The Mulberry Tree

“That night Kyle went to each house, got us out of bed, and had us sneak away to have a little ‘meeting’ with Harper. Kyle was furious, and he threatened Harper that if he ever did anything like that again, we’d cut him out of our group. We’d shun him and leave him on his own.”

“But you came out of the bombing as the Golden Six,” Matt said.

“Yeah, that was something we hadn’t planned.” Burgess paused a moment. “For a while it was great. We were heroes in Wells Creek, and we ruled Calburn. Everyone everywhere loved us.”

“Until Roddy insulted Theresa Spangler,” Matt said.

“Right,” Burgess said, then smiled. “By that time we’d pretty much forgiven Harper since everything had worked out so well. In fact, we were doing better than we ever had in our lives thanks to him. Then after Spangler was insulted, horrible things began to happen to us, but Harper saved us.”

“He wrote the articles,” Matt said. “But Bailey hasn’t read them.” Quickly, he added, “That’s not a criticism, dearest.”

“I didn’t realize you two were married,” Burgess said.

“We’re not,” Bailey said.

“She only started sleeping with me—” Matt began.

“Would you mind?!” she said to Matt, and both men laughed. “So tell me about the articles.”

“Harper’s family owned the Calburn newspaper, and his mother stayed home and had Harper wait on her hand and foot, while her deceased brother’s oldest son ran the newspaper. Sort of. Harper’s mother was a tyrant, and she tried to rule anyone who got within twenty miles of her.

“Right after Roddy made Spangler angry, she started telling people that she believed we’d planted the bomb ourselves. She said that heroes didn’t just appear in one day, that there had to be something leading up to them. But it’s my experience in life that people want heroes, so for the most part the other kids ignored her. So she went to Calburn and pretended she was writing an article about the Golden Six and asked a lot of questions.”

“Just as she did many years later for her book.”

“Exactly,” Burgess said. “She got people to confide in her, then spread what she had learned around, and the students began to hate us.

“Because we weren’t from Wells Creek, we didn’t know where the evil gossip was coming from. It was Roddy who found out. Some girl told him while they were in the backseat of a car.

“And when Harper heard, he got angry. He said that no cross-eyed, buck-toothed, frizzy-haired Medusa was going to win over him.

“What Harper did was to tell his mother that if he was going to be a writer, he needed to start young, so he needed to have his work published in their newspaper now.

“His mother allowed Harper to have anything except freedom, so she agreed, and Harper wrote his first story. But when Harper’s cousin, the editor of the paper, read the first column, he refused to publish it. ‘I can’t publish this,’ he told his aunt. ‘Have you read this thing? It says that Kyle Longacre is a cross between Galahad and Buddha, a “champion of the underdog,” he calls him. I’ve known Kyle all his life, and he never championed anything except a football. He’s a nice kid, but he’s no saint. And your son has portrayed that Thaddeus Overlander as a great mathematician who’s secretly working with the government to save the world from destruction. And Burgess is—’

“ ‘I think the article shows great imagination,’ Mrs. Kirkland said.

“ ‘This isn’t imagination, it’s libel. And, besides that, it’s all a great whopping lie.’

“ ‘My son wrote it, so you will publish it, or you will no longer have a job,’ she said, and that was that.

“And that’s when everything really began. Harper took all the bad stories that Spangler had used against us and twisted them around so they became good traits. He portrayed Frank as a man with the voice of the angels, and said Frank had worked his way up pas

t unimaginable poverty, all with his voice. As a result, Frank was asked by a local radio station to announce the football scores.

“Kyle was said to be a young man of noble character, a throwback to ages past, so he was given any job in school that called for someone trustworthy.

“Roddy was made out to be irresistible to women, and it got so that he couldn’t open his locker without love notes falling out.

“Taddy was said to be brilliant, and as a result, he was given special attention from the teachers, which made his grades soar.

“For himself, Harper hinted that he’d written books under a famous pen name, so he was constantly being stopped in the halls and asked if he was so and so.”

Burgess paused for a moment, and Bailey gave him another drink of water. “As for me, everyone in the county knew what had happened when I was four, but instead of hiding it, Harper wrote an essay about me that had anyone who read it crying. He portrayed me as living under the burden of great tragedy, from which I was suffering every moment. More papers sold the day that essay came out than any day before, and after that, ‘murderer’ was never again written on anything I owned.”

When he’d finished this story, Bailey could see that Burgess was worn out. His skin was beginning to turn gray. She gestured silently to Matt that they should leave. He nodded, but still, the big question hadn’t been answered.

Matt took a breath. “James Manville had a very important piece of paper, and he said he gave it to ‘the person he trusted most in the world.’ ”