The Mulberry Tree Read online

  “What do you mean that he’s left it all to them? All what?” I asked Phillip. I wanted to think about anything other than what my life was going to be like without Jimmie.

  “I mean that James willed all his stocks, his houses, real estate around the world, the airlines, all of it to your brother and sister-in-law.”

  Since I hated each and every one of the houses that Jimmie had purchased, I couldn’t comprehend what was so bad about this. “Too much glass and steel for my taste,” I said, giving Phillip a bit of a smile.

  Phillip glared at me. “Lillian, this is serious, and James is no longer here to protect you—and I don’t have the power to do anything. I don’t know why he did it, Lord knows I tried to talk him out of it, but he said that he was giving you what you needed. That’s all I could get out of him.”

  Phillip stood up, then took a moment to regain his calm. Jimmie said that what he liked about Phillip was that nothing on earth could upset him. But this had.

  I tried to get the picture of my future out of my head, tried to stop thinking about a life without Jimmie’s laughter and his big shoulders to protect me, and looked up at Phillip expectantly. “Are you saying that I’m destitute?” I tried not to smile. The jewelry that Jimmie had given me over the years was worth millions.

  Phillip took a deep breath. “More or less. He’s left you a farm in Virginia.”

  “There, then, that’s something,” I said, then I took the humor out of my voice and waited for him to continue.

  “It was a breach of ethics, but after I wrote the will for him, I sent someone down to Virginia to look at the place. It’s . . . not much. It’s—” He turned away for a moment, and I thought I heard him mutter, “Bastard,” but I didn’t want to hear that, so I ignored him. When he turned back to me, his face was businesslike. He looked at his watch, a watch that I knew Jimmie had given him; it cost over twenty thousand dollars. I owned a smaller version of it.

  “Did you do anything to him?” Phillip asked softly. “Another man maybe?”

  I couldn’t stop my little snort of derision, and my answer was just to look at Phillip. Women in harems weren’t kept under tighter lock and key than James Manville’s wife.

  “All right,” Phillip said, “I’ve had months to try to figure this out, and I haven’t come close, so I’m going to give up. When James’s will is read, all hell is going to break loose. Atlanta and Ray are going to get it all, and what you get is a farmhouse in Virginia and fifty grand—a pittance.” He narrowed his eyes at me. “But the one thing I can do is see that you receive as much as you and I can buy between now and the moment that James’s death is announced to the public.”

  It was hearing those words, “James’s death,” that almost did me in.

  “No, you don’t,” Phillip said as he grabbed my arm and pulled me upright. “You don’t have time for grief or self-pity right now. You have to get dressed. The store manager is waiting.”

  At five-thirty on that cold spring morning, I was pushed inside a huge department store and told that I was to buy what I needed for a farmhouse in Virginia. Phillip said the man he sent couldn’t see inside the house, so I didn’t even know how many bedrooms it had. The sleepy store manager who’d been roused from bed to open the store for James Manville’s wife dutifully followed Phillip and me about and noted down what I pointed at.

  It all seemed so unreal. I couldn’t believe any of it was happening, and a part of me, the still-in-shock part, couldn’t wait to tell Jimmie this story. How he’d laugh at it! I’d exaggerate every moment of it, and the more he’d laugh, the more flamboyant my story would become. “So there I was, half asleep, being asked which couch I wanted to buy,” I’d say. “ ‘Couch?’ the little man asked, yawning. ‘What’s a couch?’ ”

  But there was not going to be any storytelling with Jimmie, for I was never going to see Jimmie alive again.

  I did as I was told, though, and I chose furniture, cookware, linens, and even appliances for a house that I had never seen. But it all seemed so ridiculous. Jimmie had houses full of furniture, most of it custom-made, and there were great, enormous kitchens full of every imaginable piece of cooking gear.

  At seven, when Phillip was driving me back to the house, he reached into the back of his car and picked up a brochure. “I bought you a car,” he said, handing me a glossy photo of a four-wheel-drive Toyota.

  I was beginning to wake up, and I was beginning to feel pain. Everything seemed so odd; my world was turning upside down. Why was Phillip driving a car himself? He usually used one of Jimmie’s cars and a driver.

  “You can’t take the jewelry,” Phillip was saying. “Each piece has been itemized and insured. You may take your clothing, but even at that I think that Atlanta may give you some problems. She’s your size.”

  “My size,” I whispered. “Take my clothes.”

  “You can fight it all, of course,” Phillip was saying. “But something’s wrong. About six months ago, Atlanta hinted that she knew some big secret about you.”

  Phillip looked at me out of the corner of his eye. I knew he was again asking me if there were other men in my life. But when? I wondered. Jimmie didn’t like to be alone, not even for a second, and he made sure I was never alone. “ ’Fraid the bogeyman will get me,” he said, kissing my nose, when I asked him why he avoided solitude so diligently. Jimmie rarely—no, Jimmie never gave straight answers to personal questions. He lived in the here and now; he lived in the world around him, not inside his head. He wasn’t one for pondering why people were the way they were; he accepted them, and liked them or didn’t.

  “I was a virgin when I met him,” I said softly to Phillip, “and there’s only been Jimmie.” But I looked away when I said it, for I knew that there was a secret between Jimmie and me. Only I knew it, though. Atlanta couldn’t know—could she?

  But she did.

  By eight, my comfortable, safe world as I knew it had collapsed. I don’t know how Atlanta heard about Jimmie’s plane going down so soon after it happened, but she had. And in the time between when Atlanta was told and the press heard of Jimmie’s death, she had accomplished more than in all the other forty-eight years of her life combined.

  When Phillip and I returned from our crazy shopping expedition, we were greeted at the front door of what I’d thought of as my house by men carrying guns, and I was told I wasn’t allowed to enter. I was told that, as Jimmie’s only surviving relatives, Atlanta and Ray now owned everything.

  When Phillip and I got back into the car, he was shaking his head in wonder. “How did they find out about the will? How did she know James left it all to them? Look, Lillian,” he said, and I noted that up until Jimmie’s death, he’d always called me Mrs. Manville, “I don’t know how she found out, but I’ll find the culprit who told and . . . and . . . ” Obviously, he couldn’t think of anything horrible enough to do to someone on his staff who’d leaked the contents of Jimmie’s will. “We’ll fight this. You’re his wife, and you have been for many years. You and I will—”

  “I was seventeen when I married him,” I said quietly. “And I didn’t have my mother’s permission.”

  “Oh, my God,” Phillip said, then he opened his mouth to begin what I assumed was going to be a lecture on my irresponsibility. But he closed it again, and rightfully so. What good would it do to lecture me now that Jimmie was gone?

  The next weeks were horrible beyond anything I’d ever imagined. Atlanta was on TV just hours after Jimmie’s death, telling the press that she was going to fight “that woman” who had so enslaved her beloved brother for all those years. “I’m going to see that she gets everything she deserves.”

  It didn’t matter to Atlanta that Jimmie’s will stated I was to get nothing. Not even the farmhouse was mentioned in the will. No, Atlanta was out to avenge all the things she imagined I’d done to her over the years. She didn’t just want money; she wanted me humiliated.

  Yes, of course she’d found out that my marriage to Jimmie h