The Mulberry Tree

“And it’s good to see you, too,” Alex said blandly.

Matt calmed himself. “Sorry. Did you find her? We heard nothing from you all this time.” He couldn’t prevent himself from this reprimand.

As Alex glanced toward the dark house, Matt could see from the porch light’s dim glow that the boy was exhausted, and the anger left Matt.

“She asleep?” Alex asked.

“Yeah,” Matt answered. “You look beat. Want something to eat?”

“I could eat the tires off the bike,” he said, “but I need to talk to you in private. I think you and I need to decide what to tell her.”

Matt knew that the ‘her’ was Bailey. He nodded. “I’ll get you some food and meet you in the barn. There’s a shower in the office if you need one.”

Alex just grunted in reply, then turned and started walking toward the barn.

Twenty minutes later, Alex was seated on a hay bale, his hair wet from the shower, wearing the clean clothes that Matt had brought him, and ready to talk.

“I crashed it,” Alex said, his mouth full.

“Crashed what?”

“The bike. I didn’t want to waste time, so I asked a few questions in the stores around where she lives, found out that she lives alone, then ran my motorcycle through the front window of her house. When she said she’d call an ambulance for me, I made an attempt to leave, as though I was afraid of being found by the police. She loved it; invited me to stay so she could personally nurse me back to health.”

Matt just sat there blinking at the young man in wonder. Words like audacious, fearless, and . . . stupid came to mind. He refilled Alex’s glass of iced tea. “If you wrecked the bike, how—” He nodded toward the barn door. Outside was the motorcycle that Alex had ridden up on.

“New one. She bought it for me.”

Matt’s eyes widened. “Where’d she get the money? I figured that when Manville died, her income would be cut off.”

“I don’t know where it comes from,” Alex said, “but she’s got lots of cash. I couldn’t find out about her money in the little time I had with her, but I know that it’s not from a legitimate source. Lord! but that is one angry woman! She said that she has to keep her money in a dozen different accounts so nobody will know how much she has. And she whines constantly about having to live in a ‘dump’ like the one she has, when she can afford better. But ‘they’ won’t let her show her wealth.” Alex shook his head for a moment. “She has a six-bedroom mansion set on four acres that look like something out of a magazine. Her swimming pool could be used in the Olympics.”

“Did you find out anything about Bailey and the marriage?”

“Yeah, Manville got her mother’s permission.” When Matt opened his mouth to speak, Alex held up his hand. “But Dolores doesn’t know where the paper is. When she told me that, she laughed and said, ‘But they don’t know that I don’t know,’ then giggled like a kid.”

Matt waited while Alex took a long drink of tea, then returned to the food. “I want to know every detail,” Matt said.

Alex put his plate of food down on the floor, then lifted his shirt and turned around. On his back were deep scratches, the kind of scratches left by a woman in the throes of passion.

Matt gave a low whistle.

Alex picked up the plate again. “No wonder she’s lost three husbands,” he said. “I never saw a woman so full of hate.” He glanced toward the door of the barn. “And every bit of that hate is directed toward Bailey . . . Lillian. Dolores truly and deeply hates her sister. She believes that Lillian—I mean Bailey—took Manville away from her. But Dolores never even met the man until after he’d married her sister. Does that make any sense to you?”

“Yeah, sort of. Go on.”

“Dolores says she wasn’t there when it happened—the signing, I mean—or she would have stopped her mother. Dolores was onstage, singing. She says she was singing for Manville, but he was—”

“Go on,” Matt said impatiently. “Tell me about the paper.” He was afraid that Bailey would wake up, find him gone, and start looking for him. He could already tell that he didn’t want Bailey to hear what Alex had to say.

“Dolores said that on that day in hell—that’s what she calls it—three men in suits showed up with a type-written piece of paper and—get this—one of them was a notary public. Dolores said her mother didn’t have time to think, and that the ‘poor woman’ hardly knew what she was doing. Dolores said the notary asked to see her mother’s driver’s license, then one of the men ‘ordered’ her to sign the paper ‘if she knew what was good for her.’ The notary put his seal beside the signature, then all three of the men left with the paper.”

“Her mother wasn’t given a copy?”

“No. Dolores said her mother was so bedazzled—that’s her word—by it all that she didn’t even tell Dolores until

late that night.”

“Didn’t Dolores wonder where her teenage sister was?”