“And I appreciate your letting me get first crack at this treasure,” he said.
“Assuming it’s a treasure.”
“I taught you well, Erica. You wouldn’t lure me up to that godforsaken hamlet if you didn’t think your find had value.”
She considered objecting to his description of Rockwell, then decided not to.
“Don’t let any museum sneak in ahead of me,” he reminded her. “I want to be the first.”
“You will be,” Erica assured him. “I won’t let anyone else look at it until you get here.” The silhouette shook his head briskly, like a dog shaking off water. His hair spiked out from his scalp. “I’ll call you after I’ve reserved a room for you. I’ve got to go now.” She really did. The silhouetted man had vanished from the window. He could have gone anywhere. He could be doing anything. With or without a shirt on.
“Very well, then. I’ll see you Thursday evening. I suggest you refer to me as Avery at this point,” he added. “I’m not grading you anymore.”
Five years after graduating from Harvard, Erica ought to stop viewing her former professors with awe. Randy Rideout was only two years out of her class, and he didn’t treat her with awe. Even so, she felt funny saying, “Goodbye, Avery.”
She disconnected the phone, returned to the kitchen to hang up the handset and peeked out the back-door window. The man was standing near the fallen fence, staring at her half-planted garden. He was still a silhouette in the gray twilight, but he was a full-length one now, tall and long limbed and definitely better built than Jack Willetz.
And he was crossing the fence onto her land. What were the rules about trespassing in Rockwell? Either she was supposed to be neighborly or she was supposed to haul out a shotgun and aim it at him. She didn’t own a shotgun, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to be neighborly to a man who stood a good six feet tall and had to outweigh her by at least fifty pounds.
She shouldn’t have ended her phone call with Dr. Gilman—Avery, she mentally corrected herself. If the stranger continued to approach, she could have told Avery and he could have…well, he couldn’t have done much from Concord Avenue in Cambridge, Massachusetts. But he could have dialed 911 for her.
She could dial 911 for herself—except that Rockwell didn’t have a 911 system. Grabbing a knife, she nudged her kitchen door open.
She flicked on the porch light, and as he approached, the jaundiced glow from the yellow bulb spilled light across his features. He had a wide forehead, a sharp nose and, as best she could see in the rapidly dying evening, pale, intense eyes. His face was framed by shaggy hair that could either be dark blond or light brown. He wore black jeans and a dark wool shirt over a snug-fitting T-shirt, which implied that he hadn’t been topless when she’d seen him in Mr. Willetz’s window. She wasn’t sure if she was relieved or disappointed by that.
He arrived at her back porch, and more light bathed his face. He looked familiar, but she wasn’t sure where she’d seen him before. At a school function? On a Most Wanted poster in the post office? She clutched her knife more tightly and asked, “Can I help you?”
“I’d consider it a big help if you’d put down your knife,” he said. His voice had a raspy edge to it, as if he’d spent the past few weeks screaming. Where had she seen him? Maybe he was a movie star. He was certainly that handsome. Then again, she’d been living long enough in Rockwell that any new male face would dazzle her. One thing Rockwell didn’t have in abundance was gorgeous men.
“I’m Jed Willetz,” he said, extending his right hand. He still kept his distance—her knife must have spooked him—so if she wanted to shake his hand, she was going to have to descend from the porch.
She could bring the knife with her, just in case. But he was a Willetz—and then she remembered where she’d seen him before: at John Willetz’s memorial service back in January. His hair had been a lot neater then, and he hadn’t had a day-old growth of hair smudging his jaw and upper lip, but yes, he was the fellow her friend Fern had pointed out to her after nudging an elbow into her ribs with enough force to leave a bruise. “That’s the grandson,” Fern had whispered. “John Edward Willetz III. He was two years behind me in school. Every girl at Rockwell Regional would have dropped her panties for him when he was there.”
“Including you?” Erica had asked.
“If he’d asked? You bet,” Fern had said fervently. “I probably would even today. Look at him.”
Erica had looked. She wasn’t sure she’d drop her panties for him, but admiring his rough-hewn face and honey-blond hair had been the highlight of John Willetz’s funeral.
Actually, it had been just a church service not a funeral. The ground had been too frozen for a burial. As Erica had learned, no one got buried in central New Hampshire in January. People stored their loved ones’ remains until mud season, when the ground was soft enough to enable the digging of graves. Erica found this tradition morbid, but it was what Mother Nature demanded.
Jed Willetz remained where he was, a few paces back from the foot of the porch stairs, with his hand still outstretched. She shifted her knife to her left hand, marched down the steps and shook his hand. His palm was as smooth and hard as finely sanded pine. “Erica Leitner,” she introduced herself.
“You bought this house from my grandfather.”
“I’m so sorry for your loss.”
He made a face, apparently not in the mood for platitudes. She hadn’t meant it as a platitude, though. She was sorry.
“Have they buried him yet?”
“Who, my grandfather? He was cremated,” Jed Willetz said. “I’m up here to bury his ashes.”
Well. Wasn’t this a fun topic for two people just getting to know each other? “What can I do for you?” she asked a bit more congenially.
“Put down the damn knife.”
“Ah.” She climbed back onto the porch and balanced the knife on the railing. After considering her options, she decided to remain on the porch. Jed Willetz was too tall. When she’d briefly stood next to him, she had felt small enough to need the knife. From the top step, she loomed an inch taller than him.
“Can I ask you a question?” he inquired, his gaze drifting to the knife perched on the railing and then back to her empty hands.
“Of course.”
“Has anyone been in my grandfather’s house since he died?”
“I don’t know. I’m not here during the day. I have seen your—I guess he’s your father, or your uncle? Jack Willetz. He’s been in and out a few times.”
“My father.” Jed nodded, his forehead creasing into a frown. “So, he’s been around?”
“I don’t keep tabs on him,” she said, a bit irked. His father’s comings and goings weren’t her business.
Jed scruffed a hand through his hair, an easy, casual move that made her think his father’s occasional visits to his grandfather’s house didn’t matter much to him, either. She liked the way his shoulder rolled when he lifted his arm and then lowered it.
“So, tell me about the box,” he said in an offhand voice.
She stopped thinking about his shoulder as wariness overtook her. How had he learned about the box? If he knew of its existence, who else did? She didn’t want the entire town of Rockwell badgering her about her possible archaeological find.
“What box?” she asked with feigned innocence.
“The box you dug out of your garden.”
“Where did you hear that?”
He chuckled without smiling. “By tomorrow morning everyone’ll know about it.”
“Why? It’s just a box.”
“Can I have a look at it?”
She hesitated. She didn’t want him to see it, partly because, for all she knew, it could be extremely valuable, but mostly because she’d promised Avery she wouldn’t show it to anyone else before he arrived in town. “I’ve put it away for safekeeping,” she said.
“If it’s just a box, why does it need safekeeping?”
Jed Willetz was a lot
pushier than his grandfather had been. With shoulders like his, and those hard, cool eyes, he probably thought he could persuade anyone to bow to his will. But she wasn’t about to drop her panties for him. No way. “Look, Mr. Willetz. I don’t know you, and I don’t have to show you anything I don’t want to show you.”
“You do if it’s mine.”
“Yours?” She drew herself taller and gave him her sternest look. It usually cowed her third-graders. He seemed unmoved.
“You dug it out from over there, right?” He gestured toward the edge of her garden, near the collapsed fence. “That’s my property.”
“Your property? What are you talking about?”
“My grandfather left me his house and land.”
“Be that as it may…” God, she sounded pompous. She took a deep breath and strove for plainer words. “I own the property east of the fence line. Your grandfather sold it to me. It’s mine.”
“I’m not so sure where that property line lies. The fence was crooked, and now it’s broken. I’m thinking maybe you were digging on land that’s legally mine.”
“That’s ridiculous! We had a surveyor come out here and review the property lines before the sale went through. You can check in town hall. Everything’s on file there.”
“So this box is worth nothing,” he said, knocking her thoughts askew. What was he getting at? Why had he changed the subject back to the box if he was so worried about where his property ended and hers began? “Makes me wonder why you’re fighting so hard to keep me from having a look at it.”
“Because I made a promise,” she said, figuring that if he was going to be her new next-door neighbor—a ghastly thought; she didn’t think she could bear to have him rolling his shoulders just a few yards from her dining-room windows—she’d be wise to avoid quarreling with him. “I’ve got an expert coming up to evaluate the box, and I promised I wouldn’t let anyone mess with it until he got here. Why do you think everyone’s going to hear about it, anyway? I haven’t told anyone about it.”
“You told your expert. From Harvard, right?”
That took her even more aback. “How did you know that?”
“Same way I knew about the box. Randy Rideout has a big mouth.”
Damn. Randy did have a big mouth. She usually was amused by what came out of it. But not this. Discretion would have been the prudent course, at least until she’d found out exactly how valuable the box was.
The crunch of tires against loose gravel jolted her and Jed Willetz both. She turned in time to see twin shafts of light shoot up her driveway, followed by the rumble of a large engine. “You expecting someone?” he asked her.
She’d showered and changed after her gardening adventure that afternoon, but she was wearing old jeans, a Sierra Club sweatshirt and her L.L. Bean clogs. Her hair was pulled back into a ragged ponytail, held in place with a green ribbon. She was quite obviously not dressed for company. “I wasn’t even expecting you,” she said.
“Nobody ever expects me,” he commented, then turned back toward the driveway as the loud kachunk of a heavy door slamming resonated through the night. The knife was within easy reach, she noticed. One swift move and she could tuck it against her palm. Jed Willetz might thank her for her foresight.
Good grief. She’d moved to Rockwell to escape from big-city paranoia. She’d come here so she could join a community where people dropped in on one another and trusted one another, where a person didn’t have to reach for the nearest knife whenever a strange vehicle coasted up the driveway.
Maybe she wouldn’t need the knife if she had Jed Willetz to protect her. Yeah, right, as if she was prepared to turn her back on a lifetime of feminism and let a big, unshaven guy protect her. Especially him. He was planning to give her a hard time about her property lines. She couldn’t depend on him at all.
Footsteps rattled the gravel, and a small, round-faced woman emerged from behind the SUV. Her hair, styled in a rigorous pageboy with bangs stretching across her forehead, made her face look even rounder. Recognizing her, Erica let out her breath and smiled. See? This small-town living was all it was cracked up to be. She did know just about everyone.
“Meryl,” she said pleasantly, even though Meryl Hummer was not her favorite person. The chief reporter for the Rockwell Gazette, Meryl had a way of turning every conversation into an interview. Her sense of her own importance was grossly inflated. The Rockwell Gazette was a flimsy weekly with so little news to report that it had to pad its pages with articles about every varsity, junior varsity and intramural sport at the high school. Senior Shot-Putter Sets His Sights on Plymouth State College, a headline might scream, or Outing Club Plans Annual Hike Up Mount Washington. Meryl favored large, bubble-shaped earrings that echoed the roundness of her face, and she always poked her curved chin outward as if it were a weapon, even though it was about as deadly as the edge of a teaspoon.
“I hope you don’t mind my stopping by like this,” Meryl said, striding across the back lawn as purposefully as her short, stocky legs would allow. She carried a tweedy bag on a strap over her shoulder, and her cardigan was textured with pills and pulls. As she neared the back-porch light, Erica could see that she’d slathered her face with makeup that gave her complexion a uniformly dull peach hue. The effect, ironically, was to make her look much older than her thirty-something years.
Before Erica could say whether she minded, Meryl had reached the steps, barely sparing Jed Willetz a glance. “Jed, I heard you were home,” she said as she brushed past him.
“I’m not home,” he argued. “This isn’t home.”
“If you say so.” Evidently, she wasn’t among the Rockwell womenfolk willing to drop her panties for him. According to Fern, Meryl was married to seventy-year-old Dunc Hummer, who’d earned his fortune years ago when the granite quarry north of town was more productive than it currently was, and used said fortune to shore up the Gazette so his child bride could continue to accumulate bylines. Jed Willetz apparently couldn’t compete with a sugar daddy like Dunc.
Meryl’s gaze and her oddly artificial smile zeroed in on Erica as she dug into her bag. “I’m doing a story on the box. Where is it?”
Erica suppressed a groan. Jed had warned that her that everyone would know about the box by tomorrow. Obviously, he’d missed his estimate by a few hours, but that minor error didn’t keep him from grinning smugly. He had a remarkably sexy grin, she noticed with some annoyance.
She turned back to Meryl. “I’m sorry,” she said, “but the box isn’t for public consumption.”
Meryl smiled. “No one wants to consume the box, Erica. The people of Rockwell just want an accurate report about what it looks like. I’ve already interviewed Glenn Rideout—”
“Randy’s father? What does he have to do with it?”
“He’s Randy’s father,” Meryl explained. She pulled a camera from her bag. “I’d like your side of the story, as well as a photo. This is page-one stuff.”
“My side of the story?” Erica would have laughed if she didn’t feel so uneasy. “There’s no side of the story.”
Erica slung the camera around her neck on its strap, then plucked a notepad and pen from a side pocket of her bag. She flipped open the pad and skimmed her jottings. “What I have is that Randy found the box—”
“We found it together,” Erica muttered, aware that perhaps there was more than one side of the story after all.
“You’re disputing the Rideout version?” Meryl’s eyes sparkled.
“There is no Rideout version. Glenn wasn’t here. He has no idea what happened.” Erica sighed. “Randy and I were planting my garden. Right where the zucchini were going to go—”
“According to Glenn, you were planning to plant too many zucchini.”
“Glenn wasn’t here,” Erica repeated. “That was Randy’s opinion, about too many zucchini plants. But I did research, and I believe I selected the correct number of zucchini plants.” She heard a chuckle rising from the foot of the steps but ch
ose to ignore it. “While digging in the area of the zucchini plants, Randy and I unearthed the box. I’ve put it in a safe place, and it’s going to stay there until an expert evaluates it.”
“From Harvard,” Jed added quietly. “There’s a question about whether they found the box on my land.”
Meryl glanced at him, then turned back to Erica, her eyes even brighter. “Really? You were poaching on his property?”
“Of course not.” Erica bristled. Why was Jed stirring Meryl up? “The garden is on my land. I bought this land from his grandfather. Mr. Willetz has nothing to do with it.”
“But I’m here,” he said cheerfully, climbing the steps to join her and Meryl on the porch. “Let’s go have a look at the box.”
“Who’s this expert from Harvard?” Meryl asked, clicking her pen. “Do you have a name?”
Erica sighed. It wasn’t as if she had anything to hide. Avery Gilman was highly esteemed in his field. Maybe if people reading the Gazette realized that she had connections to one of the nation’s foremost authorities on Colonial artifacts, they wouldn’t railroad her the way she felt she was being railroaded right now.
“Avery Gilman,” she said. “Dr. Avery Gilman. One L.”
Meryl jotted down the name and gave Erica another watermelon smile. “Now, how about let’s have a look at this box and get some photos taken?”
“Yeah, how about it?” Jed chimed in.
Erica sighed again. She really wanted to protect the box—from publicity, from prying eyes, from the sort of attention that could put it at risk. If it was a genuine artifact, it could be priceless. If it was a piece of junk, hyping it in any way would be ridiculous.
But, as Jed had pointed out, everyone in town knew about the box already. And maybe if she played along, if she let Meryl write a story about it, complete with a front-page photo, Rockwell would embrace Erica even more completely, letting her feel like a genuine part of the town. When in Rockwell, do as the Rockwellians do—even if what they did was go nuts over a dirty old box.
“Okay,” she said, allowing herself one final sigh before she scooped up the knife and opened the kitchen door. “I’ll show you.”
Hidden Treasures Page 4