The Mulberry Tree

  When nothing happened, she opened one eye. He was grinning at her!

  “Well, now, so you’ve come to meet me and ask me about the good times.”

  “I came to meet—” She was going to say that she’d come to meet the beautiful Rodney Yates, but from the way the man was looking at her, and from what he’d said . . . But this ugly old man couldn’t possibly be . . .

  He was watching her, and he’d lowered the shotgun only about an inch.

  “You,” Bailey said. “Yes, I came to meet you. You’re Rodney, aren’t you? You look . . . a . . . Well, you look just like all your pictures.” Bailey was sure that a lie of that magnitude was going to get her shot, but instead the man grinned more broadly, reached out, put his arm around her shoulder, and pulled her out of the car. Bailey almost gagged. His breath was foul, and the hand on her shoulder had half-inch-long fingernails with what looked to be years of dirt under them.

  She wanted to get back into her car and get away from this awful place and this dirty man as fast as she could.

  “You’re sure pretty,” he said, and his hand began to run up and down Bailey’s arm as he pulled her closer. “Hey! Wait a minute. You aren’t here to do to us what that other one did, are you?”

  Bailey had to piece that together. “Oh, you mean Congresswoman Spangler.”

  “Congress, ha!” Rodney said, then spit a glob on the ground about an inch from Bailey’s foot.

  “No, I’m not,” she answered.

  He grinned again, exposing teeth that hadn’t been brushed in years. “Then you come on in, and I’ll show you about that old hag, and I’ll tell you what she did.”

  They were at the foot of the stairs up to the porch of the cabin now, and the house was dirtier than any place she’d ever seen in her life. How could people live like this? she wondered.

  Rodney held her tighter as they went up the stairs, and Bailey could feel her body getting stiffer by the moment. “Here, now, watch that step. It’s a little bit broken, and I’ve been meanin’ to fix it, but I been real busy lately.”

  Bailey looked down to see a rotten board that had probably been there since the 1930s, and just managed to step over it. When she nearly lost her balance, Rodney took the opportunity to run his fingertips across the side of her breast. Bailey thought maybe she was going to be sick.

  The inside of the cabin was worse than the outside. They stepped into a room furnished with dirty, broken old chairs and a couch with half of its legs missing, making it about four inches higher on one side than the other. “Have a seat,” Rodney said, and there was a leer in his voice. He was motioning to the high end of the couch. If she sat on that end, she’d slide down to the low end, probably where he planned to sit.

  “I’ll, uh . . . ” She looked around. There was a small wooden chair to one side. “I better take this one,” she said as she moved it opposite the couch. “Bad back. I need the support.”

  “You know what the cure for a bad back is, don’t you?” Rodney said, putting his face near hers, and she had to work to keep from moving away from his foul breath. “You need more exercise. You know what I mean? More of the ol’ . . . ” He made a circle with the finger and thumb on one hand and stuck his index finger of the other hand through the circle.

  You owe me, James Manville, Bailey thought as she gave Rodney a weak smile that she hoped wouldn’t show her revulsion.

  Rodney bent over her and ran his hand down her arm. When it started to stray toward her breast, she twisted her shoulder.

  Smiling, Rodney stood up. “What you need is a little drink.”

  “No, thank you. I just—”

  “You’re refusin’ my hospitality?” he said, all humor gone from his face.

  “No, I just—”

  “Well, good then, we’ll have a little drink, then you and me can spend the rest of the day . . . talkin’.” He wiggled his eyebrows at the last word as though he knew she wanted to spend the day doing something else with him.

  Bailey was sure she was going to be ill, and if the man weren’t still holding a shotgun, she’d have left.

  The next moment she nearly fell out of the chair when Rodney bellowed, “Woman! Get out here. Can’t you see we got company?”

  There were two doors out of the room they were in, one open and one closed. Through the open door, Bailey could see a dirty, rumpled bed. The closed door opened a bit, and the pale face of a girl who looked about thirteen or fourteen peeped through.

  “Out!” Rodney shouted, and the girl stepped into the room.

  Bailey was shocked to see that she was heavily pregnant. She didn’t look old enough to be out of elementary school, much less having a baby.

  Bailey looked up to see Rodney watching her, and there was pride on his face. “Mine,” he said smugly. “I’m good at makin’ babies. You got any?”

  Bailey could hardly take her eyes off the girl, who was looking down at the floor and awaiting orders.

  “You got any?” Rodney said louder.

  “Any? Oh. You mean babies. No, I don’t have any children.”

  “Well, maybe I can help you,” Rodney said. “Maybe you and me—”

  The door behind the pregnant girl slammed open, and out stepped a beautiful girl of about fifteen. She had on a worn-out dress, but it was clean, and her blonde hair was clean and tidy.

  “She don’t want any of your kids, and if you touch her, the cops’ll be out here again,” she said as she handed Rodney a can of beer.

  “Nobody asked you,” Rodney snapped. “And where’s her drink?”

  “She don’t want a can of warm beer at ten o’clock in the mornin’. Do you, miss?”

  Bailey gave both of them a weak smile. “I really just wanted to ask a few questions.”

  “About the Golden Six?” the girl asked, and there was so much derision in her voice that Bailey was taken aback. “About the glory days when he wasn’t a bum and worthless?”

  “Get out of here!” Rodney shouted. “Leave me and my visitor alone.”

  The girl didn’t so much as blink at the order, or at the volume at which it was delivered. “You leave her alone, you hear me?” She turned to Bailey. “He touches you, and you call out, you hear?”

  Bailey could do nothing but silently nod.

  “So go ahead and ask him your questions. He knows all about those six boys, and he’ll talk all day if you’ll sit and listen. His life stopped on the day Frank McCallum died.”

  With that she put her arm tenderly around the pregnant girl’s shoulders, led her from the room, and closed the door behind them.

  “Don’t pay her no mind,” Rodney said as soon as the door closed. “You’d think a daughter’d have more respect for her father than that girl does for me. The other one, the young one, she’s my wife.” He looked at Bailey. “Now you just ask me all you want.” He gave her a threatening look. “Unless you’re writin’ another book that’s bad about us.”

  “No, I promise I’m not writing a book of any kind. I . . . ” She couldn’t think of a lie quick enough to explain why she wanted to know about him. And, truthfully, at this moment she couldn’t remember why she was there.

  “That other one, that Spangler woman, she was eaten up with jealousy, and jealousy is a real strong emotion. I never felt it myself ’cause I never had reason to be jealous of any man, if you know what I mean. I had more than my share, so I didn’t need to want what somebody else had.”

  He looked at Bailey as though he expected her to tell him that he was still a fine-looking man.

  “Did you know a boy who had a harelip?” she blurted out.

  “A couple. You wanta see a picture of that T. L. Spangler?”

  No, not really, Bailey wanted to say, but she just gave him a tiny smile.

  Rodney put down his shotgun—at last—and went to an old cabinet in one corner. The upper half of the cabinet had doors that were about to come off their hinges, but the bottom doors had a big padlock on them. Rodney reached into his pocket and
pulled out a chain with a key ring and a dozen keys on the end of it. He inserted a key into the lock, then turned back to Bailey. “Can’t be too careful around here with so damned many kids around.”

  Again, all Bailey could do was smile in reply.

  She could see that the inside of the cupboard was clean and in perfect repair. Lying on a shelf were two leather-bound photo albums, and Bailey knew enough about quality goods to know that these albums had cost a lot. A wave of anger shot through her. His children lived in filth, but he had beer and leather-bound photo albums.

  As though he were handling a priceless object, Rodney withdrew the top album, then carefully opened it about two-thirds the way through. “Missed it by one page,” he said as he walked toward her. “Usually, I find whatever I want on the first try, but you’re makin’ my heart thump so hard I can’t think straight.”

  Why oh why hadn’t she brought Matt with her? she wondered. Or Violet? Or a .45?

  She took the album he held out so reverently and looked at the photo he was pointing at with his dirty fingernail.

  “There she is. That’s your T. L. Spangler when she was in school with us. Ain’t she about the ugliest thing you ever saw?”

  Bailey looked at the girl in the photo and had to admit that she was what was sometimes called “unfortunate.” She had frizzy hair that stood out around her head, thick glasses, crooked, protruding teeth, no discernible chin, and a bad case of acne.

  “Now look at this one,” Rodney said as he flipped the page.

  There was a cover torn from a Time magazine. On it were the faces of three women and the headline “Tomorrow’s Future.” Bailey had to read the fine print to see that the woman in the foreground was Senator Spangler. Her hair had been straightened, she didn’t wear glasses, her teeth had been fixed, she now had a chin, and her skin had cleared up.

  “Good surgeon,” Bailey said in admiration. “Wonder who did the work?”

  Rodney was looking at her as though she were stupid and missing the point entirely. He flipped the page back. “That girl was mad about Kyle. She wanted him. She did everything on earth to get his attention when we were in school, and when he wouldn’t touch her, she swore she’d get him back. That’s why she wrote that book.”

  “I see,” Bailey said. She handed the album back to him. “So, uh, Mr. Yates, you don’t remember a boy with a harelip?”

  Rodney closed the album and carefully put it back in its place inside the cabinet. “How old was he in 1968?”

  “Nine,” Bailey said.

  “No, I don’t remember any kid like that. Sure he was from Calburn?”

  “Yes. I—” She had been about to say that she had a photo of him in front of the mulberry tree at her farm, but something was keeping her from telling him that, and certainly from saying that she had a copy of the photo in her car. “You know, I think I better be going.”

  “You can’t go yet,” Rodney said, advancing on her. “I got three albums full of pictures. You and me, we could sit down with them together and look at every picture.”

  Bailey got up. “Maybe another time,” she said as she headed for the door. Maybe when I have an armed escort with me.

  Rodney put himself between her and the door. “You can’t go yet. It’s too soon,” he said in what Bailey was sure he meant to be a sexy voice.

  She put her hand on the door latch and pulled. In the next two seconds, she was out the door, down the steps, and heading toward her car. Just let me get out of here, please, she prayed.

  “Wait a minute!” Rodney called from the porch.

  Bailey stopped walking, but she didn’t turn around.

  “I forgot. Lucas McCallum had a harelip, but he was fourteen that summer. Big kid, hulking.”

  Slowly, Bailey turned around to look at him.

  Rodney made a motion with his shoulders that Bailey had seen Jimmie do a thousand times. “He was an ugly kid. I mean, real ugly. Upper lip split open all the way up into his nose. You could see the gums above his teeth. And his ears stuck straight out. That the boy you’re lookin’ for?”

  “McCallum?” Bailey said.

  “Yeah. Frank’s kid. You heard of Frank, ain’t you?”

  “Yes,” Bailey said softly. “One of the Golden Six, the one involved in the murder-suicide.”

  “Yeah, that’s Frank. Luke was Frank’s kid, and he left town after Frank died. Never heard from him again—not that anybody cared. He had a real chip on his shoulder. Would fight anybody. Real angry kid.”

  Bailey knew without a doubt that Lucas McCallum and James Manville were one and the same. In spite of what her brain said she should do, she found that her feet were moving back toward the house.

  “That’s right,” Rodney said, “you come on back here, and I’ll tell you all about Frank. He was a wonderful man.”

  “Lucas,” Bailey said as she reached the stairs. “Tell me about Lucas.”

  “Yeah, sure, whatever,” Rodney said as he opened his arm wide for her to step inside the circle. “You come on back in here, and I’ll tell you whatever you wanta know.”

  This time Bailey had to sit on the high end of the couch, and as she hung on, she kept visualizing the movie Titanic and the people holding on to the railing as the ship went down. In their case, the sea was awaiting them; for her it was Rodney’s hands. She wasn’t sure which was worse.

  She had to listen to Rodney tell the whole glorious story about how the six divine boys had saved a whole school. Bailey hung on to the couch arm, trying not to slide down the seat onto Rodney’s lap, and tried her best to get him on the subject of Lucas.

  It was probably only about forty-five minutes that she had to wait, but it seemed like hours. “What about Lucas?” she asked for the twentieth time.

  Rodney frowned, annoyed that she’d interrupted him again. “He wasn’t much, and he wasn’t there when all the real stuff, the important stuff, happened. It was later that Frank went off and came back with that . . . that—” Rodney waved his hand in dismissal.

  “What about Luke’s mother?”

  “Never met her. Never wanted to. If she had a face like that boy’s, she probably drugged Frank to get him to go to bed with her, then lied that it was his kid. Frank was always a generous guy. Give you anything he had. He probably took that kid on just to be nice. Frank was like that.”

  “Saint Frank,” Bailey mumbled, and Rodney looked at her sharply.

  “How come you’re askin’ me so many questions about this kid? You know him? He still alive?”

  “I don’t think so,” Bailey said, and didn’t like the way Rodney was looking at her.

  “That boy was uglier than Spangler, and even meaner. Are you writin’ a book for him?”

  “No,” Bailey said, “of course not.” The way he was looking at her now was beginning to make her nervous in a different way.

  Rodney looked at her for a long moment, as though trying to figure out whether or not to believe her. “So how come you want to know about that ugly kid and not us heroes?”

  “I, uh . . . I . . . ”

  His gaze was getting sharper by the second. She had to come up with something.

  She took a deep breath. “I want to open a canning business, and I was told that the man who owned the farm I have used to can things, and I wanted to know about him. We, I mean, I looked on the Internet, but there wasn’t anything on there about who used to own the farm.”

  He was frowning at her in such a way that the hairs on her neck were standing up. As unobtrusively as she could, she got off the couch and started slowly backing toward the front door. “That’s all there is to it. I was just curious about the farm I bought and wanted to know more about it. You see, there’s this big mulberry tree on it, and—”

  Rodney’s eyes opened wide. “Mulberry tree?” he said quietly. “Lord have mercy! Are you that widow woman that’s livin’ on Gus’s old place?”

  Instantly, Bailey felt relief. “Yes! That’s me. I heard his name was Guthrie, but y
ou’re probably right, and it was Gus. Poor man. Did you know that he hanged himself?”

  One minute Rodney was sitting on the end of the couch and Bailey was a foot away from the door, and the next he had her by the neck and was trying to strangle her. “Gus Venters was an evil man! Evil, I tell you, and he deserved to die! He deserved it!”

  He pushed her against a window, and Bailey was holding on to the sides so her head wouldn’t go through the glass, while at the same time trying to get Rodney’s hands from around her throat.

  Suddenly the window opened outward and Bailey fell backward—into the arms of a young man. He staggered backward a few steps with a muffled “Umph!” When Bailey recovered herself enough to open her eyes, she looked up into the blue eyes of a man she’d seen in several photographs: Rodney Yates. Time travel? she thought. I’ve fallen through a window into the 1950s?

  But the next second the young man dropped her to her feet, grabbed her hand, and started running. “You have the keys?” he yelled over his shoulder.

  It took her a second to know what he meant, then she saw her Toyota at the foot of the hill, and behind her she could hear Rodney’s angry shouting. Just as they reached the car, she heard the sound of a shotgun blast, then the roar of a car engine.

  “Let’s go, lady!” the young man shouted as he vaulted into the driver’s seat. “Where the hell are the keys?”

  Bailey was still dazed from all that had happened in the last minutes. What had changed lecherous old Rodney into a murderer? Her neck hurt so much she didn’t think she could swallow. “On the floor,” she managed to whisper.

  He moved to the passenger side, stuck his head under the dashboard, and within seconds held up the keys. Turning toward the sound of a car engine, Bailey saw a huge black truck with giant wheels coming toward them. She didn’t think about what she did; she just reacted. She grabbed the keys from the young man’s hand, leaped into the driver’s seat, and jammed the key into the ignition.

  During the search for the keys, Rodney had driven his black truck down the hill and was now about to block the only way Bailey knew how to get down the mountain. When she saw the truck coming toward her, she knew there was only one way to go: directly toward it. If she took the time to turn around and try to find another way to get down the mountain, he’d be on top of her in a flash. Instead, she put the car in drive and floored it.