Water Witches

by Chris Bohjalian

  "When do the trackers arrive?"

  "Tonight. The resort's flying them right in. They're going to start work tomorrow," Reedy says, filling his basket with ears of corn.

  "You know why Ian's moving so quickly, don't you?" I ask.

  "I assume it's because of next month's appeal."

  "Right. They're hoping there won't be any proof of the animals, and they can have those findings recorded in the prehearing testimony."

  Reedy laughs. "Hoping? I'm sure they're positive there won't be! This is all a sleazy public relations ploy because a pretty little nine-year-old girl named Miranda Avery-Winston and her dad have been all over the news the last two weeks, talking about the animals they saw on Mount Republic. It makes the resort look good right now, and even better at the hearing when Ian or Bussey stands up and says, 'We don't know what those Winston folk saw on that chair lift, but they weren't catamounts.' "

  "Ian doesn't have much of a spine, but he wouldn't lie," I tell Reedy. "If the trackers find something, Ian won't cover it up."

  "It won't matter anyway. The Chittenden River is practically a puddle right now. I told you, I had great faith in this drought, and it hasn't let me down. Unless it rains for the next forty days, there is just no way in hell the Environmental Board will let the permits stand."

  "Because of the drought."

  "Right. Because of the drought."

  We wander up the store toward the cash registers, Reedy walking with a sudden rush of enthusiasm. After he has unloaded his basket before a pregnant young woman in a tie-dyed

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  housecoat and bandanna, after he has paid for his groceries and we are back outside in this summer's absurd August heat, I try to remind Reedy that it's not that simple.

  "The Board can do a lot of things. Even if they agree with you"

  "Not me. My experts. My 'experts on the aquatic environment.' "

  "Even if the Board agrees with your experts that the water flow is too slow to touch, that doesn't mean they'll completely reverse Liza's decision. There's a lot of middle ground."

  He switches his bag of groceries from one arm to another, pushing corn silk from the top of the bag out of his eyes.

  "Such as?" he asks.

  "They might agree with you that the resort shouldn't proceed with a snowmaking plan that involves the Chittenden River, but still allow it to clear away half of Mount Republic for new ski trails."

  "Maybe."

  "No maybes about it. The fact the Chittenden River is low won't affect the construction of those new trails on the mountain. Not one bit. You don't need a fast river to chop down a tree."

  "That depresses you, doesn't it? I can hear it in your voice."

  Sweat is already beginning to show along the side of Reedy's shirt, along the spot where he had been holding the grocery bag. I can feel my own shirt sticking to my back and shoulders underneath my sports jacket. "A bit. The sort of things that would cause the Board to rule against the new trail system are those catamounts. And if you're right about the trackers Powder Peak's bringing in, there won't be any evidence that they're out there."

  "Which they are."

  "Right. I saw them. Miranda saw them."

  He stops walking and turns to me. "Are you going to testify?"

  "Of course not."

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  "You should. You and Miranda both should."

  "It wouldn't be right. I know too much about Powder Peak. I worked for them for too many years."

  He shakes his head. "No way, that's no excuse. If you want to be so damn ethical about all this, then limit your testimony to the catamounts. Don't say one word about any other part of the expansion, but tell the Board what you saw."

  I climb out of my jacket, and then pull my handkerchief out of an inside breast pocket. I wipe my forehead.

  "Our testimony would hold much less weight than two naturalists'."

  "It would be better than no testimony."

  "And it certainly wouldn't endear me to my partners. Or our other clients."

  "I don't imagine they're real wild about you right now anyway."

  "Probably not."

  "Will you think about it?"

  I sigh, and rub the back of my neck. A vision of my nine-year-old daughter in a huge leather chair before a wide mahogany table passes before me. She looks very small. I can see clearly the members of the Environmental Board in one of the old statehouse conference rooms, a row of adults asking Miranda to describe over and over what she saw.

  "I'll think about it," I agree. The fact is, Miranda has been fine with the press the last two weeks, she has actually enjoyed all the attention. She probably wouldn't mind testifying, it probably wouldn't be traumatic for her at all.

  "You'll think about it seriously?" Reedy continues. "You're not just patronizing me?"

  It would probably be harder for me to sit before the Environmental Board and undermine Powder Peak's expansion plans than it would for Miranda. For almost all of my life in Vermont I have represented one set of issues, an agenda of growth and development and jobs. I have been powerful, I have been an insider. Now, because my daughter and I hap-

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  pened to see three animals from a chair lift, because I have let myself become spooked by a drought, I have been thrown onto the other side of the fence, I have been tossedmetaphorically, literallyonto the other, undeveloped side of the mountain.

  I take a deep breath and clear my throat. "No, I'm not patronizing you," I tell Reedy, trying to find courage in words. "I'll talk to Laura about it tonight."

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  24

  My daughter makes a great sound bite. Over the past two weeks, she has provided Vermont's television and radio stations with excellent three-second quotes. The sorts of quotes that distill a story down to its essence, the sorts of quotes that people can remember and talk about the next day at the garage, the general store, or on Church Street in Burlington.

  "I don't think there's an animal anywhere as pretty as a catamount."

  "Was I scared? No, those poor things should be scared of us!"

  "I can go anywhere to go snowboarding. They can't go just anywhere to live."

  She has been on one of the tv stations, the CBS affiliate, twice since we saw the animals, and the Sunday living section

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  of the Burlington Free Press ran a fifteen-hundred word story about Miranda that began on the section's front page. One of the two photographs of Miranda was taken in the Mitchells' yard. In it she is holding her Y rod, smiling proudly beside the knee-high blue cap for the well that she dowsed.

  Most of the media were originally drawn to the story because of me, because of my involvement with the ski resort. The first coverage, forty-five seconds on the NBC affiliate's eleven o'clock news and a seven-inch short on the Sentinel business page, focused on the fact that Powder Peak'sand the ski industry'schief lobbyist was jeopardizing a fifteen million dollar expansion project by claiming to have seen catamounts at the resort. As the story unfolded, however, it grew into both a business and a lifestyle story, with most newspapers in the state covering it in their money and living sections. Reporters discovered quickly that Miranda is a personable, pretty, and articulate little girl, a child with absolutely no fear of the camera. Often positioned opposite angry adult men like Ian Rawls or John Bussey, she looks and sounds very good. (As Roger Noonan said, "She's a chip off the old block. That chip just fell a little to the left of where you expected it.")

  Consequently, I have purposely fallen as far into the background as possible. Laura has been present for most of the media's interviews with our daughter, not me: Miranda's story rings true without her father's nodding corroboration, it is decidely more powerful without my hovering involvement.

  Sunday morning, as Laura, Miranda, and I are climbing into the truck to drive home after church, Elias Gray's grandson, Anson, yells at us from across the church's front yard.

  "It's too pretty a day to go
racin' outta here!" he hollers, walking briskly across the grass toward us.

  The sun is high and bright, but the first cool harbinger of fall blew into Vermont from Canada Friday night, and the temperature today won't climb above seventy. Laura and Mir-

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  anda are actually wearing sweaters for the first time since, I believe, early May.

  "That's exactly why we are racing home," I tell Anson when he reaches the truck. "It's too nice a day not to fix the clapboards on the barn."

  Miranda leans out the window on the passenger side of the truck, watching as her parents greet Anson.

  "How's your grandmother doing this morning?" Laura asks, lightly patting his back. "I didn't see her in church today."

  "No, she didn't feel like havin' one of us drive her in. But she's doin' okay. Not great, but okay," he answers, looking down at his work boots. "She said to tell you she liked the blueberry pie you brung her Friday a whole lot. She really appreciated your stoppin' by to visit," he adds.

  Laura shrugs. "How about you? How are you doing."

  "I'm good," he says, smiling. "Fact is, I'm here to ask a favor."

  "Name it," Laura says.

  He looks up at Miranda, tapping her arm aimlessly against the outside of the passenger door of the truck. "I been readin' 'bout you Miranda," he says. "I just guess you're ready to do some more dowsin'."

  Suddenly he turns back to Laura and me, afraid that he has overstepped his bounds. He pulls at his ear nervously, and says to us both softly, "If it's all right with you, that is."

  "What do you have in mind?" Laura asks.

  Miranda pushes open the truck door and jumps down.

  "Yeah, what do you have in mind?" Miranda giggles, echoing her mother.

  Laura glares at Miranda and clears her throat, chastening her daughter. Miranda has received a lot of attention the past two weeks, and Laura has worked hard to convey to the child the subtle difference between confidence and arrogance.

  Anson becomes flustered, and starts waving randomly at other parishioners as they wander from the church to their homes or their cars. "Howdy, Gertrude!" he screams at one of

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  the Scutter twins, somehow aware of which one she is. "Barton, where did you get that flashy tie? Boston?" he yells at Barton Lutz, a friend of his from the fire company. It's as if Anson is afraid that he has gotten Miranda in trouble, or he's embarrassed because he's not sure whether he should be speaking to mother or daughter.

  "Want me to wait in the truck?" Miranda asks quietly.

  "No, you don't have to," Laura says, her voice even. "Go ahead, Anson, what's up?" she continues.

  He rubs his hands together, trying to compose himself. Finally he says, "We're building a new sugar house. We've picked a spot on the other side of the hill from the one that burned, and we think it's just the spot."

  Laura rests her hand gently on the top of Miranda's head, and tussles her hair a bit. "And you want this one to dowse the area," she says.

  "Yup. If you ... if she ... wouldn't mind."

  Underneath her mother's hand, Miranda shakes her head no, she wouldn't mind at all. Laura looks down at her daughter. "I gather you're willing to help Mr. Gray?"

  "Uh-huh!"

  "Do you want her to dowse the spot for the house, or the spot for the holding tanks?" Laura asks.

  "Well, I was thinkin' both," he says, folding his arms across his chest, and toying with a button on the pocket of his blue flannel shirt. "And, if it's okay," he adds nervously, a long pause between almost every word, "I was wonderin' if she could see if the spot feels, well, fireproof.''

  I watch Miranda's reaction to the word fire, her response to Anson's reference to the blaze that killed his grandfather. She gazes up at the man in sympathy, unblinking, holding her stare until he becomes aware she is looking at him, and turns away.

  "I'm mighty glad this awful heat finally broke," he says in nobody's direction, speaking off toward the walls of the church. "First Sunday in a month I haven't been stuck to the back of the damn pew."

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  Monday morning, Warren Birch squares off the edges of the spreadsheets as if they were playing cards the size of place mats, and rests his hands on the pile. The spreadsheets summarize the firm's billings and our projected revenue.

  "We," he begins, referring to our firm, "won't stop bleeding until we get a new client, or we eliminate two positions. I've looked at the projections for all of our clients, and I don't see sufficient work in the pipeline to compensate for the loss of Powder Peak."

  "Or the loss of the Vermont Ski Areas Consortium," Duane Hurley adds, staring out the window of our conference room at the statehouse. Duane was a state senator from Bennington for close to a decade before joining Warren and me the year before last.

  "And personally, I don't see any new clients falling into our laps in the next few months, not with the legislature recessed until January," Warren continues.

  "How long do you think we can continue before we should start letting people go?" Duane asks.

  Warren pushes the spreadsheets across the table to him. "See for yourself. The simple fact is, we don't have enough billable hours in this firm right now to keep twelve people on staff. My opinion is that we can wait until the end of the year, if we're willing to freeze all salaries."

  Duane chuckles. "A year from Septemberthirteen months from nowI'll have three kids in college at the same time."

  Warren shrugs. "Or, we can let some people go, and keep the raise and bonus structure intact."

  "Well, you know where I stand," Duane says. "We're not a charity. We don't employ people out of the goodness of our hearts. If we don't have the billable hours, keeping people around is only postponing the inevitable. And it's postponing it at the expense of the people we're keeping on board."

  I look at my watch. As the three of us talk, Laura and

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  Miranda are probably on their way to the spot Anson Gray has chosen for the new sugar house. Anson had told them he was working second shift at the printing plant today, and so they had agreed they would meet at the end of the Gray's road around ten o'clock this morning.

  "You've been very quiet, Scottie," Warren says. "I know you've spent some time with the finances. What do you think?"

  Reedy will file his appeal with the state Environmental Board this week. Prehearing testimony will follow next week, with people like Miranda and me, people like Reedy's environmental experts and the resort's paid naturalists, offering our depositions to lawyers in private. It is ironic, but I will be providing my testimony to Reedy's Copper Project attorney, an environmental activist he has brought in from Boston.

  The actual hearing before the Environmental Board will probably be conducted the first or second week in September, and it will be held in public. It will, I imagine, be held in one of the rooms on the third floor of the statehouse, in one of the huge conference rooms that faces away from the parking lot. I hate those conference rooms. They're big, but they're dark and damp, and there's never any sun.

  "I know some of our clients have been disturbed by my position," I answer. "Companies like Glisten Skis. Well, I believe they may have reason to get even angrier in the next month." An image of Miranda dowsing among the ashes of the old sugar house crosses my mind, and I quickly blink it away. Anson described for me the location he has in mind, and I believe it's at least a mile from the old spot. I doubt Miranda will be anywhere near that particular patch of forest that burned.