The Mulberry Tree

by Jude Deveraux

  “How do we prove that Atlanta and Ray murdered Jimmie?” Bailey said.

  “Actually, I have proof,” Martha said, then smiled at Bailey’s and Matt’s identical looks of astonishment. “I’ve had months, and thanks to Luke, I’ve had unlimited funds, so while the rest of the world was crucifying you, dear, I hired investigators.”

  “To find out what?” Matt said sharply.

  “Who was near that plane for forty-eight hours before Luke took off in it. And I had some men—actually, about a dozen of them—go up into the mountains, find the wreckage of Luke’s plane, and bring every piece of it down.”

  “I thought the police did that. Jimmie’s body—” Bailey began.

  “The police searched the wreckage, but only superficially. They weren’t looking for evidence of foul play because two young men at the little airport where Luke kept his plane said they’d begged Luke not to fly the plane. They said they’d told him that there was something wrong with it.”

  “No,” Bailey said. “I could believe that Jimmie slammed a plane into a mountainside in one great flash of drama; he’d be in control then. But he’d never go up in a plane that was malfunctioning and let a piece of machinery have control over whether he lived or died.”

  “That’s just what I thought,” Martha said, smiling, her eyes twinkling. “I was sure Atlanta and Ray paid those two young men, so while everyone else in the world was looking at you, I was quietly having my own investigation conducted.”

  “And you found out that the plane had been sabotaged.”

  “Yes,” Martha said. “It was quite simple, really. The fuel gauge had been tampered with, so Luke ran out of gas in midair.”

  For a moment they were quiet, then Matt said, “If you found a broken gauge, couldn’t it have broken in the fall?”

  “Yes,” Martha said, “but we didn’t find a gas gauge, broken or not.”

  “Then how —” Bailey began, then her eyes widened. “He had a black box on board.”

  “Yes,” Martha said, smiling.

  Bailey turned to Matt. “I forgot all about this. Jimmie and I were watching the news one night when a jet had gone down. The reporter kept talking about the black box that recorded the words of the pilots. I remember that Jimmie said, ‘I ought to get one of those so I can’—” Bailey stopped talking.

  “So he could tell you that he loved you before he went down,” Martha said softly, and Bailey nodded. “Yes, that’s what he wrote me that he’d told you. He had a system put in his plane, and he did it in secret, as he did so many things.”

  “And your men found the box,” Matt said, “because they knew to look for it.”

  “Yes,” Martha answered. “Jimmie spent his last moments trying to get the plane down safely, and while he was struggling, he was talking so the recorder would pick up his words. He told what was wrong with the plane, who he’d seen at the airport, and how to prove that Eva and Ralph—that’s what he called them—had murdered him.”

  “But you didn’t turn this information over to the police,” Matt said.

  “No,” Martha said. “I didn’t because Luke asked me to make his murder known only if his beloved Lillian was in danger. ‘She’ll find you,’ he said just before he went down. ‘And when she does, tell her that I love her.’ Those were his last words.”

  For a moment, Bailey looked away. When she looked back at Martha, she said, “I want to hear the story. I want to know the truth. I want to know about a ‘murder called suicide.’ ”

  Thirty

  “I don’t know when the bad started, whether it was with Vonda, the Turnbull woman, or when Frank lost the use of his arm,” Martha said as she poured them tea from the silver pot. She’d picked up her phone and ordered a “breakfast tea,” and ten minutes later a feast had appeared. It had been wheeled in on a table that could hardly hold it all. There were tiny sausages wrapped in flaky pastry, three kinds of eggs, broiled tomatoes, and enough scones and muffins to start a bakery.

  Matt and Bailey spent about thirty seconds trying to be polite, before starvation won out and they nearly leapt on the food.

  “The Turnbull woman owned my farm,” Bailey said, her mouth full. “The canner’s wife.”

  “Yes,” Martha said, watching the two of them eat but politely refraining from asking how long it had been since they’d had a meal. “Hilda was a secretive woman and rarely told anyone much, but word around town was that when she was quite young, she’d married a very rich, very old man. From what I heard, people figured she hoped he’d die right away so she could have his money.”

  “Wait a minute,” Matt said. “You keep saying ‘You heard.’ Where were you?”

  “And where was Jimmie?” Bailey asked.

  Martha took a breath. “Luke and I stayed alone together up in the mountains. When Luke was little, Frank took him into town a few times, but people stared at the baby so much that Frank left him with me. He came to see us on weekends.”

  “Why didn’t you have Jimmie’s face repaired?” Bailey asked.

  Martha took a while before she answered. “I’m afraid to tell you because you’ll hate my son—and me.”

  Bailey shook her head. “Maybe I will, but I have so many other people to hate that you and Frank will be far down on my list.”

  Both Martha and Matt laughed.

  “I’ve had many years to think about the reason all of it happened, but I think it boils down to love. I don’t know how to explain, but”—Martha’s eyes bored into Bailey’s—“maybe I don’t need to explain it to you. Luke loved really hard. If you were ever on the receiving end of Luke’s love, you must know what I mean. Luke’s love was what kept Frank and me going. Does that make sense?”

  “Oh, yes,” Bailey said. “It was a smothering love, but you couldn’t leave it either.”

  “Right,” Martha said. “And I was at fault too.” For a moment she looked about the room. “May God forgive me for it, but what did I have if Luke got his mouth fixed and left me? I was a widow and poor. Frank was my only child, and I knew better than to think that if Luke was gone, Frank would visit me nearly as often. Luke and that cut in his upper lip made us a family.”

  Matt was watching Martha, seeing the way her hands wrung each other. She was obviously carrying a heavy burden over what she’d done to her grandson. “What about Hilda Turnbull?” he asked gently.

  “She—” Martha said as she tried to get herself back under control. “I saw her once. She was short, scrawny, and had fierce-looking eyes.”

  When Martha seemed to lose her train of thought, Bailey said gently, “Did her old husband die?”

  “Yes,” Martha said, seeming to regain herself. “But not until Hilda was nearly forty years old and she had two half-grown kids.”

  “Eva and Ralph,” Bailey said.

  “Yes.”

  “Why hasn’t anyone from Calburn recognized them? They’re on TV often enough,” Matt said. “Why hasn’t anyone said, ‘Hey! Those two are Hilda Turnbull’s kids, and they have nothing to do with James Manville’?”

  Martha smiled. “First of all, people in Calburn rarely saw them. Hilda kept them in one boarding school after another, then sent them to summer camps. They were dumpy, uninteresting kids, and no one paid much attention to them. Luke wrote me that a couple of buildings at the schools they attended burned down, and he was sure Ralph had done it, but no one ever suspected him because he was so—”

  “Nothing,” Bailey said. “He looked like nothing, but he always made my flesh crawl. He and Atlanta worked as a team. When they visited us, she’d knock something over to get our attention, then zip! some expensive little ornament would slide up Ray’s sleeve. I didn’t know if Jimmie saw it, and I wasn’t going to tell him that his brother was a thief, but then Jimmie started buying reproduction Fabergé boxes. When I asked why he was buying those awful things, he said, ‘They won’t know the difference, so let them steal fakes,’ and we both laughed.”

  “Go on about Hilda,” Mat
t said.

  “Sometimes Luke used to write me about . . . well, about what had happened—some of it, anyway—and he said he figured Hilda married Gus so she’d get his work for free. When Hilda’s old husband died, he left her two farms—the one they’d been living on, which Gus told Luke was worn out and useless, but Hilda had also inherited the old Hanley place in Calburn, a farm that had been in his family for generations. His great-great grandmother, I believe it was, had been a Hanley.

  “After the old man died, Gus didn’t want to leave the town where he’d grown up, and since he’d been offered two other jobs, he told Hilda he was quitting.”

  “So she married him,” Bailey said.

  “Yes. She married him, but she refused to take his last name. He was twenty-eight, and she was thirty-nine. Gus would never have scored high on an IQ test, but he was a great cook, and he could make things grow. Luke used to say that Gus could put a steel spike in the ground, and it would grow into a tree. Like you,” Martha said, smiling at Bailey. “Luke said you were as talented as Gus, but that you have the brains of a college professor.”

  “For once I agree with something Manville said,” Matt said as he put his arm around Bailey’s shoulders. She was blushing.

  “We were told that Hilda Turnbull was having an affair with a married man,” Bailey said. “Was it Frank?”

  “Heavens, no! That was Roddy.”

  “I should have guessed,” Bailey said under her breath. “He seems to be at the heart of anything bad that happens.”

  “Yes, Roddy played a big part in all this, mainly because he was after Hilda’s money. It was rumored that she had many thousands of dollars hidden somewhere in her house. But in our family, it was Gus who was the problem. You see, Gus threatened to take Luke away from Frank. I don’t mean he threatened Frank in words, but by 1968, Luke was fourteen, and he was starving for companionship.”

  “Always was,” Bailey said. “Never got enough of it.”

  Martha shook her head. “I’m not a good storyteller. I need to backtrack some, back to 1966, back to when Frank got married. One night my son got drunk, and when he woke up, he was looking into the barrel of a shotgun, and he was horrified to see that he was naked and in bed with an equally naked high school girl. Later, he told me he didn’t remember ever having seen the girl before. But her father—who was holding the shotgun—gave Frank the choice of marrying her or having his brains blown out, so Frank married her.

  “Her name was Vonda Oleksy and, from the beginning, Frank couldn’t stand her, and he knew she’d tricked him into marriage. All her silly little girlfriends couldn’t wait to tell Frank that, since Vonda was thirteen years old, she’d been saying that when she grew up, she was going to marry one of the Golden Six. It didn’t take Frank long to realize that he was some sort of prize to her, and once they were married, she had no interest in him. She was mean, lazy, and stupid, and he would have divorced her if she hadn’t had four brothers and a father who were meaner and stupider than she was. They said that if Frank divorced Vonda, he’d find Luke or me dead.”

  Martha paused a moment. “The worst part of the marriage was that, because of her, Frank became an object of ridicule around Calburn. He was thirty, while Vonda was just seventeen, so everyone assumed that Frank was a dirty old man who lusted after the young virgin. And it didn’t help that Vonda told everyone her version of how they’d come to be married. Overnight, Frank went from being a respected man in town to being laughed at by everyone.

  “Also, Vonda spent money faster than Frank could earn it. All day he was at work, she was shopping. He’d come home to see half a dozen new boxes piled in the living room, no dinner on the table, and last night’s dishes in the sink.

  “After a whole summer of trying to live with her, Frank sent Vonda up to the cabin to live with Luke and me.”

  Martha stopped for a moment, and her mouth twisted into an ugly shape. “That girl hated Luke. Frank had warned me that Vonda could be cruel, but I was trying so hard to get along with her that it took a couple of weeks for me to see the look of despair in Luke’s eyes. She used to sit outside near Luke when he was doing chores like chopping wood, and truthfully, I thought it was nice of her. But one day I hid in some bushes to listen to what she was saying to my grandson.”

  Martha had to take a couple of breaths before she could go on. “She was telling Luke that his lip was from Satan, and it was proof that Luke was evil.”

  “Sick woman,” Matt said.

  “Yes,” Martha said, watching Bailey, who was silent. “I told Frank I wouldn’t have her there anymore, that he had to take her away. Since Frank loved Luke, he took his wife back to his house in town.

  “Six weeks after he took her back, Frank showed up drunk at work, and that’s when the car slammed into him and he lost the use of his left arm. But . . . ” Martha looked away for a moment. “I saw Frank just a few hours before the accident, and he was cold sober, and he was happy. He wouldn’t tell me what he was happy about, but he said, ‘I’ve found a way to fix everything.’ I didn’t know what he meant, but I said, ‘The only way you can fix anything is to get rid of that trashy girl you married,’ and when I said that, Frank laughed harder than I’d seen him laugh in years.

  “A few hours later, a car slammed into him and shattered his arm. Frank told the police he’d accidentally left the car in gear, but the police said he reeked of whiskey, so they wrote on their report that he was drunk. Later, when he was in the hospital, I told him I didn’t believe he had been drinking. I said I thought Vonda’s eldest brother had hit him with the car, and that Frank wouldn’t tell the police for fear they’d hurt Luke or me.

  “But Frank stuck to his story and I don’t think he told anyone the truth.”

  Martha took a moment before she went on. “My son was fired from his job and given no workmen’s comp because of the police report. After he was out of work, Frank found out that that horrible girl had either spent or given her relatives everything he’d saved over the years. He had no savings, and no income, and he had to sell his house in town to pay the debts she’d run up.

  “By necessity, the two of them had to move into the mountain cabin with Luke and me. Frank swore to me that he’d keep his wife under control and that he’d take her away as soon as things got better. But things didn’t get any better. Frank tried to repair car engines with his one arm, while his wife went to work in Calburn at a diner. Frank soon learned that he couldn’t go into town because he’d hear snickers about how his young wife was on the menu.”

  Martha looked down at her hands for a moment. “Things did change. Frank made them change, but—” She looked at Bailey and Matt defiantly. “Frank was my son, and I loved him, and I know that what he did wasn’t right. But I can understand why he did it. For years he’d been part of that blasted Golden Six—how I came to hate that term!—so he’d been treated like a hero. Then, suddenly, he became a joke to the same people who used to slap him on the back and be proud to be his friend. He had an unfaithful wife little more than half his age, and he’d lost the use of his arm and his job.”

  “Frank didn’t feel like he was a man anymore,” Matt said softly as Martha paused before she spoke again.

  “The first time it happened, it was by accident. Gus Venters was a big, blond giant of a man, slow in speech and slow in his movements, and no one paid much attention to him. One day Frank was in town, and he saw Gus take some of his canned items into the store. I don’t know what made him do it, but Frank made a derogatory remark about Gus, and the men around him laughed. It was the first time in over a year that Frank wasn’t the butt of the jokes—or worse, the recipient of their pity.

  “After that, it just escalated. I’d see Frank standing over a car engine and chuckling, and I knew he was making up more Gus stories. Eventually, those jokes became Frank’s reason for going into town. ‘Got any new Gus stories?’ the men would ask him.”

  Martha closed her eyes a moment to give herself the strength to g
o on. “The problem was that Frank soon found out that to be funny, the jokes had to come close to reality, but since Gus rarely went into town, Frank knew too little about the man to make fun of him.”

  “Didn’t you—” Bailey began.

  Martha held up her hand. “Didn’t I beg, plead, threaten, and shed tears to try to get Frank to stop? Oh, yes. I did. I said everything I could think of. And maybe if I’d kept my mouth shut, none of it would have happened. At first Frank practiced his jokes in front of Luke and me, but when I protested and Luke didn’t laugh, Frank went into hiding. And when he started using Luke, he did it with such secrecy that I knew nothing about it.

  “Frank told Luke he wanted him to hide and watch Gus, then Luke was to tell his dad everything. Luke didn’t want to do it. Luke knew too well how it felt to be made fun of. But Frank got angry, which was something he rarely did with his son.

  “In the end, Luke did it, but the spying backfired on Frank, because Luke came back with stories of how hard Gus worked, and how prosperous the farm was. Luke said the farm was like the Garden of Eden. This made Frank angry again, and he shouted at Luke, ‘Didn’t you see any bad?’ And Luke had shouted back, ‘Yeah, that wife of his treats him like dirt, orders him around like he’s a dog.’ Luke had meant to defend Gus, but Frank just listened and smiled.

  “The next day Frank went to town and had the people rolling with laughter over a parody of Gus being belittled by his militant wife.”

  “Awful,” Bailey said. “Jimmie would have hated all of that.”

  “Yes, he did, and he told his dad he wouldn’t spy anymore. But when Frank had no new Gus stories to tell, the people of Calburn began ignoring him again, so he and Vonda began to fight more.