Water Witches

  "What now?" Duane moans. "I suppose you and your daughter saw a fucking Chinese panda by New England Power's hydroelectric plant?"

  "Miranda was asked if she would testify at the hearing before the Environmental Board. I expect her prehearing deposition will be next week."

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  There is a long moment of silence as my partners digest the information. Finally Duane breaks the stillness in the room.

  "Damn it, Scottie!" he begins. "Are you fucking suicidal, or just stupid? Are you trying to run this firm out of business, or is that just a happy coincidence?"

  Ignoring Duane, Warren says, "Who asked her?"

  "Reedy McClure. With my permission."

  "I guess you said yes," Warren says.

  "Damn it to hell," Duane says. "Damn it to fucking hell!"

  "She doesn't understand exactly what testifying will involve," I continue, "but she's happy to tell the Board about the catamounts."

  "Can't they just read the newspapers?" Duane asks.

  "They could, but I'm not about to stifle my daughter. That's what this whole thing is about. I'm not about to teach my daughter that she has to keep her mouth shut because she saw some animals that are nearly extinct in Vermont."

  "You know what I think?" Duane asks, his voice low. "I think this has more to do with you than Miranda."

  "You think so?"

  "I do," he says, nodding his head yes. "I really do. You've reduced this situation to some idiot simpleton's version of right and wrong. And you know why? Because you're suddenly feeling like a guilty shit for the two decades you've spent defending power plants and ski resorts and condominium developers. Well, your mea culpas are going to cost, buddy. They're going to cost you and your family one hell of a lot of money, and that's fine. But what isn't fine, is that they're going to cost me one hell of a lot of money. They're going to cost Warren one hell of a lot of money. They're going to cost some of the people who work here their jobs. And that's not fine. That's not fine at all. That is just fucking inconsiderate. And fucking stupid."

  When Duane is finished, I hear myself saying in a voice that sounds faintly hoarse, "There's something else."

  Neither man will look at me as they wait for me to continue.

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  When they remain quiet, I tell them, "At that hearing, I will be testifying along with Miranda."

  At the wedding ceremony of Patience Avery and Reedy McClure, there will be two rings. There will be a thirty-nine-year-old man giving away a forty-two-year-old bride. The bride, a woman embarking upon her third marriage, will not wear white. She will wear instead what she refers to as an aura blue dress. Not an auroral blue dress, she has explained to me, an aura blue dress: It is a blue that represents positive human auras, positive human energy fields. It is a blue that reflects human atmospheres, not celestial ones.

  To me, it is simply the blue of the shallow Gulf waters off the coasts of Key West.

  There will be no groomsmen opposite the half-dozen mothers and daughters that Patience has recruited to form her own metaphoric phalanx, although under duress Reedy agreed to ask his brother to stand beside him at the altar, serving as something vaguely akin to a best man.

  Patience and Reedy will be married in the small Congregational church in the center of Landaff, in a ceremony that is close enough to something Christian that Reverend Taylor will perform it, but sufficiently esoteric, new age, and quasi-druid that it will draw a fair number of dowsers away from the annual convention's "Earth Energies" field trip to a sacred site. Angel Source Brandy, the former JoAnn Pomerleau Brandy, will lay down a labyrinth in white lime in the commons across the street from the Landaff church, and then around the church itself. The church will be in its center.

  The bridal party, led by an extremely earnest nine-year-old girl, will enter the labyrinth about one hundred yards from the church. That group, seven women, three men, and Miranda, will then proceed to walk the labyrinth through the dead grass in the heart of the commons, around the church parking lot, behind the church's new addition, and then through the wide

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  front doors. WeI, specificallyhave been instructed by Patience to walk the labyrinth with "appropriate gravity and dignity," which I have interpreted to mean no mambos.

  For Patience and Angel and many of the dowsers who will be in attendance, the labyrinth represents balance and harmony. The labyrinth that Angel will design for the wedding of Patience Avery and Reedy McClure will, Angel has boasted, serve as an initiation chamber of sorts for the bride and the groom, initiating them into their roles as flesh and blood bonds between heaven and earth, and among the energies of the human psyche.

  I asked Patience what we in the bridal party should do if we become lost in the labyrinth, and she said that wouldn't happen, that I was confusing a labyrinth with a maze. While the purpose of a maze was to torment, disorient, and entrap all who entered it, a labyrinth was usually built to help channel positive earth energies into those who walked it, to help one literally and figuratively find one's way. The pathways of an Angel Source Brandy labyrinth, Patience reassured me, would lead me inexorably to its center.

  Patience has also reassured Laura that if she stops biting her fingernails right now, a full month before the wedding, there will be sufficient time for her nails to recover.

  The phone rings Tuesday night after dinner, while Laura and Miranda are at Patience's house, helping the blushing bride to refine the reception menu. Miranda has promised me that she will fight hard for a bridge mix of Cap'N Crunch and Cocoa Puffs. I answer the phone in the kitchen, the one nearest the back porch where I was dozing, listening to the Boston Red Sox take one of their early leads that they inevitably lose.

  "Hi, Scottie, this is Rosamond Donahue at the Sentinel. I'm on deadline, and I want to ask you a question. We heard from Powder Peak"

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  "Hold on, Rosamond. You don't want to be speaking to me. You should be speaking to John Bussey or Ian Rawls. Our firm no longer represents"

  "I know that, just listen. Powder Peak faxed us a news release today that said the naturalists they brought in found no signs of catamounts on Mount Republic. They spent four full days nosing around the mountain, especially the area where you and your daughter claim to have seen the animals, and the resort says there isn't one bit of evidence that mountain lions live anywhere near Powder Peak."

  "Gee. Imagine that. What a surprise."

  "Is that your response?"

  "Can I think about my response and call you back?"

  "No. I'm on deadline."

  "Five minutes?"

  She groans, exasperated. "Fine. Call me back in five minutes."

  I thank her and return to the porch. If I am smart, if I want truly to do all that I can to minimize the aggravation I cause my partners and our firm's clients, I will take my phone off the hook and fail to call Rosamond back. I will let her run the story with either no comment from me, or the simple statement that I was surprised.

  But I also don't want to allow Powder Peak to get in the only word on this story.

  I decide I will phone Reedy McClure. This was his fight from the beginning. I'm sure he'll be as happy to scream now for a family of cats as he has been for Chittenden River fish.

  It is an odd sensation for me to read or hear news about Powder Peak that I did not anticipate, plant, or at the very least respond to. I am conditioned to reading the Sentinel and the Free Press largely to discover how they have translated the information wethe resorthave given them, to see how

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  the Rosamond Donahues of the press have used the charts or the facts or the opinions we have spun for their benefit.

  Wednesday morning, I read Rosamond's story about the naturalists' findings, while sipping my coffee at my office. Reedy told me last night what he thought he had told the reporter, but it is still jarring to read his remarks and see Ian Rawls's comments on the front page of the newspaper. It is the lead Vermont story,
running along the bottom right column of the page under the headline, "Resort Finds No Sign of Endangered Animals."

  BARTLETT, VTThe mystery of the Powder Peak catamounts may have moved a step closer to resolution yesterday, when two naturalists whose expertise is mountain lions said they found no evidence of the animals on Mount Republic.

  The findings were reported by Ian Rawls, managing director of the Powder Peak Ski Resort.

  The investigation was triggered when Scott Winston, 39, a lobbyist who worked for the resort until recently, and his 9-year-old daughter claimed they had seen three of the endangered animals while riding a chair lift in July.

  "I think the operative word here is relief. The last thing any of us wanted to do was pursue an expansion project that might affect the environment adversely," Rawls said.

  Powder Peak hopes to begin $15 million worth of improvements to the resort sometime next month, when it breaks ground for what spokespeople have said will be the world's fastest gondola.

  The planned improvements also include a new snowmaking system, an expanded base lodge, and a new network of trails, all of which are scheduled for construction next spring and summer.

  The resort's building and land-use permits will, however, in all likelihood be appealed by the Copper Project, a local environmental group opposed to the expansion project.

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  That expansion was further complicated when Winston and his daughter said they saw the catamounts in an area targeted for clearing.

  The naturalists, Carl Macomber and Jason Richardson, faculty members at Colorado State University, spent four days searching for proof of the animals, especially within a three-mile radius of the reported sighting.

  Macomber, the author of two books about mountain lions as well as numerous articles, said the fact that they saw no evidence of the animals on Mount Republic does not definitively mean there are none there.

  "Mountain lions roam a wide area, and we confined our study to a very small area. Just because we didn't see any signs of them doesn't categorically prove there are no catamounts on that mountain," Macomber said.

  "I must admit, my opinion is that there aren't any [catamounts] up there, and there probably haven't been for decades," Macomber added.

  The naturalists looked for catamount tracks, scat (excrement), claw marks, fur, signs of kills, and evidence of a den. Macomber said they discovered none of these signs.

  Reedy McClure, a state senator from Washington County and the leader of the Copper Project, disputed the two professors' findings.

  "I find it ludicrous that two guys have the nerve to claim there are no catamounts on Mount Republic, after spending a grand total of four days up there," Senator McClure said.

  "Is there a connection between the fact these guys are being paid by the resort, and the fact their findings support the resort's plans? I'd say so," he continued.

  Macomber and Richardson have been retained by Schuss Limited, the owner of Powder Peak as well as two ski resorts in the west. Rawls would not say how much Schuss was paying the professors.

  Rawls said the naturalists will testify if the Copper Project appeals the resort's permits.

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  Scott Winston, whose lobbying firm, Birch, Winston, and Hurley, was fired by Powder Peak less than a week after he and his daughter told people they had seen catamounts at the resort, said simply that he was surprised by the two naturalists' findings.

  Releasing the news that the naturalists found no signs of the catamounts for today's press was a sound strategy, it is exactly what I would have recommended. It will give the Environmental Board time to digest the findings, to begin to accept them as gospel.

  I am caught like a deer by some car's headlights Thursday night.

  I step to the side quickly, nearly walking into the side of another automobile in the "Scoop Shop" parking lot just outside of Montpelier, trying to see who is there. Even before my eyes can focus, however, whoever it is leans out the driver's side window of the car and yells to me in a voice I know well, "It's official! You hear? Your buddy filed his appeal today."

  "That you, Roger?" I realize I am holding in my hand a bag with two pints of ice cream, and I am holding it up as if it were a lantern.

  "You betcha." Roger Noonan turns off the lights and climbs out of the car. "At about four twenty-eight this afternoon, about two minutes before the State shuts itself down for the day, the Copper Project formally filed its appeal. They waited until just about the very last minute of the very last day."

  Even in the dark, even at night, Roger Noonan looks hot. This year, this summer, the man has probably perspired more moisture than the heavens have rained. Simply pushing the door of his car open, twisting his fat so he can escape the thin prison between his seat and the steering wheel, and then pushing the gigantic pear that defines his upper body into an upright and erect position, is a high-stress, aerobic workout for the man.

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  ''I hear you're planning to testify," he continues. "Can I have Rosamond give you a call tonight?"

  "Since when does Rosamond need my permission to call me?"

  He shrugs. " 'Course she doesn't. Just thought I'd be civil."

  "If I thought it would stop her from calling me, I'd tell you no. As it is, I'll tell you I probably won't comment. I might not even answer the phone."

  He raises his eyebrows and frowns. "Scottie Winston, just when did you become an uncooperative paranoid? Just when did you become afraid of the First Amendment?"

  I point at the bag in my hands. "I have two pints in here, Roger. You want to know the meaning of fear? Fear is not returning to Landaff soon with this ice cream intact. Fear is letting a perfectly good pint of Green Mountain Chocolate turn into cold swamp water." I smile. "Sorry, Roger. I have to run."

  Miranda mashes down the ice cream in her dish with the back of her spoon, and then licks the back of it.

  "Will it be like a courtroom? Will it be like tv?" she asks her mother and me, as we savor our ice cream in the family room. There is a small hint of nervousness in Miranda's voice.

  Laura pushes shut the glass door to the porch, keeping outside the slight August chill in the air. She smiles at her daughter, and then looks at me. "It won't be that scary, will it?"

  I stretch my legs underneath the coffee table. "I hope it won't be scary at all, sweetheart," I tell Miranda. "Next week should be cake."

  "Next week is the part in your office?" she asks. She looks down at the ice cream in her dish, and then proceeds to stir it quickly into soup. I lied when I told Roger that my family dislikes chocolate swamp water. Miranda, at least, believes that is indeed the proper way to eat ice cream.

  "Maybe. It will either be in my office, or a fellow named

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  John Bussey's office. He's a lawyerlike me. And his office is right in Montpelier too."

  Laura shakes her head. "John Bussey is not a lawyer like you."

  Miranda spoons some of the soup into her mouth, leaving a small splotch on her chin. It makes her look even younger to me than nine. Younger, certainly, than almost ten.