Hidden Treasures

E
RICA WASN
’
T THRILLED
with Randy’s cap. Above the curved visor appeared the words Triple-X—the Sexy Beer. It would have seemed silly enough on an adult, but it seemed even sillier on Randy, who was only eleven years old.

No doubt he’d gotten the cap from his father. Erica had concluded from the few times she’d met Glenn Rideout that the man was a jackass. He ran Rideout’s Ride, one of Rockwell’s eight bars; maybe the hat was a gift from one of his distributors. He probably thought the thing looked cute on his son.

Even without the hat, Randy didn’t qualify as cute. He was skinny and gawky, with an olive-shaped head and a hot-dog–shaped body. He wore his hair in a buzz cut and his two front teeth overlapped. But Erica didn’t invite him to her house because she wanted to hang out with a cute little boy. To be sure, she didn’t really invite him at all. He just showed on a semiregular basis, foraging for cookies and companionship.

Today, he’d rapped on her screen door when she’d been about to embark on her new project: the garden. “Sure, I’ll help,” he’d offered when she told him her plans. “And after we do your garden, we can have cookies, right?”

“Of course.” In an eleven-year-old boy’s economic
system, cookies could purchase just about anything—labor, the truth, a new best friend.

Randy had helped her carry the flats of seedlings she’d bought yesterday morning at Tully’s Hardware and Garden Center from the rear of her station wagon to the rectangular patch of dirt she’d hacked out of the scruffy tufts of grass that she euphemistically referred to as her lawn. She’d done her best to cultivate the patch yesterday. She’d raked the dirt, sifted out the obvious stones and tossed them into the woods, and felt achy and fulfilled once she’d gone inside to shower. She was a
gardener
—or she would be, once she got all those seedlings into the ground. She would be the sort of woman who connected with the earth, who participated in the cycles of nature and the seasons of life. She would have dirt beneath her nails, and her jeans would fade to white at the knee.

“Pull the tape a little tighter,” she instructed Randy, who stood at the far end of the rectangle.

“I don’t get why we have to measure it,” Randy called back to her. His voice was still high and piping, not much different from its pitch two years ago, when he’d been a student in her class. “Why can’t we just plant the plants?”

“I told you, Randy, according to my research, the plants will thrive best if the seedlings start out six to eight inches apart.”

“My mom doesn’t measure her garden.”

“And how are her plants?”

“I don’t know. I don’t pay attention.”

Erica nodded. “I
do
pay attention. And I’m planting my seedlings six inches apart.”

Randy obediently stretched the tape measure the length of her garden. Erica used her spade to mark six-
inch intervals along the first row. “This is where my tomato plants are going.”

“That’s an awful lot of tomato plants,” he observed, eyeing the plastic frame box of tender green sprouts, which sat beside the garden plot.

“Maybe some of the plants will die. I don’t know what my harvest will be like. I’m a novice at gardening. Do you know what a novice is?”

“Something like a priest, I think.”

Erica smiled. “It can mean someone who’s training for a religious order. In general, it means someone who’s new at something. It comes from the Latin
novicius
, meaning
new
.” Aware she was lecturing, she shut up and finished poking indentations in the soil. Randy didn’t seem to mind when she veered into pedantic mode. But
she
minded. She’d been living in Rockwell for nearly three years. Surely some of her know-it-all attitude should have atrophied by now.

“Okay,” she said once she was sure she’d gotten her didacticism under control. “We’ll put the tomatoes in this row, and then we’ll measure off a row for cucumbers and peas, and in the last row I’ll plant some broccoli and zucchini. What do you think?”

“Broccoli?” Randy wrinkled his nose. “My gramma used to make me eat broccoli when I was bad. It was like a punishment.”

“Your grandmother must love you very much,” Erica remarked, reeling in the tape measure somewhat and turning it perpendicular so she could get her rows properly distanced.

“My gramma is a statist.”

“A statist?”

Randy frowned. “Isn’t a statist, like, a mean person?”

“A
sadist
,” she corrected him.

“Oh. Whatever. Broccoli sucks. And zucchini…” He shook his head gravely.

“What’s wrong with zucchini?”

“If you plant too much of it, it takes over the world.”

“The world?”

“Well, your garden, anyway.” Randy shook his head at her obvious ignorance. “Nobody plants zucchini.”

“Then it’s a good thing I’m planting it. Otherwise it might become extinct.”

Randy eyed her from beneath his cap. Despite the shadow that obscured the upper half of his face, she could read in his expression a bit of doubt mixed with panic that zucchini might in fact be on the verge of extinction, and only Erica’s noble efforts could save it.

The soil she turned with the pointed tip of her trowel smelled malty. It was damp—New Hampshire was just emerging from mud season, the weeks when land frozen through a long New England winter finally thawed. Erica was proud of herself for having learned about things like mud season. She personally knew people who tapped maple trees, and she no longer pictured Bambi and cringed when she saw antlers hanging on the wall of some public establishment. Maybe in another year or two, she’d actually feel she belonged in Rockwell. Meanwhile, it was long past the time she should learn how to garden.

“So when are we gonna start planting this stuff?” Randy asked.

Erica pressed the button to retract her tape measure. Glancing up, she saw him fingering one of the spindly tomato seedlings. He wore shorts even though the tem
perature couldn’t have been much higher than the mid-fifties, and his knobby knees were gray with dirt. The shorts bulged strangely in places; he seemed to have oddly shaped items crammed into most of the pockets.

She surveyed the grid of her garden one more time. “Let’s do it,” she said, hooking the tape measure over her belt. It had a clip for just that purpose, like for a cell phone or pager. Clipping a tape measure onto her belt made a very different statement from clipping a high-tech gizmo onto her belt. The tape measure said,
I’m competent. I know my tools
. She wished it were true.

She grinned, although she couldn’t help gazing warily around her yard, which extended between a fringe of trees on one side and the remnants of a fence on the other. At one time the fence must have stood straight, a row of narrow vertical slats linked by wire, but the wire had rusted, and Erica had demanded that it be removed before she bought the house. All that remained were a collection of rotting slats sprawled between her house and the house where John Willetz used to live.

He’d been her landlord when she’d first moved to Rockwell from Brookline, Massachusetts. Then last year, he’d offered to sell her the cottage she’d been renting from him, and the half acre of land on which it stood—so he could die with money in the bank, he’d told her. Less than six months after the closing, he’d died. She still felt a little guilty about that, as if by agreeing to buy the house she’d somehow hastened his death.

His house had remained empty for more than three months. Every now and then his son, Jack, parked his rust-scabbed pickup in front of the old farmhouse, ram
bled through its rooms and emerged carrying some object or other. Once he’d taken a skillet, another time a gilt-framed mirror, yet another time a tarnished brass lamp. He never spoke when he showed up. If she was outside, fussing with her property and doing her impression of a proud home owner, he’d nod to her. She’d nod back. That seemed to be all the friendliness he could handle.

She’d peeked into the windows of John’s house a few times, but snooping struck her as rude, even if the man she was snooping on was “in a better place,” as most people in town tactfully put it. Erica wasn’t sure if that meant they believed he’d gone to heaven or just that they considered death an improvement over Rockwell.

“What do you want me to do?” Randy asked.

“We’re going to dig the holes now—about three inches deep—and plant a seedling in each. Think you can do that?”

Randy rolled his eyes. Of
course
he could do that, just as he could convert fractions to decimals, recite the entire opening text of
Star Wars
by heart and program a VCR. He often put on a show of exasperation for Erica, but she figured that if she was really that annoying, he wouldn’t keep biking up her gravel driveway and sticking around for an hour or two. Her cookies weren’t that good, not even the home-baked ones. Especially not the home-baked ones. Baking was right up there with gardening as one of those earthy, rustic skills she had yet to master.

She hoped some sort of synergy would develop around the wholesome north-country crafts she was acquiring. Home owner. Gardener. Baker. Teacher. Put
them all together and they’d surely turn her into the earth-mother spirit she’d always dreamed of becoming.

Randy carried a tray of zucchini seedlings over to the row nearest the decrepit fence and dropped to his knees. All her measurements notwithstanding, he wasn’t too precise with his planting. He used the claw and his bare hands to shove the moist dirt aside. Before he had the first plant in the ground, he was wearing a streak of dirt on his chin.

Wielding the trowel, she started planting across the garden from him. There was no such thing as too many tomato plants, she reassured herself. If her harvest was too big, she would eat tomatoes for breakfast. She’d stew them into marinara sauce and preserve them—another north-country skill she could add to her repertoire. She’d make tomato sandwiches and tomato omelettes. She’d find a recipe for tomato cookies and bake a few batches.

“You gonna put a fence around the garden?” Randy asked.

“I bought some fencing, yes,” she said.

“It better be high enough to keep out deer.”

The fence was only two feet tall. “I have yet to see a deer wandering into my yard,” she said defensively.

“That’s because you didn’t have a garden. Now you do.”

“Deer go after trees and shrubs, not garden plants,” she argued, pretty sure she was on solid ground. “The real pests are raccoons and gophers. The fencing I got ought to keep them out.”

“Gophers dig under fences—Hey, wow, there’s a huge rock over here.”

Erica sat back on her heels and frowned. She’d ne
glected to calculate huge rocks into her grid. “Can you dig it out?” she asked.

Randy banged the tines of the claw against the rock. It didn’t sound like a rock, actually. She couldn’t see what he was hitting, but the contact made a dull sound. He pushed some dirt out of his way and banged again.

“What
is
that?” she asked, rising and walking around the garden’s circumference. Randy was hunched over his hole, scooping dirt out with his hands. She knelt beside him and applied her spade to the hole. When the metal edge banged against whatever was buried there, she knew the object wasn’t a rock. It sounded almost like wood, a hard, rounded surface.

“Keep digging,” Randy encouraged them both as he burrowed deeper. Erica was as eager as Randy to find out what lurked under the soil’s surface here. “I bet it’s a bone,” he said.

“A bone?” Erica swallowed hard. What if a body was buried in her backyard? When she’d had the property inspected before signing the final purchase agreement, no one had mentioned anything about a secret cemetery or an Indian burial ground on her land.

What if, instead of a cemetery, the bone belonged to a murder victim? What if John Willetz’s previous tenants had met a grisly end? He’d been an ornery old man, crusty and terse, but she’d loved that about him because it had made him seem like an authentic New Hampshire Yankee.

Could he have been a mass murderer in his spare time?

“Like a dinosaur or something,” Randy was saying. “Like, maybe we’ll find a dinosaur here and we’ll wind up on the Discovery Channel.”

A dinosaur would be fine with her. In fact, the bone was probably from a dead animal, a species far less exotic than a dinosaur. Like a deer. Maybe this was a deer burial ground, which was why the deer never wandered through her yard. It was sacred territory to them.

Randy was scrabbling away at the dirt, muttering when a mound he’d removed from the hole rolled back in. “There’s a shovel in the garage,” she said, pointing to the shed at the rear of her property. She didn’t think it had been built as a garage, but it stood at the end of the driveway and its doors opened wide enough for her Subaru wagon to squeeze through.

Randy stood and loped to the garage. His feet were too big for him, and at least two times she was sure he’d trip over his own toes, but he made it to the shed and back without incident—and with the shovel. Unfortunately, it was a snow shovel.

“Be careful,” she cautioned as he dug the shovel’s wide, curved scoop into the soil. “If it’s a dinosaur bone, you don’t want to damage it.”

“Okay.” Randy shot her an awed look.

Together they cleared enough dirt to discover that their find was not a dinosaur bone, or any bone at all. It appeared to be the corner of some sort of wooden box with an arched lid.

Please, God, not a coffin
, she prayed, although if it was a coffin, the odds were, the remains inside would not have belonged to John Willetz’s last tenant. Or if they did, John Willetz would likely not have murdered the tenant. Murderers generally didn’t bury their victims in coffins—at least, not in the mystery novels she read.

But it was too small for a coffin. A bit more dirt
clearing revealed the width of the box to be maybe six inches—the distance between two zucchini seedlings.