Hidden Treasures (13 page)

“I didn’t know you had an aunt named Louise,” the tall, silver-haired woman remarked dryly.

“Small world,” Toad added. “Your name is Louise, too.”

Derrick tried to catch Sonya’s eye. The situation was deteriorating. But she was beaming at the proliferation of hicks, and Mookie was capturing it all on tape.

At least the other reporters weren’t there. They were a group of local hacks, and he’d made nice with them while they’d been cooling their heels at Erica Leitner’s house that morning. But they clearly weren’t in his class. The Manchester Fox affiliate?
Please
.

“All right,” Sonya announced, her brassy voice slicing through the din. “Let’s film a little by the supermarket.”

Derrick forced a faint smile as Louise with the coincidentally named Aunt Louise thrust her pad and pen at him. He preferred to think of himself as a reporter, but in this era of celebrity, what could he do? People recognized him. He had to keep his public happy.

Of course, his scribbling “Best wishes, Louise—Derrick Messinger” onto her pad meant everyone else would start rummaging through pockets and purses in search of paper for him to sign. He braced himself, flexed the fingers on his signing hand and dug into the
inner pocket of his blazer for his own pen. To his surprise, no one asked him for his autograph.

Obviously, they respected him more than Louise did. They understood that he was a journalist, not a pop idol.

In front of the Superette, Derrick found himself surrounded by locals, all of them grinning wildly at the camera. The thin balding man who’d requested that they film in front of his store had the temerity to wrap an arm around Derrick’s shoulders. There was nothing pansyish about his embrace, but it still gave Derrick the willies.

“Okay, everybody back off,” Sonya ordered the crowd. “We’ll interview you in a minute. But first, everybody take a giant step away from Derrick and let him do his thing.”

Reluctantly, the man disengaged from Derrick and joined the others milling around behind Mookie. Derrick shrugged as if to slough off any residue the man might have left on him. Then he read a couple more pages of Sonya’s script.

“Good,” Sonya said when he was done. “Now, you.” She located the skinny bald man among the crowd, grabbed him by the wrist and hauled him over to stand next to Derrick. “Derrick will interview you. Interview him, Derrick.”

Easier said than done. It wasn’t as if he were chasing a real story. This wasn’t a drive-by shooting. It wasn’t a sordid account of drugs and the Mafia. How was he supposed to interview this guy?

“What’s your name?” he asked.

“Pop Hackett.”

Derrick imagined the twangy lilt of “Dueling Banjos” again. He lifted his mike, gazed soulfully at the
camera and said, “I’m standing in front of Hackett’s Superette with Pop Hackett. Tell me, Mr. Hackett, have you ever had any experience here in Rockwell with ancient artifacts?”

“Ancient, I can’t say. I’ve got a couple of cans of cream of asparagus soup that’ve been sitting on the shelf a pretty long time. Don’t suppose that’d count.”

The onlookers chuckled. Oh, that Pop Hackett. What a card.

“That’s
great
,” Sonya enthused, her attempt at courting the crowd. Derrick could hear the phoniness in her tone, but they probably couldn’t. “That’s really funny. Thank you, everybody, for your help. We have to go to another location now.”

Mookie lowered his camera and gave everyone a good-natured smile. Sonya slung her arm around Derrick—he didn’t mind so much when she did it—and ushered him across the street. “We’re going to film over at the school,” she murmured. “That’s where Erica Leitner teaches. Just to get a sense of who she is and where she’s coming from. We want to humanize the story, you know?”

“Sure.” Derrick hoped they wouldn’t get besieged by another gang of Yankee yokels there.

Mookie drove unerringly to the grade school. Among his many assets, besides his general affability and his skill behind the camera, he seemed incapable of getting lost. Derrick wondered whether he snuck out late at night and cruised whatever town they were in, familiarizing himself with the roads and landmarks, or whether he pored over maps into the wee hours. He was probably the only man in the world who never asked for directions because he didn’t need them.

Derrick’s mood, not particularly bubbly to begin
with, went seriously flat once they reached the school. The Boston reporter with the Pepto-Bismol-hued suit and the chipmunk cheeks had beaten them to the scene.

“Don’t worry,” Sonya said, evidently reading his mind. “Let her get her two minutes. Who cares? She hasn’t got any more on the box than we do.”

“You hope,” Derrick muttered.

“Erica Leitner is in that building right now. How could that lady have gotten anything on the box?” She twisted in her seat to face him. “Remember that cartoon
Pinkie and the Brain?
She’s Pinkie. You’re the Brain.”

Derrick didn’t remember the cartoon—Sonya was a good ten years younger than him, so she had an entirely different pop culture reference—but he felt better anyway. He considered giving his bottle of scotch a farewell kiss, but thought better of it. Not in a schoolyard. It wouldn’t be right.

He’d seen sprawling elementary schools before, elaborate structures with angular roofs, banks of windows and awnings along the bus circle. Rockwell Regional Primary School was the antithesis of those schools. A sad box of faded brick, it had undoubtedly been built as a public works project in the Depression, and it was still depressed. The playground was colorful, at least, lots of vivid molded plastic accenting the swing sets and climbers. The playground was empty, though. All the kids must be inside.

Climbing out of the car, he gave Pinkie a polite nod. She sent a grimacing smile his way before resuming her stand-up, chattering calmly into her microphone while her cameraman filmed her. She didn’t have a producer with her, he noticed. Probably the cameraman doubled, or else she produced herself. Low-budget. Her
station hadn’t invested serious resources in this story. She’d be lucky if she got a sixty-second closer after the weather recap at eleven-thirty.

Not like him. He was going to have a whole documentary, with national syndication.
Eat your heart out, Pinkie
, he thought, his spirits lifting.

“My son’s in there,” a man shouted, loping over to him. “Mr. Messinger? My boy’s in there. You’ve got to talk to him.”

Derrick turned from Pinkie to acknowledge the man. He had the longest face Derrick had ever seen, and most of the length seemed to be chin. “Can I help you?” Sonya intervened.

“Glenn Rideout,” he said, extending his hand. “I heard from Potter Henley—he’s a regular of mine—that you were filming out on Main Street, but by the time I got there you were driving away. So I followed you here.”

“How resourceful,” Sonya said pleasantly. A hank of hair flopped into her face and she shoved it back behind her ear. “We’re trying to set up a shot here. You can watch if you’d like, but please don’t—”

“You don’t understand. I’m Glenn Rideout. My son, Randy, found the box.”

“Your son did?” Sonya leaned closer to him. So did Derrick and Mookie. They didn’t want Pinkie to hear this. “According to my research, Erica Leitner was digging in her garden with a former student of hers—”

“Yeah, that’s my son.”

“And they unearthed the box together.”

“That’s her story,” Glenn Rideout grumbled.

“And your story is?”

“My son found the box. I’ve got a lawyer says that
box is Randy’s as much as the teacher’s. If you’re going to interview anyone around here, I think you should interview Randy.”

Sonya shot Derrick a look. He shrugged back. Why not?

“Does your son want to be interviewed?” Sonya asked.

“He damn well better. He found the box. You want me to get him out of his classroom?”

“I don’t think that’s necessary, Mr. Rideout,” Sonya said. As if in response to her assertion, a pair of double doors on the side of the school building suddenly swung open and a raging horde of children spilled out, screeching and shoving like wild beasts just sprung from their cages. Pinkie, who’d been standing about twenty yards down along the chain-link fence from where Mookie was setting up, let out a yelp and jumped away from the fence, as if she feared some of the kids might mistake her for a very large piece of bubble gum and leap over the fence to dig their teeth into her.

“He’s here,” Rideout insisted, scouring the mayhem on the other side of the fence with his gaze. “He’s one of the older kids. A fifth-grader.”

Derrick searched the group, too, looking for an older boy with a disproportionately long chin. But the kids all blurred into a shouting, running, tumbling mass, and the only people he could distinguish were the adults—teachers and staff. He spotted Erica Leitner hovering on the concrete steps near the double doors, beside her a woman with blunt-cut hair the color of strawberries. Punk, he thought, despite her tailored slacks and sweater set. Anyone who’d color her hair that shade of red had a bit of the rebel in her.

“Look at Erica’s friend,” he whispered to Sonya.

“What about her?”

“She looks a little out of place, don’t you think?”

“Don’t be so provincial. They’ve got Lady Clairol even in Rockwell, New Hampshire.”

“Lady Clairol doesn’t make that shade of red.”

“So…what? You wanna ask her out? What’s your point, Derrick?”

“No, I don’t want to ask her out. I was just curious about why she was here instead of, say, selling bustiers in some boutique in the East Village.”

“What do you know about bustiers?”

“You’d be surprised.”

“I already am.” Sonya surveyed the raucous scene on the other side of the fence and shouted to Mookie, “You think you’ll pick up Derrick’s voice over this noise?”

“Huh?” Mookie shouted back, cupping a hand around his ear.

“All right, look, we can’t tape here while those banshees are shrieking their heads off. Mr. Rideout, we’ll meet with your son after school. How’s that? Do you know what time school ends?”

“Around three,” Rideout said. “Why don’t you come to my neighborhood tavern and meet Randy there. Rideout’s Ride, on the corner of Main and Elm. Four blocks down from Hackett’s—only, the door’s on the Elm Street side.”

“Fine. Okay. We’ll try to get over there then. Mookie, get some of the chaos on film. We can do a voice-over later.”

“Huh?” Mookie leaned toward Sonya and scowled, obviously unable to hear her.

Sighing, she marched over to the fence to confer
with him. Derrick eyed Glenn Rideout skeptically. Did he want Derrick to interview his fifth-grade son at his neighborhood tavern, surrounded by smoke and mugs of beer?

Once again, the “Dueling Banjos” theme rippled through his mind. The box had better be worth it, he thought, turning back to watch the mayhem on the opposite side of the fence. The box had better contain something of great value. Because if Derrick had trekked all the way here, spent a night in that drafty little inn and interviewed the offspring of someone who ran an establishment named Rideout’s Ride, and then the box turned out to be empty…

Well, it had better not be. That was all.

“Y
OU DIDN
’
T RETURN
my call yesterday,” Erica’s mother said.

“I’m sorry.” Erica wasn’t really sorry, but what else could she say? “I got your message, but by the time I could have called you back, it would have been too late.” That wasn’t too far from the truth, at least. By the time she’d come home and recovered from Jed’s kiss—well, she still wasn’t completely recovered, but in any case, phoning her mother at that hour would have given the woman a heart attack. Of course, Erica could have solved the situation by taking her mother’s call in the first place, instead of letting the answering machine pick up.

Sometimes dishonesty was the best policy.

“So, you were with friends?”

“Yes.” Erica carried her cordless phone down the short hall to her bedroom. The curtains at her front window were crooked, exposing a sliver of window, and as soon as she’d slid her feet out of her loafers, she crossed to the window and straightened the drape. She’d started that day peeking through that sliver of window and discovering the press camped outside her door, as if she were someone famous or important.

“You have friends there?” her mother asked.

“Of course I have friends here.” Erica didn’t bother to disguise her irritation. She’d been living in Rockwell
for nearly three years. Her mother knew she had friends. She talked about them sometimes when she was visiting Brookline. Whenever she did, her mother would click her tongue and say, “What kind of people would live in a town like that?”

People like Erica; that was what kind.

“So you were out partying with your friends on a school night?” her mother grilled her.

“Mom.” Erica laughed to keep from screaming. “I’m a grown-up. You can’t give me a curfew.”

“I don’t know how you can stand to live there,” her mother went on, as if Erica hadn’t spoken. “They pay you nothing.”

“Nothing goes a long way here,” Erica pointed out. She lifted her hair off her neck and shook it loose, then wandered back toward the dining room, where she’d dumped her tote and a stack of math quizzes when the phone had rung. Maybe she should have let the answering machine take her mother’s call tonight, as it had last night. But she’d had only three messages waiting for her when she’d arrived home from school, none of them obnoxious, so she’d decided to live dangerously and answer the phone.

“And your house. It needs a paint job.”

“My house looks fine.”

“Not on TV, it doesn’t.”

Erica paused halfway down the hall to the dining room. “How would you know what my house looks like on TV?” she asked, bracing for an answer she wasn’t sure she wanted to hear.

“How do you think I’d know? I saw your house on TV.”

“When?”

“This evening, at the end of the five o’clock news.
Lacy McNair, you know her? The reporter on Channel 4. Of course you know her. You talked to her.”

“I did?” Lacy McNair must have been one of the reporters who’d invaded her property that morning. “She didn’t introduce herself.”

“Why should she? She’s Lacy McNair. Everybody knows who she is.”

“Everybody in Boston, maybe. I don’t watch Boston news shows.” Erica cautiously resumed her walk down the hall. She halted in the living room. The curtains on those windows hung wide open, revealing the twilit vista of her front yard, the site of that morning’s press siege. Which one had Lacy McNair been? Did it even matter?

“She was talking about some box. It didn’t make any sense, but there you were in the spotlight, saying you hadn’t opened the box yet. You looked kind of washed out, sweetie. Then they showed your garden, and forgive me, but it’s a mess.”

“I haven’t finished planting it yet.” Great. Now all the Channel 4 viewers in the Greater Boston Area had seen her half-completed garden. She would never be able to hold her head up in Brookline again.

“So this box, it was in the garden?”

“If that’s what Lacy McNair said, she got it right.”

“And why aren’t you opening it?”

“I don’t want to break it. It’s an antique, I think.”

“So…what? You’re never going to open it?”

“I’m going to open it when Avery Gilman gets here. He was a professor of mine at Harvard, and he’s—”

“See? This is what I’ve been telling you. You went to Harvard, you worked with professors like this Avery person, the top people in their fields, and for what? So
you could earn nothing in that provincial little town in the middle of nowhere.”

“It’s not in the middle of nowhere,” Erica argued.
It’s off to one side of nowhere
, she added silently. “Mom, I know you don’t approve of the choices I made, but we’re done having that discussion. Okay? I’m here because I want to be here, because this is where I belong.”

“You belong in civilization, honey. Not up there with all those ‘Live Free or Die’ maniacs.”

“They’re not maniacs.”

“They hunt. They own guns.”

“Not all of them.” She sighed and continued to the dining room, taking comfort in the stack of work sheets, the red and blue pens lying on her table. She was a teacher, and she belonged in a town where her teaching skills were valued. Brookline was full of teachers with Ivy League degrees. In Rockwell, she could contribute something unique. She could offer a new perspective, and have her own perspectives rearranged. She could learn that people who hunted and ate the game they brought down were not evil, although she still felt a little uneasy about all the antlers decorating walls in town.

A knock on the kitchen door startled her. If she owned a gun, she could hold it while she greeted whoever her visitor was. Probably some pesky reporter again; maybe her good buddy Derrick Messinger, whom she’d spotted skulking around the schoolyard that afternoon.

“Mom,” she said, angling her head to peer into the kitchen from the dining-room doorway. “I’ve got to go. Just tell me, I wasn’t on the news yesterday, was I?”

“Shouldn’t you have been? You’re the one with this fancy box that you won’t open.”

“The reporters didn’t arrive until today. Why did you phone me yesterday?” Peeking through the window, she made out the silhouette of her caller and sighed. It wasn’t a pesky reporter. No such luck. It was her next-door neighbor.

She’d resolved to stay away from Jed, hadn’t she? Just so he wouldn’t kiss her again. Just so she could avoid putting her willpower to such a severe test.

But there he was, standing on her back porch. He must know she was home. Lights were on in the house. Her car was in the shed.

“I’m not allowed to call and say hello?” her mother said with feigned innocence. “I’m not allowed to want to hear your voice?”

“Why did you call?”

“Your cousin Suzanne met this friend of her fiance’s and said he’s perfect for you. Robert Goldstein. Yale Law School. You could go to the Harvard-Yale games and bicker.”

Erica laughed. “Don’t be a matchmaker, Mom.”

“You’re never going to meet anyone up there.”

That’s what you think
, Erica munbled, her gaze locked onto the shadowy figure on the other side of her kitchen door. Oh, she’d met someone, all right—someone she would have been better off not meeting.

She was probably the only person in Rockwell who locked her doors—old habits died hard—but it seemed downright unneighborly not to let Jed in. She pulled the door open, tried not to react to his smile as she beckoned him inside and then headed down the hall to her bedroom to finish her conversation with her mother in private. “I really can’t talk, Mom,” she said. “I’ve
got a pile of math quizzes to grade. Just tell me, did that woman on the news—Stacy…?”

“Lacy McNair.”

“Right. Did she say anything worthwhile in her report?”

“Just what I told you. And I’ve got to say, Erica, my phone has been ringing off the hook. All the neighbors saw you. And your ninth-grade English teacher, Ms. Wexler, remember her? She called. She said she was so proud that you had become a teacher. She thinks she inspired you.”

Ms. Wexler had been about as inspiring as overcooked pasta. Which reminded Erica of the leftover pasta primavera sitting beneath a sheet of plastic wrap on the bottom shelf of her refrigerator. Had Jed come over in search of food? Just what she needed in her life: a tall, outrageously attractive version of Randy Rideout. Maybe she’d give Jed a handful of chocolate chip cookies and send him on his way.

“Mom, I’ve got to go.”

“Please warn me if you’re going to be on TV again, honey. I’d like to set up the VCR so I can get you on tape.”

Erica considered that a fine reason for her not to warn her mother if she was going to be on TV again. To be sure, she’d had no idea she was going to be on today. “You seem to know more about my TV appearances than I do,” she joked. “I’ve got to go.”

“All those math quizzes,” her mother muttered, as if she didn’t believe they existed. “All right, Erica. Go take care of the quizzes. Dad sends his love.”

“Bye.” Erica disconnected the phone and returned to the kitchen. The room was empty. She glimpsed Jed in the dining room, his hands in the pockets of his
jeans as he perused the math exam on the top of the pile. “Do you want to grade them?” she asked from the doorway.

He straightened and turned to face her. “God, no. Long division and I have never been on good terms.”

Falling silent, he smiled slightly. If he’d come here hoping for her to offer him dinner, he was going to be disappointed—partly because feeding him two dinners in a row would set a bad precedent, but mostly because she’d feel kind of weird entertaining him in her home, offering him the leftovers of a meal that Fern had prepared. If only Erica had mastered a few more recipes; if only she could chop vegetables with Fern’s panache; if only she could bake loaves of herb bread, kneading the dough and getting flour on her wrists and knowing what the hell she was doing…

Even then, she wouldn’t want to feed Jed. She’d kissed him once; she was too smart to tempt fate by spending more time with him.

He still didn’t speak. His gaze wandered over her and she wondered whether he’d dropped by for another kiss, or to transport her to where they’d obviously been heading last night. Finally he cleared his throat and said, “I’ve got a bottle of merlot at home. I’m not sure how good it is, but I bought it to share with you. I was going to bring it over here, but then I thought that would be kind of presumptuous of me. So I’m inviting you over to my house, instead.”

“Your house.”

“We could throw together some supper. You fed me so well last night I owe you one.” He shrugged. “I’d take you out, but that might not be a good idea. It’s so public.”

“People would gossip,” she agreed.

“Plus the reporters. You’re the story they’ve all come to Rockwell to get. If we went out for dinner they’d find us and drive us nuts.”

“Maybe they’ve all gone home by now.”

“As of this afternoon, they were still out in full force downtown.”

Erica would hardly refer to Rockwell’s sleepy Main Street as “downtown,” but Jed’s point was well taken. “So,” she said slowly, not sure how she felt about it, “you’re going to cook me dinner?”

“We could fix it together. I’m not the world’s greatest cook.”

“Neither am I,” she warned. “Maybe we should give Fern a call.”

“Fern’s got other fish to fry.”

Erica felt her eyes widen. How would Jed know more than she did about her best friend?

“I needed to buy a skillet, because my father stole my grandfather’s, and while I was driving home I saw Fern hanging out by the Hope Street Inn.”

“The Hope Street Inn?” That was the bed-and-breakfast where Erica had reserved a room for Avery Gilman. Why would Fern be there?

“Derrick Messinger and his crew are staying there. I think your buddy was doing the groupie thing.”

“What? You think she was going to offer herself to Derrick Messinger?” Erica’s laughter sounded hollow. Offering herself to Derrick Messinger was just the sort of thing Fern would do.

Jed held up his hands as if to ward off any criticism. “Hey, it’s not my business. All I’m saying is, I don’t think you ought to count on her driving out this way to cook a meal for us tonight.”

Erica shook her head. She thought Fern had been
hot for Jed. But then, as she recalled, Fern had reacted to Derrick’s phone message yesterday with a lot more enthusiasm than Erica had.

“So, you want to take your chances at my place?” Jed asked.

Say no
, the voice of wisdom inside her cautioned. She ignored it.

T
HE KITCHEN
of the old farmhouse next door was much larger than hers. The cabinets were polished knotty pine, the floor featured checkerboard tiles of black and white, instead of a quease-producing foamy green pattern, and the ceiling fixture infused the room with sunshine brightness. A large four-burner gas range stood in one corner, a double-basin stainless-steel sink occupied a space beneath the window and the refrigerator was a relatively new model, with side-by-side doors and a built-in ice dispenser. Erica gazed around, wondering if her awe was visible. This was the kitchen she should have had. It was a kitchen an earth mother could bake bread in—assuming the earth mother knew how to bake bread.

Jed lifted a bottle of wine from the table at the center of the room. “We’ll probably need this,” he said, carrying it to a counter and pulling a corkscrew from a drawer, “given that neither of us can cook.”

“I can cook,” Erica argued, crossing to the stove and lifting a large Teflon-coated skillet from one of the burners. The bottom of the skillet was a pristine shining silver. This must be the new pan Jed had bought. “I’m not as good a cook as Fern, but I’m learning. Why did your father steal your grandfather’s pan?”

“Because it was there?” Jed guessed with a shrug. He levered out the cork, which made a happy little pop
as it came free of the bottle. “He was just helping himself to whatever caught his eye. You’d have to ask him why he chose the pan.”

“It’s just that pans are not that valuable.” She lowered the new pan to the burner.

“He’s a junk dealer. What does he know about the value of things?” He filled two goblets with wine and handed one to her. “I picked up some chopped beef, but burgers don’t go with merlot. You think we could come up with something more interesting to do with the meat?”