The Mulberry Tree Read online

  “Right,” Matt said, smiling.

  “And this one has to be Rodney . . . Roddy. Heavens! But he was beautiful.”

  “Yeah. Right after high school he went out to Hollywood for a couple of years, but he couldn’t act. Or maybe he had too much competition. Whatever, he came back here.”

  “Like Frank did,” Bailey said.

  “Did you finally read that book on your bedside table? The one Violet gave you?”

  “How—” She put up her hand. “No, don’t tell me how you know what’s in my bedroom and who gave me what. But, no, I haven’t read that book yet. I spent the afternoon in the Ridgeway library, reading the newspaper accounts.”

  “Ah.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “It means that you haven’t heard all the story, not if you’ve only read what was in the newspapers.” He nodded toward the photo in her hand. “So, go on, tell me who is who in that picture.”

  “Frank must be the skinny one on the end. Is that a cigarette in his hand?”

  “Unfiltered. But are you sure he isn’t Taddy?”

  “No, Taddy is the tall one on the other end, the one who looks scared.”

  “You’re not bad at this, are you?”

  “And Burgess is the big one squatting down in front.” She lifted the photo higher and looked hard at the young man standing beside Kyle. Harper Kirkland was short, thin, and as cute as a cherub on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. He reminded her of someone, but she couldn’t think who. “What happened to them?”

  Matt took the photo from her and put it on the table beside the other one. Inside the box were folded pieces of paper; he kept each photo in its own little envelope to prevent scratching.

  “Burgess ran his father’s lumber business for years, went bankrupt, and died when the plane he was piloting crashed. I think it was 1982 or 1983. Rodney married a couple of times and had a lot of kids. Taddy taught science at Calburn High until it closed, then died of a heart attack two years later. He never married. Frank and my father, you know about.”

  “What about Harper?”

  Matt hesitated before answering. “He was one of America’s first victims of AIDS.”

  “I see,” she said, then bent forward and looked at the photo again. “Sal Mineo. Remember him? That’s who he looks like.” She looked back at the photo. “If those kids at Welborn had known that about him, his life probably wouldn’t have been worth much.”

  Matt handed her another photo. This one was of a smiling, laughing young couple. He was wearing a school letter sweater, and she had on a big circle skirt and a tight sweater with a fuzzy little collar. They looked like actors in a stage presentation of Grease.

  “Your parents?”

  “Yes,” Matt said softly. “That was them in the days before my grandfather went bankrupt, before he drove his car over a cliff and took my grandmother with him.”

  The bitterness in Matt’s voice made Bailey shiver. “They look so much in love,” she said, holding the photo. “Look at her eyes! She’s looking at him as though she’d—” She broke off.

  “As though she’d follow him anywhere?” Matt asked, his voice sarcastic. “She did follow him. But years later he left town and never came back. He left the woman who loved him more than life with two young children to support, and much too proud to ask her parents for help.”

  “How did your family survive?”

  Matt leaned back against the sofa, and for a moment he didn’t speak. “I remember a childhood of work,” he said softly. “That’s all there seemed to be. My mother ran the local grocery store for a tightfisted old bastard, and she left us in the care of a slovenly old woman who watched soaps on TV and ignored my brother and me.”

  Matt took a breath to calm himself. “I did my best to see that my little brother was fed and kept safe. I was a big kid, so I started mowing lawns for money when I was nine. On the day my father walked out on us, I was transformed from a child into a man. He took his high school medals, wrote a note to his wife, then left.”

  When Matt looked at Bailey, his eyes were black with anger. “You know what the note said?” He didn’t wait for her answer. “ ‘Forgive me.’ That’s all he wrote. Just two words.”

  “But you didn’t forgive him, did you?”

  “No. When a man makes a bargain, he stands by it.”

  “As you did with Cassandra?”

  “Right. Until her actions let me out, I stayed. I’d made the vows, and I meant them.”

  “Your mother never contacted her parents?”

  “No. Too much pride.” He smiled. “And don’t look at me like that. I know that I inherited her pride. Patsy’s told me often enough. But my mom wouldn’t take money from her parents, and she never took any money from me. I worked all through school, every minute I could, and I saved every penny of it. My mother said she wanted me to go to college. She said that school was the only way that I wouldn’t end up like her, and saying that was the closest she ever came to complaining.”

  “I wish I could have met her,” Bailey said. “But if I had been in the same situation, I would have complained, and I would have gone to my father on my knees and begged him for help.”

  Matt looked at her with raised eyebrows. “Oh? Now why don’t I think that’s true? Why do I have the impression that maybe, possibly, you have more pride than my mother and me put together?”

  Bailey looked away. He saw too much. “Did your mother see you graduate from college?”

  “No. She died the year Rick was a senior in high school, and six months later he married Patsy. Rick said he wasn’t like me, that he didn’t have my drive, and he couldn’t bear to live alone. He said Patsy would give him someone to live for. He was smarter than I was. He knew what was good for him, and he went after it. He’s been very happy with Pat and the kids.”

  “But not you. You haven’t been happy.”

  “No, not me. I’ve always felt that something was missing from my life, that there was a big empty place inside me.”

  “Did you ever find out where your father went, or why?”

  “A few years ago, I received a package. A woman who owned a boardinghouse in Baltimore sent it, and she wrote that her boarder said that if he died, she was to mail me the package.”

  “Let me guess. It was from your father.”

  “Yes. All his high school medals, the ones he’d taken with him, were inside. There was no note, nothing but the medals. At the time I was too involved in my own life to do anything more than mutter, ‘The bastard,’ and toss the whole box into the top of the closet. But later, during the divorce, when everything was being separated, I found the box and dropped it into my suitcase.”

  “A suitcase that you’d packed for going home to Calburn.”

  “Yes. I think it was in my mind that I needed to figure out where to go from here, and Calburn, home, was where I needed to figure it out.”

  “And have you found out anything so far?” Bailey asked softly.

  “The truth is that I’d like to know what happened to my father. I grew up hating him and knowing I would never have done what he did, but I’m older now, and I’ve realized that people don’t live by their brains alone.”

  “Right,” Bailey said. “People live by their emotions. Their emotions can drive them to do all manner of extraordinary things.”

  “Speaking from experience?” Matt asked, his eyes twinkling, obviously trying to lighten the mood. “What do you say that we go see a movie? How about if we do something normal for a change?”

  “That sounds nice,” Bailey said as she watched Matt put the photos back into the box. But as he lifted the folded papers to straighten them, one fell to the floor, and Bailey reached down to pick it up. He hadn’t shown her all the photos in the box, and she wondered why. Did he have secrets, just as she did?

  The photo she picked up was of two teenagers, a boy and a girl, both of them pudgy and sullen-looking. They were wearing ill-fitting clothes, and the boy had a complex