Hidden Treasures (9 page)

Jed shouldn’t let his father irritate him so much. He should just bury his grandfather’s ashes and go back to New York. But after he’d left the Moosehead, all
he’d been able to think about was talking to Erica, venting to her. As if she’d understand. As if she’d be sympathetic.

She just might be. She was an outsider in Rockwell, and although Jed was a native, he felt like an outsider, too.

He’d spent the rest of the day cataloging what his father hadn’t filched from the rambling farmhouse and watching for her car. From one of the upstairs windows, he’d seen the Subaru wagon roll to a stop at her mailbox around three forty-five, and then bump up her unpaved driveway. Then he’d seen her duck into her house.

Instead of chasing her inside, he’d decided to wait. He’d drop by around five and ask her to have dinner with him. They could go somewhere, or fix something at home, if they wanted to avoid town gossip, which was as irritating as his father’s attitude. Talk to an unmarried woman in Rockwell and folks assumed you were enjoying a steamy romance with her.

He hadn’t expected to find Fern Bernard in Erica’s house. He remembered Fern from high school. Her hair wasn’t so red then, but she’d been sassy and smart, and he was surprised to learn that she was still in Rockwell. If she was friends with Erica, it probably said good things about Erica.

Fern remained at the stove, babbling about her job as a nurse at the primary school. “You don’t know this current principal,” she was saying. “Burt Johnson. He lives in fear of every tight-ass in town. I’m not allowed to use the word
tampon
in front of the fifth-graders. I’m supposed to call it a
feminine hygiene product
.”

Well, this was real exciting: discussing tampons with two members of the primary school faculty. Jed met
Erica’s eyes and a quiet laugh escaped her. He laughed, too. She immediately bent over the bread she was slicing, concentrating hard on that simple task, measuring the width of each slice as if it had to be calibrated to the nearest millimeter.

“So, how about you, Jed?” Fern called from the stove. “You doing exciting things in New York City?”

“I’m living there. I don’t know how exciting that is.”

“Well, compared with living here…” Fern sent him a knowing look. He grinned. “What kind of work are you doing there?”

“I guess you could say I’m in the family business.”

“What family business?” She hooted. “Your dad runs a junkyard.”

Jed shrugged. Erica gave him a hard look. “You run a junkyard in New York City?”

“I run a resale business,” he said. “Same thing.”

“What do you mean, a resale business?”

He quoted the old line: “‘I buy junk. I sell antiques.’”

“You buy junk?” Fern shouted at the same moment Erica asked, “You sell antiques?”

“Something like that.” He didn’t want to go into it, not if Fern was going to draw connections between his father and him. It wasn’t as if he’d deliberately pursued his father’s trade. It was just that he’d needed to make some money and he’d stumbled onto something he could do. Unlike Jed, his father might buy junk, but he also sold junk.

Erica’s phone rang. She kept gazing at him, as if trying to figure out how much like his father he was.
Not much
, he wanted to assure her. When the phone
rang a second time, she resumed sawing away at the loaf of bread.

“Aren’t you going to answer it?” he asked.

“No. It’s probably someone else’s lawyer, planning to sue me for a share of my abundant wealth.”

“Or else it’s her mother,” Fern called from the stove.

It rang a third time. He was impressed by Erica’s refusal to answer the phone. That took genuine willpower. “What do you want me to do with this bread?” she asked, gathering up the slices.

“Have you got a cookie sheet? They need to be spread on a cookie sheet,” Fern instructed her.

“Okay.” Erica pushed to her feet as the answering machine clicked on.

“Erica Leitner?” a smooth male voice purred through the speaker. “This is Derrick Messinger. I’m in town, and I’d really like to talk to you.”

Erica stared at her answering machine as if unsure whether to pick up the receiver. It was probably a good thing she didn’t, because talking to Derrick Messinger, the oily TV journalist, would have been impossible with Fern screaming at the top of her lungs. “Derrick Messinger? Derrick Messinger’s in town? And he wants to talk to you?
Erica!
”

“About what?” Erica asked stupidly. “What on earth would he want to talk to me about?”

“Your box!” Fern shrieked, swooping down on Erica and giving her a hug, nearly smacking her with the spoon she’d been using to stir the vegetables. “Derrick Messinger! Oh my God! Erica, you’re
famous
now! You’re going to be on TV, on
I’m Just the Messinger!
Oh! My! God!”

Jed recalled the artifact she’d shown him and Meryl
on Sunday evening. It had been a musty, chipped, faded chunk of wood, its hardware tarnished and crusted with dirt. A box. Why Derrick Messinger would want to talk to Erica about it was beyond him.

Of course, folks got carried away over junk all the time. If they didn’t, he’d be out of business.

People were weird, that was all. Some people had taste, some had credentials, some had serenity. Some danced around the room, cheering and hooting at the mere thought that a reporter as famous as Derrick Messinger had come to their boring little town. Some drank wine to take the edge off the lingering craving for nicotine. Some had beer for breakfast.

And some, like Erica, looked utterly bewildered, overwhelmed by what life had thrown at her, or, more accurately, laid beneath her shovel in her garden.

Lawyers. TV reporters. Erica was in for it, all right.

And Rockwell suddenly seemed more interesting to him than it ever had before.

A
S EAGER AS
F
ERN
had been to have dinner with Erica, she seemed just as eager to leave once she’d swallowed the last limp coil of rigatoni from her plate. The box from Erica’s garden had apparently slipped her mind.

Well, she hadn’t come to see the box. She’d come to see Jed Willetz. Erica refused to feel exploited because, after all, she’d gotten a delicious dinner out of the deal. The thing she couldn’t figure out, though, was why, with Jed sitting right in the same room, right at the same table, Fern had decided to depart so abruptly. She’d said something about having work to do, work tonight, work tomorrow, busy-busy-busy, and off she’d flown, leaving behind enough leftovers for two more pasta primavera dinners—or one more pasta primavera dinner for two, if Erica happened to find someone to have dinner with in the next several days.

She eyed Jed, then glanced away. She wasn’t going to be having dinner with him on a regular basis.

To be sure, she expected him to leave when Fern did. But he stuck around, carrying the dishes in from the dining room and lingering in the kitchen while she cleaned them. He didn’t say much, and neither did she. It was as if Fern had been the only one among them who knew how to sustain a conversation, and now that she’d abandoned them, Erica and Jed were floundering.

They’d had conversations before, though. They’d
had conversations during which Erica had been holding a knife, and other conversations during which she’d been unarmed. She wasn’t sure whether scrubbing the stickiness from a knife under a stream of steamy water counted as being armed, but while she washed the dishes Jed wandered lazily around the kitchen, scrutinizing the streaked enamel paint on the cabinet doors, studying the awkward arrangement of wires snaking out from the console of her cordless phone, peering through the dingy window in the back door, roaming the place as if it were his.

She liked having him in her kitchen. She didn’t object to his poking around, scanning the contents of her cabinets, resetting the clock on her cooking range so it was no longer three minutes slow. His presence made the room feel…different. The proximity of testosterone seemed to rearrange the air molecules in an exhilarating way.

She shook the excess water from the final plate and stacked it in the dish rack to dry. Now what? she wondered as she dried her hands on a paper towel. Was she supposed to entertain him? She couldn’t regale him the way Fern had, with updates on Stuart Farnham—“Remember how he sounded like an asthmatic horse when he laughed? Well, he still does”—or Cynthia Conklin—“She’s always getting brought in on traffic violations, and then the charges are dropped. She’s sleeping with the entire police force. Marty Nichols—he’s a sergeant now—says the joke around the station house is that she’s a case of ‘arrested development.’ I guess if you saw her bosom, you’d get the joke.”

True, Cynthia was well endowed, and she did seem to run red lights and stop signs with impunity. And Erica had heard Stuart Farnham snort and wheeze
when he laughed too hard. But she didn’t know these people the way Fern and Jed did, the way someone who was truly a Rockwellian would.

“So,” he said when the silence deepened with her shutting off the water, “I see there’s still some wine in that bottle.”

Great. He was hanging around to drink her wine. Given what a sterling conversationalist she’d been, why else would he have stayed so long?

“It’s kind of warm out,” he went on. “For April, anyway. We could refill our glasses and sit on the porch.”

“I haven’t got a porch,” she said. “The back porch is really just a couple of steps.”

“I meant my porch.”

He had a huge porch. And there was enough wine left to top off both their glasses. If they sat outside, the night air would dilute his testosterone effect. In all honesty, she wasn’t ready to say good-night to him, even if she’d had trouble thinking of anything else to say to him.

They’d find things to talk about on his porch. She wanted to hear more about his junk business. She’d driven past his father’s junkyard a few times; it seemed to be little more than a huge lot enclosed by a chain-link fence and filled with wrecked cars, rusting refrigerators and other large appliances from which salvageable parts could be harvested. What Jed did had to be different from what his father did, which, as best Erica could tell, amounted to sitting on a bench in the doorway of a small, ramshackle shed near the gate, listening to talk radio and waiting to make a profit off someone’s desperate need for a gasket from an old Whirlpool dishwasher.

Jed bought junk; he sold antiques. His father didn’t sell antiques. For that matter, he didn’t buy junk. As Erica understood it, people paid him a fee to truck their old appliances or tow their wrecked cars away. So he made money on that end, and on the other end, when he cannibalized his acquisitions and sold the parts. In theory it sounded like a pretty shrewd arrangement. But Jack didn’t appear to be raking in the big bucks with his junk trade.

Neither did his son. But what did she know?

Not much, she acknowledged as she slipped her arms through the sleeves of her field jacket. Late-April warmth in Rockwell was not the same thing as late-April warmth in Miami. Without the jacket, she’d be too cold outside to enjoy her wine, let alone Jed’s company.

He grabbed the bottle and both glasses and preceded her out the back door. Walking behind him afforded her an interesting view of his narrow hips and long legs, his relaxed gait and solid shoulders. For a junk-dealing son of a junk dealer, he was damn nice eye candy.

The porch of his grandfather’s house was furnished with a swing and several deeply sloping Adirondack chairs. The swing looked more comfortable, and she’d be able to burn off her nervous energy by swinging. Not that she was nervous, but sitting in the peace of a half-moon evening, drinking wine with Jed, was just romantic enough to make her edgy.

As soon as she was seated, she realized her mistake. If she’d sat in one of the Adirondack chairs, he wouldn’t have been able to plant himself right beside her. But the swing was wide enough for two, and his
legs, being much longer than hers, got to dictate whether they swung, and how fast.

And it wasn’t a very big swing. Once he’d settled his large frame next to her, she realized he was awfully close.

He refilled their glasses, set the empty bottle on the porch planks and said, “So, what do you think about Derrick Messinger?”

She didn’t want to think about him at all. That a TV tabloid journalist had phoned her was preposterous. “I think he wears a toupee,” she said.

“Nah. That’s real.”

“No way.”

Jed eyed her, not quite smiling. “Fifty bucks says it’s real.”

“Fifty bucks?” She scowled. Even if she were a wagering woman, fifty dollars was a lot of money.

“Okay. Ten bucks.”

“I’m not going to bet on something like that!”

His smile widened into something mischievous, challenging her. “What would you bet on, then?”

“Absolutely nothing.”

He laughed. “Not a risk taker, are you?”

She bristled defensively. She’d taken a huge risk by moving to Rockwell, hadn’t she? Not a life-and-death risk, not a major financial risk, but she’d moved to a tiny village in the shadow of the Moose Mountains, where she knew no one. She’d defied her parents’ expectations by choosing to settle in a place where Clinique facial cleansers and the
New Yorker
were unavailable in the local stores. She’d bought a house and planted a garden—or at least gotten a start on that. She considered herself rather daring, all things considered.

“I don’t wager money,” she explained.

“What do you wager?”

She couldn’t tell if he was mocking her or coming on to her. She decided to change the subject. “I have no idea why Derrick Messinger would want to see me. Maybe it’s not about the box. Maybe it’s about something else, although I can’t imagine what.” She took a sip of her wine, carefully, because Jed was nudging the swing back and forth with his toe and she didn’t want to slosh any Chianti on her jacket. “Doesn’t Messinger usually do shows on gangsters and missing people?”

“He does shows on anything he thinks will attract an audience. The guy’s slick. He’s into ratings.”

“As if a show about an old box with a dirt-clogged lock is going to get high ratings,” she said.

“If the box is filled with a million dollars, it is.”

“It’s not,” Erica said with a certainty she didn’t feel. Actually, she didn’t feel certain about anything. The air seemed to fluctuate between mild and cool. Her wine tasted more tart than it had inside. Scattered clouds drifted across the sky, pale gray against dark blue like a Magritte painting. And Jed was so
warm
. He hadn’t bothered with a jacket, and he clearly didn’t need one. He radiated heat like someone with a fever; only, he was obviously healthy. Big and hot and healthy.

She lowered her gaze to his left hand, which dwarfed his wineglass. She was used to eight-year-old hands, soft and small, with dirty nails or pencil smudges on them.

“How do you know it’s not?”

It took her a moment to remember what they’d been discussing: the estimated value of the box’s contents.
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “I just hope it’s not filled with money.”

“You don’t want a million dollars?”

“Even if the box contained a million dollars, I couldn’t claim the money as mine.”

He shifted slightly to look at her, and the swing rocked from his motion. She saw mischief in his eyes. When was the last time she’d sat alone at night with someone like him? “In other words, you admit half the money is mine?” he asked.

That was why he was being nice to her, she realized—if jostling her on the swing so she had to keep flexing her wrist to keep the wine level in her glass, and giving her grins just a bit too tricky for her to interpret, constituted being nice. He wanted half of whatever was in the box. She hoped it was pebbles and pine needles. She’d gladly give him half of that, and it would serve him right for being so greedy.

Then again, he might just be teasing her. She couldn’t tell.

She straightened her back. For God’s sake, she wasn’t a ditz. She was a Harvard graduate in charge of her own life. She’d taken on fabulous-looking guys before. Maybe no one quite as fabulous-looking as Jed, but honestly. He was a junk dealer. A Rockwell native. She had the brains to handle him. “Tell me about your business,” she said.

His gaze softened, his smile losing its taunting edge. “It’s a shop in New York,” he told her. “City Resale.”

“You really buy junk and sell antiques?”

He chuckled, shook his head and twisted back on the swing’s bench so he was facing the porch railing. He propped one foot up on it and used it to rock them.
His foot was big, too, encased in a thick-soled work boot. Big feet, big hands. She wondered what else about him was big, then shut that thought down before it could get her into trouble.

“I don’t buy junk,” he told her, “and I don’t sell antiques.”

“I see.” Actually, she didn’t.

“When I went to New York, I had nothing. A few bucks saved from summer jobs and working on my grandfather’s farm—” he gestured toward the fallow field that extended back from the house “—but that was it. I was fresh out of high school and I didn’t own a pot to…well…”

“Piss in,” she said helpfully, so he’d know she wasn’t a prig.

“Yeah. I got a job as a night janitor in a midtown office building, and when I’d leave work around six in the morning, I’d see all this stuff people would discard on the sidewalk. I guess the trash collectors were supposed to pick it up, but it was just out there—tables, lamps, rugs, all kinds of stuff. I couldn’t afford furniture, so I’d pick up whatever I could use and bring it home with me. I’d clean it, repair it—the lamps usually just needed rewiring or some other easy fix—and that was how I furnished my apartment. You wouldn’t believe what some people throw out. Really good stuff.”

Erica nodded, remembering with a twinge all the really good stuff her family had thrown out over the years, simply because they could afford better stuff. When the old stuff was in decent shape, they donated it to Goodwill, but if it needed repair, they’d just pay their trash-removal service to haul it away.

“When people came to visit they’d be blown away by some lamp I’d rewired, or a chest of drawers I’d
refinished, and they’d tell me I could make money selling it. So I decided to give it a try.”

“Just like that?”

He nodded. “After a while, I was making enough money to quit the janitor job.”

“That’s amazing.”

“No, it’s not.” He bent his knee and straightened it, pushing the swing in a gentle rhythm. “Most people have no idea of the value of things. They want to get rid of something, so they toss it. They don’t stop to think about what they’ve got.” He drank some wine, then glanced at her. “I don’t scavenge on the street anymore. I’ve got my store and workshop downtown, in SoHo. People sell their old stuff to us. Or someone dies, and the survivors just want grandma’s apartment closed up fast, so they take a lump sum for everything in it. Then I figure out what’s worth working on. We’ve got a shop upstairs from the store, where we do the repairs and refinishing. And then these chic artsy customers come in and drop a bundle to buy the old tea cart or sling chair someone else thought was garbage.”

It was Erica’s turn to shift in the swing, not to stare at him but just because she felt she needed a new position. There she was, an Ivy Leaguer who had grown up in affluence, seated next to a high school–educated almost-junk dealer who’d created a business successful enough to occupy two floors of a building in SoHo, where he catered to the frivolous tastes of chichi New York connoisseurs. Who would have thought Rockwell—and in particular, Jack Willetz—could have produced such a person?

“You’re very enterprising,” she remarked, then
cringed at the possibility that she sounded condescending.

He only laughed. “Oh, yeah, that’s me. Mr. Enterprise.” He drained his glass and leaned forward to set it on the floorboards. The motion unbalanced her physically as much as his nearness unbalanced her mentally, and she pitched forward, then sideways into him to keep from tumbling off the swing.