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to show you.”
    “You do if it’s mine.”
    “Yours?” She drew herself taller and gave him her sternest look. It usually cowed her third-graders. He seemed unmoved.
    “You dug it out from over there, right?” He gestured toward the edge of her garden, near the collapsed fence. “That’s my property.”
    “Your property? What are you talking about?”
    “My grandfather left me his house and land.”
    “Be that as it may…” God, she sounded pompous. She took a deep breath and strove for plainer words. “I own the property east of the fence line. Your grandfather sold it to me. It’s mine.”
    “I’m not so sure where that property line lies. Thefence was crooked, and now it’s broken. I’m thinking maybe you were digging on land that’s legally mine.”
    “That’s ridiculous! We had a surveyor come out here and review the property lines before the sale went through. You can check in town hall. Everything’s on file there.”
    “So this box is worth nothing,” he said, knocking her thoughts askew. What was he getting at? Why had he changed the subject back to the box if he was so worried about where his property ended and hers began? “Makes me wonder why you’re fighting so hard to keep me from having a look at it.”
    “Because I made a promise,” she said, figuring that if he was going to be her new next-door neighbor—a ghastly thought; she didn’t think she could bear to have him rolling his shoulders just a few yards from her dining-room windows—she’d be wise to avoid quarreling with him. “I’ve got an expert coming up to evaluate the box, and I promised I wouldn’t let anyone mess with it until he got here. Why do you think everyone’s going to hear about it, anyway? I haven’t told anyone about it.”
    “You told your expert. From Harvard, right?”
    That took her even more aback. “How did you know that?”
    “Same way I knew about the box. Randy Rideout has a big mouth.”
    Damn. Randy did have a big mouth. She usually was amused by what came out of it. But not this. Discretion would have been the prudent course, at least until she’d found out exactly how valuable the box was.
    The crunch of tires against loose gravel jolted her and Jed Willetz both. She turned in time to see twin shafts of light shoot up her driveway, followed by therumble of a large engine. “You expecting someone?” he asked her.
    She’d showered and changed after her gardening adventure that afternoon, but she was wearing old jeans, a Sierra Club sweatshirt and her L.L. Bean clogs. Her hair was pulled back into a ragged ponytail, held in place with a green ribbon. She was quite obviously not dressed for company. “I wasn’t even expecting you,” she said.
    “Nobody ever expects me,” he commented, then turned back toward the driveway as the loud kachunk of a heavy door slamming resonated through the night. The knife was within easy reach, she noticed. One swift move and she could tuck it against her palm. Jed Willetz might thank her for her foresight.
    Good grief. She’d moved to Rockwell to escape from big-city paranoia. She’d come here so she could join a community where people dropped in on one another and trusted one another, where a person didn’t have to reach for the nearest knife whenever a strange vehicle coasted up the driveway.
    Maybe she wouldn’t need the knife if she had Jed Willetz to protect her. Yeah, right, as if she was prepared to turn her back on a lifetime of feminism and let a big, unshaven guy protect her. Especially him. He was planning to give her a hard time about her property lines. She couldn’t depend on him at all.
    Footsteps rattled the gravel, and a small, round-faced woman emerged from behind the SUV. Her hair, styled in a rigorous pageboy with bangs stretching across her forehead, made her face look even rounder. Recognizing her, Erica let out her breath and smiled. See? This small-town living was all it was cracked up to be. She did know just about