As he sat on the creaky swing on the broad farmer’s porch that extended the length of his grandfather’s house, he acknowledged that his business entailed more than just taking care of what was left of his grandfather’s life. There was that other matter. The matter of Erica Leitner.
Everyone at the Superette had been buzzing about her when he’d gone in to buy a few days’ worth of food. Of course, once he’d stepped inside the glaringly lit shop, everyone had started buzzing about her and him. “I see you’re making friends with that schoolteacher,” Harriet Ettman had remarked, a dangerous glint in her eyes. “You sure know how to work fast. Barely back home, and you’re already cozy with that lovely young lady.”
“You’d be the first,” Pop Hackett had commented from his post at the cashier counter. “Not that others haven’t tried with her.”
“I hope you haven’t tried with her,” Harriet had clucked, wagging a bony finger at Pop. “Elaine wouldn’t be too happy with you. Besides, you’re old enough to be Erica’s father.”
“You’re old enough to be her grandmother,” Pop had retorted.
“Well, who cares how old I am? I think it’s lovely that she came here all the way from Boston just to teach our children. That shows true dedication. Not too many young people would be happy settling in a sleepy little town like Rockwell. Isn’t that right, Jed?”
“She’s Jewish,” Toad Regan had commented to no one in particular as he emerged from behind a rack of potato chips. Toad Regan had a way of addressing the air molecules around him rather than actual people. Much of what he said made no sense, and a goodly portion of the rest of it was irritating or offensive.
“What’s her being Jewish got to do with anything?” Harriet had inquired, her voice as prickly as a porcupine.
Toad had glanced up, as if startled to discover human beings within hearing distance of him. “Well, we ain’t got no Hebrew National here, if you get my meaning,” he’d muttered before shuffling out of the store, a wrinkled paper bag shaped suspiciously like a whiskey bottle tucked under his arm.
Jed hadn’t gotten his meaning, but that was nothing new. The last time he’d seen Toad was a few years ago, when he’d been visiting town and had spent the night at his father’s place. In the morning, he’d discovered Toad passed out on the living-room sofa. Jed had awakened Toad and asked him what the hell he was doing, and Toad had answered, “I’m sleepin’.” He’d launched into a monologue about having seen a UFO the night before and Jack Willetz’s house was the closest, and he’d had to find cover, and by the way, where did Jack keep his blankets, because it was as cold as a witch’s tit in the living room and he hadn’t been able to find a blanket anywhere. Besides which, what the hell was Jed doing there, anyway?
Jed supposed every small town had its version of Toad Regan, a skinny, underemployed fellow in baggy, stale-smelling clothes, who alternated between two states: drunk and hungover. Toad was generally harmless, and because front doors were left unlocked, he never went wanting for a place to sleep if UFOs were in the vicinity and he was too crocked to find his way home. New York City was crawling with guys like Toad, but unfortunately people kept their front doors locked in the city, so all its Toads wound up sleeping on sidewalks and park benches.
Jed had managed to pay for his purchases at the Superette without too much more needling over his having gotten up close and personal with Erica Leitner. He’d driven home, reminding himself that one of the particular joys of Rockwell was that everyone felt entitled to comment and conjecture on everyone else’s affairs—even when those affairs didn’t exist.
Yet, for some reason, Pop Hackett’s words resonated inside him: You’d be the first. Not that others haven’t tried with her. Who’d tried? Why hadn’t they succeeded? What was her story?
Jed shouldn’t even be thinking about it. He didn’t have time for her, even if her lips were the color of a cherry sourball and her hands were strong—especially when she was aiming a carving knife at him—and her hair was as thick and lush as the tresses in a Renaissance painting of Eve or Venus or any of those other mythical women who were always depicted in artwork as naked and sexy and worthy of worship. Erica was thinner than the fine-art Eves and Venuses he’d seen, but not skinny. Hard to tell with the baggy sweatshirt she’d had on last night, but he was reasonably sure she had some nice curves going on under her clothes. And beautiful eyes, dark and soulful, full of worry even when she was trying to smile.
He didn’t have time for her.
Still, there he was, sitting on his grandfather’s porch swing, gazing out at Old North Road and wondering when she’d be rolling home from her job at the primary school. According to Meryl Hummer’s article in the Gazette, Erica taught third grade. Jed didn’t remember his own third grade teacher, but he’d probably hated the woman. He’d hated pretty much all his teachers.
He heard the spit of tires on gravel and straightened up. A Subaru wagon braked by her roadside mailbox. Erica reached through the car window to retrieve her mail, then proceeded up the driveway.
He crunched his teeth into the remains of his candy and watched as she pulled to a halt and climbed out of her car. Her curves were better displayed by the outfit she had on today—tailored navy-blue slacks and a soft, silky-looking beige blouse. Her hair was clipped back from her face, emphasizing her cheekbones.
She crossed her backyard, pausing briefly to study her half-planted garden, then pursed her lips and scaled the steps to the back porch. She carried a bulging leather tote, the kind very busy women in New York seemed to favor. Maybe they liked those leather totes in Boston, too. Wasn’t that where Harriet Ettman said Erica was from?
God, he really didn’t have time for this.
“Hey,” he called over to her.
She glanced in the direction of his voice, then squinted, then frowned. His grandfather’s front porch and her back porch were maybe two hundred feet apart, and nearly on the same latitude, since her house was much closer to the road than his grandfather’s.
His house. He owned this place now. He ought to start thinking of it as his so he could figure out what to do with it. And what to do about the items his father had stolen from him, not from his grandfather.
She was still standing on her back porch, staring at him. He shoved himself to his feet and strode across the grass to the broken fence that separated their property. She wasn’t exactly frowning, which he took as encouragement to step over the fence slats. “How was school?”
“Awful,” she told him. “Have you seen today’s Rockwell Gazette?”
He noticed an edition of the newspaper protruding from her tote. “I saw it,” he said with a smile. “We’re famous.”
“I don’t want to be famous,” she announced, then pulled a key from her pocket and unlocked the back door. “I can’t believe how Meryl mangled Dr. Gilman’s name. He’s going to be upset about that.”
“As if he actually reads the Rockwell Gazette.”
He couldn’t tell if his sarcasm annoyed her until she glanced over her shoulder at him. Yeah, it annoyed her, but her eyes had laughter in them. “Maybe it would be best if I don’t mention the article to him.”
“That would be my strategy.”
She shoved open the door, which stuck a little around the molding—his grandfather should have taken care of that when he’d sold her the place—and didn’t try to prevent him from following her inside. A frantic beeping came from the telephone sitting on a counter. She tossed her tote onto a chair beside the small pine table near the window, crossed to the phone and pressed a button on the console. He realized it was an answering machine, and all those beeps—he lost count after five—were messages.
“Hello, this is Doug Brezinski from the Boston Globe. I’m writing a piece about your archaeological find. I’ve already spoken with a Mr. Rideout, and I’d like to speak to you, too. My phone number…”
“This is Sandy Bradburn from Channel 3 News in Manchester. I’m heading up to Rockwell today, and I�
��m hoping we can talk. I’ll call again when I get into town…”
“I’m trying to reach a Ms. Leet-ner. My name is Malcolm Moody, and I’m a historian with the Minuteman Historical Society…”
“Jeez Louise, Erica! How’d you get so friendly with Jed Willetz?”
Erica slammed the off button to silence her messages.
“Hey, who was that?” he asked, pretending enormous interest. “It sounded a little like Janelle Dickerson.” He’d gone to high school with Janelle. He’d gone the distance with her, too. She’d been quite the party girl back then. Last he heard, she was working behind the counter at Rockwell Rx, keeping tabs on who in town was taking which drug.
“It wasn’t,” Erica said swiftly. Then she sighed. “She’s Janelle Mondo now.”
“No kidding? She married Danny Mondo?” He flipped a chair around and straddled it. “When did that happen?”
“It was rather sudden. She was pregnant.” She bit her lip and turned away, her cheeks flushing pink. “I shouldn’t have said that. It’s only gossip.”
He grinned. He liked her qualms, even though they were misplaced. Everyone knew everything about everyone in Rockwell. The only reason he hadn’t known about Janelle was that he no longer lived in town.
She turned back to Jed, her cheeks still bright with color but her eyes steady. “Did you get lots of calls like these?” she asked, gesturing toward her answering machine.
He shook his head. “I haven’t got a phone. Well, I’ve got my cell phone with me, but nothing hooked up at my grandfather’s house. No number people from the Boston Globe could look up in the directory.” He pondered the other messages he’d overheard, even though he’d much rather contemplate Janelle’s insinuation about him and Erica getting friendly. “It looks like you really are famous.”
“It’s ridiculous. Why would the Globe want to write a story about an old box I dug out of my garden?”
“Maybe because you’re from Boston?”
She frowned. “I’m not. Technically. I’m from Brookline, which is a large suburb of Boston.”
“And that makes all the difference, doesn’t it?” He shrugged. “That Harvard-professor pal of yours is interested in your box. Why wouldn’t the Globe be?”
“Well…the box could have historical import.”
“It could be worth millions,” Jed noted, pulling her copy of the Gazette from her tote and holding it up so she could see the banner headline.
She sagged against the counter, unclipped one of her barrettes and smoothed her hair back before refastening the barrette. It was such a thoughtlessly graceful gesture his mouth went dry. He wanted to smooth her hair back from her face, kiss her cheek, kiss her jaw, work a path to her lips. He lived in Manhattan, he knew women there, he was mature and seasoned…but at that moment, when her fingers nimbly worked the barrette into place, he felt a surge of lust almost adolescent in its irrationality.
He definitely did not have time for this.
“If it’s worth millions,” she was saying, “everybody’s going to want a piece of me.”
Especially him, but he didn’t tell her that. The thought made him uneasy. He had to bury his grandfather’s ashes and go home, escape from this smothering little town before it made him crazy. Twenty-four hours inside its borders, and he was already feeling slightly deranged.
More than slightly. If he were sane, he never would have said, “So, I went down to town hall today and looked at the records, and I think that million-dollar box was at least fifty percent on my land.”
CHAPTER FIVE
DERRICK MESSINGER wouldn’t have come to a crummy little hole-in-the-wall like Rockwell if his career depended on it—except that his career did depend on it, and here he was.
Another man might have been stirred by the greening humps of the mountains surrounding the town, so damn pretty they looked like something a set designer might have painted for a summer-stock production of The Sound of Music. Another man might have swooned at the tangy pine scent and the stunningly blue New England sky. Derrick wasn’t another man, though, and pretty mountains and pine trees didn’t do it for him. He’d seen the underbelly of life, the squalor, the tragedy. He’d witnessed grief, loss, despair—not just witnessed it but reported on it. He’d reported on toxic dumps in Tennessee, airplane disasters in Arkansas, neo-Nazis in Nebraska. He’d been reviled by environmental radicals, stalwart racists, politicians, animal rights activists and even fellow journalists. He’d gone undercover in a prison—or it would have been undercover if a few of the cons hadn’t immediately recognized him and started blabbing their guts out, drowning him in their hard-luck stories—and he’d once talked a potential jumper down from the Tappan Zee Bridge, on the air, live and unedited.
And now he was supposed to do a story about the opening of a box? In this half-dead town, where every fourth storefront seemed to be a bar? Had he really come to this?
“I’m telling you,” Sonya, his producer, honked in her profound Bronx accent, “this is gonna be a great show.” She was seated shotgun in front, and Mookie, Derrick’s good-natured lunkhead of a cameraman, was behind the wheel. Derrick liked to sit in back. These days, it was as close as he got to riding in a limo.
Like doing this stupid story was going to get him any closer to his limo days.
“Big ratings,” Sonya insisted. “Double digits, I’m telling you.” Nowadays, with all the cable channels vying for eyeballs, if a show broke into double-digit ratings it was a big deal. “What I’m thinking is, we’ll capture the entire atmosphere of this town—”
“What atmosphere?” Derrick snapped. “There’s a bar on every corner.”
“That kinda makes the place, if you ask me,” Mookie said.
Sonya shoved her hair back behind her ears. If her hair had been long, the gesture would have been dramatic, but she’d recently hacked her tresses to chin length, and the grand hand flourish seemed like overkill. “I was thinking about the mountains. The forests. The small-town charm. Look—there’s a crafts store—I mean, a crafts store! And a pharmacy—”
“This is special?” Derrick muttered.
“And a general store!”
“What do they sell there?” Mookie wondered aloud. “Generals?” He let out a snorting laugh.
Derrick wished he could be anywhere else. But Sonya was right. She always was. She had a nose for news, as the saying went. Derrick used to have a nose for news, but then he’d gone through that long stretch when his ratings had been way down, not just single digit but in the two range. Maybe he’d lost his nose for news literally because his nose had been fractured during a scuffle on his show a few years back, when two professional wrestlers had started taking swings at each other and Derrick had stepped between them. Now, that show had gotten double-digit ratings.
A plastic surgeon had reshaped Derrick’s busted nose to resemble his old nose pretty closely, and he didn’t think his appearance had suffered. His ratings, though…
So he relied on Sonya. Despite all her annoying tics, she knew what she was doing. She would package this show about the damn box in the teacher’s garden and turn it into a phenomenon. Hadn’t she worked miracles with his last special, “The Search for Jimmy Hoffa”? Of course, Jimmy Hoffa was a newsworthy name, even though Derrick’s search for him was no more successful than any of the other searches for him over the past thirty years. Finding Hoffa or not finding him wasn’t the point. The show had been good TV.
Sonya seemed to believe that the opening of an antique, possibly valuable, wooden box would also be good TV. The instant she’d spotted the story on the wires about some mousy schoolmarm in a central New Hampshire granite-quarry town digging up an ancient relic in her garden, she’d been on the phone to Derrick, telling him to pack some sweaters and meet her at LaGuardia. “We’ve got to get to the teacher first,” she said. “I’m telling you, Rockwell is going to be overrun by the media in two days. That’s why we’ve got to get there in one day. Mookie’ll drive up tonight wit
h his gear and meet us at the airport in Lebanon tomorrow.”
Derrick highly doubted that the media would overrun this dead-end burg, but he knew better than to argue with Sonya. She’d pulled him out of the Valley of Oblivion, where he’d fallen after the network honchos had axed him for questioning a Supreme Court justice on live TV about his rumored sexual predilections. After that debacle, Sonya had agreed to produce him, putting together independent reports and selling them into syndication. She’d saved his butt. She’d turned his show, I’m Just the Messinger, into a nationally known brand name.
So when she told him they were going to Rockwell, New Hampshire, to do a story on a mysterious old box that might contain millions of dollars, he’d packed his sweaters.
A freaking box, though…This was still a long way down from an exclusive interview with a Supreme Court justice.
Mookie pulled into a parking space that angled back from the curb in front of a place called Hackett’s Superette. “You want the usual?” he hollered over his shoulder.
“They’re not going to have the usual here.” Derrick eyed the sign above the store suspiciously. “Superette” sounded like the name of a sixties girl group, not a store that would carry Chivas Regal.
“You’re the one who pointed out that there’s a bar on every corner,” Sonya reminded him. “This is obviously a community that takes its booze seriously.”
Derrick folded his arms across his chest and scowled at her. He liked to have a bottle of Chivas on hand for a shoot. All he needed was a couple of nips in the evening to unwind—in his own room, in privacy. No way was he going to sit on a bar stool in one of those seedy-looking joints, swapping yarns with crusty cow farmers and unemployed quarry workers while he enjoyed his nightcap. None of the bars in town looked as if they’d carry Chivas, either. He should have brought his own supply with him. But Sonya had been in such a big hurry to get to Rockwell ahead of everyone else in the media, he hadn’t thought to toss a bottle into his bag. He was lucky he remembered to pack his toothbrush and his good-luck rubber band.
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