The Mulberry Tree Read online

  “How do we prove that Atlanta and Ray murdered Jimmie?” Bailey said.

  “Actually, I have proof,” Martha said, then smiled at Bailey’s and Matt’s identical looks of astonishment. “I’ve had months, and thanks to Luke, I’ve had unlimited funds, so while the rest of the world was crucifying you, dear, I hired investigators.”

  “To find out what?” Matt said sharply.

  “Who was near that plane for forty-eight hours before Luke took off in it. And I had some men—actually, about a dozen of them—go up into the mountains, find the wreckage of Luke’s plane, and bring every piece of it down.”

  “I thought the police did that. Jimmie’s body—” Bailey began.

  “The police searched the wreckage, but only superficially. They weren’t looking for evidence of foul play because two young men at the little airport where Luke kept his plane said they’d begged Luke not to fly the plane. They said they’d told him that there was something wrong with it.”

  “No,” Bailey said. “I could believe that Jimmie slammed a plane into a mountainside in one great flash of drama; he’d be in control then. But he’d never go up in a plane that was malfunctioning and let a piece of machinery have control over whether he lived or died.”

  “That’s just what I thought,” Martha said, smiling, her eyes twinkling. “I was sure Atlanta and Ray paid those two young men, so while everyone else in the world was looking at you, I was quietly having my own investigation conducted.”

  “And you found out that the plane had been sabotaged.”

  “Yes,” Martha said. “It was quite simple, really. The fuel gauge had been tampered with, so Luke ran out of gas in midair.”

  For a moment they were quiet, then Matt said, “If you found a broken gauge, couldn’t it have broken in the fall?”

  “Yes,” Martha said, “but we didn’t find a gas gauge, broken or not.”

  “Then how —” Bailey began, then her eyes widened. “He had a black box on board.”

  “Yes,” Martha said, smiling.

  Bailey turned to Matt. “I forgot all about this. Jimmie and I were watching the news one night when a jet had gone down. The reporter kept talking about the black box that recorded the words of the pilots. I remember that Jimmie said, ‘I ought to get one of those so I can’—” Bailey stopped talking.

  “So he could tell you that he loved you before he went down,” Martha said softly, and Bailey nodded. “Yes, that’s what he wrote me that he’d told you. He had a system put in his plane, and he did it in secret, as he did so many things.”

  “And your men found the box,” Matt said, “because they knew to look for it.”

  “Yes,” Martha answered. “Jimmie spent his last moments trying to get the plane down safely, and while he was struggling, he was talking so the recorder would pick up his words. He told what was wrong with the plane, who he’d seen at the airport, and how to prove that Eva and Ralph—that’s what he called them—had murdered him.”

  “But you didn’t turn this information over to the police,” Matt said.

  “No,” Martha said. “I didn’t because Luke asked me to make his murder known only if his beloved Lillian was in danger. ‘She’ll find you,’ he said just before he went down. ‘And when she does, tell her that I love her.’ Those were his last words.”

  For a moment, Bailey looked away. When she looked back at Martha, she said, “I want to hear the story. I want to know the truth. I want to know about a ‘murder called suicide.’ ”

  Thirty

  “I don’t know when the bad started, whether it was with Vonda, the Turnbull woman, or when Frank lost the use of his arm,” Martha said as she poured them tea from the silver pot. She’d picked up her phone and ordered a “breakfast tea,” and ten minutes later a feast had appeared. It had been wheeled in on a table that could hardly hold it all. There were tiny sausages wrapped in flaky pastry, three kinds of eggs, broiled tomatoes, and enough scones and muffins to start a bakery.

  Matt and Bailey spent about thirty seconds trying to be polite, before starvation won out and they nearly leapt on the food.

  “The Turnbull woman owned my farm,” Bailey said, her mouth full. “The canner’s wife.”

  “Yes,” Martha said, watching the two of them eat but politely refraining from asking how long it had been since they’d had a meal. “Hilda was a secretive woman and rarely told anyone much, but word around town was that when she was quite young, she’d married a very rich, very old man. From what I heard, people figured she hoped he’d die right away so she could have his money.”

  “Wait a minute,” Matt said. “You keep saying ‘You heard.’ Where were you?”

  “And where was Jimmie?” Bailey asked.

  Martha took a breath. “Luke and I stayed alone together up in the mountains. When Luke was little, Frank took him into town a few times, but people stared at the baby so much that Frank left him with me. He came to see us on weekends.”

  “Why didn’t you have Jimmie’s face repaired?” Bailey asked.

  Martha took a while before she answered. “I’m afraid to tell you because you’ll hate my son—and me.”

  Bailey shook her head. “Maybe I will, but I have so many other people to hate that you and Frank will be far down on my list.”

  Both Martha and Matt laughed.

  “I’ve had many years to think about the reason all of it happened, but I think it boils down to love. I don’t know how to explain, but”—Martha’s eyes bored into Bailey’s—“maybe I don’t need to explain it to you. Luke loved really hard. If you were ever on the receiving end of Luke’s love, you must know what I mean. Luke’s love was what kept Frank and me going. Does that make sense?”

  “Oh, yes,” Bailey said. “It was a smothering love, but you couldn’t leave it either.”

  “Right,” Martha said. “And I was at fault too.” For a moment she looked about the room. “May God forgive me for it, but what did I have if Luke got his mouth fixed and left me? I was a widow and poor. Frank was my only child, and I knew better than to think that if Luke was gone, Frank would visit me nearly as often. Luke and that cut in his upper lip made us a family.”

  Matt was watching Martha, seeing the way her hands wrung each other. She was obviously carrying a heavy burden over what she’d done to her grandson. “What about Hilda Turnbull?” he asked gently.

  “She—” Martha said as she tried to get herself back under control. “I saw her once. She was short, scrawny, and had fierce-looking eyes.”

  When Martha seemed to lose her train of thought, Bailey said gently, “Did her old husband die?”

  “Yes,” Martha said, seeming to regain herself. “But not until Hilda was nearly forty years old and she had two half-grown kids.”

  “Eva and Ralph,” Bailey said.

  “Yes.”

  “Why hasn’t anyone from Calburn recognized them? They’re on TV often enough,” Matt said. “Why hasn’t anyone said, ‘Hey! Those two are Hilda Turnbull’s kids, and they have nothing to do with James Manville’?”

  Martha smiled. “First of all, people in Calburn rarely saw them. Hilda kept them in one boarding school after another, then sent them to summer camps. They were dumpy, uninteresting kids, and no one paid much attention to them. Luke wrote me that a couple of buildings at the schools they attended burned down, and he was sure Ralph had done it, but no one ever suspected him because he was so—”

  “Nothing,” Bailey said. “He looked like nothing, but he always made my flesh crawl. He and Atlanta worked as a team. When they visited us, she’d knock something over to get our attention, then zip! some expensive little ornament would slide up Ray’s sleeve. I didn’t know if Jimmie saw it, and I wasn’t going to tell him that his brother was a thief, but then Jimmie started buying reproduction Fabergé boxes. When I asked why he was buying those awful things, he said, ‘They won’t know the difference, so let them steal fakes,’ and we both laughed.”

  “Go on about Hilda,” Mat