“Big happenings, eh?” he said, his voice emerging on puffs of vapor in the chilly air.
“What the hell is going on? What are you doing here?”
“Well, these newsfolks needed to know where the teacher lived. I was happy to show them.”
“I’ll bet you were.” Actually, Jed bet his father had been paid to lead them here. He was always happy to help out if someone waved a few crisp bills under his nose. “Newspeople?”
His father glanced over his shoulder and pointed proudly at all the vehicles but his banged-up truck. “There’s a news team outta Manchester, one outta Boston, and that guy, Derrick Messinger, the one that does all those TV specials on Mafia crime and the like.”
“I know who he is,” Jed muttered, wondering if Erica was awake yet, if she was aware of what was going on right outside her front door.
His father patted his chest as if in search of something, then asked, “You got a smoke on you?”
“I quit,” Jed said, his scowl deepening. He never missed cigarettes more than when he uttered those two words.
His announcement seemed to vex his father. “Quit, eh? What, you’re trying to get healthy or something?”
“Yeah, something like that.”
Jack shook his head, clearly disappointed. “Well, maybe one of them newspeople’s got one.” He turned and sauntered over to the caravan of vehicles.
Swearing quietly, Jed marched back into his house and slammed the door. His chest was damp from the morning fog, and he belatedly buttoned his shirt. Then he dug into his jeans pocket for his cell phone, flipped it open and stalked down the hall. His grandfather kept important phone numbers on scraps of paper taped to the inner surfaces of his kitchen cabinets. Jed hoped he’d find Erica’s among them. She’d been the old man’s tenant for a while, so he probably would have wanted to keep her number handy.
There she was, alongside the number of the pharmacy and just above the number of the National Weather Service on the door of the cabinet where Jed’s grandfather had stored his cooking spices. Jed punched her number into his phone, then moved to the window above the sink and adjusted the blind slats so he could see her house. It looked dark.
She answered halfway through the third ring: “H’lo?”
He’d awakened her. A glance at the wall clock told him it was six-forty, and he experienced a fleeting stab of guilt about having roused her from sleep. But the guilt faded, replaced by a much deeper stab of lust at the thick, dazed sound of her voice. She was in bed, he realized, all warm and soft and tousled. Did she sleep nude? Or in something lacy, maybe?
“It’s Jed Willetz,” he remembered to say. His voice came out a little raspy, but she was probably too drowsy to care.
“Jed?”
His abdominal muscles tightened. He’d like to hear her say his name that way when he was lying beside her, waking up with her. She’d smile, remembering the previous night, and murmur his name, and he’d proceed to replace those last-night memories with some new ones. Yeah, that would work.
He pinched the bridge of his nose again, as if he could squeeze out all those distracting images. “So you’re answering your phone now?”
“Only when I’m half asleep and not thinking straight.”
He tried not to take her words as an insult. “There’s a bunch of media people in your front yard,” he told her.
“What?” She sounded more alert now.
“TV journalists,” he repeated. “Derrick Messinger and some others. My helpful father brought them here.”
“In my front yard?”
“Look out your window.”
She sighed, a wavering whisper of breath. “Hang on a second,” she said, followed by a muffled thud as she put down the receiver, and then the rustle of sheets as she got out of bed. Her sheets might be dark—midnight blue, or chocolate brown. Or maybe something pastel and flowery.
Like he’d even notice her sheets if he was in bed with her.
While he waited for her to return, he tackled the challenging task of preparing a pot of coffee with only one hand. The stove still looked strangely barren to him without his grandfather’s skillet sitting on a rear burner. It had always sat there, like a part of the range. He wanted to get the pan back from his father, but he wasn’t sure it was worth fighting over.
To silence his cravings for a cigarette, he rummaged through the drawers until he found a toothpick. After wedging it between his teeth, he sucked on the tip.
A rattle on the other end of the phone signaled that Erica was back. “My God.”
“They’re from Manchester and Boston, as well as your good buddy Derrick Messinger.” The toothpick bobbed up and down as he spoke.
“My God.” She sounded bewildered and resigned. “This can’t just be about the box.”
“No?” He felt his eyebrows rise. “Have you got some other newsworthy stuff going on in your life? Are you having an affair with a congressman or something?”
“I am the most unnewsworthy person in the world,” she said dryly.
“Then it’s about the box.” The aroma of brewing coffee somehow warmed his bare toes. “Open the thing up and those people will disappear.”
“Unless it’s got a million dollars inside.”
“But you don’t think it does,” he reminded her.
After a minute, she said, “I’m not going to open it. Not until Professor Gilman gets here. I’m not going to risk breaking something that could be a priceless artifact.”
“Even if it’s priceless, it’s not going to be worth as much as the million dollars inside it,” Jed pointed out. The toothpick snapped and he tossed it into the trash. He still wanted a cigarette, but at least he hadn’t caught a splinter in his tongue.
“I mean, this is Rockwell.” Her voice took on a slightly hysterical edge. “I came here because it’s a peaceful, quiet place.”
A dead place, he thought.
“It isn’t overrun with people intoxicated with their own importance.”
No, just people intoxicated the old-fashioned way.
“I mean, Meryl Hummer. She’s the sum and substance of the media around here.”
And she’d gone and written a story about Erica’s box and plastered it across the front page of her newspaper, and now look. I’m Just the Messinger and those news outlets from Manchester and Boston were crawling all over Erica’s front yard at six-forty in the morning.
Not that Jed cared one way or the other. It was her box from her garden, on her property, and it was her headache. He would have helped shoulder the burden if she’d been more open-minded about the property line, but she didn’t want to share the box and its bounty with him, so he wasn’t going to share her hassles with her. Let her keep her million dollars—if Glenn Rideout didn’t figure out a way to get his greedy paws on it. What would Jed do with half a million dollars, anyway?
Lots of things, he admitted, pulling a mug from the cabinet that contained the phone numbers of the police station, Ostronkowicz’s garage and Reena Keefer, a plump, taciturn widow who ran a small maple syrup operation west of town. Jed’s grandfather had never come right out and said so, but Jed had always suspected there was something going on between those two. Reena hadn’t shed a single tear at the church service after old John died, and that was just the kind of thing John would have admired in a woman. He’d been about as sentimental as a block of granite. Reena was that way, too.
Half a million dollars. Jed filled the mug with fresh coffee and contemplated what he’d do with that much cash. He could buy his apartment, do away with having to budget according to the whims of his landlord. Or maybe he’d invest the money—some in the store, some in stocks. His accountant kept saying he should set up a retirement fund.
Half a million dollars could pay for some useful things. One thing it couldn’t pay for was a cure to nicotine addiction. He considered whether to mangle another toothpick with his teeth and decided that drinking coffee was just as effective. He sipped it slowly, peeri
ng out the window again, across the collapsed fence that separated his house from Erica’s. He could see her back door and her garden from where he stood. Right now, she would be at the opposite end of her house, where her bedroom was located.
He wondered what she’d do with a million dollars. Or even half a million, if she was forced over to fork the rest to Glenn Rideout.
In her position, Jed would leave Rockwell. But he’d done that already. You didn’t need a lot of money to get out of a town like this.
He turned from the kitchen window and wandered back down the hall to the front door. “Look,” he said into the phone, “I’m sorry I woke you up, but I thought you could use a little warning.”
“Thank you,” she said.
Closing his eyes, he pictured her one more time in bed. He pictured her hair mussed and her legs extended, her toenails painted red. She didn’t strike him as the type to paint her toenails, but this was his fantasy and he could make them any damn color he wanted. He pictured her lips slightly parted, the way they’d been last night just before he’d kissed her, and his jeans suddenly felt snug.
She could keep her money, whatever it turned out to be. She could keep her front-page fame, her tabloid celebrity, her Harvard-professor buddy, her priceless artifact and all the rest.
He knew what he wanted from her, and it had nothing to do with what she’d dug out of her garden patch a few days ago.
AFTER SHE HUNG UP, she berated herself for having failed to bring up the subject of last night’s kiss.
She wasn’t sure what she should have said, but she should have said something. “Jed, you shouldn’t have kissed me,” she might have declared. “It’s made things awkward between us. You’re just passing through town, and I’ve planted my roots here, and there’s no reason for us to start something we have no intention of finishing.”
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 celebrit
y—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.
Hidden Treasures Page 10
