The Mulberry Tree - Page 8

He closed his eyes for a moment in memory. It had been one of James’s multimillion-dollar houses, “all glass and steel,” as Lillian had said, and the voices had come from a room Phillip had never seen before. It was off the kitchen, and since the door was open, he looked inside. As he was standing near some flowing draperies that some designer had put up, he knew they weren’t likely to see him. He knew he was playing the voyeur, but he couldn’t move as he looked in on the scene.

Lillian, wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, not the designer clothes that he’d always seen her in, was serving James dinner. They were in a small sitting room with a tiny round table at one end. From the look of the room, no designer had touched it. The sofa was covered in a rose chintz; near it was a plaid chair. The table was pine and scratched; the two chairs with it looked like something from a country auction.

None of the furnishings had that fake look that designers managed to achieve. There was nothing “arranged” in this room. Instead, it looked like half the living rooms in America, and the couple in the room looked like what other American couples hoped to be. As Lillian filled James’s plate from the food set out on a buffet, James was talking nonstop. And Lillian was listening closely. When she turned and put the plate in front of him, she laughed at what he was saying, and in that moment, Phillip thought she was beautiful. She wasn’t just the billionaire’s plump wife who never had a word to say, but a real beauty. As she began to fill her own plate, she started talking, and Phillip was astonished to see James listening to her with an intensity he’d never seen in him before. James nodded as she talked, and Phillip could see that he’d asked her opinion about something and she was giving it. Partnership was the word that came to his mind.

Silently, his paper unsigned, Phillip tiptoed away. How many times over the years had he heard people say, “Why doesn’t Manville ditch the dumpling and get a woman who isn’t afraid of her own shadow?” But obviously, as in everything else, James Manville had known what he was doing.

On that day, as Phillip walked back to the car, he thought that in all the years he’d known James, he’d never been jealous of him. Thanks to James, Phillip had all the money he wanted, so he didn’t envy James his billions. But Phillip realized that when he looked in on that scene, he’d felt a hot wave of jealousy. Carol hadn’t looked at him like that or listened to him in that way since the first year they were married.

Phillip had looked at the unsigned paper and was glad he hadn’t made his presence known. It would be better if James didn’t know that his private moments with Lillian had been observed.

“Yes,” Phillip said to Carol. “I’ve seen her happy.”

“Oh?” Carol asked, her voice full of curiosity. “When was that?”

James might be dead, but Phillip still couldn’t bring himself to betray his friend by telling what he’d seen. The memory of it, though, just made him more confused. If James loved his wife so much, why hadn’t he at least left her enough money to protect herself from the press? “You have som

ething you want to tell me,” he said to his wife, “so why don’t you spit it out?”

“On the way to James’s funeral, Lillian asked me if I’d seen the farmhouse that James left her.”

“So?” Phillip asked. “What does that mean? The place is a pigsty. It’s horrible. The countryside around it is beautiful, but the house ought to be torn down, and only a bulldozer would help the landscaping.”

“Hmmm,” Carol said, closing her magazine. “Nobody made as much money as James did without being able to plan. What do you think his plan was for that farmhouse?”

“Insure it for millions, then burn it down?”

Carol ignored him. “How can she ever live there in peace? She’ll have reporters setting up camp in her front yard. She’ll . . . ” Trailing off, she looked hard at her husband, as though she expected him to figure out the rest of her idea.

Phillip was too tired to play guessing games. “What?” he asked.

And that’s when Carol revealed her idea to change Lillian’s looks, and even her name.

Now, as Phillip got out of the car and watched Lillian—no, Bailey, he reminded himself—look at the ugly old place, he had to admit that she certainly looked like a different person. He remembered one day when James had slammed a book down on a desk and said, “I can’t concentrate. Lil’s on one of those damned diets again.” Then he’d yelled for his secretary to come into the office—no intercom system for James Manville. He’d ordered his secretary to send Lillian a pound of every kind of chocolate the nearest Godiva store had. “That should do it,” he had said, smiling. “Now let’s get back to work.”

Without her husband’s sabotage, Lillian had dropped a lot of weight in just a few weeks. When Phillip told his wife what James used to do to keep Lillian off her diets, she’d said, “So that’s the secret to losing weight,” then she’d put her hand on her hip. “I’ll remember that the next time you get on a plane.”

Between the weight loss and the removal of that big schnozz of hers, Phillip had to admit that Bailey was a looker. Pudginess had been replaced with slim curves, and without that nose, you could really see her beautiful eyes and small, full lips. One morning at breakfast, Carol, holding a metal spatula, had leaned close to his ear and said, “You keep on looking at her like that, and I’ll ram this—”

But Phillip did admit that Bailey looked good. “Do you think anyone will recognize me?” was the first thing Lillian had asked when the bandages were removed.

“No one,” the doctor, Carol, and Phillip had all assured her, each trying not to say how much better she looked, because that would have been saying how bad she used to look.

Now Phillip got out of the car and motioned to the man in the car behind him to remove the suitcases from the trunk and put them inside the house. He’d arranged for two cars to be waiting for them at the airport: the SUV he’d bought for Lillian, and a black sedan from a local car service to follow them and drive Phillip back to the airport.

On the plane ride to Dulles Airport in D.C., Lillian had put her head back against the seat and closed her eyes. When Phillip had spoken to her, she’d just nodded. He figured that she wasn’t speaking to him because he’d taken the job with Atlanta and Ray. He wanted to explain to her why, but at the same time, the less she knew, the better. If she wasn’t going to fight for herself, then he was going to do it for her. And the only way he knew how to do that was from the inside out.

It had been a three-hour drive from the airport to the tiny mountain town of Calburn, where the farmhouse was. On the drive Lillian had put aside her anger and had pumped him for everything he knew about the town and the house.

Unfortunately for Lillian, Phillip could honestly say that even though he’d been James Manville’s friend for twenty years, he knew nothing about his childhood. Truthfully, he wasn’t at all sure that this farmhouse was even connected to James’s past.

“How can Jimmie be related to people like Atlanta and Ray?” she’d asked. “I can’t understand that.”

Phillip was tempted to say, “That’s because you never saw James do business. If you had, you’d know that he was more like them than you realize.” But he didn’t say that. Let her have her dreamy-eyed visions about her dead husband, he thought.

Lillian—Bailey, he corrected himself again—had walked around the house to look at the back. The investigator Phillip hired had taken photos of the property, so he knew that the back was more tangled than the front, and he dreaded having her see it. Using the key that James had given him when he’d signed over the deed to the house, Phillip opened the front door.

The door fell off its rusty hinges and crashed onto the floor, taking the jamb with it. In astonishment, Phillip turned and looked at the man behind him, whose arms were loaded with suitcases. Turning back, Phillip stepped onto the fallen door and into the house.

Tags: Jude Deveraux Mystery
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