The Mulberry Tree Read online

  Bailey grimaced when she read that. There was no mention that his wife was having an adulterous affair and had ordered her husband to get out.

  She continued reading.

  Also on the night of Frank McCallum’s death, one of the Golden Six left town and hasn’t been seen since. It was revealed at McCallum’s funeral that Mrs. Kyle Longacre had managed to keep her husband’s disappearance a secret for three days. But when Kyle Longacre did not attend his friend’s funeral, wasn’t there to be a pallbearer, the town knew that something was wrong. A man like Kyle Longacre would not have missed his longtime friend’s funeral unless something was badly amiss.

  This reporter was told by an anonymous, but reliable, source that Mrs. Longacre is the daughter of the socially prominent Winfield family of Philadelphia. However, there has been no contact with her elite family since Mrs. Longacre quit college just months before she was to graduate to marry the charismatic Kyle Longacre. The same source told this reporter, “I guess they didn’t think that a son of Stanley Longacre was good enough for their family.” Longtime residents of Calburn will remember that Kyle Longacre’s father was the wealthiest man in several counties before he lost everything in 1958, and drove his car off a cliff, with his wife of thirty years in the car beside him. Their grave marker reads “Together in death as well as in life.”

  Due to the financial reverses, Kyle was forced to leave his prestigious northern university before he graduated. He returned to his hometown of Calburn and began to make a living as a traveling salesman. Soon after he returned home, the young society lady he’d met at school defied her family, married Kyle, and lived in Calburn with her husband, whose work kept him away for much of their married life.

  But that great romance seems to have ended just three days ago. This reporter was told that Kyle Longacre wrote a note to his wife—the contents of which she would not reveal—then left town. He leaves behind his wife and two young children, Matthew, aged five, and Richard, three. When questioned, Mrs. Longacre said that she planned to take her children and go home to her family in Philadelphia.

  Bailey leaned back in her chair. Matt’s mother hadn’t gone home, or if she had, she’d returned to Calburn. What happened? Bailey wondered. Had Matt’s mother appeared on her family’s doorstep, her two young boys with her, and been refused entrance?

  That poor woman, Bailey thought. Her family had disowned her for marrying the man she loved; then they’d kept to their word even when she’d been abandoned.

  And poor Matt, Bailey thought. All his life he’d been fighting to regain what should have been his.

  Bailey rummaged in her bag for a notebook and a pen. At the top of a page she wrote: “30 August 1968,” then she began to make a list.

  Gus Venters hanged himself

  Frank and his wife—murder-suicide

  Matt’s father left town forever

  Jimmie’s birthday—1959

  Bailey put down her pen. But was that the date of Jimmie’s birthday?

  Jimmie hated clairvoyants and anything to do with fortune-telling. Bailey had lived with him for years before she understood that it wasn’t that he didn’t believe in them; it was that he feared what they might see. At a dinner party a woman, minor aristocracy, had happened to be an amateur astrologer. She’d asked Bailey when Jimmie’s birthday was. But when Bailey said it was August 30, the woman had said, “I don’t think so. He’s not a Virgo. No, James Manville is anything but a Virgo. Can you get me the true time and place of his birth?” she’d asked. “I’ll do a chart for him.”

  Bailey hadn’t told Jimmie what the woman had said, and she certainly hadn’t asked him where and when he was born—she knew she’d receive no truthful answer. And, worse, he’d wheedle it out of her who had asked such a question. Then, Bailey knew, she’d never see the astrologer again, and she rather liked the woman. “Don’t mention your . . . hobby to anyone here,” Bailey said quietly, and the woman had nodded in understanding.

  Now Bailey remembered looking up once to see Jimmie staring at her intensely, as though he was trying to read his wife’s interest in the old woman, who was wearing enough fake diamonds to fell a smaller person. That night, Jimmie had asked her what she’d found so interesting about the woman, and Bailey had chattered inanely about finding her so very interesting because she’d traveled all over the world. Jimmie had looked at his wife with one eyebrow raised, and she knew he’d known she was lying. But she stood her ground and didn’t tell him the truth. That was the last time she ever saw the countess.

  What Bailey remembered most strongly about the astrologer was that she had said she’d stake her life on a bet that James Manville had not been born on the thirtieth of August.

  Now Bailey looked at her watch. It was after three, and if she was going to get home to make Matt’s dinner, she’d better leave. But as she reached for the wheel to rewind the film, she saw a note at the bottom of the article: “See reprint of original story starting on page B2.”

  There was no way on earth that she could resist turning the film to the second page of the second section of the newspaper.

  The truth was, until today the whole idea of a group of high school boys who were called the Golden Six had seemed like a joke, some local event that had happened long ago and far away. She hadn’t even been interested enough to read the book Violet had given her. Until today, she didn’t think she knew anyone who had a connection to the young men. Now she’d learned that Janice’s father was one of them, and so was Matt’s. Why did Matt’s father abandon his wife and two children? Was Kyle Longacre so devastated over the murder-suicide of his childhood friend that he could no longer bear his hometown?

  Bailey read the story of what had happened in 1953, the event that had given the boys the name of the Golden Six, and by the time she finished, she had to admit that what those boys did had been pretty heroic.

  The first part of the article recounted the story Violet had told her, about the fire at the high school and the students being bused to Wells Creek.

  But the reporter hadn’t just reported. She’d spent some time researching, and she’d interviewed several people, so she was able to present not just the facts but a story. She told how the parents of Calburn had so driven the school board crazy about which schools they wanted their children bused to that in the end, all the students’ names had been put into a hat and drawn out. It was because of this random assignment that all girls were sent to one school while another received only two girls. And it was because of the drawing that six boys who had grown up in the same town but not really known each other came to be together.

  The reporter told a little about each boy, and although she tactfully never said that the boys came from different social classes, it was definitely implied. She said that the boys were from such different backgrounds that they never would have become friends if they hadn’t been isolated together.

  There was Thaddeus Overlander, a studious boy with born-again Christian parents. “Taddy” had never been allowed to attend so much as a basketball game at Calburn, much less participate in a social life. Frederick Burgess, called “Burgess” by all, was an athlete, a great hulk of a boy, who found studies “difficult.” Harper Kirkland lived alone with his mother, the last of the family that had founded Calburn and, according to the reporter, had once owned it all. But Harper’s grandfather had sold the land off bit by bit, then frittered away the money until all the Kirkland family owned now was the small Calburn newspaper.

  Frank McCallum and Rodney Yates were cousins, raised in the mountains of Virginia in a hardscrabble existence. They were attending high school in Calburn because they were staying with one of Rodney’s seven brothers, a young man who’d quit school when he was in the sixth grade. Rodney and Frank had wanted to do better for themselves, though, so they were determined to finish school.

  The reporter described Frank as a persuasive speaker who had a part-time job selling ads for the newspaper.

  “And one has only to