The Mulberry Tree Read online

  Lord! but the woman could cook!

  He was halfway through the plate when he again began to wonder where she was. On impulse, he opened the door to the big pantry off the kitchen, then drew in his breath. Yesterday the room had been empty, but tonight there were many jars on the shelves, all filled and labeled. Stepping inside, he ran his hand along them. On the shelf under the window was a big glass jar filled with cherries, looking as though they’d just been picked and swimming in a clear liquid. “Cherry Cordial,” the label said in her neat lettering. On the shelves against the wall were jars filled with a dark liquid and labeled “Blackberry Liqueur.” There were jars of carrots surrounded by whole spices and a rich-looking liquid. “Jam,” “Conserves,” “Green Tomato Chutney,” he read.

  Matt backed out of the pantry, unable to comprehend what he was seeing. It was Pioneer Woman meets Julia Child.

  In the kitchen again, he finished his plate of food, then removed the bowl from the oven and took off the foil. It was bread pudding, one of his favorite things in the world. There were fat raisins in the bread, and a warm, custardy sauce floated on top. He took one bite and thought he might swoon, then laughed at himself for thinking of the old-fashioned word. Would he have to be revived with cherry cordial?

  With his bowl full of pudding in his hand, he pushed open the screen door and went outside. It was early in the year yet, but soon it was going to get hot. He looked up at the mulberry tree. “Know where she is?” he asked, then smiled when a breeze blew the leaves and they seemed to point down the path. Looking through shrubs and low-hanging tree branches, Matt could see a bit of yellow near the fishpond. Bailey’s shirt.

  “Thank you,” Matt said, smiling up at the old tree as he followed the twists and turns of the stone path down, and there was Bailey, bent over an empty raised bed. She was planting some little green things she pulled from a bunch.

  For a moment he didn’t say anything, just stood behind her and watched her work. She was a very desirable woman. Very. But not in the way that most people would think of as “desirable.” There was something about her that made him feel good. She wasn’t the kind of woman that would make a man go wild with lust. No, she was the kind of woman that made a man think of quiet evenings in front of a fireplace. She made him think of coming home from work and telling her everything that had happened. She made him think of . . . well, of kids and catching fireflies in jars, and of grabbing her and them and rolling down the hill on the grass.

  Matt had never liked to tell anyone his innermost feelings, so he couldn’t tell Patsy that he had to go slow with this woman, because this woman was too important to make a wrong move with.

  “Dinner was delicious,” he said softly, and was pleased to see that the unexpected sound of his voice didn’t make her jump.

  “Glad you liked it,” she said. “You probably know that Mr. Shelby raises catfish in a big tank in back of his house.”

  Matt sat down on the grass not far from her and noted that somebody was going to need to mow the big lawn and the patches of grass here and there. He thought he’d better do some research on lawn mowers. “I can’t say that anyone around here knows much about Shelby. The shotgun tends to keep people away.” He noticed that she started to say something, but didn’t, then turned back to her planting. “What are you planting?”

  “Strawberries. I got the sets from Mr. Shelby. Everbearing over there and June-bearing in this bed.”

  “What’s the difference?” he asked.

  She didn’t look up. “Take a guess.”

  Matt laughed. “Let’s see, those bear strawberries all season, and those just produce berries in June. So how’d I do, Teach?”

  “Perfect.” She moved on to the next row. “And before you ask, canners want all the berries to be ripe at once, so we can make great vats of preserves.”

  “So where’d you learn to make all that—” He waved his hand in the general direction of the house.

  “As a kid. My grandmother canned out of necessity, and I do it because I like to.”

  He waited for her to say more, but when she didn’t, he sat there and watched her. He didn’t know her very well, but she seemed to be thinking hard about something. “Did Violet tell you something that upset you?”

  Bailey sat back on her heels and wiped mud off her hands. “I guess I’ll have to get used to small-town ways again. So everyone knows that I went to see Violet Honeycutt?”

  “I’m sure they do. But I take it you weren’t there to buy grass, although her stuff is good. The best I’ve ever—I mean, I’ve heard—” He gave her a crooked smile and filled his mouth with the last bite of the pudding.

  Smiling, Bailey moved to another place, bent forward, and began planting again. “Did you know that a man hanged himself in my barn?”

  “Yes,” Matt said softly. “It’s not going to spook you, is it?” And make you move away, he wanted to add but didn’t.

  “No,” she said, “but I keep thinking about that poor, unhappy man. I know how he feels. He loved the soil and what it produces. But then to have it taken away from him . . . ” She paused. “Poor man.”

  “Yeah, there’s been lots of tragedy in Calburn.”

  “Oh, yes, I got an earful of your Calburn Six.”

  “Golden Six,” Matt corrected automatically.

  “There!” Bailey said, turning quickly to look at him. “There it is again.”

  “What?” he asked. “There what is again?”

  “That tone of voice. Have those boys been canonized? At the hairdresser’s—no, it’s the beauty parlor, I’ve been told—I thought Opal was going to accuse me of heresy for not knowing about the Golden Six. Were those boys that important?”

  Matt almost said, To me they were, but he didn’t. “People in Calburn have become suspicious. They’re afraid of what outsiders will say about the town. That book, The Golden Six, hurt Calburn. It didn’t sell well, but it got some attention from the critics when it came out, and for a while Calburn had some tourists here asking questions.”

  “It seems sad that anyone would write about such tragedy.”

  “Yes and no,” he said. “I guess it depends on how you look at all of it. In Calburn, people tend to think that they were six magnificent young men, but their luck changed.”

  “And the other side of it is?”

  “That it was all a hoax made up by some imaginative boys. Whatever the truth, for a while, everything they touched seemed to turn to gold, but after graduation, it seems that their luck ran out. Or maybe their luck was attached to Calburn.”

  “But I thought they all lived here.”

  “Some did; some went away. But they were all in Calburn in the summer of 1968 when Frank killed his wife and then himself.”

  “Do people know why he did such a thing?”

  “More or less. He’d been in a car wreck four years before and lost the use of his right arm. For about three years afterward, he was out of work, but finally he got a job as a night security guard and seemed to be doing all right, but . . . ”

  “Violet said his wife was pregnant.”

  “Yes. The autopsy showed that she was. Everyone guessed from that that maybe it wasn’t Frank’s child. He was a proud man, so maybe he didn’t want the humiliation.”

  “So he shot her, then himself.”

  He didn’t answer her redundant question. Instead, he looked at her. “Why are you so interested?”

  “I’m not. I mean, that sounds callous, but I wasn’t interested in them at all. Actually, I was asking Violet about this farm, about who owned it, that sort of thing. Opal sent me to Violet, and I was told about the Golden Six.”

  “Opal hates Violet. She wouldn’t have sent you to her,” he said.

  “Right. Sorry. Her daughter Carla told me. Or rather wrote me a note. Why does Opal hate Violet?”

  Now that they were on a different subject, Matt relaxed again and leaned back on his arms. “Violet didn’t always look like she does now.”