Hidden Treasures (23 page)

“I bet you can,” Fern purred.

Erica dug into her pie so she wouldn’t have to witness the goo-fest in progress between Fern and Avery. The apples were tart and spicy, with a hint of crunch. The crust was light and crisp, still warm from the oven. How did Fern do it? Was her skill at baking innate? Was Erica doomed because she’d grown up in a semi-urban home where her mother never baked because, “Let’s face it, there are a dozen gourmet bakeries in this town that make better pastries than me, so why should I knock myself out?”

She continued to eat while Avery and Fern murmured to each other on the subject of speed limits. The pie filled her as the cookies she’d snacked on before leaving her house hadn’t. When she was done, she pushed her plate away and said, “Avery, I don’t know how long you’re planning to stay in town, but if you want to get access to the box, we have to arrange it with Peter Goss. The bank is closed on weekends, so we’d have to contact him and see if he could meet us there.”

“I was thinking I’d stay until tomorrow,” Avery said, addressing Fern more than Erica.

“I can get Peter to open the bank,” Fern assured him. “He’s scared of me.”

Before Erica could ask why, Avery said, “I’m not surprised.” Erica decided to let it lie.

“Well. Okay, then,” she said, forcing enthusiasm into her voice. “We’re all on the same page. I just wanted to make sure.”

“I think you should hire an attorney, Erica,” Avery said abruptly.

Erica flinched. “Why?”

“We talked about it, “ Fern chimed in, surprising Erica even more. Surely they had better things to do than talk about Erica. “Now that everyone in the world knows what’s in that box, Glenn Rideout’s going to be making all kinds of claims. He’s got a lawyer. You should get one, too.”

“Is there more than one lawyer in Rockwell?”

“I’d recommend someone from Cambridge,” Avery suggested. “We might even be able to hire someone through the university—although if you did that, the attorney would be representing Harvard’s interests more than yours.”

“I can’t afford a lawyer,” Erica said. She couldn’t even afford granite counters in her kitchen.

“If the box and its contents are worth as much as I’m starting to think they are,” Avery pointed out, “you can afford an attorney.”

“I don’t even want the box! What would I do with it? It’s an antique artifact. It belongs in a museum.”

“If it’s yours,” Avery explained, “you can donate it to a museum. But first you’ve got to ascertain that it’s yours.”

“And not Glenn Rideout’s—the greedy creep,” said Fern.

“All right.” Erica rested her head in her hands. It still thrummed with pain. “My cousin Naomi’s husband is a lawyer down in Cos Cob, Connecticut. Maybe I’ll call her.” Naomi’s husband, Sheldon, charged top dollar—he was quite the hotshot, according to Erica’s mother. Naomi had met him at Cornell. Why couldn’t Erica have met a hotshot at Harvard? If she had, she could have been living in a four-bedroom Colonial with central air in Cos Cob, too.

She’d call Naomi tonight. She’d call her mother. She’d do everything everyone thought she should do. Her life had been slipping out of her control ever since the box had been found. She hadn’t wanted anyone to see it, yet that very first evening Meryl Hummer had managed to finagle a photo for a front-page story about it, and Erica had never regained her footing.

That very first evening, Jed had entered her house and her world. She’d armed herself with a knife, but unlike Fern, she inspired no fear.

God, she was a failure. At everything. Her garden was a muddy mess, the plants unevenly spaced and poorly chosen. Her culinary skills were zilch. Her family didn’t approve of her career. She had an Ivy League degree with high honors and she felt like an idiot.

And the man she wanted, the man allegedly every woman in town except for Fern wanted, the man who had loved her all night long, so sweetly, so wildly that merely remembering caused a wave of heat to surge through her, was going to bury his grandfather’s ashes and disappear.

A stupid box had changed her fortunes, and instead of making her feel grounded and rich she felt lost and impoverished.

S
EEING HERSELF
as a fifth wheel, she refused Fern’s offer of a second slice of pie. Avery promised to phone her tomorrow, once Fern had worked out a time with Peter Goss to meet them at the bank. “Buy a T-shirt,” Fern urged her as she headed out the back door. “I mean it, Erica. You don’t ever have to wear it, but you should own one, just in case.”

Erica didn’t want to contemplate just in case
what
. She drove back toward town, wondering whether buy
ing a T-shirt would make her feel better or worse. She decided to buy one. If it turned out to make her feel worse, she’d send it to her mother.

An impressive crowd swarmed outside Hackett’s Superette, watching a TV reporter ply his trade on the sidewalk. Erica kept driving, heading down to Rideout’s Ride. For Randy’s sake, she’d buy her shirt from his father.

The bar was not as lively as the sidewalk outside the Superette, but its clientele seemed relatively spirited. At least a dozen people, mostly male, occupied the tables at the rear of the tavern. They conversed, they smoked cigarettes and they shuttled glasses of booze between their cocktail napkins and their mouths. They seemed well suited to the place, their faded plaid shirts and burly demeanors making her think of hunters, just as the antlers hanging on the wall made her think of the hunted.

Randy’s father stood behind the bar, energetically polishing its surface with a rag. A rotund, balding fellow in twill trousers and a V-neck sweater—clearly not a hunter—sat on a stool across from him, nursing a highball glass containing a brown, and no doubt potent, liquid. “Well, well,” Glenn Rideout greeted her. “If it isn’t our very own celebrity! What can I get you, Miss Leitner?”

Erica wasn’t sure how to interpret his congeniality. She’d been in his bar twice a couple of years ago, both times to discuss Randy’s schoolwork when he’d been a student in her class. Glenn had not been so warm and affable those times, so she couldn’t rationalize his cheerful mood as standard bartender behavior. Maybe he’d made a lot of money selling T-shirts today. Glenn
Rideout struck her as the kind of guy whose mood could be buoyed by large influxes of cash.

Perhaps he was treating her with particular conviviality because he was planning to claim the box was half his. She didn’t want to hire a lawyer, but Avery and Fern were probably correct. The happier Glenn Rideout seemed, the more strongly Erica felt she needed legal representation.

“I was thinking of buying a shirt,” she told him, ignoring the insistent throbbing in her skull. “How much do they cost?”

“Nineteen-ninety-nine. A steal, if you ask me.”

Right
, Erica thought,
you’re stealing nineteen-ninety-nine from me
. Did she really have to buy a damn shirt? She didn’t want to. “What sizes do they come in?”

“Small, medium, large, extra large.”

“And extra-extra,” a chubby man on a bar stool hollered, as if he wanted people in the next county to know. “That’s my size.”

Erica smiled politely at him, then turned to look at the shirt Glenn Rideout was displaying for her. She suppressed a grimace. It truly was ugly. “I don’t know,” she hedged. As aggravating as her mother could be, Erica loved her too much to unload such a hideous shirt on her.

“You better buy it,” the man on the stool shouted. “It could be as close as you ever get to that box.”

Erica frowned. She’d assumed everyone in town knew who she was by now, but evidently this fellow didn’t. “Actually,” she told him, “I’m pretty close to the box.”

“Don’t expect that to last,” the man said.

Erica shot Glenn an accusing look. Was he boasting
publicly that he was going to claim ownership of the box? Let him try to claim it. She’d line up a lawyer. Sheldon Mandel of Cos Cob would shut Glenn down.

“What are you looking at me for?” Glenn asked, radiating spurious innocence.

She ordered herself to remain polite. “I know you’re planning to argue that the box might belong in part to your son, Randy—”

“The hell with what I argue,” Glenn said, folding the shirt neatly and nudging it toward her as if she’d already purchased it. “Your neighbor, Jed Willetz, says the box is his.”

“Jed? Why would he say that?” Her body had been his. Her heart might be his. But the ancient, coin-filled box from her garden?

“He was just in here a while ago,” Glenn informed her. “Said the box was on his property and it belongs to him. What do you think of that?”

She didn’t know what she thought. She couldn’t imagine why Jed would say such a thing. He’d checked and double-checked the property lines. He’d granted that her garden was on her own property. The question had been asked and answered long ago, before she and Jed had spent the night together. “I think you must have misunderstood him,” she said as calmly as she could.

“Glenn misunderstands a lot, but he didn’t misunderstand this,” the chubby man declaimed. “I was sitting right here, Miss Leitner. I heard every word. I’m a certified public accountant, so when the discussion turns to money and ownership, I’m pretty much on top of things.” He nodded for emphasis.

“But Jed—no,” she insisted. “He would have told
me if he thought the box came from his property. We talked about it.”

“Before or after he saw what was inside?” the chubby man asked.

Before.
Before he’d known the box was full of potentially valuable gold coins.

“He’s got a lawyer in New York City,” Glenn told her. “A sharp one, he says. What I’m thinking, Miss Leitner, is you and me oughtta join forces and fight him. What gives him the right to lay claim to the box when everybody knows you and my son dug it up? Derrick Messinger broadcast that bit of news all over the country, so it must be true, right? Jed Willetz is the son of a scumbag. I’d say he’s inherited a few of his dad’s scummy genes. But you and me together, with a good lawyer we could chip in on…We could beat him.”

The notion of joining forces with Glenn Rideout in opposition to Jed made the apple pie she’d just eaten churn unpleasantly in her stomach. As queasy as she felt, though, her headache vanished. Jed—the bastard—was going to contest her for claim on the box? Let him try. Sheldon might not be a shark, but he’d fight for her—if she could afford him, which she could if ownership of the box and its contents was decisively assigned to her and the coins proved valuable. Maybe he’d take the job on contingency. Or he’d take it because Erica had hung out with Naomi at dozens of family bar mitzvahs over the years, sharing lipstick, giggling over Aunt Marion’s blue-rinsed hair and sneaking glasses of wine when the bartenders weren’t looking. Family was family. Sheldon would get the job done, without any help from Glenn Rideout.

But who cared about the box? Jed—that bastard!
He’d kept an eye on her, guarded the box for her, raced to her house to protect her from Toad Regan and then spent the night making love to her, and now he was going to hire a lawyer to argue that the box was his?

She didn’t care what the box was worth. She never had. But she’d cared about Jed, and about what last night was worth. It had been worth so much to her, much more than all the two-hundred-year-old gold coins in the world.

Now she knew what it had been worth to Jed, too.

The only positive aspect of this entire disaster, she thought as she stormed out of Rideout’s Ride, was that she was so angry she forgot to buy the damn T-shirt.

J
ED WAS NOT A HAPPY MAN
when he steered the turquoise Saturn up the driveway to his grandfather’s house. He’d just spent an hour arguing with his father, who claimed that the memorial service for Jed’s grandfather should be held in church, not graveside. As best Jed could tell, the only reason the man was agitating for a second church service was to give him something to barter with. He’d probably hoped Jed would say, “Okay, you can take whatever other junk you want from the house. Just let me do the service my way.”

Jed hadn’t given him that satisfaction. Most of his grandfather’s possessions weren’t worth much, but money wasn’t the point. Jed was still royally ticked that his father had stolen his grandfather’s favorite cast-iron skillet. There were principles involved.

He’d stopped at the Superette on his way home and picked up a chilled six-pack of Michelob. He would have preferred a dark lager to match his dark mood, but Pop Hackett’s inventory of beer was pretty limited. Jed had also picked up a pack of red licorice whips to chew on if the urge for a cigarette overcame him.

But he hadn’t wanted a cigarette since last night. Since Erica. He wondered if sex with her tapped into the same pleasure center as nicotine, although he’d bet sex with her wouldn’t cause cancer. High blood pressure, perhaps.

Driving back to his grandfather’s place only increased his gloom, because she was next door. Of all the women in this godforsaken town he could have fallen for, why did it have to be the only one who lacked the sense to see Rockwell for what it was?

Okay, maybe
he
was the one who lacked sense. Maybe there was something to be said for clean, pine-scented air. A person could re-create that fragrance in Manhattan with a can of air deodorizer, but it wasn’t the same thing. Maybe living surrounded by open space, having the freedom to plant a garden right outside your back door, being able to greet everyone you ran into by name, knowing that the most dangerous human threat in town was a bonehead like Toad Regan—so all right, maybe Rockwell wasn’t synonymous with hell.

It came close, though.

He was so busy fuming about how close Rockwell came to his definition of hell that he didn’t notice her on his front porch until he was already out of the car. She rose from the swing and watched him as he strode toward the porch steps. In the long shadows of dusk, he couldn’t quite make out her face. He knew it was Erica, however—not just because of her resplendent hair, her posture, the specifics of a body he’d grown intimately acquainted with overnight, but because whenever he was near her his nervous system and at least one other part of his anatomy sprang to high alert.

He’d spent the day trying to avoid her, reminding himself that last night had been a one-time deal. But to discover that she was waiting for him on his own front porch—it was too gratifying. He was too damn glad to see her.

His joy ebbed a bit when he got close enough to
read her expression. She was not the least bit glad to see him.

“Hey,” he said cautiously.

She glowered.

He climbed the steps and balanced the six-pack on the porch railing. “I’m not in a real great mood,” he warned her. “I’ve just finished fighting World War III with my father. You want a beer?” He removed a bottle from the cardboard tote and extended it toward her.

“No, thank you.”

Shrugging to cover his apprehension, he twisted the cap off the bottle and took a swig.

She gestured toward the five remaining bottles. “Are you planning to get drunk?”

“No.”

“Then why did you buy six beers?”

“It was cost-effective.” This conversation wasn’t going well. He was standing less than two feet away from a woman he had become obsessed with, consuming beer when he only wanted to consume her, to taste her instead of cold, sour bubbles on his tongue, to feel her instead of the chilled round glass of the bottle. He wanted to scoop her into his arms like a Neanderthal, and carry her off to bed, and make her come so many times she’d take a week to recover.

A week. He’d be gone before that week was up.

No sense indulging in X-rated fantasies. That she hadn’t shown up at his house with the intention of deepening their friendship was clear from the dark glint in her eyes and the fierce set of her chin.

“So,” he said even more cautiously, “how was your day?”

“My day was swell,” she snapped. “Glenn Rideout
invited me to pool resources with him so we could fight you in court.”

“Oh.” He took another swig of beer and rested his hips against the railing. He wanted to sit, but as long as she was standing he’d remain standing, too. Not out of chivalry but because being taller than her gave him a tactical advantage. “Let me offer you some advice. You don’t want to join forces with Glenn Rideout. Ever.”

“Thank you.” The words dropped out of her mouth like two small chips of ice.

“So, you want to fight me in court?”

“Glenn told me you’ve got a New York lawyer lined up and you’re going to claim legal ownership of the box. Your contention is that it was found on your property. I thought we’d already straightened that out, Jed. I thought—”

“Okay, okay.” He held his hand up to silence her. She clamped her mouth shut, but he felt waves of rage rolling off her. “I only told Rideout that to get him off your back.”

“Is that so?”

“He’s like a termite, Erica. He gnaws on things, nibbles away at them, and you think he’s just a bug. But he can bring your whole house down if you don’t watch out. He’s got this dumb idea that he can claim half the box because Randy found it.”

“Randy
did
find it.”

“But it wasn’t on his property. In my work, I can’t go into people’s houses, say, ‘Gee, I really like this table—I could refinish it and sell it for a nice profit,’ and help myself to the table. It’s in their house. Just because I see it doesn’t make it mine.”

“But nobody saw the box. It was buried. Randy dug it up.”

“On your property.”

“Or maybe on yours,” Erica said with a sniff. “You want a cut of the action, Jed? Just say the word.”

The action he wanted had nothing to do with her damn box. He sighed. “Who are you going to believe, Glenn Rideout or me? I thought I was doing you a favor by threatening to bring a New York lawyer into it. If you’d rather I back away and leave you to take on Rideout all by yourself, just say the word.”

She eyed him dubiously, her teeth playing over her lower lip in an unintentionally sexy way. He cooled himself off with a quick gulp of beer.

“Fine,” he said, hoping to goad a response out of her. “Believe Rideout. Go be his partner. Sue me.”

“I don’t believe him,” she admitted, lowering her eyes, suddenly deflated. “I don’t know who to believe, but he’s certainly not at the top of my list.”

“Come to New York with me,” Jed said. The invitation slipped out, startling him as much as it seemed to startle her, but he didn’t regret it. In fact, saying it made him feel better than he’d felt since he’d climbed out of her bed that morning. He set his beer bottle on the ground, took her hand and drew her down onto the swing with him. “How about it?”

She shook her head, as if unfamiliar with the language he was speaking. “What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about New York. Where I live. Tall buildings, lots of people, rude drivers and a hundred brands of beer available in every liquor store. How about it?”

“You’re asking me to go to New York with you?”

He thought hard about what he’d suggested and decided it sounded all right to him. “Yeah.”

“To visit?”

“I don’t know. To visit, to stay, whatever.” He wasn’t prepared to get specific. He hadn’t even been prepared to invite her in the first place. Not that he regretted the invitation, but he didn’t want to get tangled up in details or overanalyze his motives.

“I live here,” she reminded him.

“I used to live here. Big deal.”

“Jed.” She sounded shaky, and her hand fluttered like a frightened moth against his. “It
is
a big deal. I own a house here.”

“So do I.” He gestured at the farmhouse extending back from the porch.

“And I have a job.”

“They need teachers in New York.”

She lifted her gaze to his. Her eyes swarmed with emotion—panic, doubt, yearning and a bunch of other possibilities. He tried not to see love in them. This discussion wasn’t about love. He had already jumped way ahead of himself. He wasn’t going to put himself in deeper peril by making bold declarations and commitments. All he wanted was Erica—somewhere that wasn’t Rockwell.

“What are you suggesting, Jed? I should go to New York with you and get a job there?”

He shrugged. She was looking for a bold declaration and a commitment. He hoped she’d be willing to settle for honesty. “I don’t know. We could see how it worked out.”

“Why?”

Maybe she wasn’t trying to wrangle a promise out of him. She seemed to be aiming for something else:
logic. A handle around which to wrap her Harvard-honed brain. “We like each other,” he noted. “We’re good together. Last night…” He retrieved his beer bottle and drank some beer, buying time.
Go for honesty.
“Last night was incredible. I don’t know about you, but I haven’t ever experienced anything like that before. It was just really good.”

She smiled, not the sexy, kittenish smiles she’d given him last night but something deeper, acceptance mixed with bemusement. “It was really good,” she agreed.

“Not just the sex,” he added. “The part where you took on Toad Regan with a boot and coat hanger. A
dress
hanger,” he corrected himself before she could set him straight. “I admire your courage, Erica.”

Her smile widening, she turned away. He nudged the floorboards to set the swing in motion, and they rocked together gently. “I live here,” she said again. “I settled in Rockwell for a reason.”

“Yeah, and I’m having one hell of a time buying it.”

“All my life I’ve pictured myself living in a small town like this,” she said. “Tossing aside the razzle-dazzle of urban life and surrounding myself with tranquillity. When I was in college, my world was filled with all these brilliant people, every single one of them ambitious and brimming with entitlement, ready to take over the planet. I don’t want to take over the planet, Jed. I want to become a part of it. I want to find my way back to old-fashioned values, to live a simple life.”

“What’s so simple about Rockwell?” he argued. “This is a very complicated town.”

“What’s complicated about it?”

“Half the people here are crazy. The other half are close-minded. Old-fashioned values around here mean, ‘I’m your best friend unless you happen to find a box full of gold coins. Then I’m going to sue you or break into your house.’”

“All right. Maybe simple isn’t what I mean,” she conceded, poking at the floorboards with her toes as he pushed with his heel, so they could both propel the swing. “Maybe
natural
is a better word. Like my garden. And my attempts to learn how to cook with the food I grow. I want to get back to nature, immerse myself in nature—be a part of nature.”

“What’s so great about nature? Nature sucks.” He waved his hand toward his scraggly front yard. “Take mud season, okay? Nature is mud season.”

She laughed. “Mud eventually dries.”

“Mud is not even an issue in New York City.” He tried to figure out why he was fighting so hard for this. He had female friends in New York, no one as intriguing as Erica, but it wasn’t as if he couldn’t get a date. He didn’t
need
her to come to New York with him.

But it irked him no end that she’d choose Rockwell over New York—over
him
. How could she want to stay in this stifling town that he’d been so thrilled to escape from? How could she make that choice when the possibilities between him and her were so enticing?

“Well, it was just a thought,” he said, then forced a grin to prove he didn’t care that she preferred Rockwell to him. “You want to stay here, suit yourself. I think you’re crazy, but maybe that’s why you fit in so well here.”

“I don’t fit in so well,” she argued, getting serious just as he was trying to lighten things up. “I wish I did. It’s been my dream to fit into a town like this.
And in time, I think that dream will come true. It’s not easy, but I haven’t given up yet.”

No surprise that she was stubborn. That was one of the things he liked about her. But he was still infuriated by the thought that she’d turn her back on what they’d shared last night for
this
—this dead quarry town full of busybodies and scammers, people who’d ignore you until they thought you might be rich or famous or, God help you, both, and then they’d target you for friendship or legal action or burglary.

She’d chosen Rockwell over him, and it hurt.

E
RICA UNFOLDED HERSELF
from Fern’s car and met Fern at the rear bumper. They’d driven over together from the school in time for John Willetz’s graveside service Tuesday afternoon. Fern had suggested they travel together because it would be easier to find one parking space than two.

Erica hadn’t imagined that anything—even John Willetz’s burial—could cause a parking problem in Rockwell. Obviously, her imagination was much too limited. The sides of the road near the gate that led into the cemetery were packed with cars, most of them protruding halfway into the roadway and narrowing the space for traffic like an artery narrowed by cholesterol deposits. Why anyone would have created a cemetery without a parking lot was beyond her.

She wished she could have thought of a good excuse to miss the service. But the only excuse she’d come up with was the truth, and the truth—that she’d slept with Jed and then he’d asked her to go to New York with him, without any promises or plans, and that for reasons she still couldn’t fathom, she’d said no—was better kept to herself. If Fern found out Erica had been
the most recent Rockwell female to drop her panties for Jed…Well, it was just better if no one knew.