Hidden Treasures (7 page)

“It’s ridiculous. Why would the
Globe
want to write a story about an old box I dug out of my garden?”

“Maybe because you’re from Boston?”

She frowned. “I’m not. Technically. I’m from Brookline, which is a large suburb of Boston.”

“And that makes all the difference, doesn’t it?” He shrugged. “That Harvard-professor pal of yours is interested in your box. Why wouldn’t the
Globe
be?”

“Well…the box could have historical import.”

“It could be worth millions,” Jed noted, pulling her copy of the
Gazette
from her tote and holding it up so she could see the banner headline.

She sagged against the counter, unclipped one of her barrettes and smoothed her hair back before refastening the barrette. It was such a thoughtlessly graceful gesture his mouth went dry. He wanted to smooth her hair back from her face, kiss her cheek, kiss her jaw, work a path to her lips. He lived in Manhattan, he knew women there, he was mature and seasoned…but at that moment, when her fingers nimbly worked the barrette into place, he felt a surge of lust almost adolescent in its irrationality.

He definitely did not have time for this.

“If it’s worth millions,” she was saying, “everybody’s going to want a piece of me.”

Especially him, but he didn’t tell her that. The thought made him uneasy. He had to bury his grandfather’s ashes and go home, escape from this smothering little town before it made him crazy. Twenty-four hours inside its borders, and he was already feeling slightly deranged.

More than slightly. If he were sane, he never would have said, “So, I went down to town hall today and looked at the records, and I think that million-dollar box was at least fifty percent on my land.”

D
ERRICK
M
ESSINGER
wouldn’t have come to a crummy little hole-in-the-wall like Rockwell if his career depended on it—except that his career
did
depend on it, and here he was.

Another man might have been stirred by the greening humps of the mountains surrounding the town, so damn pretty they looked like something a set designer might have painted for a summer-stock production of
The Sound of Music
. Another man might have swooned at the tangy pine scent and the stunningly blue New England sky. Derrick wasn’t another man, though, and pretty mountains and pine trees didn’t do it for him. He’d seen the underbelly of life, the squalor, the tragedy. He’d witnessed grief, loss, despair—not just witnessed it but reported on it. He’d reported on toxic dumps in Tennessee, airplane disasters in Arkansas, neo-Nazis in Nebraska. He’d been reviled by environmental radicals, stalwart racists, politicians, animal rights activists and even fellow journalists. He’d gone undercover in a prison—or it would have been undercover if a few of the cons hadn’t immediately recognized him and started blabbing their guts out, drowning him in their hard-luck stories—and he’d once talked a potential jumper down from the Tappan Zee Bridge, on the air, live and unedited.

And now he was supposed to do a story about the
opening of a box? In this half-dead town, where every fourth storefront seemed to be a bar? Had he really come to this?

“I’m telling you,” Sonya, his producer, honked in her profound Bronx accent, “this is gonna be a great show.” She was seated shotgun in front, and Mookie, Derrick’s good-natured lunkhead of a cameraman, was behind the wheel. Derrick liked to sit in back. These days, it was as close as he got to riding in a limo.

Like doing this stupid story was going to get him any closer to his limo days.

“Big ratings,” Sonya insisted. “Double digits, I’m telling you.” Nowadays, with all the cable channels vying for eyeballs, if a show broke into double-digit ratings it was a big deal. “What I’m thinking is, we’ll capture the entire atmosphere of this town—”

“What atmosphere?” Derrick snapped. “There’s a bar on every corner.”

“That kinda makes the place, if you ask me,” Mookie said.

Sonya shoved her hair back behind her ears. If her hair had been long, the gesture would have been dramatic, but she’d recently hacked her tresses to chin length, and the grand hand flourish seemed like overkill. “I was thinking about the mountains. The forests. The small-town charm. Look—there’s a crafts store—I mean, a
crafts
store! And a pharmacy—”

“This is special?” Derrick muttered.

“And a
general store!
”

“What do they sell there?” Mookie wondered aloud. “Generals?” He let out a snorting laugh.

Derrick wished he could be anywhere else. But Sonya was right. She always was. She had a nose for news, as the saying went. Derrick used to have a nose
for news, but then he’d gone through that long stretch when his ratings had been way down, not just single digit but in the two range. Maybe he’d lost his nose for news literally because his nose had been fractured during a scuffle on his show a few years back, when two professional wrestlers had started taking swings at each other and Derrick had stepped between them. Now,
that
show had gotten double-digit ratings.

A plastic surgeon had reshaped Derrick’s busted nose to resemble his old nose pretty closely, and he didn’t think his appearance had suffered. His ratings, though…

So he relied on Sonya. Despite all her annoying tics, she knew what she was doing. She would package this show about the damn box in the teacher’s garden and turn it into a phenomenon. Hadn’t she worked miracles with his last special, “The Search for Jimmy Hoffa”? Of course, Jimmy Hoffa was a newsworthy name, even though Derrick’s search for him was no more successful than any of the other searches for him over the past thirty years. Finding Hoffa or not finding him wasn’t the point. The show had been good TV.

Sonya seemed to believe that the opening of an antique, possibly valuable, wooden box would also be good TV. The instant she’d spotted the story on the wires about some mousy schoolmarm in a central New Hampshire granite-quarry town digging up an ancient relic in her garden, she’d been on the phone to Derrick, telling him to pack some sweaters and meet her at LaGuardia. “We’ve got to get to the teacher first,” she said. “I’m telling you, Rockwell is going to be overrun by the media in two days. That’s why we’ve got to get there in one day. Mookie’ll drive up tonight with his gear and meet us at the airport in Lebanon tomorrow.”

Derrick highly doubted that the media would overrun this dead-end burg, but he knew better than to argue with Sonya. She’d pulled him out of the Valley of Oblivion, where he’d fallen after the network honchos had axed him for questioning a Supreme Court justice on live TV about his rumored sexual predilections. After that debacle, Sonya had agreed to produce him, putting together independent reports and selling them into syndication. She’d saved his butt. She’d turned his show,
I’m Just the Messinger
, into a nationally known brand name.

So when she told him they were going to Rockwell, New Hampshire, to do a story on a mysterious old box that might contain millions of dollars, he’d packed his sweaters.

A freaking box, though…This was still a long way down from an exclusive interview with a Supreme Court justice.

Mookie pulled into a parking space that angled back from the curb in front of a place called Hackett’s Superette. “You want the usual?” he hollered over his shoulder.

“They’re not going to have the usual here.” Derrick eyed the sign above the store suspiciously. “Superette” sounded like the name of a sixties girl group, not a store that would carry Chivas Regal.

“You’re the one who pointed out that there’s a bar on every corner,” Sonya reminded him. “This is obviously a community that takes its booze seriously.”

Derrick folded his arms across his chest and scowled at her. He liked to have a bottle of Chivas on hand for a shoot. All he needed was a couple of nips in the evening to unwind—in his own room, in privacy. No way was he going to sit on a bar stool in one of those
seedy-looking joints, swapping yarns with crusty cow farmers and unemployed quarry workers while he enjoyed his nightcap. None of the bars in town looked as if they’d carry Chivas, either. He should have brought his own supply with him. But Sonya had been in such a big hurry to get to Rockwell ahead of everyone else in the media, he hadn’t thought to toss a bottle into his bag. He was lucky he remembered to pack his toothbrush and his good-luck rubber band.

Mookie got out of the car and loped into the Superette. Sonya pulled some papers out of her leather briefcase and shuffled them importantly. “I’m figuring we’ll contact the schoolteacher as soon as we get checked in,” she told him.

“Where are we staying?” Once upon a time, Derrick stayed only in three-star or better hotels. During his long climb from hellhole ratings to syndication, he’d learned to be content in chain motels. But if the motels he’d noticed on the outskirts of Rockwell belonged to any chain, it was the “Quickie Adultery” chain.

“I got us rooms in a bed-and-breakfast right in town,” Sonya told him without looking up from her papers. “The Hope Street Inn. I checked it out on the Internet. It looked cute.”

Just what he needed—a cute place to stay. “The Hope Street Inn sounds like a halfway house. Maybe a battered women’s shelter.”

“They’ve got private bathrooms, and fresh coffee and pastries in the morning. And the price fit into our budget. So—” she jotted something on one of the papers “—we’ll check in and then we’ll set things up with the teacher. I wanna get first crack at her, see if we can get her to agree to an exclusive.”

“Is she pretty?” Derrick asked. His curiosity was strictly professional; her appearance would influence how he approached her and how they filmed the story.

Sonya fished a file folder from her briefcase and pulled out some papers. “Here’s a photocopy of the original story in the
Rockwell Gazette
,” she said, handing him one sheet. “From other sources, I got that she’s twenty-seven, grew up in Brookline—not Brook
lyn
, Brookline. It’s a suburb of Boston.”

“What am I, an idiot?”

Sonya didn’t bother to answer that question. “She earned her undergraduate degree in English at Harvard, then got a masters of arts in teaching at Brown.
Veddy veddy
Ivy.”

“And she wound up in this rat hole. I’m glad I didn’t waste all that money getting a Harvard education.”

“Single, no kids, no pets. In high school she was the captain of the girls’ volleyball team, she served on the student senate and she did debate. While at Harvard, she coordinated a bunch of community-service stuff—a literacy project, a program that got uninsured city kids vaccinated. She sounds like a do-gooder.”

Nodding, Derrick glanced at the picture of her from the
Rockwell Gazette
story. If she was nice-looking, he sure couldn’t tell from the photo. It was smudgy and blurry. About all he could say with certainty was that she had dark hair.

When it came to interviewing women, he approached the beautiful ones in a flattering way. They knew they were gorgeous, and if he conveyed that
he
knew it, too, they believed he shared their worldview and were happy to open up to him. With plain-looking women, his strategy was different. He had to be more
businesslike, less personable. If he flattered too much, they’d think he was a phony and refuse to open up.

In the case of Erica Leitner, he couldn’t be too hard-hitting. She was an overeducated bleeding heart. If he went at her aggressively, she’d shut him out. He had to approach her like a fellow Good Samaritan, interested in helping poor, uninoculated children and solving the mystery of the incredible box she’d dug out of her garden.

“The most important thing,” Sonya went on, “is to make sure she opens the box on camera—for us alone. If there’s a million dollars in there, I want the exclusive. You up for that, Derrick?”

“Do you even have to ask?”

Mookie emerged from the store, carrying a paper bag. Derrick’s spirits improved marginally. “Any luck?” he asked as Mookie slid behind the wheel.

“They had Johnny Walker, Derrick. Sorry.”

“Red or Black?”

“Red.”

Derrick let out a disgusted breath. Johnny Walker Red. Not even Black. The sooner they got this story and left, the happier he would be.

F
ERN HAD CLAIMED
she wanted to see the box, but Erica suspected that she might have another agenda.

“We’ll make pasta,” she’d suggested when she’d cornered Erica in the faculty parking lot at three-thirty. “Pasta primavera and garlic bread. I’ll buy the ingredients if you’ll supply the wine.”

“I’d love to have dinner with you,” Erica had said, adjusting her sunglasses in the afternoon glare. “But isn’t this kind of sudden?”

Fern’s wounded look failed to convince Erica. “I
didn’t know I had to book you weeks in advance. Come on. Where’s your sense of spontaneity?”

“Spontaneity is take-out pizza. It’s not pasta primavera and garlic bread.”

Fern laughed. “Pasta primavera is the easiest thing to prepare. Easier than phoning Jimbo’s Pizza. I’ll bring all the ingredients. All you have to do is pick up a bottle of wine.”

“I’ve got wine. Why do you really want to get together for dinner?”

Fern again attempted to look offended, then grinned sheepishly. “I want to see the box, okay? You’ve already shown it to the whole world, thanks to that photo Meryl Hummer ran in the
Gazette
, and I’m your best friend, and I haven’t seen it. Except in the newspaper.”

Erica had decided she’d enjoy Fern’s company for dinner enough to let her see the box. She was right, after all—it had already been photographed and publicized. As long as Fern didn’t tamper with it—and she wouldn’t—where was the harm in showing it to her?

Besides, how often did Erica have the opportunity to learn how to make pasta primavera? Maybe if she mastered the recipe and her garden came through for her, she could prepare the dish with homegrown vegetables next fall. She could use up some of her overabundant crop of zucchini that way—if she ever got around to planting the rest of her zucchini seedlings.

She’d managed to listen to the day’s phone messages before Fern arrived at her house. Her answering machine stopped recording after fifteen messages, which was just as well. Today’s batch was all nonsense—a newspaper in Camden, Maine; a disc jockey from a radio station in Worcester, hoping to interview her live on his show; a professor from a college she’d
never heard of, questioning the identity of “Abraham Gallen”; someone inquiring about licensing miniature reproductions of the box, to be sold in airport gift shops; an attorney who claimed to be representing the Rideout family; and a lot of calls from people she knew in town, reminding her what good friends they were. Obviously, they assumed the box contained great riches.

None of the messages was from Jed Willetz. She had no reason to expect a call from him, but yesterday she’d made him promise to return to town hall and double-check the property line between her house and his grandfather’s. She was sure the records would back up her claim of where the line was located, and it would have been courteous of him to apologize for implying that her garden had encroached on his land.

But he hadn’t done the courteous thing. Big deal, she’d thought as she’d changed from her school clothes into khakis and a cotton sweater. She and Fern would have a lovely dinner. She would learn how to cook something new and she’d show Fern the box, and who cared about Jed Willetz?

Once Fern arrived at her house, though, she had seemed less than eager to view the box. She emptied an array of ingredients from a couple of paper bags onto the kitchen table: a box of dry rigatoni, broccoli florets, carrots, plum tomatoes, a single green zucchini, a bulb of garlic, a bottle of olive oil, a long, skinny loaf of bread and a pale-yellow wedge of Romano. As she folded the bags flat along their creases, her gaze drifted to the window.