The Mulberry Tree Read online

  Violet finished the last of her dessert. “Good dinner. Carol has me eatin’ six kinds of green things at each meal. I’m beginnin’ to hate that color! And her idea of dessert is sugar-free Jell-O.”

  “What happened on the thirtieth of August, 1968?” Matt asked softly.

  “Ah,” Violet said. “That’s when everything changed. That summer all six of ’em were here. My husband went from bein’ home every night to bein’ gone every night—and all day. All that summer they were callin’ me from the lumberyard and askin’ me when Burgess was comin’ to work. They needed decisions to be made, but they couldn’t find him.”

  “Why were they all here in Calburn?” Bailey asked.

  “Different reasons. That little fruit, Harper, said he’d come back to see his mother because she was dyin’, but he didn’t spend much time with her. Burgess told me Harper was a big-deal producer out in Hollywood and that he was givin’ up a lot to stay with his sick mother. I couldn’t stand the little creep, and I was sure he was lyin’, so I called somebody I knew in L.A. and asked some questions. It was just as I thought: Harper Kirkland was a nobody. He’d worked on a few sets as best boy—you know, he bangs the clapper”—Violet gestured as though clapping the board that shows the scene and the take number in a movie—“but the creep caused so many fights that he was always fired. He earned a living turnin’ tricks.”

  “Fights?” Matt asked. “What kind of fights? Fist-fights?”

  “Yeah. Whatever. He did bitchy stuff like tell one person one thing, then another somethin’ else. He loved to stir up trouble.”

  “And my father was home all that summer,” Matt said. “He’d broken a bone in his ankle and couldn’t drive.”

  “Yeah,” Violet answered, looking at Matt. “I only met your dad a couple of times, but he was a real nice guy.”

  “So nice he abandoned his family.”

  “So all the six were here, and Frank . . . ” Bailey said, encouraging Violet to go on.

  “Yeah,” Violet said. “On the thirtieth of August Frank shot his young, pregnant wife, then himself.”

  “And Gus Venters hanged himself in a barn,” Matt said.

  “And I wonder if Jimmie saw it all,” Bailey said softly.

  “My husband changed after that night,” Violet said. “After that night he became depressed, deeply depressed, and he stayed that way until his plane went down and ended his misery.”

  For a moment the three of them sat in silence, then Violet spoke and broke the spell. “After my husband died,” she said, “I found some scrapbooks he’d kept when he was a kid. You wanna see them?”

  “Yes!” Bailey said before Matt could answer, and fifteen minutes later they had the table cleared and the dishes in the dishwasher Carol had had installed. Bailey had to admit that Carol had done an excellent job of remodeling the old kitchen. She’d had the worn linoleum removed and the wide pine floorboards refinished. She’d had a cabinet by the sink removed so the dishwasher could be installed, but none of the other cabinets had been replaced. They’d been cleaned, and the worn-out old hinges replaced, but Carol had wisely not even repainted them. The sink, the old stove, and even the retro refrigerator had been cleaned and repaired but not replaced. In the end, the kitchen looked as it probably had when it was installed back in the 1930s. And Bailey had to admit that the effect was marvelous.

  “Here they are,” Violet said as she put three scrapbooks on the coffee table in the living room, then sat down on a newly upholstered chair. In this room too Carol had done nothing but return it to its original state, and again it looked great, perfect for the style of the house.

  For an hour, as it grew dark outside, the three for them drank coffee and liqueurs and went through the scrapbooks. Violet said, “I haven’t seen these in years,” as each person picked up a scrapbook.

  There was nothing remarkable in the scrapbooks, just the usual high school clippings and photographs, but when Bailey thought about what had happened to the laughing kids in the pictures, the books were rather sad. For the most part, the pictures were from when Burgess was in school in Calburn, not in Wells Creek.

  At one point, Matt pointed to a photo and asked Violet, “Is this Bobbie?” and she’d said yes in a way that made Bailey ask who Bobbie was.

  “Burgess’s older brother,” Violet said quickly.

  “Died when he was a kid,” Matt said just as quickly, then he looked back at the scrapbook on his lap. And the way he said it made Bailey know she was going to get no more out of him, just as she’d not been able to get more out of him about what Alex had found out from Dolores. All Matt would tell her was that Dolores had said that, yes, Jimmie had had her mother sign the paper, and he’d given the paper to “the person he trusted most in the world.” Other than that, Bailey could get nothing out of Matt, not whether Alex had liked Dolores or not, whether they were going to continue to have contact with each other, nothing. The only thing that Matt would discuss with her was the fact that she had been legally married to James Manville, and now all they had to do was prove it.

  “And figure out how to run a billion-dollar empire,” Bailey had mumbled, but Matt had just smiled at her.

  “What are these?” Bailey asked as she opened a big envelope that had been at the back of one scrapbook. Inside was a thick stack of carefully cut-out newspaper clippings.

  Matt looked at Violet. “She hasn’t read the book,” he said.

  Bailey narrowed her eyes at him. “I’ve been a little bit busy trying to figure out a way to support myself and spending hours in the kitchen trying to fill your growing belly.”

  “And doing a damned fine job of both!” Matt said with enthusiasm.

  Violet chuckled and nodded toward the envelope full of clippings. “After the paper named the boys from Calburn the Golden Six, Harper jumped on the bandwagon and wrote a bunch of articles about the boys that glorified them. The articles were half truth and half—What?” Violet looked at Matt for help.

  “Comic book,” he said, staring down at the book on his lap, his eyes wide.

  Bailey doubted if Violet noticed it, but she could see that Matt had seen something that interested him a great deal.

  Abruptly, Matt gave a great yawn and looked at his watch. “You mind if we borrow these and read them later?”

  Bailey could see from the way Violet grinned that she probably thought Matt had suddenly had a sex attack. “Sure,” Violet said. “Take your time. Those things have been stored in a closet for years, so it’s not like I need ’em.”

  Fifteen minutes later Bailey and Matt were in her car and heading home, the scrapbooks on her lap. She asked the question she was dying to ask: “So what did you see?”

  “Burgess’s social security number. It was on a copy of an application for his first job.”

  “So?” Bailey asked.

  “I can feed it into the computer and see what comes up.”

  “But what good will that do? The man’s dead.”

  “I don’t know what to expect,” Matt said, “but it’s a lead. If that ex-husband of yours did erase the past, surely he missed something somewhere. Maybe he didn’t erase all there was to know about Frederick Burgess.”

  As soon as they got home, Matt ran upstairs to his computer, and Bailey checked her phone for messages. There was seventeen, all from Janice and Patsy about the business. By the time she got off the phone to the two of them, it was too late to read the scrapbooks. Besides, Matt had already showered and was waiting for her in bed.

  She took a shower and slipped into his arms, and quite a while later, as she was drifting off to sleep, she murmured, “Find anything?”

  “I put his social security number into a search service. They’ll get back to me with what they have within twenty-four hours. Probably nothing,” he said. “There was nothing on the Turnbull name.”

  “Mmmm,” was all Bailey said before she fell asleep.

  The next thing Bailey heard was a distant shout, then Matt threw open the