Hidden Treasures (12 page)

His car was parked in front of the Superette, and he ducked inside to pick up some more chewing gum. What he needed was the nicotine gum, but that struck him as the equivalent of methadone; he saw no point in exchanging an addiction to cigarettes for an addiction to nicotine gum. Plain old peppermint ought to be enough for him.

Pop Hackett was hunkered down in front of the checkout counter, tidying the candy racks. “Hey,” Jed greeted him.

Pop glanced over his shoulder. “Hey, Jed. You live in New York City—tell me, you think I’ve got too many rows of M&M’s?” He had four rows—brown packages, yellow packages, blue, red. “I’m just thinking you’d be a little more savvy about style and such, that’s all.”

“M&M’s are M&M’s,” Jed said. “They look the same in New York as they do here.”

That seemed to please Pop. He straightened up, dusted the cuffs of his plaid flannel shirt and smiled. Forty years ago, orthodontia would have done him a world of good.

Jed hoped he wasn’t destroying the aesthetic balance of the candy display by grabbing a pack of chewing
gum. “Where is everybody?” he asked. The store was empty except for Pop.

“Running their own stores and dreaming of fame,” Pop told him, sweeping a hand over the sparse strands of hair stuck to his scalp like dried brown seaweed. “Haven’t you heard about the TV people?”

“Yeah.” He tried to think of any other food items he might need. His stock of peanut butter, milk and bananas was holding up, and while he’d been inventorying the house’s contents yesterday he’d stumbled upon a dozen cans of soup, another five of stew and three of canned pears on a shelf in the basement. No canned peaches—and he wouldn’t be able to buy any fresh peaches, either, not for another couple of months.

Thinking of peaches made him think of other things. He wandered toward the back of the store, where Pop kept a small and rather pitiful selection of alcoholic beverages. His wines were mostly Château du Jug and Vintage Screw Top, but Jed needed to have a bottle on hand. He searched the shelves in vain for a halfway decent Chianti. That was what Erica had served last night. It had been good; she obviously hadn’t bought it at the Superette.

He settled on a Merlot he knew would be mediocre, but mediocre was better than bad. Maybe he’d bring it over to Erica’s tonight, and they could split it—once she’d gotten rid of the paparazzi. They could drink some wine, and he could experience something just as delicious as fresh peaches, even though peaches were out of season.

D
ERRICK TOOK A NIP
of scotch, winced because it wasn’t Chivas and tucked the bottle under the back seat of Mookie’s car. Ordinarily, he didn’t indulge before the day’s work was done, but he’d been up since five-thirty, so in a sense he’d already put in eight hours. He deserved a pick-me-up.

Actually, other than the unavailability of Chivas in this puny burg, things were looking not too bad. His contact with Erica Leitner that morning had been brief, but he believed he’d connected with her. He always did, sooner or later, especially with women. He could fine-tune the ratio of earnestness to humor in his approach, and he’d been blessed with a rugged and unarguably telegenic handsomeness that had, if anything, been made even more appealing by the plastic surgeon who’d rebuilt his nose. Women like Erica nearly always succumbed.

He’d get his exclusive; he was sure.

But until she was ready to talk to him—and let him film her damn box—he was stuck in Rockwell with time to burn. Sonya had the swell idea of turning the show into a quasidocumentary about small-town New England life. “I’m telling you,” she cawed, “the viewers’ll eat it up. Crusty Yankees, cute little stores and all those mountains in the background. Mookie, film the mountains, wouldja?”

Mookie obediently swung his camera in the direction of the hills. They weren’t mountains. Derrick ought to know. He’d climbed mountains in his pursuit of stories. He’d once climbed all the way to the top of Massachusetts’s Mount Everett as part of an interview with a guy who claimed to have killed his commanding officer in Vietnam thirty-something years ago. The guy liked to get away from it all by climbing mountains whenever the memories of that ugly day in ‘Nam threatened to overtake him. He’d climbed a few mountains out West, in the Cascades and the Rockies, but fortunately Derrick had caught up with him on Everett rather than Mount Hood. Derrick had later discovered that if he mumbled—a skill that didn’t come naturally to him, given his well-honed broadcast elocution—he could trick people into thinking he’d climbed Mount
Everest
rather than Mount Everett.

The guy he’d interviewed during that trek had turned out to be a dogfaced liar, too. Derrick had located his sergeant—the officer he’d supposedly killed—running a Jiffy-Lube in Cincinnati.

The point was, though, Derrick knew mountains. Those humps on the horizon were
not
mountains.

“You happy with this?” Sonya thrust a clipboard in front of him. He leaned against the car and skimmed the text she’d written. He was a journalist, a hard-hitting reporter who whistled like a missile when he was going after someone. But to stand on a corner of Rockwell’s picturesque little Main Street and deliver a monologue about small-town values and the treasures that might be hidden within the most sleepy, inconsequential community, well, that wasn’t his strength. For a task like that, he needed Sonya to put words in his mouth.

“Yeah, it’s fine,” he said, handing the clipboard back to her. She’d printed clearly, block letters in black ink on white paper, so he’d be able to read the text from a distance without squinting. Squinting was fine when you wanted to look indignant or determined, but this was a happy story. A fun story. Totally not up his alley.

“I’m thinking, we’ll have you stand in front of that crafts store for the first part. I like the flowers. That’s such a nice touch. I wish we had some sunlight. Mookie, can you make it look sunnier in the film?”

“Sure.” Mookie was too goddamn agreeable. Derrick wouldn’t mind—he liked when Mookie was agreeing with him—but Mookie’s good-natured acquiescence meant that Derrick always seemed much grouchier by comparison.

“What kind of flowers are those, anyway?” Derrick asked, peering down at the wilting little blossoms. They were yellow and purple—odd colors.

“Pansies,” Mookie said.

Derrick straightened up and backed away from the planter. “I don’t want to get filmed with any pansies.”

“Don’t be stupid, Derrick,” Sonya scolded. “They’re very nice flowers. They make the setting look springlike.”

“I don’t want to look springlike. Not with pansies.” Why couldn’t he stand in front of an evergreen somewhere? A sturdy Douglas fir. Or an oak. Were oak trees evergreens? He didn’t know much about plant life, but he knew he didn’t want to be associated with pansies in front of a TV audience of millions.

“Just stand there.” Sonya nudged him back into place next to the planter. Derrick felt a muscle tick in his thigh, a flurry of light spasms, his body’s protest
against this juxtaposition. A movement to his left caught his peripheral vision, and when he turned toward the crafts shop he saw a couple of women inside, spying on him. They grinned like baboons when he stared at them. Which one of them was responsible for the pansies? Whoever it was, he hoped she’d get stricken by a bolt of fabric.

“Mookie, you set?” Sonya asked.

“Yeah. I got lots of mountains.”

Hills
, Derrick thought churlishly. Those were
not
mountains.

Mookie switched on a rectangular light attached to his camera. “Is that gonna look like sunshine?” Sonya asked.

“Close enough.”

“Okay, then, let’s boogie.” She smoothed a few strands of Derrick’s hair, blotted the surface of his nose with a tissue, then backed up to stand beside Mookie. She held up the clipboard. “Go,” she cued him.

“‘I’m standing on Main Street in Rockwell, New Hampshire,’” Derrick read from Sonya’s script. He heard tension in his voice. The flowers were emitting invisible vibes. He felt them radiating up his spine and tightening his throat. “‘When we speak of the heart of New England, we’re speaking about places like Rockwell, where the stores are small and the neighbors are friendly.’” Right, like those two friendly apes gawking at him through the shop window. “‘No big chain stores here—’” Wal-Mart wouldn’t waste its time, he thought “‘—but instead a slow, cozy rhythm, the way life ought to be lived.’” What the hell was that supposed to mean, anyway? A cozy rhythm? Was Sonya turning into a freaking poet on him?

She flipped the page and he continued to read her
text. “‘Small towns have their histories and their mysteries.’” Great—now she was crafting rhymes. “‘The history of Rockwell revolves around some early-Colonial farmers and trappers and a granite quarry. Its most recent mystery revolves around an ancient box that a schoolteacher…’” Sonya had inserted a few words above the line, and he struggled to make them out. “‘And her former student…’” Back to the big black print: “Dug up in her backyard.”

“Okay, okay.” Sonya cut him off. “That was fine, but jeez. Do you mind?”

He realized she was addressing someone behind him. Spinning around, he saw a skinny, bedraggled fellow with bulging eyes and scraggly hair that appeared not to have been shampooed since sometime during the Clinton administration. The clown was mugging and waving, mouthing
Hi, Mom
at the camera.

“We’re trying to film something here,” Sonya scolded him.

“Yeah, that’s why I’m wavin’,” he explained. “Tryin’ to get in your film.”

The man smelled a little ripe. Derrick stepped back from him and banged his leg into the pansy planter. Flinching, he sidled in the opposite direction, toward the store’s window. Chivalry might demand that he protect Sonya from this jerk, who was obviously a derelict and quite possibly demented.

Apparently undaunted, she stormed over to the guy and wagged her clipboard in his face. “Look at my notes,” she demanded, although she never held the clipboard still enough for him to read them. “Do you see anything in here about having someone standing behind Derrick and waving and saying, ‘Hi, Mom’?
Do you see anything even remotely like that in the script?”

“I wasn’t
saying
‘Hi, Mom,’” the guy defended himself. “I was just mouthing it. So’s only someone who can read lips would know what I was saying.”

“But you’re not in this script, are you?”

The guy tried to follow the fluttering clipboard with his eyes. “Hey, you wanna film in Rockwell? Well,
I
live in Rockwell, eh? This is
my
town.”

Sonya regarded him. “What’s your name?” she finally asked.

“Toad Regan. What’s yers?”

Toad Regan
. Honest to God. If they were about a thousand miles south of here, Derrick would be expecting to hear the “Dueling Banjos” theme right about now.

Sonya signaled Mookie to resume taping. “So, why don’t you tell us a little about your town?” she asked Toad.

Was she actually going to include this rancid morsel of humanity in the show? Derrick scowled, then forced his forehead to relax so he wouldn’t deepen his facial creases. He took a steadying breath and watched Sonya go at it, reminding himself that she’d dragged him out of the ratings abyss and that she knew what she was doing.

“My town?” Toad stood a little straighter and quit mugging. He eyed the funneled lens of Mookie’s camera and his smile faded. “Well, it’s just a town, y’know? Not too much happens here. You got yer occasional car wreck, yer occasional death, but other’n that, not much. Sometimes a car’ll hit a deer. That’s something, I guess.”

“I guess,” Sonya agreed, straight-faced. “We’re
here in town because of a box someone dug out of her garden. Do you know anything about that?”

“Oh, sure, the box. Everybody knows about the box.”

The door to the crafts shop abruptly swung open, and the two apes emerged. Derrick amended his first impression of them; they looked nothing like a lower orders of primates. Rather, they resembled the sort of women who got orgasms from admiring autumn leaves. One was tall and thin, with silver hair, dressed in exceedingly sensible attire and fringed leather loafers. The other was shorter and rounder, and she carried a quilted bag from which protruded a pair of thick knitting needles.

“I’m sorry but I must interject here,” the taller one said. “I’m afraid Toad Regan is going to say something about Erica Leitner—”

“You mean, that she’s Jewish?” Toad said helpfully.

Both women rolled their eyes. “Erica Leitner is a lovely young woman,” the taller one went on. “She’s a third-grade teacher—”

“What did I say?” Toad demanded. “Did I say anything bad about her?”

“You’re a drunk old fool,” the shorter woman declared. “Go home.”

Toad glowered at her. “Yeah? And where might that be?” Turning back to Sonya, he said, “Did I say anything bad about her?”

“Is the fact that she’s Jewish relevant to this story in any way?” Sonya asked.

“Only that they don’t carry any Hebrew National at the Superette, if you get my meaning.”

“We’re very proud of our diversity here in Rockwell,” the taller woman from the crafts store said.

“She’s an excellent teacher,” the shorter one said. “My neighbor’s little girl had her last year and said she was excellent. She went to Harvard, you know,” the woman added, giving Derrick an oddly coy look. “Not my neighbor’s daughter, but Erica Leitner did. I’ll bet, Mr. Messinger, that being a big TV star you know lots of Harvard folks.”

If Derrick wasn’t mistaken, the news director who’d fired him for asking unseemly questions of a Supreme Court justice had been a Harvard folk. He couldn’t swear to it, but the Supreme Court justice might have been one, too.

“I don’t think you should interview Toad,” the woman continued. “You’d be much better off interviewing us. Wouldn’t he, Harriet?”

The taller one had fixed Toad with a look of diamond-hard disapproval, but at the sound of her name she shifted her attention to Derrick and her face softened. “Yes, I think that would be more appropriate. We’ve lived in Rockwell longer than Toad has.”

“That’s on account of you’re so much older’n me,” Toad pointed out.

Sonya sent Derrick a meaningful look. He interpreted it to mean she wanted him to take over the questioning. Not a problem, except who the hell were these ladies? Where was his research on them?

They smelled better than Toad, at least. “Erica Leitner hasn’t lived in town very long, has she?” he asked.

“She’s much younger than we are,” the short one said.

“So is she an integral member of the community now?”

“There’s no temple here, if you get my meaning,” Toad commented.

The women from the crafts shop ignored him. “She’s very much a part of this community,” the short one said. “We’ve embraced her like one of our own.”

“Well, that’s not exactly true,” the tall one corrected her. “She’s certainly a part of this community, and we’ve embraced her, but you can see she still hasn’t lost her big-city ways.”

“What do you mean?” the shorter one asked.

“Well, her vocabulary, for one thing.”

“Does she swear a lot?” Derrick asked. As far as he knew, the only difference between big-city vocabulary and small-town vocabulary was that living in a big city, a person was exposed to a much wider variety of curse words, in assorted languages.

“Oh, no!” The shorter one shook her head indignantly. “She’s a very nice girl. She uses very clean language.”

“It’s the big words,” the taller one explained. “She uses lots of bigger words. And she dresses—”

“In all that L.L. Bean stuff.” The shorter one completed the sentence. “It makes her look a little touristy.”

“People around here don’t wear L.L. Bean stuff?” Derrick asked, surprised. He would have assumed everyone laced on a pair of those trademark Bean hybrid boots in November and didn’t pry them off until Easter.

“Well, mostly. Just the summer-home people.”

“And the leaf peepers in the fall.”

“I don’t own anything from L.L. Bean,” Toad Regan added vehemently.

A thin, balding man swept out of Hackett’s Super
ette on the opposite corner. “Hey, why don’t you do a little filming over here?” he shouted across the street. “I think you’ve given Harriet’s store enough of a plug.”

A woman followed him out and continued into the street, brandishing a pen and a pocket-size notepad. “Mr. Messinger? Mr. Messinger, could I have your autograph? Not for me, of course—for my aunt Louise.”