Hidden Treasures Read Online Free PDF Page A

bought it. But the few times Jed had visited in the past couple of years, he’d never met his grandfather’s neighbor. She must have been over at the school, teaching earnest third-graders.
    So now this small-town schoolmarm was living on land adjacent to the farm Jed had inherited, and a box— a treasure chest —had been found on her land. Was it actually on her land? How clearly had the property lines been drawn?
    Sure, she ought to be warned about Glenn Rideout’s greed. But if Jed was going to do her this good deed by warning her, well, it wouldn’t hurt to find out exactly where the box was when she and the Rideout kid had dug it up. Property lines could be a tricky thing.
    Yeah, he’d like to have himself a look at exactly where this box was when she and Randy had unearthed it. On the slim chance they were talking about something of real value here—and if anyone knew the difference between junk and something of real value, it was Jed—he decided he’d better check out this new lady and her old box.

CHAPTER THREE

    E RICA ’ S HOUSE WAS NOT designed for a cordless telephone. Her cordless required a phone outlet and an electric outlet so the handset battery could be recharged when the cordless wasn’t in use, but her house had only two phone jacks and neither was near an electric outlet. She’d called the phone company to see if they could install a new jack for her, but the price they quoted—just for showing up…she’d have to pay extra if she actually wanted them to do anything—had deterred her. She was responsible for a mortgage now. She couldn’t afford such extravagances as paying phone company employees to ring her doorbell.
    So she’d set up her cordless on a kitchen counter, with one wire stretching to connect to the wall-phone jack and the other stretching in the opposite direction to share a double socket with her toaster oven. Having wires snaking across the counter looked messy, but it wasn’t as if the kitchen was a House and Garden showcase to begin with. The counters were gray linoleum with black-and-white speckles running through it, and the cabinets were metal layered with white enamel paint that was chipped along the edges, as if a tiny rodent had been gnawing on them. The sink was a porcelain basin with a few indeterminate yellow stains that no amount of scouring and bleaching could obliterate. The floor was also linoleum—green agitated byspumes of black and white that reminded her of The Perfect Storm . It was truly an ugly kitchen, not the sort of environment she’d fantasized as a place for kneading bread, whipping up wholesome casseroles and baking cookies.
    Maybe that was why cookies were as far as she’d gotten in her culinary aspirations. By the end of the summer, if Randy was right, she’d be whipping up lots of zucchini casseroles. And kneading lots of zucchini bread.
    At least her oven no longer chirped. When she’d first moved in, it chirped every time she turned it on. She’d complained to her landlord: “I think there’s a cricket living inside my oven, and the heat makes it screech.”
    John Willetz had marched over the flattened fence to her house, poked around inside her oven with a flashlight and pronounced it cricket free. Then she’d turned on the oven and he’d heard the chirp. He’d slid the oven away from the wall and tipped it at an angle. A cricket had scampered out from underneath. John had mercilessly crushed the bug under his heel, abandoned its smashed carcass on her seasick floor and taken his leave.
    As landlords went, he hadn’t been bad. Despite his advanced age, he’d been strong and tall, his shoulders barely hunched and his skin stained a weak-tea brown by sunshine and time. The lines in his face had had a permanence about them and the backs of his hands had been blotchy with age spots, but the only thing that had really marked him as old was his temperament: taciturn bordering on grouchy. Erica had liked to think he was the epitome