The Mulberry Tree Read online

  When nothing happened, she opened one eye. He was grinning at her!

  “Well, now, so you’ve come to meet me and ask me about the good times.”

  “I came to meet—” She was going to say that she’d come to meet the beautiful Rodney Yates, but from the way the man was looking at her, and from what he’d said . . . But this ugly old man couldn’t possibly be . . .

  He was watching her, and he’d lowered the shotgun only about an inch.

  “You,” Bailey said. “Yes, I came to meet you. You’re Rodney, aren’t you? You look . . . a . . . Well, you look just like all your pictures.” Bailey was sure that a lie of that magnitude was going to get her shot, but instead the man grinned more broadly, reached out, put his arm around her shoulder, and pulled her out of the car. Bailey almost gagged. His breath was foul, and the hand on her shoulder had half-inch-long fingernails with what looked to be years of dirt under them.

  She wanted to get back into her car and get away from this awful place and this dirty man as fast as she could.

  “You’re sure pretty,” he said, and his hand began to run up and down Bailey’s arm as he pulled her closer. “Hey! Wait a minute. You aren’t here to do to us what that other one did, are you?”

  Bailey had to piece that together. “Oh, you mean Congresswoman Spangler.”

  “Congress, ha!” Rodney said, then spit a glob on the ground about an inch from Bailey’s foot.

  “No, I’m not,” she answered.

  He grinned again, exposing teeth that hadn’t been brushed in years. “Then you come on in, and I’ll show you about that old hag, and I’ll tell you what she did.”

  They were at the foot of the stairs up to the porch of the cabin now, and the house was dirtier than any place she’d ever seen in her life. How could people live like this? she wondered.

  Rodney held her tighter as they went up the stairs, and Bailey could feel her body getting stiffer by the moment. “Here, now, watch that step. It’s a little bit broken, and I’ve been meanin’ to fix it, but I been real busy lately.”

  Bailey looked down to see a rotten board that had probably been there since the 1930s, and just managed to step over it. When she nearly lost her balance, Rodney took the opportunity to run his fingertips across the side of her breast. Bailey thought maybe she was going to be sick.

  The inside of the cabin was worse than the outside. They stepped into a room furnished with dirty, broken old chairs and a couch with half of its legs missing, making it about four inches higher on one side than the other. “Have a seat,” Rodney said, and there was a leer in his voice. He was motioning to the high end of the couch. If she sat on that end, she’d slide down to the low end, probably where he planned to sit.

  “I’ll, uh . . . ” She looked around. There was a small wooden chair to one side. “I better take this one,” she said as she moved it opposite the couch. “Bad back. I need the support.”

  “You know what the cure for a bad back is, don’t you?” Rodney said, putting his face near hers, and she had to work to keep from moving away from his foul breath. “You need more exercise. You know what I mean? More of the ol’ . . . ” He made a circle with the finger and thumb on one hand and stuck his index finger of the other hand through the circle.

  You owe me, James Manville, Bailey thought as she gave Rodney a weak smile that she hoped wouldn’t show her revulsion.

  Rodney bent over her and ran his hand down her arm. When it started to stray toward her breast, she twisted her shoulder.

  Smiling, Rodney stood up. “What you need is a little drink.”

  “No, thank you. I just—”

  “You’re refusin’ my hospitality?” he said, all humor gone from his face.

  “No, I just—”

  “Well, good then, we’ll have a little drink, then you and me can spend the rest of the day . . . talkin’.” He wiggled his eyebrows at the last word as though he knew she wanted to spend the day doing something else with him.

  Bailey was sure she was going to be ill, and if the man weren’t still holding a shotgun, she’d have left.

  The next moment she nearly fell out of the chair when Rodney bellowed, “Woman! Get out here. Can’t you see we got company?”

  There were two doors out of the room they were in, one open and one closed. Through the open door, Bailey could see a dirty, rumpled bed. The closed door opened a bit, and the pale face of a girl who looked about thirteen or fourteen peeped through.

  “Out!” Rodney shouted, and the girl stepped into the room.

  Bailey was shocked to see that she was heavily pregnant. She didn’t look old enough to be out of elementary school, much less having a baby.

  Bailey looked up to see Rodney watching her, and there was pride on his face. “Mine,” he said smugly. “I’m good at makin’ babies. You got any?”

  Bailey could hardly take her eyes off the girl, who was looking down at the floor and awaiting orders.

  “You got any?” Rodney said louder.

  “Any? Oh. You mean babies. No, I don’t have any children.”

  “Well, maybe I can help you,” Rodney said. “Maybe you and me—”

  The door behind the pregnant girl slammed open, and out stepped a beautiful girl of about fifteen. She had on a worn-out dress, but it was clean, and her blonde hair was clean and tidy.

  “She don’t want any of your kids, and if you touch her, the cops’ll be out here again,” she said as she handed Rodney a can of beer.

  “Nobody asked you,” Rodney snapped. “And where’s her drink?”

  “She don’t want a can of warm beer at ten o’clock in the mornin’. Do you, miss?”

  Bailey gave both of them a weak smile. “I really just wanted to ask a few questions.”

  “About the Golden Six?” the girl asked, and there was so much derision in her voice that Bailey was taken aback. “About the glory days when he wasn’t a bum and worthless?”

  “Get out of here!” Rodney shouted. “Leave me and my visitor alone.”

  The girl didn’t so much as blink at the order, or at the volume at which it was delivered. “You leave her alone, you hear me?” She turned to Bailey. “He touches you, and you call out, you hear?”

  Bailey could do nothing but silently nod.

  “So go ahead and ask him your questions. He knows all about those six boys, and he’ll talk all day if you’ll sit and listen. His life stopped on the day Frank McCallum died.”

  With that she put her arm tenderly around the pregnant girl’s shoulders, led her from the room, and closed the door behind them.

  “Don’t pay her no mind,” Rodney said as soon as the door closed. “You’d think a daughter’d have more respect for her father than that girl does for me. The other one, the young one, she’s my wife.” He looked at Bailey. “Now you just ask me all you want.” He gave her a threatening look. “Unless you’re writin’ another book that’s bad about us.”

  “No, I promise I’m not writing a book of any kind. I . . . ” She couldn’t think of a lie quick enough to explain why she wanted to know about him. And, truthfully, at this moment she couldn’t remember why she was there.

  “That other one, that Spangler woman, she was eaten up with jealousy, and jealousy is a real strong emotion. I never felt it myself ’cause I never had reason to be jealous of any man, if you know what I mean. I had more than my share, so I didn’t need to want what somebody else had.”

  He looked at Bailey as though he expected her to tell him that he was still a fine-looking man.

  “Did you know a boy who had a harelip?” she blurted out.

  “A couple. You wanta see a picture of that T. L. Spangler?”

  No, not really, Bailey wanted to say, but she just gave him a tiny smile.

  Rodney put down his shotgun—at last—and went to an old cabinet in one corner. The upper half of the cabinet had doors that were about to come off their hinges, but the bottom doors had a big padlock on them. Rodney reached into his pocket and