The Mulberry Tree

“This could go on forever,” Bailey muttered. Jimmie always said that he hated any decision that everyone agreed with.

“Good!” she faxed back to them. “If they don’t know what a mulberry tastes like, they won’t have any preconceptions. If either of you have any better ideas, I’d like to hear them.”

For an hour there was silence from the fax machine, then Bailey received two notes, both of which said, “Okay by me.” Since the wording was identical, she knew that, somehow, the two women had communicated with each other and come to an agreement.

“Thanks, Jimmie,” Bailey said as she smiled at the faxes. Now she needed to go to the kitchen and start making some prototypes for the Before and After part of their brand-new company.

Bailey was experimenting with a strawberry-cherry mixture in which she used no alcohol. How could she make the sauce taste as good as though it was flavored with kirsch without using the liqueur? She’d found out that selling food flavored with alcohol involved obtaining a liquor license, something that none of the women was ready to take on. Janice said, “Let’s save that as a goal for 2005,” and the others had agreed.

Maybe if she extracted the juice, boiled it down, and added a little almond flavoring, she would create the flavor she wanted. With that thought, she went into the pantry to look for her chinois, the conical strainer set in a frame. It took nearly ten minutes before she saw the chinois on the top shelf of the pantry.

“Matt!” she muttered. He’d put the dishes away last night, and for some odd reason, he’d obviously thought that the strainer should be put on the highest shelf, a shelf that was at least three feet above Bailey’s head.

There was a ladder in the barn, and she knew that she should go get it, or even get a chair, but it all seemed so time-consuming, and the fruit was bubbling. Bailey stepped onto the lowest shelf and held her breath to see if it would hold her weight; then she remembered that she was no longer heavy enough to break shelves.

Holding on to the shelves above, she stepped up until she could reach the strainer. But as she grabbed it, she saw something sticking out of the boards at the back of the shelf. This room was the only one that hadn’t been remodeled. Bailey had refused to allow Matt and his beer-drinking friends to touch its perfection. It had been cleaned, and that was all.

Curious, Bailey put the chinois on a lower shelf, then stepped higher to reach the tiny piece of paper sticking out from the boards. Hanging on with one arm, she slowly pulled on it, and out came a rectangle of white. Bailey knew instantly that she was looking at the back of a photograph.

Slowly, she turned the photo over, and what she saw made her draw in her breath. In the foreground of the picture were two people. One was a giant of a man, blond, with eyes that didn’t look too intelligent. But he had a smile on his face that was so sweet Bailey almost smiled back at him. He had his arm playfully around the neck of a boy who looked to be about fourteen or fifteen.

The boy had a horribly deformed cleft palate.

Slowly, Bailey got down from the shelves and walked closer to the window to look at the photo in the light. The boy in the photo was Jimmie. She’d recognize the set of those shoulders anywhere, and the eyes were the same. And she was sure that the blond giant was the man who’d once lived in her house, the man who had hanged himself in her barn.

She looked at the photo in the sunlight. In the background were three other people, a woman and two men. The face of the woman was clearly visible. She was small and thin, and not particularly attractive; her face was long and pinched-looking. Since she was openly sneering at the back of the big man and Jimmie, her disapproval plain to see, Bailey was sure she had to be the adulterous wife.

The men in the background had their faces turned to profile and were a bit out of focus, so Bailey couldn’t identify them.

Who would know who these people are? she wondered. Matt? No, he was too young when this photo was taken. It didn’t have a date on it, but she guessed by the clothes that it was late 1960s or early 1970s.

“Violet,” she said aloud, then she went back into the kitchen, turned off the pot of simmering fruit, put a dish towel on the glass shelf in the refrigerator, and set the hot pot on top of it. As she ran toward the front door, she grabbed her car keys, and fifteen minutes later she was at Violet’s house.

Violet was sitting on her front porch, her head back, snoozing.

Bailey didn’t bother with any preliminaries. “Who are these people?” she asked as she thrust the photo at Violet.

Violet awoke instantly, unstartled, as she looked up at Bailey. “And nice to see you too,” she said as she took the photo. “Go get my glasses. They’re in there somewhere,” she added as she nodded toward the door.

It took Bailey ten minutes to find Violet’s reading glasses, and another five to wash them. By the time she got back outside, Violet was asleep again, the photo on her lap. “So tell me,” Bailey said loudly, holding out the reading glasses.

Slowly, Violet put on her half glasses and looked at the photo, while Bailey took a seat across from her. “I don’t know who the two in front are. They’re—”

“I know who they are. I want to know about the people in the back.”

Violet raised her eyebrows at Bailey. “Know who they are, do you? You’ve been doing some research. Is the kid in the front, the one with the lip, the guy you were lookin’ for?”

“Never mind that. Who are the people in the back?”

“What do I get out of it?”

Bailey narrowed her eyes at Violet.

Violet laughed. “Okay, let me look. I don’t know who the woman is, but that one is Roddy, and the one way in the back is, I think, Kyle.”

“The Golden Six,” Bailey said under her breath. “So he was involved with them.”

Violet stared at Bailey hard, then lifted the photo and looked at it again. “The big guy must be the man my friend told me about, the guy who hanged himself in your barn. Isn’t that big ol’ tree in the back the one that’s at your house?”