The Mulberry Tree - Page 58

When Patsy looked up at Bailey, her eyes were as cold as Janice’s had been. “I understand that you’re an outsider, but those six boys mean a lot to the people of this town, so I’d advise you not to make fun of them. And I’d especially advise you not to make any remarks against them to Matt.”

“To Matt?” Bailey asked. “Why?”

Patsy looked at her as though she were daft. “Matt and Rick’s father was one of the Golden Six.”

For a moment all Bailey could do was blink at Patsy as she tried to remember what she’d said about those boys to Matt. He’d never so much as hinted that he was connected to them. “And what about Janice?” Bailey asked, and her tone didn’t allow for Patsy to play games about pretending not to know who Janice was.

“Father,” Patsy mumbled, bending her head again. “One of them.”

An hour later, Bailey got into her car and put her head down on the steering wheel. The meeting had been a bust. This morning she’d awakened full of enthusiasm. She was going to start a fabulous business with two women who had become her friends and she was going to do it all in secret—secret, that is, from the men they were living with.

But now she felt as though her legs had been cut off. Her two “partners” refused to speak to each other, and their “business” meeting had turned into one of those girl things in which everyone walks away in silent anger.

“Women can never play the game,” Jimmie used to say, as usual making no attempt to hide his male chauvinism. “You women get your feelings hurt, then you back out.”

Bailey leaned back against the seat and closed her eyes. Part of her wanted to give up right now. Part of her said she should go to the nearest lingerie store and buy something sexy, then parade around in it in front of Matt. She had an idea that he was the kind of man who would propose marriage the morning after. Have a couple of kids, she thought. Make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Drive the kids to soccer practice and ballet lessons.

But even as she was thinking this, she put the key in the ignition and turned it. Okay, so the term outsider had hurt. Yes, she was an outsider. She was also obviously enough of an insider that her smart remarks about the town’s history could hurt people.

At home she had three loaves of bread rising. She should go back, punch them down, and put them back in the proofing oven for the second rise. But she didn’t. Instead she turned onto the highway, drove to Ridgeway, and parked in front of the library.

When Bailey handed her request slip to the girl behind the periodicals desk, the girl didn’t blink. She’s not from Calburn, Bailey thought, or she would have commented on the date. Minutes later, Bailey had the microfilm on the machine, and she was looking at the Ridgeway Gazette for August 31, 1968. She had to find out what Janice meant by her angry reference to that date.

“Tragedy in Calburn,” the headline read.

What followed was the story of the murder-suicide of Frank McCallum and his young wife, Vonda. “Of the Golden Six, Frank was the talker,” the article said.

He was the one with the voice, the one who could talk anyone into anything, and for years it seemed that everything he touched was indeed “golden.” He left Calburn right after he graduated from high school, but he returned a few years later, a widower with a young son to raise alone. With his talent for talking and selling, he easily got a job at the local used car dealership. Within a year, he was made manager, and a year after that, he was selling more cars than any other dealer in the state.

But then Frank’s luck seemed to change. Some said it happened when he used his voice to seduce a high school girl named Vonda Oleksy. The people at the Calburn Baptist Church were angry about what Frank had done, and many of them said that the Golden Six got away with too much. So Frank McCallum married Vonda, a girl half his age.

Not long after the marriage, Frank went to work drunk. No one knows exactly what happened or how it happened, but a car was left in gear, and, somehow, it slammed into Frank, pinning him against a concrete wall. For weeks afterward, he was in the hospital, and when he got out, he was a shell of the man he once was. He lost the use of his left arm, but, worse, he seemed to have lost his luck. Within a year of the accident, Frank was fired from his job at the car dealership. Broke, jobless, an alcoholic, Frank took his young wife and moved back into his childhood home, a mountain cabin without plumbing or electricity. We can only imagine the despair that he must have felt at the way his life had turned out.

But who of us can forget the glorious deeds of the Golden Six? Years ago, back in 1953, six boys had been sent away from their beloved hometown to attend another high school. They’d had to endure cruelty such as only the surviv

ors of high school can understand. They were bullied, harassed, ridiculed. Yet did these boys retaliate in kind? No. Instead, when there was danger and there was need for heroism, the Calburn boys were there. No one in this half of the state hasn’t heard of how the Golden Six saved the entire school when it was under threat.

But that was then and this is now. Somehow, Frank McCallum went from the top to the bottom. He fell from being a hero to living a life of desperate poverty and drunkenness, and finally, he fell to murder and suicide. We don’t know the exact circumstances that drove him to these deeds; we only know the facts.

On the thirtieth of August, 1968, Frank McCallum shot his young wife, then turned the gun on himself. The coroner ruled it a murder-suicide.

The funeral will be held at Davis Funeral Home in Calburn on the second of September and, I am sure, the names of the pallbearers are familiar to us all.

Below was a list of names: Rodney Yates, Thaddeus Overlander, Frederick Burgess, and Harper Kirkland. And, at the last, was the name Kyle Longacre. Matt’s father.

Bailey turned the wheel of the microfilm machine to the second of September. There was nothing in the headline of the front page on that day, but on page 6 it said, “All of Calburn in Mourning.”

“Three days ago the bodies of Frank McCallum and his young wife were found in a pool of blood, both of them with their faces blown off.”

With a grimace, Bailey skipped the next two sentences. Whereas the first article had been written in a sad, elegiac tone, this one seemed to be inspired by a love of lurid detail. She checked the bylines; yes, the articles were written by two different people. She read on.

But what no one knew three days ago was that other tragedies happened in Calburn on that fateful night. Gus Venters, a prominent and much-loved citizen of Calburn, hanged himself. His grieving widow told the sheriff that she had no idea why her beloved husband wanted to die. She said he had everything to live for. He had a farm and a business and two beautiful stepchildren who loved him very much. “I don’t understand it,” Mrs. Venters told this reporter.

Bailey grimaced when she read that. There was no mention that his wife was having an adulterous affair and had ordered her husband to get out.

She continued reading.

Also on the night of Frank McCallum’s death, one of the Golden Six left town and hasn’t been seen since. It was revealed at McCallum’s funeral that Mrs. Kyle Longacre had managed to keep her husband’s disappearance a secret for three days. But when Kyle Longacre did not attend his friend’s funeral, wasn’t there to be a pallbearer, the town knew that something was wrong. A man like Kyle Longacre would not have missed his longtime friend’s funeral unless something was badly amiss.

Tags: Jude Deveraux Mystery
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