Free Digging Too Deep by Jill Amadio Page A

music practice, hour after hour, drove her away. The other was an athlete who came to despise his disdain of sports. Even fellow female musicians failed to be attracted to him, which Whittaker attributed to his attitude, considered by his peers to be one of veiled arrogance. Later, his professorship at UCI, where he was esteemed, and growing fame led to invitations to events and parties where his reputation gained him attention; but one by one the women he dated as a result soon dropped him.
    Whittaker realized he hadn’t added to his coin collection in two years, certainly not since Monica’s real estate company had gone bust. Obviously, his desire and obsession had dimmed. All right, time to start fresh. That meant the coins must go. In a hurry to leave, he transferred the velvet pouches into a small calfskin leather attaché case, closed the locks and returned the empty trays to the wall safe. Then he closed the safe and swung the painting back into place.
    He checked his watch. Damn. He’d almost forgotten. There were still four more hours to wait. Although they’d had no contact for six years, he guessed that coin broker Gustave Vernays still permitted no one to visit him before nine p.m. When Whittaker had purchased a rare 1619 hammered gold laurel coin and a Roman denarius , equally as rare and considered a masterpiece of numismatic art, he’d arrived fifteen minutes early and been forced to cool his heels outside the door.
    Now, too unsettled to sit still, the professor spent the time packing the rest of Monica’s belongings into boxes for donation to Goodwill. The thought of this generous gesture was the most gratifying he’d felt in a long time.
    Finally the grandfather clock chimed eight-thirty. Clutching the attaché case, Whittaker was about to close the door behind him when something compelled him to look back. His glance went straight to the shiny, dime-sized circle on the dark blue carpet under the DelRossi painting. The coin must have slipped out of its envelope. In three strides, he bent to pick up the silver Greek aegina by its edges, but then, in a fit of perversity, deliberately pressed the coin between fingers and thumb and closed his fist around it. What did it matter if he soiled its surface now? He dropped the coin into his jacket pocket.
    In the garage the professor eased into his car and placed the coin collection on the passenger seat. He switched on the Jaguar’s ignition and backed out, heading for Center Street. He drove across the bridge and headed up Jamboree Boulevard, past the exclusive Big Canyon Country Club and several gated estates, toward the Santa Ana freeway. Around him, Rolls-Royces, Mercedes-Benzes, BMWs, Range Rovers and Ferraris cruised the streets. But when he left behind Newport’s pristine, landscaped borders, the upscale cars gave way to Chevrolets, Fords and Suzuki pickup trucks.
    He drove by the local airport. Located a few miles north of Newport Beach’s stretch of shore, it had been transformed a decade earlier from a mown field with a few short runways and small buildings into a bustling terminal. Whittaker often flew out of there but disliked the fact that the growth was in response to the real estate development of Orange County. He resented the way it gobbled up farmland and ranches, spawning financial institutions and banks to create a mini-Wall Street on Newport Center Drive.
    “We’re in a fabulous boom,” Monica had assured him at the time. “We’re going to be multi-millionaires!” Her small partnership in a real estate company funded by Whittaker found her among leading developers as they feverishly bought up strawberry fields, orange groves and cattle pastures, building thousands of condominiums and cluster homes in their place. The structures crept up every ridge and overlooked each canyon, the relentless march of a silent army of dwellings whose uniforms were white stucco and whose helmets were red Spanish tile.
    Everyone wanted everything,