The Mulberry Tree

Both men looked at her as though to ask what she was talking about. “A woman Winston Churchill disliked was sitting beside him at dinner, and she said, ‘You, sir, are drunk,’ and Churchill said, ‘And you, madam, are ugly, but I shall be sober in the morning.’ ”

Both men were still looking at Bailey in question, silently asking what her story had to do with anything. “Roddy could have pointed out the woman’s plagiarism,” Bailey said, but the men kept staring at her. “Right. I forgot. You’re boys. You probably think Roddy should have punched her in the nose. Oh, well, what did he say?”

“Nothing,” Burgess answered. “Roddy was beautiful, not smart, so he said nothing, and everyone in school laughed at him.

“But what none of us from Calburn knew was that no one made fun of Theresa Spangler, because she was dangerous. All the kids in Wells Creek had learned in primary school to stay away from her. If they didn’t, their lunches ‘disappeared.’ Or they found chewing gum in their hair. Or there were ‘accidents’ on the playground.”

“A dirty fighter,” Matt said.

“The dirtiest,” Burgess said. “She never did anything in the open. The kids all knew who had hurt them, but the teachers never did. They felt sorry for Spangler because she was so ugly, so if a kid said Spangler did it, it would usually be the innocent kid who got punished.

“In high school, the snotty little leader of the cheerleading team once made a rude remark about the ugliness of Theresa Spangler, and the other girls laughed. The next day someone put green dye in the shampoo of all the girls on the team. After that, everyone in Wells Creek High School treated Theresa with the utmost respect.”

“I’m sure her methods were bad, but at least she fought back,” Bailey said. She had too frequently been called “ugly” herself, and she’d fantasized often about revenge.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Burgess said. “She was right to get revenge, and maybe she was. But that girl played too dirty, and she didn’t forgive. After those cheerleaders laughed at her, Spangler didn’t stop at dyeing their hair green. They led lives in hell for that whole year. The next year, three of them moved to other schools, and the other three . . . well, let’s just say that they desperately needed therapy.”

“So you boys had inadvertently chosen the most formidable person in school to pick on?” Matt said.

“Yes. And she took her rage out on all of us. She set herself a goal to undeclare us the heroes that the bomb scare had made us. On the next Monday, Kyle opened his notebook, and inside was some jock’s homework. Four of them were waiting for Kyle after school. They beat him so badly he spent two days in the hospital.”

Burgess shook his head. “All six of us were accused of awful things that year, but we were innocent. An obscene note from Roddy was found in some football player’s girlfriend’s locker, and only by luck did he escape a beating. Part of Frank’s shirt was found outside the girls’ locker room, and he was accused of being a Peeping Tom. Taddy was accused of cheating on a test. And Harper was locked inside Kyle’s locker by four boys who said he was spying on them. They did it on a Friday afternoon, and we didn’t find him until Saturday night. We had to break into the school to get him.”

“And you?” Bailey asked. “What did they do to you?”

“ ‘Murderer’ written on my locker. And it was written inside my books and on anything that had my name on it.”

For a moment the three of them were silent.

“Was it all a setup?” Bailey asked quietly. “The bombing, I mean. Did you all plan it, or were you really heroes?”

“Yes and no,” Burgess said. “In a way we planned it because we fantasized about doing it for days beforehand, but I don’t think any of us really thought about planting a bomb in the school.”

“Except Harper,” Matt said softly.

“Exactly. How’d you guess?”

“I think maybe my dad told my mother the truth because one time there was a news piece on TV about a bomb going off somewhere, and my mother said, ‘Better check Harper’s whereabouts.’ She didn’t mean for me to hear her, but I did. At the time I was so young that I thought she meant a harp, a musical instrument, but what she’d said was so puzzling that I remembered it. Years later, I heard the name Harper,

and I put two and two together.”

“So how did it happen?” Bailey asked.

“It started out as loneliness, just as Spangler said. We were strangers in a school that didn’t want us, and we desperately wanted to find our places.”

“Spangler said that Frank and Rodney and Thaddeus were better off in Wells Creek than they had been in Calburn,” Bailey said. “She said Frank had impressed the whole school with his persuasive speech.”

Burgess snorted so loud that one machine began to beep, and he had to take a couple of breaths to calm himself and quieten the machine. “You know why Frank had such a good voice? He’d been chain-smoking since he was eleven, and his lungs were charbroiled. Spangler wrote that book to impress her teachers. We were all misfits. The only thing that woman got right was that since we were the only boys from Calburn, it threw us together. And she was right when she said that in Calburn we’d never been friends. Nerds like Taddy don’t rub elbows with shining stars like Kyle Longacre.”

Bailey glanced at Matt and saw that his mouth was in a hard line. Obviously, he didn’t consider his father a “shining star.”

“The first weeks were awful,” Burgess said. “We were alone and lonely and we missed our school, where we knew the rules. Every afternoon we had to wait forty-five minutes to an hour for the bus to pick us up to take us back to Calburn. And, like kids then did, we stayed apart from the girls. The first time the bomb was mentioned, as usual, we were complaining about how much we hated Wells Creek High School.”

“What would you do if someone bombed this place?” Harper asked the other boys as they stood in the little kids’ playground and waited for the bus to arrive.

“Run,” Roddy said, and they all laughed.

“I’d get the hell out of here, and hope that they all blew up,” Frank said.