.

  “It needs to be a ‘thing,’ ” Patsy said. “It has to be something concrete so we can make a logo of it.”

  “Mother Duck isn’t a good name,” Janice said, her eyes on Bailey as though they were the only two people in the room.

  “I was thinking of Rainbow Preserves, something like that,” Patsy said stiffly.

  Bailey wanted to groan. How were they going to do anything together when these two didn’t speak? And now they were sniping at each other like first-graders. She wanted to relieve the tension that was growing in the room. “Why don’t we name it The Golden Six? With that name, we’d sell everything we made right here in Calburn,” she said, smiling.

  To Bailey’s consternation, the women looked at her with expressions of intense dislike. Patsy’s lip was curled upward, and Janice’s eyes were cold and hard.

  “What did I say?” Bailey whispered.

  “Why don’t you just call it The Thirtieth of August and be done with it?” Janice snapped as she got up and left the room.

  The venom in Janice’s voice left Bailey breathless. But worse was what Janice had said. Jimmie’s birthday was August 30. Had the women somehow found out who Bailey was?

  No, Bailey thought, that couldn’t possibly be it. Surely the date was a coincidence. But what had made Janice so angry? She looked at Patsy, who had her head down and was studiously looking at the notebook on her lap. “What did I say?”

  When Patsy looked up at Bailey, her eyes were as cold as Janice’s had been. “I understand that you’re an outsider, but those six boys mean a lot to the people of this town, so I’d advise you not to make fun of them. And I’d especially advise you not to make any remarks against them to Matt.”

  “To Matt?” Bailey asked. “Why?”

  Patsy looked at her as though she were daft. “Matt and Rick’s father was one of the Golden Six.”

  For a moment all Bailey could do was blink at Patsy as she tried to remember what she’d said about those boys to Matt. He’d never so much as hinted that he was connected to them. “And what about Janice?” Bailey asked, and her tone didn’t allow for Patsy to play games about pretending not to know who Janice was.

  “Father,” Patsy mumbled, bending her head again. “One of them.”

  An hour later, Bailey got into her car and put her head down on the steering wheel. The meeting had been a bust. This morning she’d awakened full of enthusiasm. She was going to start a fabulous business with two women who had become her friends and she was going to do it all in secret—secret, that is, from the men they were living with.

  But now she felt as though her legs had been cut off. Her two “partners” refused to speak to each other, and their “business” meeting had turned into one of those girl things in which everyone walks away in silent anger.

  “Women can never play the game,” Jimmie used to say, as usual making no attempt to hide his male chauvinism. “You women get your feelings hurt, then you back out.”

  Bailey leaned back against the seat and closed her eyes. Part of her wanted to give up right now. Part of her said she should go to the nearest lingerie store and buy something sexy, then parade around in it in front of Matt. She had an idea that he was the kind of man who would propose marriage the morning after. Have a couple of kids, she thought. Make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Drive the kids to soccer practice and ballet lessons.

  But even as she was thinking this, she put the key in the ignition and turned it. Okay, so the term outsider had hurt. Yes, she was an outsider. She was also obviously enough of an insider that her smart remarks about the town’s history could hurt people.

  At home she had three loaves of bread rising. She should go back, punch them down, and put them back in the proofing oven for the second rise. But she didn’t. Instead she turned onto the highway, drove to Ridgeway, and parked in front of the library.

  When Bailey handed her request slip to the girl behind the periodicals desk, the girl didn’t blink. She’s not from Calburn, Bailey thought, or she would have commented on the date. Minutes later, Bailey had the microfilm on the machine, and she was looking at the Ridgeway Gazette for August 31, 1968. She had to find out what Janice meant by her angry reference to that date.

  “Tragedy in Calburn,” the headline read.

  What followed was the story of the murder-suicide of Frank McCallum and his young wife, Vonda. “Of the Golden Six, Frank was the talker,” the article said.

  He was the one with the voice, the one who could talk anyone into anything, and for years it seemed that everything he touched was indeed “golden.” He left Calburn right after he graduated from high school, but he returned a few years later, a widower with a young son to raise alone. With his talent for talking and selling, he easily got a job at the local used car dealership. Within a year, he was made manager, and a year after that, he was selling more cars than any other dealer in the state.

  But then Frank’s luck seemed to change. Some said it happened when he used his voice to seduce a high school girl named Vonda Oleksy. The people at the Calburn Baptist Church were angry about what Frank had done, and many of them said that the Golden Six got away with too much. So Frank McCallum married Vonda, a girl half his age.

  Not long after the marriage, Frank went to work drunk. No one knows exactly what happened or how it happened, but a car was left in gear, and, somehow, it slammed into Frank, pinning him against a concrete wall. For weeks afterward, he was in the hospital, and when he got out, he was a shell of the man he once was. He lost the use of his left arm, but, worse, he seemed to have lost his luck. Within a year of the accident, Frank was fired from his job at the car dealership. Broke, jobless, an alcoholic, Frank took his young wife and moved back into his childhood home, a mountain cabin without plumbing or electricity. We can only imagine the despair that he must have felt at the way his life had turned out.

  But who of us can forget the glorious deeds of the Golden Six? Years ago, back in 1953, six boys had been sent away from their beloved hometown to attend another high school. They’d had to endure cruelty such as only the surviv
ors of high school can understand. They were bullied, harassed, ridiculed. Yet did these boys retaliate in kind? No. Instead, when there was danger and there was need for heroism, the Calburn boys were there. No one in this half of the state hasn’t heard of how the Golden Six saved the entire school when it was under threat.

  But that was then and this is now. Somehow, Frank McCallum went from the top to the bottom. He fell from being a hero to living a life of desperate poverty and drunkenness, and finally, he fell to murder and suicide. We don’t know the exact circumstances that drove him to these deeds; we only know the facts.

  On the thirtieth of August, 1968, Frank McCallum shot his young wife, then turned the gun on himself. The coroner ruled it a murder-suicide.

  The funeral will be held at Davis Funeral Home in Calburn on the second of September and, I am sure, the names of the pallbearers are familiar to us all.

  Below was a list of names: Rodney Yates, Thaddeus Overlander, Frederick Burgess, and Harper Kirkland. And, at the last, was the name Kyle Longacre. Matt’s father.

  Bailey turned the wheel of the microfilm machine to the second of September. There was nothing in the headline of the front page on that day, but on page 6 it said, “All of Calburn in Mourning.”

  “Three days ago the bodies of Frank McCallum and his young wife were found in a pool of blood, both of them with their faces blown off.”

  With a grimace, Bailey skipped the next two sentences. Whereas the first article had been written in a sad, elegiac tone, this one seemed to be inspired by a love of lurid detail. She checked the bylines; yes, the articles were written by two different people. She read on.

  But what no one knew three days ago was that other tragedies happened in Calburn on that fateful night. Gus Venters, a prominent and much-loved citizen of Calburn, hanged himself. His grieving widow told the sheriff that she had no idea why her beloved husband wanted to die. She said he had everything to live for. He had a farm and a business and two beautiful stepchildren who loved him very much. “I don’t understand it,” Mrs. Venters told this reporter.