The Mulberry Tree

“What’s bothering you?” he asked. “You’ve been too quiet ever since we picked them up at the airport.”

Bailey almost said that there was nothing wrong, but she didn’t. Instead she told him that Luke McCallum was said to be retarded, and that he’d lived in seclusion in the mountains.

“We’re not talking the Middle Ages,” Matt said. “The kid’s mouth could have been fixed. It was fixed.”

“So why wasn’t it repaired when he was a child?” Bailey asked. “That photo of Jimmie was when he was a teenager. Even if there was no money for the surgery, there are welfare agencies. Surely, with a case like that one a doctor could have been found who would have done the work for free. Jimmie—” She stopped and took a breath. “Jimmie used to give a lot of money to doctors to perform free surgeries on malformed children.”

Matt gave Bailey a soft kiss. “Eventually we’ll find out everything, and we’ll start by finding out what Violet knows.”

But after Bailey had served them the lamb and a cold cucumber soup, as they sat outside and ate, she and Matt found out that Burgess had told his wife little.

“When I met Burgess in California,” Violet said, “I had only recently escaped from a hardscrabble life in Louisiana. My mother had six kids, all with different fathers, and—” She waved her hand. “That doesn’t matter now. I was young and pretty, and I thought that if I could just make it to Hollywood, I’d instantly become a movie star.”

Violet smiled at her naïveté. “Yo

u can imagine how that worked out. Four months after I got to California, I was doin’ the same thing my mother had done to earn a livin’. But even though I was doin’ rather well at it, I’d seen where a life like that led. I’d seen that I wasn’t always gonna be young and pretty, and I knew that someday I was gonna look like this.”

She motioned down toward her own body, but neither Matt or Bailey smiled at her self-deprecating joke.

“Anyway, one day my car broke down on some back road, and this big, slow-movin’ man from Virginia stopped to help me. I knew right then that I was at a crossroads of my life, and I decided to take the opportunity. I put on my best helpless-little-girl act, made up lots of stories about my past and my present, and a few days later Burgess and I were married, and we came back here to Calburn to live.”

Violet glanced toward her garden as though to see if Carol really had cut down all her marijuana plants, but they were indeed gone.

Bailey got up to get dessert, a mango-infused crème brûlée, and when she returned with two bowlfuls, one for Matt and one for Violet, she said, “Go on with your story. Did you like it here in Calburn?”

Violet laughed. “It was all right. Borin’, but okay. I made an attempt at bein’ a housewife, and I did okay. Burgess was easy to please. Except when he told some long-winded story, he didn’t talk much, so I got lonely sometimes. He was a nice man, though.”

“What did he say about the Golden Six?” Matt asked.

“Not a word. In fact we’d been back here for months before I heard of them. Somebody at the grocery mentioned them and said that my husband had been one of them. I didn’t think anything about it except as a joke, so that night, I was sort of teasin’ him, sayin’ I’d heard he was a ‘Golden Boy.’ He shocked me because he got angry. Burgess never got angry. Never! But he did that night.”

“And that made you curious,” Bailey said.

“Nope. Curiosity ain’t one of my faults. I’d seen too many people with too many nasty little secrets in my life, so I wasn’t interested. If he didn’t want to talk about the Golden Six, I didn’t either.”

Violet finished the last of her dessert. “Good dinner. Carol has me eatin’ six kinds of green things at each meal. I’m beginnin’ to hate that color! And her idea of dessert is sugar-free Jell-O.”

“What happened on the thirtieth of August, 1968?” Matt asked softly.

“Ah,” Violet said. “That’s when everything changed. That summer all six of ’em were here. My husband went from bein’ home every night to bein’ gone every night—and all day. All that summer they were callin’ me from the lumberyard and askin’ me when Burgess was comin’ to work. They needed decisions to be made, but they couldn’t find him.”

“Why were they all here in Calburn?” Bailey asked.

“Different reasons. That little fruit, Harper, said he’d come back to see his mother because she was dyin’, but he didn’t spend much time with her. Burgess told me Harper was a big-deal producer out in Hollywood and that he was givin’ up a lot to stay with his sick mother. I couldn’t stand the little creep, and I was sure he was lyin’, so I called somebody I knew in L.A. and asked some questions. It was just as I thought: Harper Kirkland was a nobody. He’d worked on a few sets as best boy—you know, he bangs the clapper”—Violet gestured as though clapping the board that shows the scene and the take number in a movie—“but the creep caused so many fights that he was always fired. He earned a living turnin’ tricks.”

“Fights?” Matt asked. “What kind of fights? Fist-fights?”

“Yeah. Whatever. He did bitchy stuff like tell one person one thing, then another somethin’ else. He loved to stir up trouble.”

“And my father was home all that summer,” Matt said. “He’d broken a bone in his ankle and couldn’t drive.”

“Yeah,” Violet answered, looking at Matt. “I only met your dad a couple of times, but he was a real nice guy.”

“So nice he abandoned his family.”

“So all the six were here, and Frank . . . ” Bailey said, encouraging Violet to go on.

“Yeah,” Violet said. “On the thirtieth of August Frank shot his young, pregnant wife, then himself.”