Hidden Treasures by Judith Arnold Read Free Book Online Page B

bloody knees, placing compresses on bloody lips, inspecting scalps for lice and cleaning up vomit. How she managed to maintain a sense of humor Erica didn’t know.
    Come to think of it, Fern’s sense of humor was a sometime thing. A person could laugh about stomach-flu epidemics only so much. “By my fourth puke of the morning, I’ve pretty well had it,” she occasionally lamented to Erica when they met for lunch on those days that Erica didn’t have cafeteria duty. After a few minutes of that sort of conversation with Fern, Erica’s appetite generally disappeared.
    A first-grader losing a tooth wasn’t going to steal Erica’s appetite today. But the sight that greeted her on Fern’s desk might. It was that day’s edition of the Rockwell Gazette , which Erica hadn’t yet seen because it always arrived at her house after she’d already left for school. Most of the page was occupied by a large photo of her, Jed Willetz and the box beneath the headline Could This Find Be Worth Millions?
    If there hadn’t been a student in the nurse’s office, Erica would have cursed. Instead, she gritted her teeth so tightly her jaws ached. Bad enough Meryl Hummer had written the damn story—did she have to give it such a sensationalist headline?
    She tried to focus on the column of small print running along the right edge of the photo, but her gaze veered back to the picture itself. It was a color shot, oddly mushy, as if the printer’s hues hadn’t quite lined up. In it she looked tired, her sweatshirt fresher than her face, which was framed by squiggling strands of dark hair that had unraveled from her ponytail. She needed to do something with her hair, but she had yet to find a salon she trusted within a fifteen-mile radius of Rockwell. The last time she’d gotten her locks professionally trimmed had been during the school’s winter break, when she’d driven down to Brookline to visit her family. Her mother had taken one look at her, shrieked, “You resemble an escapee from an asylum,” and made an emergency appointment for her at Armand’s for the morning after Christmas. The unlucky young stylist who’d gotten stuck having to work over the holiday week had obeyed Erica’s directive to leave her hair long—the style was more in keeping with the earth-mother image she was trying to cultivate—but he’d added some desultory layers and treated the whole thing with a relaxer that had sapped the life out of the curls. After she’d returned to Rockwell, Fern had evened out the layers for her, and eventually the curls returned.
    All right, so her hair looked wild and disheveled in the photo. It hardly mattered, when her skin was so pale, her smile so grim and forced. Next to her, Jed Willetz appeared positively glorious. His hair was a mess, too, but on him the unkempt look worked. His eyes seemed brooding, unlike hers, which were wide and startled, as if the flash had stunned her, and he wasn’t smiling at all. After this photo made the rounds,Erica was certain more women than ever would be volunteering to bare their bottoms for him.
    Positioned in front of them in the photo, the box seemed much too mundane to warrant the headline Meryl had written. Squat and decrepit, a dull brown container with a curving lid and a dirt-caked padlock that photographed a grayish-beige rather than brassy yellow, it sat on her dining-room table where she’d cleared away the spelling tests.
    Erica circled Fern’s desk, appropriated the nurse’s chair and lifted the article to read. It stated that the box was found by “Erica Leitner, a third-grade teacher at the primary school, and Randy Rideout, eleven years old, a former student of Leitner’s, while they were planting zucchini in Leitner’s garden, which abuts the Willetz property.” Well, that covered everyone’s claims, she thought. The bulk of the article hypothesized on the box’s age and value—a perfunctory mention of “Professor Abraham Gallen of Harvard