The Mulberry Tree Read online

  Turning slowly, she looked toward the slithering sound and saw that it was just two branches rubbing against each other. But finding the source of one noise didn’t alleviate her fears. Around her were more noises and more places where people and animals could hide.

  She did her best to put some steel into her backbone, then turned and ran toward the barn.

  Four

  When Bailey awoke the next morning, she didn’t at first know where she was. As she’d done for half of her life, she reached out for Jimmie. When she didn’t touch some warm part of him, she didn’t worry. He was often away on a business trip, away making all that money—and spending it, he liked to tell her.

  It was the sound of a truck that brought her more fully awake. Turning over, she looked up and saw the window high above, and slowly her memory came back to her. Jimmie was gone, and she was alone. Absolutely and totally alone.

  Outside, she could hear birds calling, the wind in the trees, and that truck in the distance, its wheels heavy on gravel. It had been a long time since she’d heard any of those sounds. The houses Jimmie bought tended to have acres of lawns surrounding them, or many hundreds of feet of stone terrace, or the ocean. Gravel roads weren’t something that Jimmie tolerated.

  The movers had set up a bed for her. Incongruously, looking like an ad for linens, her pretty new bed—white-painted wood, artificially aged to look as though it had been used for many years—rested smack in the middle of the big front room of the barn. She’d had to look inside six boxes before she found the linens; then Phillip had helped her dress the bed in white cotton sheets, a fluffy white duvet on top, and half a dozen pillows at the head. When it was finished, they’d all laughed; it did look like a setting for a commercial, with the white-on-white bed in the midst of the hay bales.

  After the men and Phillip left, Bailey had gone back to the barn and climbed into the bed. What have I done? she asked herself, and at that moment, if she’d had a cell phone, she would have called Phillip and asked him to come and get her. And she would have said yes, she would fight Atlanta and Ray for a share of the money. She’d buy herself a nice house somewhere and—

  Bailey stopped her thoughts. The truck seemed to be getting closer. In the next minute, she heard the unmistakable sound of air brakes. Had the movers returned? she wondered as she threw back the covers and slipped her feet into her shoes.

  It took a few moments to get the big barn door to slide open, and she thought, Oil can, putting it on her mental list of things she’d need to buy. She ran down what was now a wide path between the house and the barn, then stood in front of the house to watch a big white truck pull into the driveway. Viking Industrial Cleaners was written on the side of the truck, beside a picture of a muscular man wearing a horned headdress and holding a mop.

  The truck door opened, and a man wearing navy blue overalls and carrying a clipboard jumped down to the ground. “You Bailey James?” he asked.

  It took her a moment to remember that that was now her name. “Yes,” she said, rubbing at her eyes, “but I didn’t order any cleaning.” Two more men got out of the truck on the other side.

  The first man looked at the house. The door was flat on its back inside; there were several broken panes of glass in the windows and through them could be seen rooms full of dirt-encrusted cobwebs. “Maybe you just wished so hard, your fairy godmother sent us,” the man said.

  She wasn’t used to such flippancy from service people, so Bailey stared at him in disbelief. Then she saw a twinkle in his eye, something that she’d been seeing rather often in men’s eyes lately. Like Phillip, this man was teasing her. “Does this mean that you believe you’re Prince Charming?” she asked, deadpan.

  Had she said this to a man a month ago, she knew that he would have frowned and walked away, but now the three men behind him guffawed in laughter, and this man seemed to think that whatever Bailey said was okay by him.

  “Whatever you want, we Viking men deliver,” he said, then held out his clipboard to her.

  “Ordered by Phillip Waterman” was written at the top of the page. Dear Phillip, Bailey thought as she signed at the bottom. Maybe he hadn’t bought her dinner, but he had ordered a cleaning crew. Part of her thought she ought to send them away and assert her independence, but another part of her didn’t relish spending weeks on her hands and knees scrubbing.

  She signed and handed the clipboard back to the man.

  “Yo, Hank!” one of the men called from the front porch. “What do we do with this stuff?”

  Bailey stepped out around what looked to be an unpruned butterfly bush to see what the men were referring to. To one side of the front door, on the ground, were some boxes and bags. There were also several pieces of paper stuck into the frame of the window to the right of the fallen door.

  Turning, the truck driver looked at Bailey for the answer.

  Quickly, she went to the pile and began to examine it. Inside one box was what looked to be a tuna noodle casserole in a Pyrex dish. “Welcome,” the attached card said, and it was signed “Patsy Longacre.” There were two roast chickens wrapped in foil, no card. A greasy paper bag held about half a pound of nails. “Thought these might come in handy,” read another note torn off the bottom of a page of lined school paper. Another bag held four apples, each one carefully wrapped in newspaper. A quart jar with an old zinc lid held homemade bread-and-butter pickles. The name Iris Koffman was on the label. On the windowsill were three bunches of wild-flowers, each one tied with string. An old, rusty hoe was leaning against the wall. The unsigned note on it read, “You need it, and heaven knows my husband never uses the thing.”

  In the window frame (which had a half-inch gap in it, so there was plenty of room) were business cards and brochures. There was a card for an insurance man whose office was on Main Street in Calburn. There was a well digger, and a real estate agent. “If you want to sell, call me,” was written on the back. There was a card for a handyman. Bailey kissed this card, then stuck it into her jeans pocket.

  “Hey! I got a card,” one of the cleaning men standing in front of her teased.

  She had no reply to his teasing, so she said, “I’ll take care of these things. You can start cleaning in there.”

  One of the men was looking through a dirty window. “I’m real sorry we left the flamethrower at the last job.”

  Bailey gave them her best Get busy! glare, but they didn’t react as men did when Jimmie gave them that look. Instead, laughing, they went back to their truck and started removing machines and supplies.

  She pulled down a big envelope that was stuck in the window and opened it. Inside was a welcome package from the Calburn Chamber of Commerce, the president of which was Janice Nesbitt. There was a map of Calburn, showing Main Street and the three streets running off it. Yesterday Phillip had driven her to the house from the opposite direction, so she’d not seen the town, and now she wondered what stores were there, and what services. At the far corner of the town map was an arrow pointing to somewhere off the map. “Your house is this way,” someone had written.

  “The middle of nowhere,” Bailey muttered to herself, then looked up to see one of the cleaning men holding out an empty box toward her. Smiling her thanks, she took the box and put all the items that had been left by the townspeople inside. Odd, she thought, but when she’d . . . well, when she’d looked different, men hadn’t been so thoughtful as to offer her boxes to put her things into.

  Smiling, Bailey carried the box back to the barn. She was hungry, and she wanted some privacy to eat, and she wanted time to ponder the idea of living in a town where people left gifts of welcome on her doorstep. But she wasn’t to have any privacy as someone started blowing a horn, and she instinctively knew that she was being called. With a chicken leg in one hand and an apple in the other, she ran down the path, then stopped at what she saw. There were three trucks in her driveway, another two parked on the road, and four more behind them looking for space to park. There were eight men walkin