The Mulberry Tree

Slowly, Bailey turned around to look at him.

Rodney made a motion with his shoulders that Bailey had seen Jimmie do a thousand times. “He was an ugly kid. I mean, real ugly. Upper lip split open all the way up into his nose. You could see the gums above his teeth. And his ears stuck straight out. That the boy you’re lookin’ for?”

“McCallum?” Bailey said.

“Yeah. Frank’s kid. You heard of Frank, ain’t you?”

“Yes,” Bailey said softly. “One of the Golden Six, the one involved in the murder-suicide.”

“Yeah, that’s Frank. Luke was Frank’s kid, and he left town after Frank died. Never heard from him again—not that anybody cared. He had a real chip on his shoulder. Would fight anybody. Real angry kid.”

Bailey knew without a doubt that Lucas McCallum and James Manville were one and the same. In spite of what her brain said she should do, she found that her feet were moving back toward the house.

“That’s right,” Rodney said, “you come on back here, and I’ll tell you all about Frank. He was a wonderful man.”

“Lucas,” Bailey said as she reached the stairs. “Tell me about Lucas.”

“Yeah, sure, whatever,” Rodney said as he opened his arm wide for her to step inside the circle. “You come on back in here, and I’ll tell you whatever you wanta know.”

This time Bailey had to sit on the high end of the couch, and as she hung on, she kept visualizing the movie Titanic and the people holding on to the railing as the ship went down. In their case, the sea was awaiting them; for her it was Rodney’s hands. She wasn’t sure which was worse.

She had to listen to Rodney tell the whole glorious story about how the six divine boys had saved a whole school. Bailey hung on to the couch arm, trying not to slide down the seat onto Rodney’s lap, and tried her best to get him on the subject of Lucas.

It was probably only about forty-five minutes that she had to wait, but it seemed like hours. “What about Lucas?” she asked for the twentieth time.

Rodney frowned, annoyed that she’d interrupted him again. “He wasn’t much, and he wasn’t there when all the real stuff, the important stuff, happened. It was later that Frank went off and came back with that . . . that—” Rodney waved his hand in dismissal.

“What about Luke’s mother?”

“Never met her. Never wanted to. If she had a face like that boy’s, she probably drugged Frank to get him to go to bed with her, then lied that it was his kid. Frank was always a generous guy. Give you anything he had. He probably took that kid on just to be nice. Frank was like that.”

“Saint Frank,” Bailey mumbled, and Rodney looked at her sharply.

“How come you’re askin’ me so many questions about this kid? You know him? He still alive?”

“I don’t think so,” Bailey said, and didn’t like the way Rodney was looking at her.

“That boy was uglier than Spangler, and even meaner. Are you writin’ a book for him?”

“No,” Bailey said, “of course not.” The way he was looking at her now was beginning to make her nervous in a different way.

Rodney looked at her for a long moment, as though trying to figure out whether or not to believe her. “So how come you want to know about that ugly kid and not us heroes?”

“I, uh . . . I . . . ”

His gaze was getting sharper by the second. She had to come up with something.

She took a deep breath. “I want to open a canning business, and I was told that the man who owned the farm I have used to can things, and I wanted to know about him. We, I mean, I looked on the Internet, but there wasn’t anything on there about who used to own the farm.”

He was frowning at her in such a way that the hairs on her neck were standing up. As unobtrusively as she could, she got off the couch and started slowly backing toward the front door. “That’s all there is to it. I was just curious about the farm I bought and wanted to know more about it. You see, there’s this big mulberry tree on it, and—”

Rodney’s eyes opened wide. “Mulberry tree?” he said quietly. “Lord have mercy! Are you that widow woman that’s livin’ on Gus’s old place?”

Instantly, Bailey felt relief. “Yes! That’s me. I heard his name was Guthrie, but y

ou’re probably right, and it was Gus. Poor man. Did you know that he hanged himself?”

One minute Rodney was sitting on the end of the couch and Bailey was a foot away from the door, and the next he had her by the neck and was trying to strangle her. “Gus Venters was an evil man! Evil, I tell you, and he deserved to die! He deserved it!”