The Mulberry Tree

“You can hide from the world, but everyone in this town knows where you are. Don’t give me that look. They don’t know who, just where. So, dear, where’s your guest room?”

“I have three bedrooms, and two men are living with me, so—”

“Oh, my, you have changed,” Arleen drawled.

Bailey had six pots of jam on the stove and four crates of strawberries that needed to be capped, so she didn’t have time to exchange bon mots with Arleen. “You’ll have to stay in a hotel.”

“Can’t, dear. I’m broke. Flat.”

Bailey started to tell her that that was no problem of hers, but then she had an idea. It was a long shot, but she thought Janice and Arleen might like each other. Janice was always trying to overcome her background, so Arleen might impress her. Years ago, Janice had pushed her husband to buy the Longacre place, the enormous house that Matt’s grandfather had built to show the town how rich he was. “The house that bankrupted my grandfather,” Matt had said. Scott had bought the run-down house for next to nothing and remodeled it. “A never-ending process,” Janice had said.

“Let me make a call,” Bailey said, and ten minutes later, a wide-eyed Janice had appeared in her Mercedes and taken Arleen away with her, along with as much of her luggage as they could get into the car.

After Arleen arrived, and Carol immediately cast her in her commercial, there was no possibility of keeping what the women were doing a secret. But by that time they were so deeply involved in starting the business, they didn’t have time to listen to anything a man said to dissuade them.

Besides, there was strength in numbers, and there were six of them.

The women spent several evenings together calculating how much money they could raise. Patsy held a huge garage sale, and Arleen sold two Paris ball gowns to a Richmond shop. Each woman did what she could to contribute to the communal bank account; then, with nervous hearts, they prepared to make an offer on a factory in Ridgeway. But before the offer had been written up, the realtor gave them the astonishing news that the owner had dropped the price by a third. Bailey was sure that this new price had something to do with a meeting that Violet had with the owner, but she knew better than to ask for details.

Janice was up to her neck in setting up the books, getting licenses, and researching codes for running a canning factory.

“For a woman of aristocracy, Arleen sure knows how to deal with money,” Janice said in admiration. “She’s better than a calculator for adding and subtracting in her head. And brother! can she bargain. I’ve never seen anything like it. She got the decorator to put up silk curtains in my dining room for half what I was told that cotton curtains were going to cost. And I don’t know where she got those rugs, but—” Janice put up her hands in amazement. “And what she says to my mother-in-law has to be heard to be believed. I thought the old hag would run and tell Scott that her ladyship would have to go, but the old bat eats it up. The nastier Arleen treats her, the harder my mother-in-law tries to please her.”

Patsy was having a wonderful time hiring all the women who had worked for her years before, women she’d had to lay off because the canning factory was closing. And she loved that she now had an excuse to give her husband and sons most of the housework to do. “Like the old days,” she said dreamily. “When I had a job.”

At one of their tasting meetings at Bailey’s house, they talked of designing a brochure to send out to small groceries and wholesalers, but here they were stumped. Not one of the six women was an artist or knew anything about computer design or Web sites.

“You know who you should get?” Alex asked one morning at breakfast. “Carla.”

Bailey had to think where she’d heard that name before.

“Opal’s daughter,” Matt said.

“You mean the girl with the multicolored hair and the various body piercings?”

“See?” Alex said. “Right there, you can see that she’s an artist.”

“Actually . . . ” Bailey said.

Matt looked at her. “You get Carla involved in this, and her mother will find out, and Opal’s the biggest gossip in Calburn.”

“It’s okay,” Bailey said. “The only people we wanted to keep it a secret from were you three men.”

She’d meant to make Matt laugh, but instead she saw red rise on his neck. “I’m not your enemy,” he said, then got up and left the table.

The next day at school, Alex asked Carla to come home with him, to Bailey’s house, and Bailey was amused to see that Alex couldn’t quit looking at her. Bailey had been afraid that Carla was going to be as sulky as she had been in her mother’s salon, but she wasn’t. She was enthusiastic and had some good ideas—and she seemed to know everything about how to create a Web site. In no time she had put together a good-looking brochure, then recruited Alex and Patsy’s twin sons to address envelopes.

“How does she do it?” Bailey said to Matt. Carla had three gorgeous young men obeying her, but as far as Bailey could tell, she wasn’t interested in any of them.

“Same way you do,” Matt said as he left the room to go upstairs to the attic. He’d cleared the boxes out and was now spending most of his time up there. But then, since the house was filled with people working on the Mulberry Tree Preserving Company, there wasn’t much room for him downstairs.

For some reason, they began to receive orders even before the brochures were mailed.

“Did you notice that all these orders are from men?” Patsy asked. “Directly from the men. Am I just old-fashioned, or don’t most company presidents have secretaries?”

“Violet,” Carol said as she licked an envelope. “She called in a few favors.”

Bailey started to ask a question, but when Patsy and Janice gave her a hard stare, she closed her mouth. “Okay, so which do you like better, the cherry or the blueberry?”