Hidden Treasures

by Judith Arnold

  “Yeah, and maybe buy a shirt.” He pulled at his loose-fitting cotton T-shirt. “Buy it from my dad, okay?”

  “We’ll see.” She wasn’t sure she wanted to own such an ugly shirt, and if she did decide to buy one, she wasn’t sure she wanted to purchase it from a man who’d hired an attorney and was making legal claims against her. She didn’t hold Glenn Rideout’s behavior against his son, but she was no fan of Glenn’s, especially when he might wind up becoming her adversary in court, fighting over the fate of the box.

  God, these small-minded small-town people. If someone had dug up a box of antique gold coins in Cambridge, the commemorative shirts would have featured more appealing designs—some interesting colors, teal and mauve, maybe, and better lettering, and an illustration that resembled the actual box. But if it had happened in Cambridge, she wouldn’t have spent the next day working on her garden. In Cambridge, only multimillionaires could afford enough land to plant a garden, and even if all the coins in the box turned out to be genuine gold, she was no multimillionaire. Only in a town like Rockwell could an untenured third-grade teacher inching into her late twenties afford enough property to plant a garden.

  Rockwell was fine. She was fine. And when Jed Willetz left town…She’d still be fine. She’d garden and cook and continue to fix up her house, and she’d join some committees. She’d find a way to weave her life more thoroughly into the town’s fabric. She had a good situation in Rockwell, a town so warm and friendly that when someone broke into her house she knew the trespasser by name.

  Even when Jed was long gone, she’d be all right.

  FLAGS AND BANNERS were out along Main Street. So were reporters, lurking on street corners, interrogating pedestrians and doing stand-ups in front of Hackett’s Superette, which sported a big placard reading We’ve Got Official Treasure T-shirts! right above the sign advertising fifty cents off on all varieties of Cap’n Crunch. The sight of those reporters and the hoopla made Jed want to climb back into his turquoise rental car and floor the gas.

  How far would he drive? Back to his grandfather’s house or back to New York City? He had to leave; he knew he had to. But…

  Erica.

  After phenomenal sex, wasn’t he supposed to want a cigarette? All he’d wanted after making love with her—all he still wanted—was her. It hadn’t just been sex last night. They’d talked, too, about her students, about some of his more profitable junk purchases, about what Avery would do with the box, about what she found so appealing about this hideous little town, and what he found so hideous about it.

  How could Erica stand it here?

  It didn’t matter. She had a dream, and she’d made a choice. So they’d had some good healthy sex, and now he would bury his grandfather’s ashes and go back where he belonged.

  Too bad Erica thought she belonged in this dive.

  He’d already stopped in at the Congregational church to talk to the Reverend Pith about having a graveside ceremony for his grandfather. Last night, around 2:00 a.m., after he and Erica had made love for the third time and they’d been lying facing each other, her hands resting against his chest while he toyed with her hair, winding it around his fingers and then releasing it so it slid against his palms, he’d asked her what she thought about skipping a church service and just saying a few words at the burial site. “My grandfather wasn’t exactly a religious guy, you know,” he’d said. “He probably wouldn’t have been thrilled about the church service we did back in January. Two church services would really piss him off.”

  “Then just do the graveside ceremony.”

  “I think Reena Keefer would be okay with that, if she’d even bother to show up.”

  “Reena Keefer?”

  “The syrup lady. She and my grandfather had a thing going.”

  Erica had leaned back and stared at him, obviously surprised. “I didn’t know that.”

  If she’d truly belonged in Rockwell, she would have known it. But Jed hadn’t lingered on that thought. “I need to work it all out with Reverend Pith and Sewell McCormick.”

  “The podiatrist? What does he have to do with it?”

  “He manages the cemetery.”

  “You’re kidding. And he’s the town manager, too.”

  “A regular Renaissance man, ol’ Sewell.”

  Erica had laughed, allowing Jed the tiny hope that maybe she understood what a joke Rockwell was. But that hope had flickered out like an extinguished flame when she’d opted to work on her garden with the Rideout kid today. A woman planning to pull up roots didn’t plant zucchini in her backyard.

  So he’d gone to the church himself, awakened the minister from an early siesta at his desk and secured his agreement to say a few appropriate words next Tuesday over John Willetz’s ashes before they were buried next to his wife’s remains on the hill overlooking the moribund granite quarry. “Don’t make the words appropriate,” Jed had cautioned Pith. “Make them nice.”

  He’d found Sewell McCormick outside his podiatry office, doing an interview with a reporter from the Burlington Free Press. Sewell was cheerleading about Rockwell with such spirit Jed wished he had some pom-poms to give the guy. Not wanting to hang around while Sewell did his town-booster routine, Jed decided he’d work out the cemetery arrangements later and headed back down Main Street to where he’d parked his car. Along the way he passed Harriet Ettman’s crafts shop, its window filled with brown wooden boxes adorned with cheap decals reading Rockwell—the Town of Hidden Treasures on the lids. Why would anyone buy such an ugly box? What would you put in it? Cigarettes, if you smoked. And cigarettes were nobody’s treasure. As he walked past, the shop’s door swung open and two vaguely familiar-looking women bounded out carrying paper bags, each of which contained a bulge the shape of the boxes.

  All right. People were making money from Erica’s find. She’d make money, too. Derrick Messinger, with his idiotic TV special, would make money. Why not? If Jed could earn a living out of junk, why shouldn’t the residents of his hometown do the same thing?

  He was nearing Rideout’s Ride, when Derrick Messinger’s two colleagues—the woman with the Noo-Yawk accent and the burly cameraman—emerged. The cameraman had on a Town of Hidden Treasures T-shirt, but the woman maintained her urban chic, dressed in formfitting black. “Hey, there, you!” she called to Jed.

  Jed could have pretended not to hear her, but Sewell McCormick at the other end of Main Street had probably heard her, and Jed wasn’t that good an actor. He approached the concrete steps leading up to the bar’s entry. “Yeah?”

  “I hear you’re living in Manhattan,” she said.

  Great. The Rockwell grapevine had sprouted runners beyond town limits. “That’s right.”

  “What I was thinking, since you’ve got connections here, maybe you could be our liaison. You know what a liaison is?”

  Jed scowled. “We may be Yankee rustics up here, but we’re not morons.”

  “Well…” She glanced behind her at the bar. “The majority of the people in there did not know what a liaison was.”

  “The majority of the people in there probably started drinking hours ago,” Jed pointed out, although he wouldn’t be surprised if even a completely sober Matty Blancher wouldn’t know the word. “And no, I’m not interested in being your liaison.”

  “You wouldn’t have to do anything,” the woman explained, determined in spite of his rebuff. “Just let us know if there are any new developments. This being our story, after all, the story Derrick Messinger broke on national TV.”

  “He did a hell of a lot better with this story than with his search for Jimmy Hoffa, didn’t he.”

  The woman’s expression hardened to stone, but the cameraman let out a guffaw. “Hey, sometimes you’ve gotta shoot a lot of arrows if you want to hit a target,” he said.

  “If you’ve got bad aim,” Jed countered.

  The cameraman laughed again. He struck Jed as someone it would take a lot of effort to insult. “Sonya still hasn’t gotten her
sense of humor back after that fiasco.”

  “I have, too,” said the woman as she dug through the black canvas purse hanging from a shoulder strap. “As a matter of fact, the numbers from yesterday’s broadcast did wonders for my sense of humor. Here—” she presented Jed with a business card “—just in case. I thought about giving your dad my card, but I got the feeling he’d charge an arm and a leg for any information.”

  “That’s him,” Jed said with a nod. He pocketed the woman’s card and hoped he’d remember to remove it before he tossed his jeans into the laundry.

  “How about you give me your phone number, just in case?” she persevered.

  “Just in case what?”

  She sighed. “You’re the only person in town who knows what a liaison is. Come on, be a sport.” She pulled out a notepad.

  He considered, then recited the phone number of his showroom. “City Resale,” he told her. “That’s my store.”

  “Great. You be my liaison, and maybe I’ll buy something.”

  “Whatever.” He turned to the cameraman. “So how much is Rideout asking for the shirt?”

  “I don’t know. I bought this down at the grocery store. We came in here looking for liaisons, and the bartender got steamed that I didn’t buy my shirt from him. It’s pretty awful, isn’t it.”

  “The shirt or the bartender’s reaction?”

  The cameraman laughed again. “Both.”

  “Come on,” the woman said, starting down the steps. “We’ve got to go rescue Derrick before he makes a fool of himself with that redhead. Thanks again,” she said to Jed. “Jack, right?”

  “Jack’s my father,” he corrected her.

  “Oh. John, then, is it?”

  Before he could correct her again, she was strutting down the sidewalk, checking her watch and adjusting her chichi sunglasses. The cameraman nodded his farewell and lumbered down the street after her.

  Since Jed was already on the porch, he decided to enter Rideout’s Ride. If his father was there, he could discuss his plans for the graveside ceremony. It seemed that the only reason he ever entered Rideout’s Ride was to see if his father was inside.

  Once Jed adjusted to the dim, smoky light, he realized Jack Willetz wasn’t among the bar’s patrons. The place was a bit more hopping than usual—maybe a dozen guys in late middle age occupied the tables, interspersing friendly conversation with shots of booze. Glenn Rideout looked atypically happy, his smile emphasizing the length of his chin. Right across the bar from him, Jed’s father’s accountant perched on a stool.

  “Jed!” the man bellowed. “Remember me? Potter Henley.” He shoved his beefy right hand toward Jed, who gave it a polite shake.

  “I was just searching for my father,” he told Rideout before the guy could pressure him into ordering a drink.

  “He’s not here,” Rideout said. “You want to buy a T-shirt?” He lifted one from behind the counter, shook out the folds and displayed it in all its tasteless glory.

  “No, thanks. I’ve got more T-shirts than I know what to do with.”

  “But this one’s a collector’s item.”

  “I’ll pass.”

  Rideout scowled, crumpled the shirt into a ball and tossed it onto a shelf behind the bar. “Don’t know why I care. By the time my lawyer is done with Erica Leitner, I’ll be so rich a few T-shirt sales won’t make a difference.”

  An alarm bell sounded inside Jed’s skull. “What do you mean, by the time your lawyer is done with Erica?” he asked.

  Potter Henley broke in, yelling, “I bet you’re going to have to sell old John Willetz’s place to cover the taxes.”

  The interruption annoyed Jed. “Why?” he asked impatiently.

  “It’s always that way. Someone inherits a nice piece of real estate and then has to sell it to raise money to cover the taxes. I’m betting your grandfather’s place has a huge tax assessment attached to it. And you’re not even going to be using the house. ’Course, it’s possible you could do away with that tax bill altogether by handing title to the house over to someone else.”

  “Who would I hand it over to?”

  “Your dad,” Potter shouted. “You sell him the house for a token amount—say, a dollar—and then he has to pay the taxes on it.”

  Jed laughed sourly. “You’re my dad’s accountant. You know what he’d do if I sold him the place for a buck. He’d turn around and sell it for a couple hundred thousand and pocket the profit.”

  “You’d save yourself a nice little tax bill,” Potter noted.

  “Big deal.” Jed turned back to Rideout, who was grinning smugly. “So, Glenn, what exactly is your lawyer going to do to Erica?” he asked, struggling to keep his voice low, under control.

  “He’s just talking big,” Potter Henley explained, not making any effort to keep his voice low. “He thinks that old box is actually worth something.”

  “The box, I don’t know,” Rideout said. “But what’s inside the box, all those pretty gold coins? You bet they’re worth something. And my boy found them. My lawyer’s gonna make sure everyone, starting with the schoolteacher and ending with everyone, knows who dug ’em up. It wasn’t the schoolteacher. It was my son. Finders, keepers.”

  Jed doubted a lawyer could successfully argue that the box belonged to Rideout—or his son. If the kid had gone into Erica’s house and found a diamond necklace in a drawer, would he have a claim on it? This was pretty much the same thing: the kid had been on Erica’s property and found a box. That didn’t make it his.

  But Jed didn’t like Rideout’s implication. He knew what lawyers were like. They could badger and intimidate a person until she gave in out of fear or weariness. Erica seemed tough, but she was trying so hard to be a part of the community here, she might not be willing to fight someone as established in Rockwell as Glenn Rideout.

  Even if she was willing, she shouldn’t have to fight him. The guy was a jerk, and he’d probably gone and hired himself a bottom-feeder who’d make Erica feel like a traitor to Rockwell if she didn’t share her bounty with the Rideouts.

  “Actually,” Jed said, straightening his shoulders and staring directly into Glenn’s marble-hard eyes, “the box was on my land. If anyone has a claim on it, it’s me.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “It was technically on my grandfather’s land—which is now mine.”

  Rideout appeared agitated. He hissed a breath into his lungs. “My son told me the garden was being planted squarely on Miss Leitner’s side of the fence.”

  “Have you seen that fence? It got knocked over years ago. It doesn’t mark the property line. I went to town hall to check the survey on the land, and wouldn’t you know? The box was on my property. So if you think you’ve got a claim on it, your lawyer is going to have to get through me before he even talks to Erica.”

  Rideout hissed again. “My lawyer’s damn good.”

  Jed smiled. “My lawyer’s in New York.”

  That shut Rideout up. Even he had the sense to realize a New York lawyer would be much sharper than whoever he’d hired from around here. “So you’re gonna snatch the box away from Miss Leitner? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “What I’m saying is, if something is mine, it’s mine.”

  “That’s a good point,” Henley said helpfully.

  “The hell it’s your land,” Rideout argued. “And even if it was, my son found the box. If you’d found it, it would be yours. If your dad found it, it would be his. Finders, keepers, like I said.”

  Jed didn’t give a damn what Glenn Rideout said. He was sick of him—and sick of Potter Henley, and his father, and the pictures of dogs staring down at him from the walls, and the antlers aimed at him, and the smell of cigarettes hovering in the air. He didn’t want a cigarette. He didn’t even want a candy cane. He didn’t want to think about selling his grandfather’s place for a dollar, about the many ways his father would rip him off given the opportunity, about the property lines, about the stupid T-shirts G
lenn was marketing, about the box, about all the reasons he hated Rockwell.

  He wanted to go back to Erica’s place, carry her off to her bedroom and pretend nothing existed on the other side of her door. Especially not Rockwell, the place she yearned to make her home.

  But Rockwell did exist on the other side of her door. And if he had half a lick of sense, he’d pack his bags and hit the road.

  “Tell your lawyer he’d better not make a move against Erica,” Jed said, pointing a threatening finger at Rideout. “The box is mine. If you think you’ve got a snowball’s chance in hell of claiming ownership of it, you’re going to have to deal with me.”

  Before Rideout could respond, Jed stormed out the door.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  IT TOOK LESS TIME to plant the rest of the garden than it had taken to plant the row and a half she and Randy had completed last weekend. She no longer cared about spacing the seedlings six inches apart and setting them three inches deep. Nor did she care if the zucchini choked out the broccoli, if the peas shriveled and died, if she wound up with too many tomatoes.

  She ought to care. She wanted to care. But she didn’t.

  Randy yakked nonstop as they dug holes, nestled the seedlings into them and patted the soil snugly around them. Some new video game had just been released, he told Erica, and all the kids were saying it was the coolest game, but Randy had played it at Nick Hunkel’s house after school yesterday and it wasn’t so great. The cars didn’t skid enough and the blood looked completely bogus.

  Once the seedlings were in, Erica realized she needed to water them. She hadn’t hooked up her hose yet, so to irrigate her newly planted garden, she and Randy traipsed in and out of the kitchen lugging a blown-glass pitcher and a plastic milk jug filled with water from the sink. If Erica had planned this whole earth-mother thing better, she would have bought a watering can when she’d purchased the seedlings and the trowel.

  Randy emptied the milk jug onto the pea plants and prattled about how computer games were really the way to go and any kid who was still relying on video games for amusement was stuck in the wrong century, while Erica stood swaying, trying not to collapse as she stared at her soggy garden and realized she was never going to make peace with those budding tomato vines, those innocent-looking zucchini plants that might someday consume the entire yard. She was never going to learn to bake zucchini bread. She’d probably never learn to bake anything edible at all. She wanted so badly to fulfill her dream of becoming integrated into this clean, wholesome environment, with its crystalline blue sky, the Moose Mountains shaping proud purple humps on the horizon, the harmony of a rural town awakening to spring. And it just wasn’t going to happen.