The Mulberry Tree

  Frank started to walk away from the idiotic turn the conversation had taken, but Kyle’s words held him back.

  “I’m listening,” Kyle said. “What do you have in mind to do?”

  “Nothing,” Harper said. “I don’t plan to do anything. It’s just that I want to be a writer, and I like to play, What if? It’s my favorite game.”

  “You mean besides trying on ladies’ hose?” Burgess said.

  Harper looked Burgess up and down. “Want to try a pair?”

  Kyle interrupted them. “Okay, I’ll bite. What would make us heroes?”

  “It was just something I was thinking about for a story, that’s all. I was thinking what I’d do if the bomber struck here.”

  “Push the lot of them into an elevator shaft then throw a stick of dynamite after them?” Taddy said, and everyone looked at him, surprised at the violence in his voice.

  “Just the opposite,” Harper said. “I’d rescue them. I’d be the calm one while they were running around in terror. I’d direct them toward the exits, and I’d take over while the teachers and students were going crazy. Then later I’d be modest when I was talking to reporters.” At this he demonstrated, with his head down, then looking up shyly. “Shucks, ma’am, ’tweren’t nothin’.”

  They were all laughing at Harper, and Kyle said, “Nice idea. We’ll lead them out the exits and make a stand for Calburn.”

  “And what if the doors of the classrooms are locked?” Taddy asked.

  “And who would rescue the naked girls in the gym?” Rodney asked.

  “What about the little kids downstairs?” Burgess asked. “I’d like to get them out.”

  “And me,” Frank said. “I’d help with the little kids, too.” Then when they all looked at him, he shrugged. “I like kids. Better than adults, anyway.”

  “What about you, Taddy? Who would you like to save?” Kyle asked, and Taddy grinned.

  “I’d save the football players. They’d be . . . ” He thought for a moment. “They’d be locked inside the gym, and smoke would be pouring into the room. They’d be coughing and sure they were going to die, then I’d . . . I’d break open a window and lower a rope down the side of the wall and help them climb up.”

  His story was so vivid that the others laughed, but Harper was serious. “What do you break the window with, and where do you get the rope? And if they get out of the place one at a time, do the others die of smoke inhalation?”

  For a while they were all silent, glancing down the road, waiting for the bus, and the discussion seemed to be over, but Harper wouldn’t let it die. He turned to Kyle. “What would you do?”

  “Catch the bastard that did it,” Kyle said instantly, as though he’d been thinking about it. “I’d put on my cape and fly into the smoke and catch the criminal.”

  “But what if the bad guy was long gone?” Harper asked.

  “I’d walk toward the bomb and take it out even if I had to throw my body over it.”

  When Kyle saw the others staring at him, he gave a half smile and said, “So sue me, I want to be a hero. I’d like to be the opposite of my old man.”

  “And that’s how it started,” Burgess said. “It was just a story we made up to entertain ourselves during the long wait for the bus.”

  “But then it really happened,” Bailey said.

  “Yes. Harper planted the bomb in the school, and between you and me, I think he’d done it before. Several bombs had gone off around the area during that summer, and I think Harper planted them all. In Wells Creek, there were actually a half dozen of them placed around the school, but during the confusion Harper managed to sneak around and remove most of them before the cops found them. They weren’t real anyway, just smoke.

  “Anyway, by the time they went off, our fantasy had been talked about so much among us that we knew exactly what our jobs were. And Harper had done his homework; everything we needed for the rescue was right where it needed to be. And when the reporters came, even our speeches of humility had been rehearsed.

  “But what hadn’t been rehearsed was Kyle’s wrath.

  “That night Kyle went to each house, got us out of bed, and had us sneak away to have a little ‘meeting’ with Harper. Kyle was furious, and he threatened Harper that if he ever did anything like that again, we’d cut him out of our group. We’d shun him and leave him on his own.”

  “But you came out of the bombing as the Golden Six,” Matt said.

  “Yeah, that was something we hadn’t planned.” Burgess paused a moment. “For a while it was great. We were heroes in Wells Creek, and we ruled Calburn. Everyone everywhere loved us.”

  “Until Roddy insulted Theresa Spangler,” Matt said.

  “Right,” Burgess said, then smiled. “By that time we’d pretty much forgiven Harper since everything had worked out so well. In fact, we were doing better than we ever had in our lives thanks to him. Then after Spangler was insulted, horrible things began to happen to us, but Harper saved us.”

  “He wrote the articles,” Matt said. “But Bailey hasn’t read them.” Quickly, he added, “That’s not a criticism, dearest.”

  “I didn’t realize you two were married,” Burgess said.

  “We’re not,” Bailey said.

  “She only started sleeping with me—” Matt began.

  “Would you mind?!” she said to Matt, and both men laughed. “So tell me about the articles.”

  “Harper’s family owned the Calburn newspaper, and his mother stayed home and had Harper wait on her hand and foot, while her deceased brother’s oldest son ran the newspaper. Sort of. Harper’s mother was a tyrant, and she tried to rule anyone who got within twenty miles of her.

  “Right after Roddy made Spangler angry, she started telling people that she believed we’d planted the bomb ourselves. She said that heroes didn’t just appear in one day, that there had to be something leading up to them. But it’s my experience in life that people want heroes, so for the most part the other kids ignored her. So she went to Calburn and pretended she was writing an article about the Golden Six and asked a lot of questions.”

  “Just as she did many years later for her book.”

  “Exactly,” Burgess said. “She got people to confide in her, then spread what she had learned around, and the students began to hate us.

  “Because we weren’t from Wells Creek, we didn’t know where the evil gossip was coming from. It was Roddy who found out. Some girl told him while they were in the backseat of a car.

  “And when Harper heard, he got angry. He said that no cross-eyed, buck-toothed, frizzy-haired Medusa was going to win over him.

  “What Harper did was to tell his mother that if he was going to be a writer, he needed to start young, so he needed to have his work published in their newspaper now.

  “His mother allowed Harper to have anything except freedom, so she agreed, and Harper wrote his first story. But when Harper’s cousin, the editor of the paper, read the first column, he refused to publish it. ‘I can’t publish this,’ he told his aunt. ‘Have you read this thing? It says that Kyle Longacre is a cross between Galahad and Buddha, a “champion of the underdog,” he calls him. I’ve known Kyle all his life, and he never championed anything except a football. He’s a nice kid, but he’s no saint. And your son has portrayed that Thaddeus Overlander as a great mathematician who’s secretly working with the government to save the world from destruction. And Burgess is—’

  “ ‘I think the article shows great imagination,’ Mrs. Kirkland said.

  “ ‘This isn’t imagination, it’s libel. And, besides that, it’s all a great whopping lie.’

  “ ‘My son wrote it, so you will publish it, or you will no longer have a job,’ she said, and that was that.

  “And that’s when everything really began. Harper took all the bad stories that Spangler had used against us and twisted them around so they became good traits. He portrayed Frank as a man with the voice of the angels, and said Frank had worked his way up pas
t unimaginable poverty, all with his voice. As a result, Frank was asked by a local radio station to announce the football scores.

  “Kyle was said to be a young man of noble character, a throwback to ages past, so he was given any job in school that called for someone trustworthy.

  “Roddy was made out to be irresistible to women, and it got so that he couldn’t open his locker without love notes falling out.

  “Taddy was said to be brilliant, and as a result, he was given special attention from the teachers, which made his grades soar.

  “For himself, Harper hinted that he’d written books under a famous pen name, so he was constantly being stopped in the halls and asked if he was so and so.”

  Burgess paused for a moment, and Bailey gave him another drink of water. “As for me, everyone in the county knew what had happened when I was four, but instead of hiding it, Harper wrote an essay about me that had anyone who read it crying. He portrayed me as living under the burden of great tragedy, from which I was suffering every moment. More papers sold the day that essay came out than any day before, and after that, ‘murderer’ was never again written on anything I owned.”

  When he’d finished this story, Bailey could see that Burgess was worn out. His skin was beginning to turn gray. She gestured silently to Matt that they should leave. He nodded, but still, the big question hadn’t been answered.

  Matt took a breath. “James Manville had a very important piece of paper, and he said he gave it to ‘the person he trusted most in the world.’ ”

  Burgess smiled. “That would be Frank’s mother, Martha. She raised Luke.”

  Bailey’s heart fell as she visualized the paper being thrown out with an old woman’s effects. “Oh, thank you,” she said, looking at Matt and trying not to let her disappointment show. “I think we’ve taken enough of your time. We’d better go now.”

  “Yes, I am tired,” Burgess said, “but a good tired. I feel lighter now.”

  Bailey gathered her things and prepared to leave, but she couldn’t resist one last question. “Why did you marry Violet, then leave her?”

  “A lot of reasons. I had some friends in California, and one of them lived out in the country. He said, ‘Burg, how long has it been since you were laid?’ Next thing I knew, he was calling some prostitute he said was the best he’d ever had. It sounded good to me until he started talking about watching, and that’s when I left. I was two miles away when I saw this girl stopped by the side of the road. Her beat-up old car had broken down, and I instantly knew who she was. I knew that when she got to where she was going, it wasn’t going to be pleasant for her, so I felt a bit guilty, and I stopped to fix her car.

  “The whole time I was working, she was putting on an act about being young and innocent, and how she sang in the church choir back home.

  “But even though I knew she was lying with every breath, I liked her. And, what’s more, I knew that she wanted my life. Not me, exactly, but my life. And that was odd, because not many pretty girls want to marry a lumber salesman and move to some nowhere town.”

  For a moment Burgess paused and smiled. “Besides, I liked the idea of taking a prostitute back to Calburn. It appealed to me to imagine introducing her to my old man as his daughter-in-law. And if Violet and I had kids—” Burgess gave a little smile. “Let’s just say that I was planning to tell my old man some interesting things on his deathbed.”

  “Did you love her?” Bailey asked.

  “Exactly as much as she loved me. And I don’t mean that in a bad way. Violet and I liked each other; we were well matched.”

  “But you faked your death and walked away.”

  “No, I didn’t plan it. The plane crashed and I walked away without a scratch, and as I looked at that wreck, I thought that maybe if I left my life, left that town and those people behind, I could be someone else.”

  “Did it work?” Bailey asked.

  “No.”

  “Because of what happened on the thirtieth of August, 1968?” Matt asked, and that’s when the alarms started screaming again, and this time the doctor pushed them out of the room before they could even say good-bye.

  “I guess that’s that,” Bailey said once they were in the lobby. “I know! Since Frank grew up in a mountain cabin, maybe they used the permission slip to paper the walls, and it’s still there.”

  Matt laughed, then shook his head as though to say that he didn’t know what to try next.

  “Excuse me,” came a voice from behind them. “Mr. Meredith wants you to have this.” The nurse was holding out an address book.

  Bailey took the old, worn-out book and looked questioningly at the nurse.

  She lifted her hands. “Don’t ask me. He just said to give you that.”

  “Thank you,” Bailey said as she walked through the door Matt was holding open for her.

  Once they were outside, she opened the address book and flipped through a few pages. They were all addresses in Florida and looked like mostly business acquaintances.

  “Try the letter M,” Matt said. “For McCallum.”

  Bailey ran her fingers down the letters, then slipped her nail under M. There, at the top of the page, was the name Martha McCallum, and a telephone number.

  Matt had his cell phone out before Bailey could get her breath. She stood in silence, breath held, as Matt asked the person who answered about Martha McCallum.

  “She is?” Matt said. “She’s alive? Lucid? Thank you very much,” he said, then hung up.

  “Where?” Bailey asked.

  “A rest home outside Atlanta.”

  When Bailey started turning around and looking at the buildings around them instead of walking toward their rental car, Matt said, “What are you doing?”

  “Looking for the nearest travel agent.”

  He grinned. “We have like minds. Remind me that when this is over I’m to tell you that I love you.”

  Bailey didn’t pause as she started for the car, but her heart was pounding in her ears. “Okay, I’ll remind you.”

  Twenty-eight

  Matt’s cell phone rang at three A.M. He and Bailey were in a hotel in Sarasota, and booked on an early-morning flight to Atlanta. They couldn’t get seats together, and they’d had to pay a lot to book a flight just hours before it left, but they were going.

  When the phone rang so early, Matt was sure it was bad news, and when he flipped the cover open and saw that it was his brother calling, he knew it was very bad. Quietly he got out of bed and took the phone into the bathroom. “What’s happened?” he said into the receiver as he shut the door. He had to resist an urge to say, Who has something bad happened to?

  “Alex has been arrested,” Rick said. His voice was calm, but Matt knew his brother was very upset.

  “What for?” Matt asked. “Speeding? DUI? Why the hell did you allow a kid that young out so late? You know he’s—”

  “Murder,” Rick said. “Alex has been arrested for murder.”

  Matt sat down on the side of the tub. “Tell me,” he whispered, as he imagined Alex in a barroom fight over a girl.

  “Have you ever heard of a woman named Dolores Carruthers?” Rick asked.

  Matt was sure his heart was going to stop. “Yes,” he managed to get out.

  “She was murdered yesterday, and the police say Alex’s prints are all over her house. And she had skin under her nails, and Matt, the boy has deep scratches on his back. If the DNA matches—” Rick took a breath. “What the hell was he doing with her anyway? She’s forty-one, and Alex is seventeen.”

  Matt ran his hand over his face. This was all his fault. If Alex was convicted—

  “Are you there?” Rick said.

  “Yeah, I’m here.”

  “Who is this woman?”

  “Bailey’s sister,” Matt said.

  Rick didn’t say anything for a while. “This is bad, isn’t it? And you’re involved in it, aren’t you?”

  “Up to my neck.”

  “Is Bailey James Manville
’s widow?” Rick asked softly.

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, God, Matt, the police are looking for her too. I told them we’d never met the woman. They showed us a picture of her, and I—”

  When he broke off, Matt said, “You what?”

  “Now I understand. Patsy saw the photo, too, but she didn’t say anything. She let me tell the police that ‘we’ had never seen the woman before. But after the police left, after they took Alex away, Patsy said, ‘I have to go see Janice.’ You know she’s not said Janice’s name in umpteen years, and all I thought was, Good, maybe this mess will make them stop that stupid feud of theirs. But—”

  “She saw that Lillian Manville was Bailey.”

  “Yeah, I think so,” Rick said. “Where are you two?”

  “In Sarasota. We—”

  “Florida?!” Rick said. “But that’s where the woman who was murdered lives. Do you mean to say that you and Bailey were in the same state when she was killed? Does Bailey have a reason to kill her sister?”

  “There was a lot of hatred and billions involved. Think that’s reason enough?”

  Rick’s voice lowered. “Do you think you and Bailey could be called co-conspirators in this murder?”

  Matt took a deep breath. “Yes, I think that’s not only probable, that’s likely.”

  “Matt . . . ” Rick said, and he sounded as he did when he was a child asking his big brother to protect him, to shield him.

  “All right,” Matt said, “just stay calm. Say as little as possible. Bailey and I are flying out of here this morning. There’s someone we need to see, and she might have some answers about why these murders have happened.”

  “Murders?” Rick said, his voice rising. “Plural? As in more than one?”

  “I’ll explain everything later. Listen, I’m going to shut this phone off, so you can give the number to the police, and you can honestly say that I didn’t tell you where we’re going or who we’re going to see. Remember that: you know nothing.”

  “Okay,” Rick said, sounding six years old again. “But why did James Manville’s widow come here to Calburn? What—”