The Mulberry Tree Read online

  “I’ve already got one father,” Alex said, glaring at Matt.

  Bailey stepped between the two of them. “Both of you are five years old. Where were you last night, Alex?”

  “With Carol,” he said; then, when both Matt and Bailey looked at him in astonishment, he shrugged. “Older women like me. They confide in me. Give me an old lady, and she wants to bare her soul to me. And, occasionally, bare other things. Not that Carol . . . Poor lady.”

  “How is she?” Bailey asked.

  “Okay. But she was pretty angry at her husband. She regrets that they didn’t make up before he died.”

  Matt took a seat at the table, and Bailey went to pour hot water into her teacup, but then, as she stood at the window looking out at the mulberry tree, what Alex had said hit her. He’d meant to be flippant, but . . .

  She turned to look at Matt, and he was watching her, waiting for the same thought to hit her. For a moment she and Matt stared at each other, wide-eyed.

  “Did I miss something?” Alex said.

  “I think we may have a job for you,” Matt said softly.

  “An acting job.”

  “Doing what?” Alex asked suspiciously.

  “We need someone to get a woman of—” Matt looked at Bailey. “How old is your sister?”

  “Forty-one.”

  “She’s that much older than you are?”

  When Bailey nodded, Matt turned back to Alex. “We need someone to meet a forty-one-year-old woman and find out about a piece of paper, if it exists, and if it does, where it is.”

  Alex looked from one to the other. “I’m going to need more information than that,” he said.

  Matt looked at Bailey in a silent question: Was it all right to tell Alex about Jimmie? After a moment’s hesitation, she nodded, and Matt began telling Alex all that he needed to know. He had, of course, seen Bailey on TV on the arm of her flamboyant husband.

  It was when they got to the part about Dolores, Bailey’s sister, that Matt turned to her. “If your sister is forty-one now, that means that when you were seventeen, she was already twenty-six.”

  “Yes,” Bailey said, not seeing his point.

  Matt and Alex exchanged one of those male looks that said that women had inferior minds.

  “So?” Bailey said.

  “And didn’t you tell me that she was beautiful?”

  “Yes,” Bailey said. “She looked like a beauty queen. In fact, she won several pageants.”

  Matt smiled. “So let me see if I have this straight. Dolores was twenty-six, beautiful, and unmarried.”

  Alex looked at Bailey. “And you were seventeen, fat, and had a nose big enough to shelter a flock of geese from the rain.”

  “Is there a point to this?” Bailey said, narrowing her eyes at both of them.

  Matt and Alex smiled at each other, then Alex nodded toward Matt, as though to say, You take the honors.

  “But in spite of the differences between the two of you, you bagged the man half of the women in America wanted. Right?” Matt said.

  “I never looked at it that way,” Bailey said, “but I guess you’re right. I did.”

  “And all your sister has done to you in retaliation is withhold knowledge that could gain you billions?” Matt said, wonder in his voice.

  “I can’t believe she didn’t kill you,” Alex said cheerfully as he bit into his third cinnamon bun. “Slowly. Real, real slowly.”

  “My goodness,” Bailey said, thinking about what they’d said. “I really did live out the Cinderella story, wicked sister and all.”

  Matt and Alex laughed, then Matt turned to Alex. “Well? Think you can find out about that paper?”

  “Sure,” Alex said. “It’s a done deal. But I’ll need a motorcycle and a full set of leathers. Chicks like motorcycles, and they like leathers. Can you afford that, old man?”

  Bailey turned away to look out the kitchen window as Alex and Matt bickered in the background, and smiled. Home, she thought. She was home.

  Twenty-four

  Bailey couldn’t attend Phillip’s funeral for fear of being recognized, but Violet and Arleen went. Bailey and Matt cuddled up together on the couch and watched CNN at every possible moment. There was little coverage of the funeral, though, except to say that James Manville’s widow did not “come out of hiding and attend the funeral of a man who had been her friend for more than half her life,” as one reporter put it.

  “Yet another strike against me,” Bailey said. “No matter what I do, it’s wrong.”

  Matt didn’t say anything. He agreed with her, but he knew that showing his anger wouldn’t help the situation.

  Atlanta and Ray did attend the funeral, and there was a shot of Atlanta weeping into a handkerchief. “I can’t believe this happened,” she told reporters. “He was our friend as well as our attorney.”

  The coverage was played against a background video of scenes from James Manville’s life.

  “It’s hard for me to believe that Manville and those two were related,” Matt said. “The three of them don’t look anything alike. And not any of them look like Frank McCallum. Are you sure that all of them are blood relatives?”

  “That’s what Phillip asked me, too,” Bailey said, her eyes on the TV. After a moment she felt Matt looking at her. When she turned toward him, he was staring at her, and he looked as though he was angry. “What?!” she asked.

  “Phillip said that he didn’t think Manville and those two were related? He said this when? During his last call to you? The one that I asked you to repeat word for word? That call?”

  Bailey gave a weak smile. “Uh, yeah. Did I forget to mention that he said he wondered if Atlanta and Ray were Jimmie’s siblings?”

  “Yes, you did,” Matt said softly. “What else did you ‘forget’ to tell me?”

  Bailey took a deep breath. “Did I mention that I found a photo of Jimmie with the man who hanged himself in the barn?”

  “One, two, three, four . . . ” Matt began, narrowing his eyes at Bailey. “That photo better be in my hands by the time I reach ten.”

  “Or what?” she said defiantly.

  “Or no more oral sex,” he answered.

  Bailey was off the couch and back with the photo before he reached eight. But she didn’t hand the picture to Matt. “Look, before you see this, I have to tell you something. By the time I met Jimmie—actually, by the time the world met Jimmie—he’d had some surgical work done on his face. I think maybe he’d had quite a bit of work done.”

  “What kind of—” Matt began, but then he stopped and held out his hand for the photo.

  Slowly, Bailey handed it to him.

  “I see,” Matt said, after looking at the photo for a long while. “And you’re sure this kid is the man you were married to?”

  “Oh, yes. When you live with a man that long and know him that intimately—” She broke off because Matt was looking at her in a way that let her know that he didn’t want to hear about her “intimacy” with another man.

  “Where did you get this picture?” he asked.

  “I was looking for my chinois, you know, that conical strainer that you put on the top shelf in the pantry? You’d put it up so high that I had to climb on the shelves to get it, and I saw the corner of this photo sticking out between the boards.”

  “The only room in this house that hasn’t been taken apart and put back together is that pantry,” he said thoughtfully. “Wait here while I get my crowbar.”

  “Oh, no, you don’t,” Bailey said. “That room is also the only one in this house that was nice from the beginning, and you’re not going to destroy it.”

  “Did it occur to you that Phillip Waterman’s death probably wasn’t accidental? That he found out something that cost him his life? And since he was warning you days before he died that those two goons were trying to find out where you are, maybe you’re next on the list to have an ‘accident.’ ”

  “No,” Bailey said, swallowing. “I can’t say that I