Romantic Times

Judith Arnold pens a quaint romance about being true to oneself.

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Hidden Treasures

Harlequin Enterprises Limited

Chapter One

No doubt he'd gotten the cap from his father. Erica had concluded from the few times she'd met Glenn Rideout that the man was a jackass. He ran Rideout's Ride, one of Rockwell's eight bars; maybe the hat was a gift from one of his distributors. He probably thought the thing looked cute on his son.

Even without the hat, Randy didn't qualify as cute. He was skinny and gawky, with an olive-shaped head and a hot-dog-shaped body. He wore his hair in a buzz cut and his two front teeth overlapped. But Erica didn't invite him to her house because she wanted to hang out with a cute little boy. To be sure, she didn't really invite him at all. He just showed on a semiregular basis, foraging for cookies and companionship.

Today, he'd rapped on her screen door when she'd been about to embark on her new project: the garden. "Sure, I'll help," he'd offered when she told him her plans. "And after we do your garden, we can have cookies, right?"

"Of course." In an eleven-year-old boy's economic system, cookies could purchase just about anything - labor, the truth, a new best friend.

Randy had helped her carry the flats of seedlings she'd bought yesterday morning at Tully's Hardware and Garden Center from the rear of her station wagon to the rectangular patch of dirt she'd hacked out of the scruffy tufts of grass that she euphemistically referred to as her lawn. She'd done her best to cultivate the patch yesterday. She'd raked the dirt, sifted out the obvious stones and tossed them into the woods, and felt achy and fulfilled once she'd gone inside to shower. She was a gardener - or she would be, once she got all those seedlings into the ground. She would be the sort of woman who connected with the earth, who participated in the cycles of nature and the seasons of life. She would have dirt beneath her nails, and her jeans would fade to white at the knee.

"Pull the tape a little tighter," she instructed Randy, who stood at the far end of the rectangle.

"I don't get why we have to measure it," Randy called back to her. His voice was still high and piping, not much different from its pitch two years ago, when he'd been a student in her class. "Why can't we just plant the plants?"

"I told you, Randy, according to my research, the plants will thrive best if the seedlings start out six to eight inches apart."

"My mom doesn't measure her garden."

"And how are her plants?"

"I don't know. I don't pay attention."

Erica nodded. "I do pay attention. And I'm planting my seedlings six inches apart."

Randy obediently stretched the tape measure the length of her garden. Erica used her spade to mark six-inch intervals along the first row. "This is where my tomato plants are going."

"That's an awful lot of tomato plants," he observed, eyeing the plastic frame box of tender green sprouts, which sat beside the garden plot.

"Maybe some of the plants will die. I don't know what my harvest will be like. I'm a novice at gardening. Do you know what a novice is?"

"Something like a priest, I think."

Erica smiled. "It can mean someone who's training for a religious order. In general, it means someone who's new at something. It comes from the Latin novicius, meaning new." Aware she was lecturing, she shut up and finished poking indentations in the soil. Randy didn't seem to mind when she veered into pedantic mode. But she minded. She'd been living in Rockwell for nearly three years. Surely some of her know-it-all attitude should have atrophied by now.

"Okay," she said once she was sure she'd gotten her didacticism under control. "We'll put the tomatoes in this row, and then we'll measure off a row for cucumbers and peas, and in the last row I'll plant some broccoli and zucchini. What do you think?"

"Broccoli?" Randy wrinkled his nose. "My gramma used to make me eat broccoli when I was bad. It was like a punishment."

"Your grandmother must love you very much," Erica remarked, reeling in the tape measure somewhat and turning it perpendicular so she could get her rows properly distanced.

"My gramma is a statist."

"A statist?"

Randy frowned. "Isn't a statist, like, a mean person?"

"A sadist," she corrected him.

"Oh. Whatever. Broccoli sucks. And zucchini ..." He shook his head gravely.

"What's wrong with zucchini?"

"If you plant too much of it, it takes over the world."

"The world?"

"Well, your garden, anyway." Randy shook his head at her obvious ignorance. "Nobody plants zucchini."

"Then it's a good thing I'm planting it. Otherwise it might become extinct."

Randy eyed her from beneath his cap. Despite the shadow that obscured the upper half of his face, she could read in his expression a bit of doubt mixed with panic that zucchini might in fact be on the verge of extinction, and only Erica's noble efforts could save it.

The soil she turned with the pointed tip of her trowel smelled malty. It was damp - New Hampshire was just emerging from mud season, the weeks when land frozen through a long New England winter finally thawed. Erica was proud of herself for having learned about things like mud season. She personally knew people who tapped maple trees, and she no longer pictured Bambi and cringed when she saw antlers hanging on the wall of some public establishment. Maybe in another year or two, she'd actually feel she belonged in Rockwell. Meanwhile, it was long past the time she should learn how to garden.

"So when are we gonna start planting this stuff?" Randy asked.

Erica pressed the button to retract her tape measure. Glancing up, she saw him fingering one of the spindly tomato seedlings. He wore shorts even though the temperature couldn't have been much higher than the midfifties, and his knobby knees were gray with dirt. The shorts bulged strangely in places; he seemed to have oddly shaped items crammed into most of the pockets.

She surveyed the grid of her garden one more time. "Let's do it," she said, hooking the tape measure over her belt. It had a clip for just that purpose, like for a cell phone or pager. Clipping a tape measure onto her belt made a very different statement from clipping a high-tech gizmo onto her belt. The tape measure said, I'm competent. I know my tools. She wished it were true.

She grinned, although she couldn't help gazing warily around her yard, which extended between a fringe of trees on one side and the remnants of a fence on the other. At one time the fence must have stood straight, a row of narrow vertical slats linked by wire, but the wire had rusted, and Erica had demanded that it be removed before she bought the house. All that remained were a collection of rotting slats sprawled between her house and the house where John Willetz used to live.

He'd been her landlord when she'd first moved to Rockwell from Brookline, Massachusetts. Then last year, he'd offered to sell her the cottage she'd been renting from him, and the half acre of land on which it stood - so he could die with money in the bank, he'd told her. Less than six months after the closing, he'd died. She still felt a little guilty about that, as if by agreeing to buy the house she'd somehow hastened his death.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Hidden Treasures by Judith Arnold Copyright © 2003 by Harlequin Enterprises Limited
Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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