Hidden Treasures (11 page)

A hot shudder rippled through her as she considered finishing what she and Jed had started last night. The
real
finish wouldn’t be having sex with him, though. It would be saying goodbye and waving him off as he returned to New York City.

In principle, she saw nothing wrong with recreational sex, as long as both participants recognized the situation for what it was. But she didn’t think she was cut out for that kind of recreation. She hadn’t even mastered gardening or baking bread. No-strings-attached sex seemed far more challenging. She knew her limitations.

Perhaps it was just as well that she hadn’t brought up the subject of last night’s kiss. Jed hadn’t said anything about it. He’d probably forgotten it already. Just because she’d been restless most of the night, remembering the seductive pressure of his mouth on hers, didn’t mean her mouth had left any impression on him.

That restlessness was taking its toll on her now. Waking up twenty minutes before her alarm sounded would have left her groggy, anyway, but the previous night’s insomnia staggered her with fatigue. She’d
need strength and lucidity to face the small army of reporters outside her house, and right now she had neither.

Maybe she should avoid the reporters altogether. She could duck out the back door, race to the shed, dive into her car and leave rubber speeding past them—as if she had something to hide. She didn’t, unless you counted the box, which she wasn’t hiding so much as protecting.

The thing was, she had nothing to say to the reporters other than “Good morning,” or “Isn’t Rockwell a charming town?”

She took her time getting dressed, donning a plain brown corduroy jumper and a plaid blouse, then headed for the kitchen to eat breakfast. Maybe they would go away if she ignored them. Starvation might drive them down to Main Street for breakfast. The Eat-zeria opened early. They could all clog their arteries with omelettes, bacon and home fries, and then they could have heart attacks and flee to the hospital in Manchester, because as charming a town as Rockwell was, its residents couldn’t count on receiving state-of-the-art medical care within its borders.

She filled a bowl with cereal and skim milk and carried it to the living-room doorway, from which vantage she could see through the windows to the front yard and the road. Either she hadn’t counted correctly when she’d peeked out earlier, or another car had arrived. Various news-media types milled about on her lawn, sipping coffee from travel mugs, checking their watches and conferring with one another. Some carried videocams with large microphones attached to them, and others were coiffed with alarming precision. It wasn’t hard to guess who the on-air talent was.

She spooned some cereal into her mouth and shook her head. This was really stupid. The box couldn’t possibly be that fascinating to people in Manchester and Boston, to say nothing of Derrick Messinger’s national audience. People in Miami and Dallas and Los Angeles were surely not perched on the edges of their seats, dying to hear about some antique wooden box a third-grade teacher and her former student had excavated from her backyard garden.

Granted, they might be lured to the edges of their seats by the prospect that the box contained a bounty of stunning magnitude. But Erica wasn’t going to open the box until Avery arrived, which would be tomorrow evening. The reporters would just have to cool their heels until then.

She decided not to sneak out of the house like a coward, especially since the reporters would surely spot her making a break for her car, and they’d chase her with their cameras bouncing and their mikes thrust at her like tilting lances, and she’d look like a racketeer or a corrupt politician trying to dodge an interview on
Sixty Minutes
.

Emboldened, she donned her lined raincoat, grabbed her leather tote and swung open the front door. The horde on her front lawn immediately launched their strike, charging across the grass and shouting at her.

She recognized one—a perky blond woman in a pink wool suit—from a network affiliate in Boston. On TV, the woman had always looked normal, but in person she seemed like an escapee from an anorexia treatment center. Her suit had to be a size zero, unless there was a smaller size than that. She was short, too, a sprite in pastel pink. The thought amused Erica, but only for
a moment, because her vision soon filled with the sight of Derrick Messinger.

No, that was
not
a hairpiece. It couldn’t be. The ruler-straight part slicing through his lush strawberry-blond mane appeared to be cut right down to his scalp. Had he been wearing a toupee, he wouldn’t have parted his hair like that.

They were all yammering at her: “Ms. Leitner! Ms. Leitner!”—some of them pronounced it “Leet-ner” instead of “Lite-ner”—“Have you opened the box yet? Where’s the box?”

The sprite from Boston was wearing bright-red lipstick. The other female reporter wore a parka, as if she thought April in New Hampshire was still ski season, which, Erica supposed, it was. The male reporter who wasn’t Derrick Messinger was almost as carefully polished and made-up as the females. A conservative beige plaid scarf shaped a V below his chin, and even as he peppered her with questions his voice remained stentorian.

Erica suppressed a laugh. The idea of reporters primping and researching and traveling all the way to Rockwell to interview her about her box was so goofy. Still, she wondered whether she should have added a little blush to her cheeks and a layer of gloss to her lips. Given the dreary morning light, she was going to look wan on TV.

No, she wasn’t. She wasn’t going to appear on TV at all, at least not based on this encounter. She had nothing to say to these people. Perhaps, once they realized that, they’d pack up their equipment and leave.

She held up a hand to silence them, and tried to ignore the huge microphones aimed at her. “I haven’t opened the box,” she announced.

“Where is it?” the sprite demanded.

“It’s in a safe place.”

“Why are you hiding it? What else are you hiding?” The questions buzzed around her like black flies.

Mentally swatting them away, she searched within herself for her calm, earth-mother soul. She ought to be annoyed at the intrusion of the reporters, but they were too silly to be annoying. In the grand scheme of things, her celebrity—even if it lasted only her Warhol-allotted fifteen minutes—was far less significant than the historical import of the box.

“The box is in a safe place,” she repeated. “And that’s where it’s going to stay for now. If you’ll excuse me, I have a class to teach.” With what she considered crushing dignity, she nodded a farewell to the reporters and strode around her house to the garage. She heard them swarming after her, but she refused to acknowledge them.

She ought to be involved in a scandal sometime, she thought. She handled the press so well.

She started to drag open the garage door, but Derrick Messinger practically shoved her out of the way in his quest to assist her. She doubted that his motives were pure, but she gave him a grateful smile and said, “Thank you.”

She got into her car, revved the engine, checked her mirror to make sure she wasn’t going to hit any of the reporters and backed slowly along the driveway. One last check in the mirror, and she slammed on the brakes. There he was again, her knight in hair spray. Derrick Messinger stood squarely in the center of the driveway, a hulking teddy bear of a cameraman at his side.

As soon as she stopped the car, Messinger glided
around to the driver’s side, his cameraman trailing him. Messinger waved a business card at her, and she reluctantly rolled down her window.

“I want an exclusive, Ms. Leitner,” he murmured, so quickly the words would have blurred into babble if his diction hadn’t been so precise. He’d pronounced her name correctly, she noted. “I’m staying at the Hope Street Inn, right here in town. We can arrange the terms. I want what you want, Ms. Leitner—a responsible, respectful report. I know we can work together.” He pressed his card against her palm and backed up, presenting her with an enigmatic smile.

Responsible and respectful, huh. His report on Jimmy Hoffa had been inane and sensationalistic. Perhaps he had more respect for a dirt-encrusted box than for a mysteriously vanished labor leader.

She conceded that Messinger had shown more resourcefulness than his competitors. He’d phoned her last night, so his appearance at her house this morning, while unwelcome, wasn’t exactly unexpected. And unlike the others, he would go national with the story. If she gave him his exclusive, the entire country could learn what was inside her box.

The laughter she’d been stifling bubbled up and out of her. She wished Jed were here so they could laugh together. No, she shouldn’t be wishing that.

“I’ll think about it,” she promised Derrick Messinger, giving his hair one more furtive look. It sure was thick. Probably real, but suspiciously thick.

By the time she’d backed out to the street and pointed her Subaru in the direction of the school, she was no longer thinking about Messinger’s hair. She was thinking about Jed Willetz’s hair, and his silver-
gray eyes, and his amazing mouth. She really didn’t want to be thinking about him, but she couldn’t help herself.

W
ALKING OUT
of the old shingled house where Sewell McCormick had his office, Jed sensed that something was out of whack.

The day had stayed overcast, fat gray clouds trudging across the sky, but down below, on Main Street, windows glistened as if they were reflecting a diamond-bright sun. Jed ordinarily didn’t pay much attention to the cleanliness of windows, but this was noticeable.

Sewell had mastered multitasking long before anyone had coined the term. He was the Rockwell town manager—which was different from the mayor in that he wasn’t elected and he did all the work—as well as a podiatrist and also the overseer of the town cemetery. Jed’s feet were fine, and he couldn’t care less how Rockwell was managed, but he did need to make arrangements to bury his grandfather’s remains.

“He was a fine man, your grandfather,” Sewell had said with practiced solemnity, patting his white medical coat in the vicinity of his heart. He’d occupied his swivel stool, leaving Jed no choice but to sit on the special podiatrist examining table, a cross between a dentist’s chair and a sectional couch, covered with a strip of sterile white paper. It wasn’t uncomfortable, but it didn’t seem like an appropriate place to discuss John Willetz’s ashes.

“He was a son of a bitch,” Jed argued mildly, “but other than that, yeah, he was a good guy.”

“This town is poorer in his absence.”

It wouldn’t be poorer once Jed paid the damn property tax on his grandfather’s land. He supposed that
overdue tax bill would have been even greater if his grandfather hadn’t sold off a chunk of his estate to Erica Leitner.

Whom Jed was not going to think about anymore today.

“Maybe you never knew this about him,” Sewell confided, leaning toward Jed and staring through his horn-rimmed eyeglasses, “but he had a real stubborn toenail fungus in ’99. I attacked that beast with every weapon in my arsenal. Got to the point where he looked like he had cauliflower growing out of the cuticle.”

This was more than Jed needed to know. “I want to lay his ashes to rest, Sewell. Just tell me when I can get that done.”

“Will you be having a ceremony? Have you talked to Reverend Pith about it?”

Jed hadn’t talked to Reverend Pith because he hadn’t decided yet whether to have a ceremony. Whom would he invite? His father? The Widow Keefer? Or would it be like the memorial service they’d had in church right after his grandfather died, when just about everyone in town had crammed into the church? Not because they all loved John Willetz so much, but because nothing else had been going on that day. January in Rockwell was pretty slow.

April in Rockwell was pretty slow, too. Every month in Rockwell was slow. Maybe a graveside ceremony would give folks some desperately needed entertainment—Jed’s gift to his hometown.

But as he gazed down Main Street, he wondered if April already had something going on. At least one thing had happened here: a massive downtown window washing.

It was more than windows. The obligatory American flags were out, hanging limply in the damp midday air, but some stores had put decorative flags on display, too. Dangling from a pole beside the door of Harriet Ettman’s crafts shop was a bright-blue pennant featuring a nauseatingly cute bunny. The Eat-zeria’s door was flanked by two flags, one depicting a bottle of soda and the other two sunny-side-up eggs frying in a pan that reminded Jed of the skillet his father had stolen from his grandfather’s kitchen. Potter Henley’s accounting office, on the second floor above the Moosehead, flew a flag in the shape of a large dollar sign. Hackett’s Superette had red-white-and-blue bunting draped festively above its door.

Last time Jed looked, it wasn’t a national holiday.

While he was watching, Harriet emerged from her shop lugging a bulky planter filled with pansies. She set it on the sidewalk just beyond her door, where people would be sure to trip over it as they walked by, and then dusted off her hands and vanished back into her store.

Flowers? Flags and flowers? Was the president planning a photo op in town?

No, but the media were here. Word must have gotten out about those TV people who’d been tramping all over Erica’s lawn that morning.

Of course word had gotten out. There were no secrets in Rockwell, other than his grandfather’s possible relationship with Reena Keefer. Rockwell was sprucing up because TV reporters were in town.

Ambling down the street toward his turquoise rental car, Jed checked out the glistening windows, the flags and Harriet’s pansies. She emerged from her store again, carrying a watering can, and gave her flowers a
good soaking. She looked a little spiffier than usual, her silver hair tidy, her cardigan tied by its sleeves around her shoulders and hanging down her back like a cape, her sneakers so white she must have used shoe polish on them.

Gee, maybe he should hold a ceremony for his grandfather today so the media could report on it. Surely the death and burial of John Willetz, an authentically crotchety New England Yankee, was at least as worthy of coverage as Erica’s box.