Free Hidden Treasures by Judith Arnold

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.”

CHAPTER FIVE

    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 theopening 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