Hidden Treasures

by Judith Arnold

  Jed ran his index finger around the rim of his glass. His fingers were thick and blunt, callused. From what? she wondered. Manual labor? What did he do in New York City? She knew nothing about him.

  Well, she had a knife. So did Fern. As long as she was armed, she could enjoy having a gorgeous guy drinking wine in her kitchen, even if he was practically a stranger.

  THE LAST PERSON he wanted to talk about was his father. After a quick, cursory stop at town hall that morning, where popcorn-brained Myrna Gilhooley forgot she was the town clerk for ten whole minutes so she could badger him about when he’d gotten to town and what his business was with Erica Leitner—“You think there’s money in that box? Is that why you’re being so neighborly?”—he’d decided to skip checking the deeds on Erica’s and his grandfather’s houses and instead headed over to the Moosehead, where he’d found his father enjoying a belated breakfast of orange juice, scrambled eggs and Ice House beer.

  “Oh, so here’s my famous son,” Jack had greeted him with phony enthusiasm as he shook a sluggish stream of ketchup onto his eggs. “You want something to eat? Order it at the counter. They don’t have a waitress here till afternoon.”

  “I’m not hungry,” Jed said, taking the seat across from his father and sighing. After fifty-three years of hard living, his father’s skin looked like scuffed shoe leather and his fingers had deep creases scoring them, like frets on a guitar. Jed had reminded himself that the old man was what he was, and he wasn’t going to change. Even so, he didn’t have the right to filch stuff John Willetz had left to his grandson.

  “Get a cuppa coffee, at least,” Jack insisted. “I don’t want to eat alone.”

  “You were all set to eat alone before I walked in. Dad—”

  “Now, don’t you go ‘Dad’-ing me. You’ve been in town how long? Talkin’ to Meryl Hummer, talkin’ to that snooty teacher, and you don’t even let your father know you’re here?”

  “I came up here to bury Grandpa’s ashes.” Jed kept his tone level so the anger wouldn’t spill out. “And I go into his house—my house—and discover you’ve been stealing things from it.”

  “Haven’t been stealin’ them. Just took a few items that the old man said should be mine.”

  “The old man left you all his money. I’m sure his will didn’t say his fry pan should be yours.”

  “I need a pan,” his father had argued before shoveling a forkful of ketchup-covered eggs into his mouth. “What’s the big deal?”

  “The big deal is that you went through the house and took things. Things Grandpa left to me.”

  “Don’t be greedy, Jed. What the hell were you going to do with that old pan, anyway? I need a pan.”

  “Why? You never cook anything.” At least, Jed couldn’t recall his father ever cooking anything for him. His mother used to cook, and after the divorce, Jed had spent most of his time between her house and his grandfather’s.

  “I do so cook, sometimes. Maybe now that I’ve got a pan I’ll cook more. Look, Jed, don’t tell me you traveled all the way up from the big city to fight with me over a pan.”

  “No, I told you, I came up here to bury Grandpa’s ashes. But when I got here, I found that you’d taken things from his house. Those things weren’t yours to take.”

  “Get over it,” Jack said before gulping down some beer. “No big deal.”

  The things themselves weren’t a big deal. It was his father who was the big deal. If his mother had still lived in town, she would have given Jack an earful for taking stuff from John’s house, but she’d moved to upstate New York with Jed’s stepfather a few years ago, and without anyone to keep an eye on him, Jed’s father did whatever the hell he wanted. A fun way to live, probably—until whatever the hell you wanted crossed into someone else’s territory.

  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 unsur
e 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.

  CHAPTER SIX

  AS EAGER AS FERN 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?”

&n
bsp; 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.”