“Where’d you find it?” he asked.
The kid turned to him, gratitude augmenting the excitement that lit up his eyes. “At Erica’s house.”
“I told you to call her Miss Leitner,” his father scolded. “And I don’t know why you spend so much time there, anyway.”
Glenn’s son ignored him and talked only to Jed. “It was buried in her garden, where she was going to put her zucchini. You wouldn’t believe how many zucchini she was planning to plant, but I think I set her straight on that.”
“That’s a big favor you did her,” Jed praised him, trying not to smile.
“So we were digging, and we dug up this treasure chest. It’s real old. Like real old. Erica—Miss Leitner—she says we can’t open the lock because we’d break it, so she’s going to get this expert to open it and then we can find out what’s inside. Like, maybe it’s full of secret talismans or something. Or jewelry. Or a million dollars.”
Glenn Rideout perked up at the possibility the chest could contain something of value. So did Potter Henley. So, even, did the two codgers and Matty Blancher, who stirred lazily in his chair and blinked his bleary eyes open. “A million dollars, you think?” Glenn asked, dropping the damp cloth he’d been using to wipe down the scarred pine surface of the bar. “Where’d you find this thing again?”
“In Erica’s garden, where the zucchini were supposed to go.”
“Who’s Erica?” Jed asked. The name Erica Leitner rang a vague bell. She must have moved into town after he’d left, although he had trouble believing anyone would ever voluntarily move into Rockwell.
“She’s this lady,” the boy explained. “She was my third-grade teacher.”
A new third-grade teacher. Jed wondered where they’d recruited her from. The potato fields of Maine, maybe; or one of the Canadian provinces where unemployment was in the double digits. People didn’t move to Rockwell unless they were moving out of somewhere worse.
“She’s real nice,” the boy continued. “She gives me cookies.”
Glenn broke in, sounding like a Doberman growling and sniffing at the invasion of a stranger. “So, what about this treasure chest? You think it’s full of valuables? How big is it?”
“I don’t know,” his son replied. “Like a shoe box, maybe? A big shoe box. The kind boots would come in. Work boots. Not real high boots, waders or something like that, but, like, ankle-high work boots—”
Potter Henley cut him off with a laugh that caused his spare chin to vibrate. “Can’t fit much treasure in a box that small.”
“You sure as hell can,” Glenn argued. “A shoe box full of money? I wouldn’t turn it down.”
“We don’t know what’s in it,” the boy reminded his father. “Erica doesn’t want to break the lock.”
“What is she, nuts? Yeah, she’s nuts,” Glenn answered his own question. “Hanging around with a twerp like you proves as much. She worries me, that woman.”
“She’s nice,” the kid argued.
“I’ll bet.” His father rubbed his long chin, looking as if thought required a great effort on his part. “The thing to do is find out what’s in the shoe box, Randy. If your teacher can’t figure out how to open a damn shoe box, I can help her there.”
“It’s not a shoe box,” the boy reminded him. “All I said was, it’s like about that size. But it’s real old, with rusty hinges.” The boy ruminated for a moment. “I bet it was real pretty when it was new.”
“A box is a box,” his father muttered. “How pretty does it have to be?”
The kid lifted his eyes to Jed again, as if seeking an ally. He was refreshingly unstylish, compared with the precociously fashionable children who lived in Jed’s Manhattan neighborhood.
“So, when is Miss Leitner going to open the damn box?” Glenn asked.
“I don’t know. She said she was going to bring an expert in to open it.”
“An expert?” Glenn snorted again. “Where’s she gonna find an expert?”
“Harvard,” Randy told him.
“Harvard?” Jed blurted out in surprise. Rockwell wasn’t the sort of community that drew experts from Harvard, although if some academic hotshot wanted to do research on a down-at-the-heels quarry town clinging desperately to its mediocrity, this would be the place to set up shop.
“Oh, that gal,” Potter Henley boomed. “Harvard. Isn’t she’s something.”
“She’s cool,” Randy insisted, obviously smitten with his former teacher.
“Okay, wait.” Glenn leaned forward on his elbows, his narrow body hunched over the bar. “Let me get this straight. You found a shoe box in her garden—a box the size of a shoe box,” he corrected himself when Randy appeared ready to interrupt. “And she wants to find someone from Harvard to open it.”
“Yeah.”
“I told you she was a little off,” Glenn muttered, also eyeing Jed in search of support. Jed shrugged.
“Who dug up this box?” Potter Henley shouted. “You or her?”
“We both did,” Randy said. “It was, like, I was digging over by the zucchini part of the garden, and I felt what I thought was this big rock, and then we both dug it up.”
“He found the box,” Potter pointed out to Glenn. “You know what I’m saying?”
“You found the box?” Glenn grilled Randy.
Jed swallowed some Coke to keep from laughing out loud. The idea of the Rideout family staking a claim on some old box that likely held the remains of someone’s beloved pet cat was ludicrous. But Glenn’s eyes were unnaturally bright. He was no doubt visualizing a major haul for whoever could stake a valid claim.
Randy evidently didn’t catch his father’s angle. “I found it, and we both dug it up.”
“Maybe we need an expert of our own,” Glenn muttered to Potter.
Potter frowned, leaned forward and cupped a hand behind his ear. “Huh?”
Before Glenn could repeat his statement at the proper decibel level, Jed turned to Randy and asked, “Where does Miss Leitner live?” If she was new in town, someone ought to warn her that Glenn Rideout’s eyes were glowing with a greed as dangerous as UV rays in July. If she thought experts from Harvard were all she needed, she had a lot to learn. People like Glenn Rideout—hell, people like liquor-dimmed Matty Blancher—could knock a Harvard expert flat around here. This was Rockwell. Fancy degrees and lofty credentials didn’t count for much in these parts.
“She lives on Old North Road,” Randy informed him. “Over by the old Willetz farm.”
“Your grandpa used to rent to her,” Potter yelled. “Know that farmhand cottage sitting on the edge of the property? Your grandpa made himself a nice little profit selling it to the schoolteacher.”
That was why her name had sounded familiar. Jed remembered his grandfather telling him he’d sold that old wreck of a building. To a schoolteacher, he recalled. She’d been renting the place, and then she’d bought it. But the few times Jed had visited in the past couple of years, he’d never met his grandfather’s neighbor. She must have been over at the school, teaching earnest third-graders.
So now this small-town schoolmarm was living on land adjacent to the farm Jed had inherited, and a box—a treasure chest—had been found on her land. Was it actually on her land? How clearly had the property lines been drawn?
Sure, she ought to be warned about Glenn Rideout’s greed. But if Jed was going to do her this good deed by warning her, well, it wouldn’t hurt to find out exactly where the box was when she and the Rideout kid had dug it up. Property lines could be a tricky thing.
Yeah, he’d like to have himself a look at exactly where this box was when she and Randy had unearthed it. On the slim chance they were talking about something of real value here—and if anyone knew the difference between junk and something of real value, it was Jed—he decided he’d better check out this new lady and her old box.
CHAPTER THREE
ERICA’S HOUSE WAS NOT designed for a cordless telephone. Her cordless required a phone outlet a
nd an electric outlet so the handset battery could be recharged when the cordless wasn’t in use, but her house had only two phone jacks and neither was near an electric outlet. She’d called the phone company to see if they could install a new jack for her, but the price they quoted—just for showing up…she’d have to pay extra if she actually wanted them to do anything—had deterred her. She was responsible for a mortgage now. She couldn’t afford such extravagances as paying phone company employees to ring her doorbell.
So she’d set up her cordless on a kitchen counter, with one wire stretching to connect to the wall-phone jack and the other stretching in the opposite direction to share a double socket with her toaster oven. Having wires snaking across the counter looked messy, but it wasn’t as if the kitchen was a House and Garden showcase to begin with. The counters were gray linoleum with black-and-white speckles running through it, and the cabinets were metal layered with white enamel paint that was chipped along the edges, as if a tiny rodent had been gnawing on them. The sink was a porcelain basin with a few indeterminate yellow stains that no amount of scouring and bleaching could obliterate. The floor was also linoleum—green agitated by spumes of black and white that reminded her of The Perfect Storm. It was truly an ugly kitchen, not the sort of environment she’d fantasized as a place for kneading bread, whipping up wholesome casseroles and baking cookies.
Maybe that was why cookies were as far as she’d gotten in her culinary aspirations. By the end of the summer, if Randy was right, she’d be whipping up lots of zucchini casseroles. And kneading lots of zucchini bread.
At least her oven no longer chirped. When she’d first moved in, it chirped every time she turned it on. She’d complained to her landlord: “I think there’s a cricket living inside my oven, and the heat makes it screech.”
John Willetz had marched over the flattened fence to her house, poked around inside her oven with a flashlight and pronounced it cricket free. Then she’d turned on the oven and he’d heard the chirp. He’d slid the oven away from the wall and tipped it at an angle. A cricket had scampered out from underneath. John had mercilessly crushed the bug under his heel, abandoned its smashed carcass on her seasick floor and taken his leave.
As landlords went, he hadn’t been bad. Despite his advanced age, he’d been strong and tall, his shoulders barely hunched and his skin stained a weak-tea brown by sunshine and time. The lines in his face had had a permanence about them and the backs of his hands had been blotchy with age spots, but the only thing that had really marked him as old was his temperament: taciturn bordering on grouchy. Erica had liked to think he was the epitome of a true New England Yankee, but as she’d gotten to know other Rockwell residents, she’d realized they didn’t all grunt and drop their Rs. Randy Rideout had spent his entire life in Rockwell, and sometimes she couldn’t get him to shut up.
John had been fine, though, not just as a landlord but as a neighbor. When she’d needed something he’d supplied it. Otherwise he’d stayed out of her way and expected the same from her.
Sometimes she got lonely, occupying her small stretch of Old North Road with John as her only close neighbor, but her loneliness hadn’t been his fault. Any newcomer moving into a small New England town would feel a little isolated, especially if she’d come from an urban area, carrying with her a different way of talking and moving, different experiences, a different worldview. Erica had made great progress in adapting to the Rockwell way, though. People seemed a little more accepting of her now than when she’d first arrived.
Buying her house also helped her to feel a kinship with her fellow Rockwellians. Paying property taxes in New Hampshire was like joining a club with extremely pricey dues, and as soon as she’d taken title to the charmingly ramshackle cottage adjacent to John Willetz’s land, she’d become a full member. He had sold her the property for eighty-nine thousand dollars, which in her hometown of Brookline, just outside Boston, might buy a person an upscale doghouse, but she was billed a staggering amount in property taxes on her modest little home. Amazing that property taxes could be so high but teacher salaries—paid for out of property taxes—could be so low.
She carried her phone handset with her into the living room and listened while, on the other end, Avery Gilman babbled about the box she and Randy had dug up. “Can you identify the wood? And the hinge material. Is it really brass?” he was asking. “I’d have to see the piece, of course, but whether the hinges are actually brass could impact significantly on the process of evaluating its provenance.”
Erica remembered why she used to doodle in his class. He was a brilliant man, but he could also be boring.
“Well, you know, I’m not an expert—”
“You’re a highly educated individual,” Avery countered. “I ought to know. I highly educated you.”
He’d been only one of the many professors who could take credit for that, but he was an expert in Colonial-era artifacts. He consulted for museums, gave lectures before historical societies up and down the eastern seaboard and earned spare change advising historical-reenactment clubs on the proper technique a minuteman might have employed to fill his rifle with gunpowder or shape his tricorn hat after a downpour. He’d also made himself unusually available to his students, hosting coffees at his Concord Avenue apartment and handing out his home phone number to anyone who asked. He hadn’t seemed at all surprised that a former student would call him on a Sunday evening five years after she’d taken his history class on eighteenth-century New England and ask him about a very old-looking box that she’d just happened to dig up in her backyard garden.
Generous though he was, Avery Gilman did tend to run on. It was the price one paid for his expertise, and she didn’t begrudge him. She simply listened, trying to snag every third word or so, wondering whether his bushy black beard had begun to go gray yet and whether he still used a pocket watch—a cute affectation, she recalled. He used to make quite a production of sliding the watch out of his pocket midway through his class lecture, flicking open the cover and checking the time.
As his voice melted into a soothing drone in her ear, she gazed out her living-room window—something she could do because she was on her cordless phone. The evening sky was a pale lilac, and the horizon rose in the looming gray curves of the Moose Mountains. In another month, they’d be lush with spring foliage, but winter took its time letting go of the central New Hampshire hills. At least the lower-elevation flora—like her scraggly lawn and her soon-to-be garden—showed encouraging signs of life. Next door at the old Willetz place, the field behind the farmhouse had gone fallow, but it was slowly transforming from beige to green. She wondered what he used to grow there. Zucchini?
While Avery blathered on about the accuracy of dating techniques, she ambled from her living room to the dining room. It contained an old oak table and a sideboard in need of refinishing, but she used the room mostly as a study. The table held neat piles: math work sheets, book reports, spelling tests. She hated having to teach spelling—it seemed like such an idiot-savant skill—but the curriculum required it, so she drilled her kids once a week on twenty spelling words. One of her students, Cammie Merton, had not yet misspelled a single word this year. She gave Erica the creeps.
The dining-room windows overlooked the broken fence and the abandoned Willetz farmhouse. Only, it wasn’t abandoned tonight. Lights were on in several windows.
She circled the table and peered outside. One upstairs window was aglow, as were two adjacent downstairs windows, one of which held the silhouette of a man.
It took her a moment to shake off her big-city panic. This was Rockwell. There was no such thing as a stranger here—at least, theoretically. The silhouette probably belonged to John Willetz’s son, even though he never came to the house at night…and his shoulders weren’t as broad as that man’s, and his hair wasn’t that thick.
“Erica?” Avery’s voice droned through the line. “I asked if the lock appears to be the same metal as the hinges.”
She spun a
way from the window and tried to pretend the house next door was empty. “Um, yeah, looks the same. But it’s really dirty. The keyhole is clogged with dirt. I tried to clean it out with a toothpick—”
“No, you mustn’t do that. The tip of the toothpick could snap off and get lodged inside the lock. Wait until I get up there. I’ll bring the proper tools.”
“So, you’re going to come here?”
“Well, you said you couldn’t bring the box down to Cambridge.”
Had she said that? She couldn’t really remember anything she’d said before she’d spotted the stranger in the house next door. “I can’t,” she confirmed. “Not until the weekend at the earliest.”
“I could get there Thursday evening, if you’d be so good as to find me a place to stay.”
Curiosity got the better of her. She peeked over her shoulder. The silhouette looked larger; he must have moved closer to the window. Was he watching her? Should she turn off the dining-room light?
“You could stay here,” she offered. “I’ve got a spare bedroom.”
“I think it would be better if I stayed elsewhere. I’m a difficult houseguest.”
Erica appreciated the warning. Most difficult houseguests would simply show up and be difficult. “I’ll reserve a room for you. We’ve got some motels and bed-and-breakfasts in town. I’d recommend one of the bed-and-breakfasts.”
“By all means, then.” The man in the window across the way seemed to be shrugging something over his shoulders. A shirt. Had he been shirtless? Standing in the window seminaked? While she was trying to decide whether to be afraid or offended, Avery broke in again. “So you’ll let me know what arrangements have been made?”
“Yes, of course. I appreciate your coming, Dr. Gilman.”
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