The Mulberry Tree

  “I don’t know. Should I?”

  Matt laughed. “No,” he said, holding out his hand. When Bailey got up and took his hand in hers, he held it and looked into her eyes for a moment.

  Bailey was the first to pull away, then she walked to the front door.

  Matt followed her lead, then stepped past her to go outside. “I’ll move in tomorrow, if that’s all right with you.”

  “Yes,” she said, then hesitated. “You aren’t going to . . . you know. I don’t think I’m quite ready for—”

  “Sex?” he asked.

  “Oh, no,” she said, smiling. “I could stand that. It’s just involvement that I don’t want. I need to find out how I can support myself before I get involved with another man—if I ever do, that is. And I need privacy. Lots of privacy. Understand?”

  “I think so,” he said hesitantly. “Sex is okay, but stay out of your life. Do I have it right?”

  “Perhaps,” she said, smiling at him as she started to close the door. “But let me make it clear: if there’s sex between us, your rent triples,” she said, then softly closed the door.

  Laughing, Matt walked down the driveway and got back in his truck, then leaned his head against the seat for a moment. He really and truly couldn’t believe his good fortune. He was going to get out of Patsy’s house!

  As he started the engine, he kept smiling. And more than just getting out, he was moving in with a woman who could cook, a woman who seemed to know all the domestic arts. He couldn’t believe his luck.

  As he turned off Owl Creek Road onto the asphalt, he hoped that Bailey didn’t find out that Patsy was charging him seven-fifty a month, plus he had to buy one week’s worth of groceries for the entire family of five adults.

  Seven

  Bailey didn’t awaken the next morning until nearly eight, late for her, but then, she hadn’t gone to bed until three. After Matt left, the ugly little house had seemed too empty, too full of all the things in life that she no longer had. She’d gone to bed, but she’d tossed about for over an hour, so she got up, pulled on her chinos and a T-shirt, then padded into the kitchen to get herself something warm to drink.

  For a while, she’d sat at the dining table in the living room and looked at the wall that concealed a fireplace. It was when she heard a noise outside and looked at the front door, fully expecting Jimmie to walk into the room, that she knew she had to do something, or she’d spend the night crying.

  In the kitchen, she had a refrigerator full of pots of jam that needed to be reheated, then put into jars, and on the floor were crates of strawberries that she’d bought at a roadside stand. Also in the refrigerator were bags of plums, a large box of blackberries, a big bag full of cherries, and the crispers were full of vegetables.

  “Cry or work,” she said aloud; then she put on her tennis shoes and an apron. After she’d put the crate of strawberries on the table and found her capper in the box where she’d put her canning equipment, she set to work. Phillip had sent a man to hook her up to a cable service, so she turned on the TV and watched HGTV while she cooked.

  So now, this morning, yawning, she got out of bed, dressed, and went through the kitchen into the pantry to look at the rows of jars: blackberry liqueur, cherry cordial, strawberry jam, green tomato chutney, pickled carrots, strawberry conserve, plum jam, and pickled plums. On the windowsill was the recipe box that she’d been so excited to find. Unfortunately, it had turned out to contain only a few basic recipes for meat loaf and chicken-fried steak. It had not been the great find that she’d hoped it would be.

  Last night she’d run Ball jars through the hottest cycle of the dishwasher to sterilize them, while keeping the lids hot in boiling water. Since there was little work space in the kitchen, she’d set up the table in the living room, covering the surface with layers of clean white tea towels.

  She first mixed the blackberries with sugar and set them in a bowl inside the small proofing oven of the big range. The fat berries needed to stay in low heat for hours, until the sugar drew the juice from them.

  She capped strawberries, then divided them into two pots, one for jam and one for conserve, where the berries were kept whole. While the strawberries were simmering, she pricked the plums all over with a big darning needle, then left them in a bowl while she put cider vinegar, apple juice concentrate, cloves, allspice, ginger, and bay leaves into a pot and let it simmer.

  She tested the jam to see if it had jelled by putting a spoonful on a cold plate in the freezer for a few minutes, and when it was ready, she began putting it into jars. She lugged a big canner full of boiling water to the table. For the jars to properly seal, everything had to be kept as hot as possible, and as clean as possible. There couldn’t be the tiniest bit of jam on the rim of the jar, or the lid wouldn’t seal—or worse, bacteria would get inside the jar.

  The plums went first. She packed the pricked plums as tight as she could inside a dozen hot, sterile jars; then, using a wide-mouthed stainless steel funnel, she poured the strained vinegar solution on top of them. She wiped each rim with a clean cloth, put on the lids, twisted the rims into place, then put the jars on a tray and carried them back to the kitchen. Using the big lifting tongs to set the hot jars inside the canning kettle, she set the timer for the hot water bath, an extra precaution needed to insure safe preservation.

  She followed with the strawberry jam and the conserve, plus the jams that she had cooked the night before.

  While she’d been putting the strawberries into jars, she’d run a two-quart decorative glass jar through the hot cycle of the dishwasher, and when it was ready, she filled it with cherries that she’d pricked with her needle, their stems still attached. She put these into the jar, covered them with white sugar, then poured enough grappa—that dry Italian brandy—in to fill the jar. The lid had a plastic seal on it, and she put it on tight.

  She spent over an hour chopping green tomatoes, which she’d also purchased at the roadside stand, onions, and apples to make green tomato chutney. Once the vegetables were cut, she put them into a pot with wine vinegar, raisins, cayenne pepper, ginger, and garlic.

  She mixed peeled baby carrots with wine vinegar, sugar, celery seeds, white peppercorns, dill seeds, mustard seeds, and bay leaves.

  When the blackberries she’d put in the oven were a mass of juice, she poured the liquid into a cheesecloth bag, tied it closed with heavy string, then hung it from the legs of a chair she’d turned upside down on top of the coffee table, a big ceramic bowl set underneath to catch the drippings.

  When the chutney and pickled carrots were in jars and sealed, she measured the blackberry juice, poured out an equal amount of gin, put the mixture into jars, and sealed them.

  Only after she’d labeled all the jars and carried everything into the pantry did she allow herself to go to bed, and by then she was so tired that she fell asleep instantly.

  So now it was morning, and she was facing the question, What now? Yesterday at the grocery it had seemed a brilliant idea to sell her jams, chutneys, and liqueurs. But during the night while she was working, she’d begun to think about marketing. How did she get her jars to the consumer? She was used to making six jars of one item. If she was going to sell them, she’d have to make hundreds, maybe thousands, of jars of one kind. And what about liquor laws? What did she have to do to be able to sell cherries preserved in grappa?

  In the past, all she would have had to do was tell Jimmie that she wanted something and he would have seen to everything else—or had someone else see to it. Early this morning, when she’d at last climbed into bed, she’d seen her address book on the bedside table. She knew that inside it were all Phillip’s telephone numbers, and she knew, without a doubt, that if she called him and asked, he’d take care of everything. But she wasn’t ready to admit defeat yet.

  So now, looking at all the jars, she didn’t know what her next step was. “Damn you, James Manville!” she said out loud. “Why did you do this to me? How am I supposed to support myself w
hen I know nothing about anything?”

  For a moment her body was filled with anger, but in the next moment she felt herself near to tears, and she leaned her forehead against a shelf. Oh! but she missed him! she thought. She missed the sound of his voice, and the way his presence filled the room. She missed talking to him, listening to him. She missed the way they solved each other’s problems.

  And she missed the sex. Yesterday with Matt Longacre, she’d been half kidding when she’d teased him about sex. It was obvious he’d been worried that she’d turn down his suggestion of being a paying boarder. He seemed to fear that she’d act like a virginal maiden and defend her virtue. But the idea of being relieved of the sheer awfulness of living alone had been everything to her. She was used to waking up in houses where dozens of people were living. Yes, nearly all of them had been staff, but Bailey had formed friendships with those people. When she went into the kitchen, there was a chef and his assistants there to say “Good morning” to. In the houses that had gardens, she’d had landscapers to greet. Their houses in the islands and on the sea had had men in boats outside.

  Perhaps her existence with Jimmie had been odd, but it had been her life, and as long as Jimmie was there, she’d enjoyed it.

  But now she was alone. There was no one to talk to, no one to consult. And there was no more sex. Part of her felt that she should put on black and be like Queen Victoria, mourning her dead husband for the rest of her life. But another part of her wanted to laugh and have a good time—and even to tumble about in bed with a man. To go from an active sex life to nothing hurt. It physically hurt.

  Slowly she made herself leave the pantry, and a few minutes later, she was sitting on the stairs out the back door eating a bowl of Cheerios.

  “We’re on our own, kid,” she said as she looked up at the mulberry tree. Tiny fruit was beginning to form. She’d learned from their English gardener that the mulberry tree was the most cautious tree in the garden. It didn’t put out leaves until all danger of frost was past. “Watch the mulberry tree,” she was told. If it was early April and the mulberry tree sent out shoots, then it was all right to put out tender bedding plants. But even if it was a sunny day in May and the weatherman saw no danger of frost ahead, if the mulberry tree was still bare, then the bedding plants stayed in the greenhouses. And, sure enough, there would be a late frost.

  So what was she to do today? she wondered. Put up more fruit? Make more chutney? Even though she had no idea how to market it?

  On the other hand, maybe she should spend the day trying to find out whatever it was that Jimmie had asked her to find out. In the weeks since she’d first read the note he’d left her, the more often she’d read it, the more it annoyed her. Find out the truth about what happened, will you, Frecks? Do it for me.

  The truth about what? she wondered. Couldn’t he have given her a clue as to where to start? Everyone in Calburn called the farm he’d left her the old Hanley place. What did that have to do with Jimmie’s name of Manville? Of course, she thought, Jimmie probably lied about his name. He seemed to have lied about everything else to do with his childhood, so why not his name?

  But as Bailey looked up at the old tree, her eyes widened. There was one thing that even Jimmie couldn’t lie about. There was a scar on his face, a scar that he hid under his big mustache, a scar that only she knew about. But the one and only time she’d mentioned it, on their wedding night, had been the one and only time that Jimmie had been really and truly angry at her. As a result, she’d never mentioned it again.

  It was that memory that gave Bailey some hope. Maybe there actually was a way for her to find out whatever it was that Jimmie wanted her to know.

  She went inside the house, put her empty bowl in the dishwasher, then picked up her handbag and her car keys. It was time to see downtown Calburn.

  But as she opened the car door, on impulse, she ran back into the house and filled a wooden strawberry crate with jars of preserves. It wouldn’t hurt to start letting people taste her product.

  If she’d had to use one word to describe Calburn, she would have said “deserted.” Or maybe “abandoned” would have done as well.

  Her farmhouse was about two miles from the crossroads that was “downtown” Calburn, and on the drive there, she saw one empty house after another. There were big old farmhouses set back off the road, their deep porches shaded by trees the size of rocket launchers. Some of the houses had lawns that were mowed, while others had been left to weeds and bushes. Now and then she saw a house that looked occupied, but for the most part, they had an air of emptiness.

  “What in the world happened here?” she wondered aloud. “Why did these people leave?”

  When she reached the crossroads, she saw that most of the stores were empty. Some of them had boards over the windows; others had dirty glass with nothing behind them. A few windows had yellowed signs that said, “For Lease.”

  There were still a few businesses open in Calburn. There was a building that looked as though it had been converted from two; one side was a post office, the other a diner. There was an antiques store, but the things she could see behind the dirty glass were more old than antique. There was a feed store that said it carried hardware as well, and a grocery store. Outside it was a bin full of tired-looking vegetables. Bailey thought that she and Matt were going to have to have a talk about where she bought groceries.

  There was a dry-goods store that rented videos and sold ice cream. And at the end of the street was Opal’s Beauty Salon.

  Bailey didn’t hesitate as she pulled into the empty parking place in front of the salon. She knew that if she was going to get information, this was where to begin.

  When she opened the door, a bell tinkled, but the teenage girl sitting in the chair and eating a candy bar didn’t look up from her movie magazine. She had three-inch-long white-blonde hair with black roots, all of it sectioned off into tiny tufts that were fastened with various-colored ties. Her eyes were heavily lined in black. Even though it was a warm day, she had on a sweater big enough to cover a baby hippo, and tight black toreador pants.

  “Yeah?” she said, turning her head vaguely in the direction of the door, but not looking at Bailey. “You want somethin’?”

  “I was wondering if—” Bailey hesitated. Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea. Maybe she didn’t want this young woman to touch her hair.

  “Carla!” came a voice from the back. “See who that is.”

  “Yeah, Ma,” came the tired-sounding voice of the girl sitting in the chair. “In a minute.”

  Bailey started to say that she’d changed her mind, but suddenly a woman stepped out from behind the curtained doorway, then stood in frozen silence as she gaped at Bailey.

  “You’re her,” the woman said at last.

  For one horrible moment, Bailey feared that the woman was going to say that she was Lillian Manville, wife of the billionaire.

  “You’re the widow that got the old Hanley place, aren’t you? And Matt Longacre is going to move in with you today, isn’t he?”

  Smiling, Bailey nodded. She’d been right: if she wanted to know what was going on in Calburn, she’d come to the right place.

  “Get up!” the woman hissed at the girl in the chair, who was now staring at Bailey as though she had just stepped off a spaceship. The woman had to push the girl’s shoulder hard before she vacated the chair. “Go to the store and get her somethin’ to drink,” she said to the girl. “A Dr Pepper.” She looked back at Bailey. “You want color? A perm? Or maybe you want highlights? Or a cut? I’m Opal, by the way.”

  “No, really,” Bailey said. “I just wanted to—” Ask some questions, she started to say, but the two of them were staring at her so hard that she couldn’t bear to disappoint them. “I just need a wash and blow-dry,” she heard herself say, and the next moment the woman took over. She took Bailey’s arm and almost pulled her into the chair, while her daughter came alive enough to scurry out the front door in search of the nearest Dr
Pepper.

  As Bailey left the hairdresser, she kept her back straight, and when she got into her car, she waved at Opal and Carla, who were watching her through the window.

  With a smile plastered on her face, Bailey drove out of Calburn, but the minute she was on the outskirts, she stopped under some trees and turned off her car. Digging in her handbag, she pulled out her big hairbrush, then got out to stand in the shade and brush her hair. The woman must have used half a can of mousse on her hair! Then she’d lacquered it down with spray that Opal said was guaranteed not to let her hair move even in a windstorm.

  For a moment, Bailey leaned back against the trunk of a tree and closed her eyes. The hour-long ordeal had been exhausting! She’d been quizzed about her marriage, her husband, and her childhood. It had taken all Bailey’s energy to lie without seeming to lie, to give answers while giving no answers.

  Since Opal talked nonstop, she didn’t seem to notice that Bailey wasn’t really saying much at all. But her daughter Carla, sitting in the second chair, now and then gave Bailey a sideways look, as though to say that she knew she was being evasive.

  It had taken all the cunning that Bailey possessed to get Opal to give information rather than try to extract it. Since Bailey couldn’t tell Opal anything that she didn’t want all of Calburn to know, she had to be subtle as well as pushy as a Sherman tank. “I’m just so interested in Calburn,” Bailey said, trying to sound young and innocent. Carla had given her one of her disbelieving sideways looks.

  “Not much to know,” Opal had said as she wrapped Bailey’s hair around a little brush roller.

  Bailey tried not to think about Shirley Temple. “I’m sure the history of the town is fascinating.”

  Opal had stopped rolling and stared hard at Bailey in the mirror. “You’re not here about the Golden Six, are you?” There was hostility in her voice, and anger on her face.