The Mulberry Tree Read online

  “Gotta go,” Matt said, then pushed the button to end the call. He moved the switch on the side of the phone to disable it.

  For a moment he stayed in the bathroom and tried to calm himself. Murder was not in his realm of expertise. Part of him wanted to panic, but he knew he couldn’t. He had to keep a clear mind so he could think about what must be done. Should they return to Calburn? Since he and Bailey had sent Alex, who was underage, to Dolores, it was probable that he and Bailey would be charged as accessories to murder.

  Matt took a few minutes, then left the bathroom. Bailey was sitting up in bed, waiting for him.

  “What’s happened?” she asked, her eyes serious.

  Matt debated whether or not to tell her, but she was a grown woman, and she deserved to be told the truth. “Your sister has been murdered, and Alex has been charged and taken into custody. The police are looking for you, for both of us, so if we want to get out of here, we’d better do it now.”

  Bailey sat there blinking at him.

  “How much cash do you have?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. A hundred, maybe. Why?”

  He could see that she was working hard to hold herself together. “Because we’re going to drive to Atlanta, and we’ve got to pay cash for gas. We can’t use credit cards because they can be traced.”

  Bailey looked up at him, her face calm, but her hands were clutching the bedcover hard. “Shouldn’t we go back to Calburn to be with Alex? Why should we go to Atlanta? What could some ancient woman—if she’s not senile—tell us that could help Alex?”

  “I don’t know,” Matt said honestly, “but if Manville trusted this woman enough to leave the paper about your marriage with her, then maybe he trusted her with other information. You have any other ideas of how to help?”

  “No,” she said slowly. “No, but Alex must be so frightened. And my sister—”

  Matt grabbed Bailey’s arms and pulled her up out of the bed. “You can cry later. You can have a nervous breakdown later if you want—in fact, we’ll both have one—but now you have to get dressed, get packed, and get going.”

  Twenty minutes later they were in the rental car, but Matt didn’t start the engine. “I want to check on something,” he said, then got out. There was an ATM machine on the side of the bank next door to the hotel, and he stuck his card in and punched some buttons.

  Minutes later, he got back into the car and started the engine. “Frozen,” he said. “My bank account has been frozen.”

  Bailey just nodded and buckled her seat belt.

  Twenty-nine

  Martha McCallum was eighty years old, much younger than Bailey and Matt had speculated. They’d been in the car for nine hours straight, arriving in the late afternoon, too late to visit the nursing home. They’d used all the cash they had for gas and food, so they couldn’t afford a motel. Matt pulled the car down a dirt road, where they had a dinner of the last of the bread and cheese and shared a gallon of springwater. When the sun went down, they snuggled together in the tiny backseat and tried to go to sleep.

  “Your foot,” Bailey said.

  “Right,” Matt said as he moved his foot. “Maybe one of us should sleep in the front. Or one of us should do a Daniel Boone and sleep outside on the ground.”

  “Bugs or a gearshift,” Bailey said. “I can’t decide which.”

  He pulled her head down on his shoulder and smiled. He was glad she was able to make a joke, because from the way she’d cried for the first three hours of their trip, he thought she might never smile again.

  At nine the next morning, they were in the lobby of the nursing home, waiting to see Martha McCallum. They’d both had sponge baths in the rest room of a nearby service station and done their best to look presentable.

  The rest home they were in today was quite a bit different from the one Burgess had been in. His had been clean and comfortable, homey even, but this one was plush. As Bailey looked up at the huge, double, curving staircase, she said, “And here I thought the Yankees had burned Twelve Oaks.”

  “She’ll see you now,” the receptionist said; she was wearing a suit that Bailey knew had a designer label.

  “Think Manville paid for this?” Matt whispered to Bailey.

  “Excuse me,” Bailey said loudly to the young woman. “Who owns this place?”

  “It’s owned by one of the late James Manville’s corporations,” she said, smiling as she stopped by a door.

  As Bailey stepped past Matt, she raised her eyebrows as though to say, See?

  Martha McCallum’s suite was beautiful, and Bailey recognized the hand of an interior designer. It was done in French country, and all the antiques were real.

  “Well, well,” came a voice from a wooden-framed chair to their left. “So, Lillian, you finally found me.”

  Bailey turned to look at a small woman wearing a perfectly pressed silk shirtwaist dress, discreet gold earrings, and a strand of pearls. She also had on a small gold watch and a gold bracelet. It was a simple costume, but Bailey knew that everything the woman was wearing was of the finest quality and had cost the earth. The woman’s face had few lines on it, and her long, blondish gray hair was softly pulled back to the nape of her neck and tied with a Hermes scarf. Bailey wondered if the same surgeon who had repaired Jimmie’s mouth had done this woman’s facelift.

  “Yes,” Bailey said, then took a seat on the couch when the woman gestured.

  “And who is this lovely man?”

  “Matthew Longacre,” Bailey said, and the woman shook Matt’s hand before he sat down.

  It was Bailey who began to talk. “You seem to have the advantage on us, since you know me, but I’ve never heard of you. I don’t mean to be rude, but we have a clock over our heads that is ticking, and when it goes off, it’s going to explode, so we need to know all that you can tell us as fast as you can tell us.”

  “Yes, of course,” Martha said. “I heard about your sister this morning. I’m sorry, dear, for her death, but she never was much of a sister to you, was she? Luke detested her.” Martha waved her manicured hand. “Forgive me, but I’ve never been able to call him anything but Luke.”

  “What did Jimmie . . . my husband tell you?” Bailey asked.

  “Everything,” Martha said. “Absolutely everything. I don’t mean about business—he never talked to me about that—but he told me everything about you, and about Eva and Ralph and how your sister extorted money out of him, and—”

  “My sister? How—”

  Martha looked at Matt. “You know, don’t you? It took me a while to piece it all together, but you sent that beautiful young man to Dolores to find out about the permission slip, didn’t you? When I read that he was one of Roddy’s children, I can tell you that my heart nearly stopped. Did he find out everything you needed to know from Dolores?”

  “Yes, I think so,” Matt said, studiously ignoring Bailey’s hard stare. He knew she was just realizing that Alex had told him a lot more than Matt had told Bailey.

  “You found out about the car Luke had to give Dolores, and the yearly income, and all the other things?” Martha asked.

  “Yes, ma’am, I did,” Matt said, still refusing to look at Bailey.

  “And Lillian, dear, what did he tell you?”

  “It seems that he told me very little,” Bailey said, her mouth a hard line.

  Martha smiled. “Men do try to protect us, don’t they? By the way, I see you had your nose fixed, and you lost all that weight Luke kept on you.”

  “Yes,” Bailey said, turning away from Matt. “And you? Jimmie’s surgeon?”

  Martha’s smile grew broader. She had beautiful, expensive dental work. “Yes, the same man. He was used to keeping secrets.”

  “And where did Jimmie get the money for all the surgery he must have had?” Bailey asked.

  Martha hesitated. “Some money had unexpectedly come into my possession . . . a box full of money, so I gave it to Luke and told him to use it any way he wanted to.” She smiled. �€