The Mulberry Tree

“Letters?” Bailey asked, sounding as though she’d never heard of one.

“They don’t speak, but they write to each other. Of course they don’t address the letters to each other, but Patsy uses green stationery and Janice uses blue, so everyone knows who the letter is to. In fact, the whole thing started because of—”

Bailey held up her hand to stop him. “Don’t tell me why they don’t speak. I just need to know how to get them to communicate with one another now.”

“Oh?” Matt said. “Speaking of which, what were you three discussing so seriously yesterday?”

“Food,” Bailey said quickly.

“Patsy was talking about food,” he said flatly, then watched as Bailey turned her face away so he wouldn’t see how red it got.

“Yes, we were,” she said, her back to him.

“I see.”

Bailey turned back to him. “Letters are too slow. Do you think they’d do e-mail? How about a fax machine?”

Matt was looking at her hard. “What are you up to?”

It was on the tip of her tongue to tell him that it wasn’t any of his business, but instead she smiled. “We’re planning a surprise birthday party for Rick,” she said. “And Patsy wants me to make a truly fabulous dinner for him. I think she’s planning to invite about a hundred people.” For a moment she stood there blinking at him, her breath held. Would he swallow this? And when exactly was Rick’s birthday?

Matt grunted as he picked up another shrimp. “You’d better get a wiggle on then, bec

ause his birthday is in just three weeks. Let me know if I can do anything to help.”

Bailey didn’t say anything but went outside to cool off. She’d never been good at lying, and she was terrible at doing things in secret. “What you’re thinking is written all over your face,” Jimmie had said to her more than once. But now, she smiled. She had just told a whopper of a lie, the sky hadn’t fallen on top of her and, what’s more, it seemed that Matt had believed her. She looked up at the mulberry tree and grinned. She had just taken her first step on the road to becoming a devious, underhanded sneak—and by golly, it felt good!

Although Bailey got past Matt without too many problems, she almost destroyed their fledgling company before it began when she offended Janice. It was their first private meeting, held in Patsy’s sewing room. “No man will bother us in here,” Patsy said. “Not after what I did to Rick.”

“Okay,” Bailey said, “I’ll bite. What did you do to your husband?”

“Embroidered pink bunnies on all his underwear. He didn’t know it until he was in the station changing his clothes, and a couple of the guys saw him. I think they ribbed him pretty hard.”

“Was he angry?” Bailey asked.

“Oh, yeah, but I cried and told him that I’d made a mistake because I had too many interruptions while I was sewing. I couldn’t concentrate. Then I showed him the new pattern I had accidently put on one of his expensive new shirts.” Patsy held up a man’s denim shirt. Across the pocket was embroidered a mother duck with four little ducklings behind her. Patsy put the shirt down. “No matter what they hear coming from this room, and no matter how much time we spend in here, neither my sons nor my husband will bother us.”

Bailey looked at Patsy in admiration. Her methods were cruel to the point of inhumanity, but they worked.

But it was Bailey who caused the problem. They were trying to come up with a name for their company.

“It needs to be a ‘thing,’ ” Patsy said. “It has to be something concrete so we can make a logo of it.”

“Mother Duck isn’t a good name,” Janice said, her eyes on Bailey as though they were the only two people in the room.

“I was thinking of Rainbow Preserves, something like that,” Patsy said stiffly.

Bailey wanted to groan. How were they going to do anything together when these two didn’t speak? And now they were sniping at each other like first-graders. She wanted to relieve the tension that was growing in the room. “Why don’t we name it The Golden Six? With that name, we’d sell everything we made right here in Calburn,” she said, smiling.

To Bailey’s consternation, the women looked at her with expressions of intense dislike. Patsy’s lip was curled upward, and Janice’s eyes were cold and hard.

“What did I say?” Bailey whispered.

“Why don’t you just call it The Thirtieth of August and be done with it?” Janice snapped as she got up and left the room.

The venom in Janice’s voice left Bailey breathless. But worse was what Janice had said. Jimmie’s birthday was August 30. Had the women somehow found out who Bailey was?

No, Bailey thought, that couldn’t possibly be it. Surely the date was a coincidence. But what had made Janice so angry? She looked at Patsy, who had her head down and was studiously looking at the notebook on her lap. “What did I say?”