Water Witches

  Behind us we hear the peculiar plink of an aluminum softball bat making contact with the ball. Another of the Quarry Men has hit a solid line drive to left field. This one, however, is hit right at the fielder. He catches it and fires a bullet to home plate, holding Clark Rawls at third.

  "I was briefed on your permit applications," Reedy says when the crowd has quieted down once again. "I don't think you're going to be able to pull this one off."

  "Oh, God, Reedy, do we have to talk about this now?"

  "No, of course we don't. But I just think you should know: There is no way you can withdraw three hundred and seventy-five million gallons of water from the Chittenden River a season. You'll kill it. You'll kill the river."

  I watch Hugo Scutter swing at the first pitch, and hit a sharp grounder to second base. The infielder scoops it up, and throws out Gertrude and Jeanette's nephew by a half-dozen strides. I punch Reedy lightly on the arm, and then reach down for my glove.

  "Just guess I've got to run," I tell the state senator. "Just guess I was saved by the third out."

  Most dowsers are evangelists. Most dowsers love to proselytize.

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  They believe that virtually anyone can dowse, and they're always looking for new converts, new believers, new blood. When the founding members of the American Society of Dowsers wrote a charter for their group in 1961, one of their five primary objectives was "to disseminate knowledge and information about dowsing to as large a group as possible." Today, the group's literature boasts that "everyone is born with the capability," and refers to dowsing as a ''birthright talent."

  Sometimes the American Society of Dowsers even holds membership drives, and existing members are offered "bounties" of sorts, for signing up new members. Things like a year's free membership. Once, the Society even gave what amounts to its "dowser of the year" award to a fellow solely for his success in one particular membership drive: This individual started a new chapter and signed up an impressive twenty-nine members, an especially eye-opening number since he lived in a town in South Dakota with a total population under two hundred.

  Patience, of course, takes objection to the idea that dowsing is a birthright talent. And while she keeps her doubts to herself when she is among most other dowsers, she makes no secret of her frustration with her family. Just as she believes that virtually no men can dowse (except Elias), she is convinced that the few chosen women in this world with the calling should keep the secrets to themselves.

  "There is just nothing I hate more than seeing some idiot with a Y rod tramping through some idiot farmer's land," she has said to me many times, "except, maybe, some idiot with a Y rod trying to teach someone to dowse."

  Her one exception to this belief is when Patience herself is the idiot with the Y rod, and my daughter Miranda is the pupil. Patience is positive that with proper training and practice and mental conditioning, there are no limits to what my daughter may someday accomplish ("Your daughter's gift makes mine look like a dime store ruby," she confessed to Laura in what

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  must have been a particularly touching moment of sisterly camaraderie).

  When I return home from the ball game, I find myself smiling as my truck coasts to a stop at the end of our driveway. Miranda is at that very moment practicing what her aunt must have been teaching her Saturday morning. She is walking in slow motion from the barn toward a small cluster of blue spruce trees Laura and I planted just before she was born, walking with her two L rods before her. She is moving slowly, haltingly, trying her best to allow the rod in each hand to point wherever it chooses.

  Occasionally her lips move as she asks herself a question, trying to be as specific and focused as possible. In theory, when the rods open so that they are pointing in opposite directions, she will be receiving a "yes" response to her questionwhatever that question is.

  I watch for perhaps a full minute, the time it takes her to reach the blue spruce trees. When she gets there she stops, and I finally climb out of the truck. She turns to me, frowning. The two L rods are still pointing straight ahead, indicating that she never received a positive answer to her question.

  "No luck, huh?" I ask, kissing the top of her head and guiding her with me toward the house. It's almost eight thirty.

  "Nope." She sounds very disappointed.

  "What were you asking?"

  "I was looking for water."

  "Practice?"

  She stops dead in her tracks, and folds her arms across her chest. "No, I'm not practicing," she says, her voice quivering.

  I stop with her and kneel beside her, a father's protective antennae at attention. Something has frightened my daughter. "Then what, sweetheart? Are you still worried about the vein you think went dry under the garden?"

  "Yes! I've got to find us some new ones!"

  "Oh, don't worry about that one. Really, you don't have to

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  worry about that at all. We have a well, and it's just fine. Just fine. We have plenty of water, sweetheart, all that we need."

  "It's not just that the other vein disappeared!" she continues, raising her voice nervously. Over Miranda's shoulder I see her mother wandering out the back door to see what's the matter.

  "Then what?" I ask. "You can tell me."

  "It's what mom and I saw on the news tonight! We watched the news tonight after the Scutters went home, and they said ..." She stops speaking and looks down at her feet, and for a brief moment I am afraid she is crying. But with her mother now beside her she abruptly looks up and continues, "And they said it's not going to rain at all for the rest of the summer, and all of the corn might die!"

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  7

  Patience was nineteen years old when she dowsed a half-dozen fraternity houses at Amherst College. A pair of supermarket tabloids ran short stories about the "mystic sorceress" who used "magic" to find missing objects of value, and the New York Post published a blurb on its society page implying that the Princess of Monaco lived at Smith College with a practicing witch.

  In actuality, it was all rather harmless, and had it not involved the Princess of Monaco, no one outside of western Massachusetts would ever have heard about it. But it did involve the Princess of Monaco, a beautiful young woman who spent as much time with aging rock stars in Manhattan nightclubs as she did with her sophomore year roommate at Smith, one Patience Avery of Vermont.

  It is also worth noting that what happened then could not

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  happen now, at least not with quite such a sexually suggestive and newsworthy hook for the tabloids: Smith has remained a women's college, but Amherst is now coeducational, and the fraternities have become great brick Georgian dormitories. Amherst and Smith are still separated by only eight miles of state highway, but in all other ways they have grown thousands upon thousands of miles apart.

  Then, however, the two schools were inextricably linked by hormones.

  And with the Princess of Monaco in residence at Smith College, it was only natural that the capture of her lingeriea bra, panties, perhaps a single silk stockingwould become a part of the annual spring hazing ritual for the freshman pledges at Amherst's fraternities. And so one evening in April, while the Princess was somewhere in Manhattan and Patience was at the college science library, Smith security officers apprehended fifteen young menboys, reallytrying to sneak into the large single room the Princess and Patience shared on the college campus. Some boys were caught shimmying up the ivory trellis outside the pair's room; others were found drunk on the house's sharply pitched roof.

  By the time Patience returned late that night, the dean of students at Smith was confident that his security people had repulsed the final invasion from the fraternities eight miles away. He was incorrect.

  The moment she entered the room Patience sensed that something was missing, something was different, something was ... wrong. She tried to convince herself that it was merely paranoia brought on by the stories she had been told abou
t the Amherst students caught sneaking around the house, but when the Princess returned from New York the next day, her suspicions were confirmed.

  Her normally serene, husky voice raised in panic, the Princess told Patience that a monogrammed silk bag with her stockings and pantyhose was gone. It had sat in the top drawer of her bureau, buried beneath nightgowns. And while the

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  Princess didn't give a damn about the stockings, she had to get the bag itself back. The tears flowing freely now down what gossip columnists usually portrayed as an astonishingly poised face, the Princess explained through sobs that the inside wall of the lingerie bag had a secret lining, and in that lining were a variety of explicit, no-holds-barred love letters from two different lovers.

  Patience had heard of both men. She knew that one was a married novelist who had recently won some sort of award, and one was a rock star who had recently been featured on the cover of Rolling Stone, naked from the waist up, with a huge tattoo of a tongue on his chest. Patience and the Princess discussed the idea of approaching the police or college security, but the last thing the Princess wanted was publicity. "Lives," she said, her voice a quavering mixture of melodrama and desperation, "would be ruined!"

  Besides, she added pragmatically, "My father would freak if he ever saw those letters!"

  And so during dinner that evening, when almost all of Amherst College converged on the dining commons, Patience Avery began dowsing the fraternities in search of the lingerie bag. She and the Princess were hoping that whoever had discovered the bag was so busy showing off its more obvious contents to his fraternity brothers that he had not yet found the secret lining.

  Using her Y rod, Patience began walking slowly up fraternity row, the Princess behind her in tow. And while the Princess tried to conceal herself with a scarf and black sunglasses, onlookers knew who she was.

  Moreover, while most students were indeed at that moment at dinner, many were not. Patience and the Princess passed a group of young men lightly tossing a baseball in the front yard of Theta Delta. They wavedby necessityat a cluster of men and women drinking keg beer on the front porch of Psi Upsilon.

  As six thirty approached, and the upraised Y rod had shown

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  no inclination to move in Patience's fingers, the Princess began to panic. It wasn't merely that they had now walked past five fraternity houses, it was the fact that they had begun to generate a crowd. Four or five men and two or three women had started to trail the pair, always a good thirty yards behind them, but always there.

  It was at quarter to seven, while Patience and the Princess were standing in front of the tremendous white columns surrounding the front porch of Phi Gamma Chi, that Patience's Y rod abruptly pointed straight into the ground.

  "It's in that building," Patience told the Princess solemnly, and she led her roommate inside.

  The group of students hovered at the end of the driveway, and then followed them.

  Pointing her Y rod again toward the sky, Patience strolled through Phi Gamma Chi's wide front doors, and into the majestic entry hall. She continued to mumble to herself as they walked through the house, asking whether the lingerie bag was in this room or that, whether it was behind this dresser or in that drawer. Finally, at the entrance to a room on the second floor of the fraternity, Patience looked at the Princess and murmured, "Bingo."

  The Princess saw that the Y rod was pointing straight into the carpet.

  From the stairs at the end of the hallway they heard the whispering and soft footsteps of the students who had followed them. Suddenly one voice rose above the others, a young man's.

  "Hey, that's my room!"

  A decent-looking fellow in a crew neck sweater who would prove to be the fraternity president raced into the room, and he confronted the two women.

  "What the hell do you think you're doing?" he asked, his hands on his hips.

  "You're talking to the Princess," a male voice whispered quickly in a hushed tone from behind him. "Don't be an idiot."

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  The fellow looked at Patience and the odd stick by her thigh, and then at the woman behind her. He bit his lip and began to nod. "Well. Welcome to Phi Gamma Chi," he said, spreading his arms expansively. "I'm Robert Oates. Can I get you two a ... a beer?"

  "No, I don't think so," Patience said, shaking her head in disgust. "We're not here for your well-known hospitality."

  "Then what can I ... what can we ... do for you two?"

  Patience felt the tip of one of the Princess's long fingernails dig into the small of her back. "You know why we're here."

  The fraternity president extended his hand to Patience. "I'm sorry," he said, stalling. "I think I missed your name."

  Patience refused to take his hand. "I didn't give it."

  Oates sighed. "Look, I don't know what the deal is here," he said. "I don't understand all this hostility. All I know is I came back from dinner, and there were a half-dozen people I hardly knew walking inside the fraternity. Now I find two women I've never met poking around my room with a ... a weird-looking stick"

  "Make it easy on yourself," Patience said. "Return what you took."

  The fraternity president shook his head. "I don't have the slightest idea what you're talking about."

  Patience walked behind him. "Sorry folks," she said to the small group in the doorway, "but I'm about to be real rude." She then pushed the door shut.

  "We're here for one reason," she said to Oates, her tone even but angry. "You took something that doesn't belong to you. You stole something."

  "I didn't steal anything," he said, smiling broadly.

  Patience watched him and paused. At first she was surprised, because something in that smile convinced her that Oates was telling the truth. She could tell that he really hadn't stolen anything. But she knew also that the lingerie bag was somewhere in this room. Hadn't her Y rod said so?

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  "Of course you didn't steal anything," she said, softening her voice. "I'm sorry I accused you wrongly of that."

  "Apology accepted."

  "Some freshman brought it to you like a trophy, and you've simply hidden the item in this room."

  Oates was silent for a long, quiet moment, and Patience took the offensive once and for all.

  "We're here to recover some stolen merchandise. A little bag of stockings. Now you can either hand it to me right this very second, or I'll find it myself. Just as surely as I figured out where the bag was on this whole stupid campus, I'll find the drawer in which you hid it."

  "I wish I could help you, but I just don't know what you're talking about," Oates said again, but his voice was weak and unsure.

  "Fine," Patience said. She raised the Y rod before her, and turned away from Oates and the Princess. She asked if the silk bag was buried in the dresser, stowed in the closet, stored in the loft. She asked if it was hidden in the wastebasket, placed neatly in the desk, andfinallytucked inside the small refrigerator in the corner.

  It was then that the Y rod responded.

  "An ice-cold stocking is not very appealing," the Princess said as she watched the Y rod react, her first words since they had entered the bedroom of the president of Phi Gamma Chi. It was clear that she was appalled.

  "Want to open that up?" Patience asked, referring to the refrigerator.

  The fraternity president thought for a moment, wrestling with his options. Finally he opened the door, reached inside, and from the bottom of a tub of Milky Way chocolate bars removed a paisley lingerie bag about the size of a purse.