The Mulberry Tree Read online

  “No!” the young man shouted. “Go down the mountain. Over there! That way! Get out of here! When he’s this mad, he’ll kill and ask questions later.”

  Bailey glanced at the narrow path between the trees where the young man was pointing, but she’d have to stop, then turn to reach it. Rodney could easily hit her from the rear. She kept going straight at the truck, gaining speed with every second. One of them had to move, or they were going to smash head-on.

  “Turn! Turn! Turn!” the boy shouted over and over.

  But Bailey didn’t turn. Rodney did. At the last second, he jerked the wheel of his truck to the right and missed hitting her by inches.

  “You’re insane, you know that?” the young man shouted at her.

  Bailey slowed the car and threw it in reverse while it was still rolling. “No. I’ve just spent a lot of my life with a man who knew how to play hardball.” She glanced at him. “You buckled up?”

  The young man grabbed the seat belt and buckled himself in.

  “We’re going down now,” Bailey said as she looked ahead and saw that Rodney was still turning around. She knew that he would come back for her, and this time, even if it cost him his life, he wouldn’t turn away. “You can use the element of surprise only once,” Jimmie had told her. “After that, you need to use brains and skill.”

  “Okay,” she said aloud. “It’s time for brains.”

  “Who are you talking to?”

  Bailey hit a bump that made both their heads hit the ceiling. “Somebody I used to know. What’s your name?”

  “Alex,” he said. “And where did you learn to drive?”

  “I think it was Bermuda.” So far, she’d been going down a meadow, but there was a fence ahead of them, and a boulder in her path. She veered so sharply that they turned on two wheels. “No,” she said. “It was in South Africa. Johannesburg.” There was an old road to her left, and again she turned sharply. “No, that wasn’t it. We were in—” In front of her was a stream with some fairly big rocks in it. If one of them hit the bottom of the car, it could tear out the whole underside, then they’d be stranded.

  Bailey turned right, then left, in midstream and missed the two big rocks. When she got to the other side, she said, “Actually, I think it was—”

  “Tell me later,” Alex said, holding on to the dashboard with both hands and casting sideways looks at her.

  “Do you by any chance know the way down to the highway?”

  “I thought you knew—” Alex began, but stopped. “Okay, slow down. There’s an old road along here somewhere, but it hasn’t been used in years. It’s probably covered with logs. Besides, I think you lost my dad a long way back there.”

  “Your dad?” Bailey said, looking in her rearview mirror.

  “Yeah, he—” Alex’s eyes widened as he glimpsed his father’s truck through the trees. “He knows which way you’re headed, so he’ll cut you off. He’s going to ambush us.”

  Suddenly, Bailey stopped the car, then backed up.

  “What are you doing now?” Alex yelled.

  “I’m going back the way I came. If he’s down there, then I’m going another way.”

  “But you can’t. You made it across that stream once by sheer dumb luck. You can’t do it again.”

  When she had the car straight and aimed down the hillside, she looked at him. “In or out?”

  Alex took a deep breath. “In,” he said as he braced himself.

  In the next second, Bailey floored the accelerator and hit the stream at full speed. And for the second time, she managed to twist the car around the rocks.

  When they were on the other side, Alex said, “I need a drink.”

  “You’re too young to drink,” Bailey snapped.

  “I’m too young to die, but that isn’t going to keep me alive.”

  Bailey jerked the wheel sharply and turned onto the road that she’d come up the mountain on. For a moment she almost relaxed, but then Rodney and his big black truck came roaring out from the trees, and Bailey went down the trail at fifty miles an hour.

  “What the hell did you do to him?” Alex yelled.

  “I don’t know,” she yelled back. “I mentioned Gus and Luke and the mulberry tree, and he went insane.”

  She swerved around a rock and nearly sent Alex through the windshield. “He’s getting closer,” she said as she looked in her rearview mirror.

  “Half a mile. If you can stay in front of him for half a mile, you’ve got it. He can’t drive on the highway. Too many DWIs, among other things. He steps out of these mountains and the sheriff will lock him up forever.”

  “Is there a shorter way out of here?”

  When Alex said nothing, she glanced at him.

  “Where?” she yelled.

  “It’s an old logging road. Impassable. You can’t go that way!”

  “Where?” she shouted again.

  Alex lifted his hand and pointed, and she could see an opening through the trees just ahead of them. “Hold on,” she shouted, then turned the car in a spray of gravel and headed down the old road.

  Alex looked out the back. “He won’t follow us this way. He knows he can’t make it. He knows—Holy shit! He’s right behind us.”

  “Watch your language!” Bailey said as she ran over a four-inch log and sent their heads banging into the ceiling.

  “We’re gonna die any second, and you’re telling me not to cuss?”

  “The Lord is my shepherd,” Bailey said. “I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in—”

  Alex turned to look at what she was seeing. There was a bridge that had been whole the last time he saw it, but now half of it was in the river. The deep, fast-moving river. “—in green pastures. He leadeth me beside the still waters. Yea though I—”

  “—walk through the valley of the shadow of death—”

  The next sound was their screams in unison as the car went flying off the bridge and sailing over the river.

  When the car hit the other side, they landed hard, and for a moment they were both too dazed to comprehend that they had made it, and they were alive.

  Alex recovered first. He looked out the back window and saw his father on the other side of the river, getting out of his truck—with his shotgun.

  Alex looked at Bailey, and Bailey looked at Alex.

  “—I will fear no evil—” they said together, then Bailey pushed on the accelerator, but the car had stopped. She turned the key, but it wouldn’t start. Alex leaned across her and looked at the gauges.

  “Lady, you’re out of gas.”

  Before Bailey could reply, Alex had grabbed her hand and was pulling her across the seat. Hunched down, they ran around the front of the Toyota, and stayed there until they heard two blasts of Rodney’s shotgun.

  “Now! While he reloads,” Alex yelled, then they started running.

  They didn’t stop until they reached the highway.

  “We’re safe now,” Alex said, “so you can slow down. By the way, what’s your name?”

  “Bailey James,” she said, and put out her hand to shake his.

  As they stood there beside the highway, eighteen-wheelers whizzing along behind them, they smiled at each other. Then they started to laugh.

  “I have never been so scared in my whole life,” Alex said.

  “Me neither.”

  “You! But you were great. Cool and calm. You must drive like that for a living.”

  “I’m a housewife,” she said, and that sent them into new peals of laughter. “I’ve probably driven a total of a hundred and fifty miles in my life.”

  “Then that explains it,” Alex said. “Anybody with any experience would have known she couldn’t have done something like that.”

  They walked along the highway, laughing together for about a mile, before Mr. Shelby happened along and gave them a ride to Bailey’s house.

  Eighteen

  When Matt got home that night, Bailey was asleep in a chair in the living room. She had on her