Hidden Treasures (14 page)

“Sure,” she said, once again aware that it was an answer destined to lead her into trouble. If she were Fern, she could take chopped meat and assorted other ingredients and whip up a marvelous meal. She wasn’t Fern, though.

She’d have to fake it. She could brown the meat and season it, and throw in some vegetables if he had any, and turn the mixture into a stew. With enough wine to wash it down, the dish might not taste too bad. “Do you have any spices?” she asked.

He swung open a cabinet to reveal an array of small jars. “I have no idea how old some of this stuff is,” he said. “For all I know, my grandmother might have bought these, and she’s been dead more than ten years.”

Erica pulled some of the jars down from the shelf and stared at them as if she knew what to look for. Spices didn’t spoil, she was pretty sure. They might lose some tang, but they didn’t rot or turn moldy.

Jed removed the meat, a loaf of bread, a carrot, a bell pepper, a tomato, an onion and a couple of potatoes from the refrigerator. “Let’s fire up the stove and see what happens,” he said.

He seemed awfully cheerful, as if this potentially doomed project was a great, joyous adventure. Erica decided to cheer up, too. As long as they were cooking, they’d be too busy to kiss. In fact, she didn’t sense much sexual heat coming from him, not like last night, when they’d sat too close together on the porch swing. This spacious kitchen gave them plenty of room to evade each other.

“So, did you do any interviews today?” he asked as he set to work cutting the pepper.

She sipped her wine, then dumped the meat into the new pan and turned the heat low under it. “Just this morning’s little press conference outside my house. My mother saw it on TV.”

“What?” He stared at her.

“That was who I was talking to when you showed up at my house. My mother. She said one of the reporters broadcast a report about the box on the local news out of Boston.”

“What kind of report? What the hell could they have said?”

“That I dug up a mystery box and its contents haven’t been revealed. You know what TV newscasts are like. They report on the weather, the sports scores, a burning building, a controversial new diet, a celebrity divorce and a cat that walked a thousand miles to get home from a campsite in Montana where it had been abandoned by accident. What better way to end the broadcast than with a story about a mysterious box found in a schoolteacher’s garden?”

The beef began to sizzle. Erica stirred it, feeling Jed’s gaze on her and wishing she looked more adept with a spatula. “Isn’t that a little cynical for you?” he finally said.

She shot him a glance. He was regarding her with a blend of curiosity and amusement. “I’m not cynical,” she defended herself.

“I didn’t think you were, but…”

“But what?”

He smiled. “You’ve got your edges.”

What edges? What was he talking about? She’d had plenty of edges while growing up outside Boston and matching wits with Ivy League intellectuals, but now she was a wholesome, holistic country girl, learning to garden, learning—not nearly fast enough—to cook, learning to center herself in Rockwell’s cozy environment.

If she still had edges, it was only because she hadn’t yet succeeded in becoming the person she wanted to be: an unedged woman.

She stirred the meat as it browned. With what she hoped resembled flair, she reached for a jar of garlic powder, opened it, sniffed and detected the faintest whiff of garlic, and shook some onto the meat. If she’d been at home and alone, she would have searched for a recipe, dug out her measuring spoons and practiced precision. But with Jed as her witness, she wanted to appear as if she knew what she was doing.

“So, should we stick this pepper in with the meat?” he asked, displaying the chunks of green on his cutting board.

“Why not?” she said bravely. It would all cook together, like her mother’s stuffed-pepper recipe. She recalled that her mother used tomato sauce with that. “You have any tomato sauce?”

“Maybe.” Sipping his wine, he perused the contents of a cabinet. “Tomato paste,” he said, producing a narrow can.

Erica had seen tomato paste on the supermarket shelves, but she’d never had any idea what to do with it. “Okay,” she said. “Let’s put some of that in.”

They fumbled along, adding onion, ginger powder and dense globs of tomato paste that gradually thinned in the heat of the pan. Jed peeled and sliced the potatoes and she tossed them in. Everything simmered together into a disgusting-looking hash. It didn’t smell too bad, though, and the wine added a pleasant shimmer to the proceedings. Jed cut the tomato into wedges and the carrot into sticks. He set the table with two plates, silverware and squares of paper towel in place of napkins. “I can’t find where my grandfather kept napkins,” he explained. “I don’t know, maybe he never used them.”

“The paper towels will work. Fold them so they look like napkins,” she suggested. Jed dutifully folded them in half and centered the forks on them. “I guess this is done. Pasta primavera it’s not.”

“Who wants pasta primavera? We just had that last night,” Jed remarked, making her feel better.

She ladled the slop onto their plates. Jed added the bread and a tub of butter to the table, then carried the half-consumed bottle of wine over and gestured for her to sit. She dipped the tines of her fork into the meat and licked them off. Not too wretched. She’d be able to eat it without gagging. “I’m not a very good cook,” she told him again.

He shrugged. “Neither am I,” he assured her once more. “This looks fine.” He scooped up a manly forkful, ate it, swallowed and nodded. “It’s fine.”

“Thank you.”

“I thought you were a good cook. Last night you knew what you were doing.”

She smiled. “I was cutting the bread. That I can handle. Fern did everything else.” She took another delicate nibble of the concoction on her plate. It went down her throat without any problem. “I’m learning to be a better cook, though. I’ve done some baking—cookies, mostly. Randy Rideout thinks the store-bought are better, but he doesn’t have much taste.”

“His tastelessness is a genetic thing. He’s Glenn Rideout’s son.” Jed dug into his food with more enthusiasm than Erica could muster. “You’ve probably already figured this out about Rockwell,” he went on, “but there are no decent restaurants. Bars, yeah. But if you want some Chinese, or Mexican, or even just a perfectly cooked steak, you’re not going to find it here.”

“Granted, Rockwell isn’t New York City. But it has its compensations.”

He chuckled. She liked the way his eyes crinkled in the corners when he smiled—and she wished she didn’t notice things like that about him. “What compensations might those be?” he asked, his tone holding a clear challenge.

“The peace and quiet. The clean air. The way the snow stays white all winter long. In Boston—and I’m sure in New York—the snow is usually gray within a day of hitting the ground. Not here.”

“In New York, the snow usually doesn’t stick around more than a day. They’ve got municipal employees who plow the streets and sidewalks.”

“Yes, and the pollution probably helps the snow to melt faster, too,” Erica pointed out. “Particulate matter in the air contributes to global warming, you know.” Dangerously pedantic, she thought, silencing herself with a sip of wine. “In Rockwell, you can plant
a garden out your back door and eat the very vegetables you’ve grown.”

“Gardening’s a lot of work,” Jed said mildly. “Some people enjoy it. I sure as hell don’t.”

“Did you garden when you lived here?”

He gestured toward the window. “That whole field behind the house used to be corn and potatoes. I spent a lot of summer days working for my grandfather. Not fun.” He ate a little of the stew, then helped himself to a slice of bread. “Tell me, Erica, someone with your schooling, you could have gotten a teaching job anywhere. Why Rockwell?”

“I liked the name,” she admitted, then smiled. “I liked the size and location, too. I wanted to live and work in a small town, one where my students might not have access to the cultural benefits of a more cosmopolitan community. Rockwell fit the bill on all those counts. And then the name.
Rockwell.
I pictured Norman Rockwell.”

Jed laughed so hard he started to cough. “Norman Rockwell? Hell, you associate Norman Rockwell with a town that has one bar for every three citizens?”

“With antlers on the walls,” Erica conceded, joining his laughter. “All right. Rockwell has less in common with Norman Rockwell than I thought it would. With the quarry nearly mined out, there’s too much unemployment. And all the bars with the antlers…” She sighed, experiencing a genuine sympathy for her adopted home and its economic woes. “But there’s something pure here.”

“What?” Jed was still smiling, but his eyes held a challenge. “What’s pure about this place?”

She searched her mind for an answer. The air, the white snow, but what else? Kids here used bad lan
guage and bullied one another. Adults had affairs and got pregnant. Her best friend dyed her hair bright red and set her sights on Derrick Messinger. Glenn Rideout hired a lawyer to protect his presumed interests in the ownership of a box. Rockwell even had its homeless: that strange, mumbling guy named Toad. Whenever she saw him shambling along the street, smelling like hot tar and morning breath, he’d issue incoherent comments about God and religion that Erica preferred not to listen to.

“I don’t want to be a city person,” she finally said, even though that didn’t really answer Jed’s question. “I want to be in touch with nature, connected to the earth. I don’t want to walk on concrete all the time. I want to walk on grass and dirt.”

“Mud,” Jed muttered, then chuckled. “We’ve got grass and dirt in New York. It’s called Central Park. You’ve got it in Boston, too. Boston Common, right? And that other place, where they have the Pops concert on the Fourth of July.”

“The Esplanade,” she informed him. “But those are contained parks surrounded by city. It’s not like that here. Here you’ve got grass and dirt and trees and mountains for miles around.”

“And long, winding two-lane roads, and there’s always some truck loaded with logs right in front of you, doing twenty miles an hour and you can’t pass him. In New York, you don’t even need a car. You can walk everywhere, or grab a bus or the subway. And we don’t get any of those twenty-mile-an-hour logging trucks jamming up our streets.”

“Well, I’m glad you’re happy in New York,” she said, realizing with a pang that she wasn’t glad at all. Eating with him, cooking with him, sipping wine with
him, even arguing with him—it was all too lovely, too natural, too—dare she think it?—romantic. If only he’d stay in Rockwell…But he never would. He wouldn’t linger a moment longer than necessary in this unpaved, muddy village.

“I’m just trying to figure out how you could be happy here. I mean it, Erica. The nearest movie theater is, what, thirty miles away?”

“Hackett’s Superette has a nice selection of video rentals.”

Jed shook his head. “Pop Hackett refuses to stock NR-17 movies. Some Rs, too. He’s got a damn good selection of Disney flicks, if that’s what you like.”

“Why are you so eager to put Rockwell down?” Erica challenged him. “Okay, so you like New York City. That doesn’t mean you have to bad-mouth Rockwell.”

“I grew up here. I know what I’m talking about. This place is the end of the road—and it’s a narrow, potholed road. Anyone with half a chance tries to get out of here.”

“I don’t know about that,” she argued. “Fern stayed.”

“Maybe she didn’t have half a chance.”

“It’s more than just Rockwell that drove you away,” Erica said, her mind digesting his words more easily than her stomach digested the stew. “Everything you say is true, Jed—no first-run movies, too many bars. But that’s not why you left.”

“Sure it is.”

“What happened? Did someone break your heart?” The question was brazen, but she had nothing to lose by asking it. Jed already thought she was crazy to want to live in Rockwell, and he wasn’t going to stay in
town once his grandfather’s ashes were buried. So what if she offended him with her nosiness?

He swallowed the last of his bread, then settled back in his chair and drank some wine. “Not a lover, if that’s what you’re asking.”

He didn’t seem annoyed, so she dug deeper, as if she might unearth a mysterious treasure beneath his hard Yankee exterior. “Who, then?”

“You’ve met Jack.”

His father. She nodded slightly. “We haven’t actually gotten acquainted.”

“Count your blessings. He’s a real son of a bitch. Leaving town was the best way to get him out of my life.”

“What about your mother? ”

“They split when I was maybe three or four. She married someone else when I was twelve—a huge improvement over my dad—and my senior year of high school, my stepdad got a job near Albany, so I moved in with my grandfather to finish out the year. I see my mother when I can. She’s a good woman.”

Erica experienced a sudden urge to meet Jed’s mother. She wouldn’t mind getting acquainted with his father, either, if only so she could learn just how much of a son of a bitch the man was, how strong his influence on Jed might have been, how difficult their relationship was. She wished she’d been friendlier with Jed’s grandfather, old John Willetz, but he’d been a private person, taciturn and crusty.

And damn, she shouldn’t care about getting to know any of them. The main reason she wanted to was that it would be a way to get closer to Jed, and that was a doomed exercise. He hated Rockwell. He wasn’t going
to stick around, no matter how close she got to him or his family.

But his eyes were searing; his gaze, seductive. And he hadn’t insulted her cooking. He was a native of the town she longed to be a part of, a product of its soil, molded by its schools and its close-knit society, its bars and its brisk, clean air. So what if he’d left? Perhaps if she’d been born in Rockwell she would want to leave, too. But in a way, he was what she was hoping to become: self-sufficient, capable, as solid and strong as the slabs of granite that formed the town’s foundation.

Noticing her empty glass, he lifted the bottle to pour a refill. She waved him away. “No, I’ve had enough,” she said. She felt relaxed and warm inside, but not drunk. Not drunk enough to want to risk drinking any more wine when she was feeling the way she felt about Jed right now.