The Mulberry Tree

“What are you reading?” She put her head on his shoulder.

“Nothing. I was just thinking how everything leads back to the Golden Six. No matter what we want to know, it always leads back to those six boys.”

“Your father,” Bailey said softly.

“It happened before he was my father. Anyway, I was thinking that the more we find out about them, the more likely we are to find out who Manville trusted.”

“And if that person is still alive,” Bailey said.

“Yes. If,” Matt answered.

Twenty-seven

“He’s never had a visitor before,” the nurse said to Bailey and Matt a few minutes after they entered the rest home. “Well, a couple of friends from work have visited him, but no family.”

“Where did he work?” Matt asked.

“High school football coach,” the nurse said, looking at them in speculation, as though to ask why they didn’t know that. “If he’s your uncle—” she began, looking at Matt.

“Family feud,” Matt said. “You know how those things are.”

“Sure,” she said as she stopped in front of a door. “All right, now here are the rules. He’s a very sick man, so if you upset him, out you go. Understand?”

Both Bailey and Matt nodded as they stepped past the woman to enter the room, and right away Bailey wanted to leave. The man on the bed looked as though he barely weighed a hundred pounds, and tubes were coming out of him everywhere. His left arm was strapped down, and a drip was slowly entering his veins. An oxygen tube was across his face. Machines all around him measured his breathing and his heart rate.

“Matt, I—” Bailey began, her hand on his arm.

But Matt stepped forward to the man’s bedside. “Mr. Burgess,” Matt said firmly, “we’d like to ask you about the night Frank McCallum died.”

In the next second all hell broke loose as the man opened his eyes and alarm bells started screaming. In an instant the door opened, and a doctor and two nurses ran into the room, pushing Bailey and Matt aside.

Bailey stood back, clutching Matt’s hands in hers as they watched the doctor examine the patient and the nurses switch off the machine alarms. After a moment Bailey heard a voice say, “I’m all right. Get off of me!” and she breathed a sigh of relief. “I was having a bad dream,” the voice said. The doctor and two nurses were blocking their view, but Bailey knew it was Burgess speaking.

“Would all of you get the hell out of here and let me talk to my guests?” the voice said.

The doctor turned around and gave Bailey and Matt a hard look. He hadn’t been fooled by his patient’s lie. “You upset him again like that, and I’ll personally escort you out of here,” he said, then the three of them left the room.

Bailey walked to his bedside. The man in bed was emaciated, wasted by whatever was eating his life away, but his eyes were bright and alive. And she could see past his wrinkled face to the young man she’d seen so many pictures of.

“I think we’d better leave,” she said. “We’ve—”

“What?” he said. “Already almost killed me?” Burgess said, then coughed.

Bailey got a glass of water with a straw in it off the table and held it while the man drank.

During this, Matt had been standing at the foot of the bed, his hands white-knuckled as he gripped the rails.

“You’re Kyle’s boy, aren’t you?” Burgess said. “You look like him, only fatter.”

“He eats a lot,” Bailey said, smiling.

Burgess turned to her. “And who are you?”

Before Bailey could speak, Matt said, “Lucas McCallum’s widow.”

“Oh, Lord,” Bailey said, then sat down on a chair beside the bed. She was sure that this news would certainly kill the man. The machines made some beeps, but no alarms went off.

“Manville,” Burgess said after a moment. “James Manville. I saw him once. I was in Oregon buying lumber, and someone said that James Manville had just come into town and was going white-water rafting. Like everyone else, I wanted to see him, so I was in the crowd that watched him get in the boat. Just before they took off, he waved at us, and I thought my heart would stop, because I was looking into Luke McCallum’s eyes.”