I'd made sure to dress in my respectable investigative reporter gear: conservative blazer, blouse, and skirt. No checks or prints to give the camera's eye double vision. Everyone else around me was casually dressed in shorts and sandals and tees.
Except one.
I caught the gold glint of cufflinks on French cuffs. Custom-made silk-blend white shirt. Cream summer-weight wool-silk pants, knife-edge pressed, also expensive. A silk tie as smoothly blue as the cloudless sky, barely loosened at the collar. A suit jacket draped over the corner of a picnic table. Everything fit for a Fortune 500 executive in a boardroom, except the slim gold herringbone belt that curled around his narrow hips like a luxurious snake.
I took all this in within two seconds. Instant observation is a reporter's first line of offense. The expensive clothes played off a dark olive complexion too smooth to be a tan. His long-fingered hands incongruously held a small dead branch from one of the nearby trees, which he was showing to three young black children dressed in rainbow colors.
Their mother, thirtyish black velvet in Queen Latifah duds, relaxed at the concrete picnic table's other end, watching the man, and I could sure see why. His strong narrow Hispanic features had an aristocratic grace, as did the relaxed length of him.
It was easy to ogle him. All his attention was on the youngsters, who were jumping up and down around him, yelling "me first." That phrase had been so common at the orphanage it still put me off. I'd never crowded forward to beg for anything, even attention. They said I was distant, a loner, but it got me through better than vying for beta spots against the alpha toughs who ran the secret gangs institutional life spawns.
A pig-tailed six-year-old girl in pink and lime-green won the prize first: strutting over the grass, the Y-shaped twig in her hands like bicycle handlebars, or as if she were pushing an invisible lawn mower. Mr. White-collar Coolio walked right behind, smiling and encouraging her, the two older boys trailing them. Curiouser and curiouser. I wished I had a videographer with me. They made a pretty, contrasting picture: corporate Pied Piper leads urban kids. Something resonated with me that made my throat tighten. Prince Charming was focusing on the kids with genuine interest and obvious enjoyment. When the girl stopped to bound up and down in frustration, he bent over her, put his fingertips just ahead of her beautiful dark little hands on the sticks and they walked on together.
The girl squealed with joy and triumph as the bottom of the Y-shaped twig jerked down at the grass. Oh. Dowsing for water.
In Las Vegas? Except for cultivated water, like man-made Lake Mead behind Hoover Dam, and this picture-book lake, or sprinkler systems, it must all be desert under the well-watered grass.
I watched the man waltz the two young boys around the same territory, where each one "dowsed" successfully in the same spot once he added his own touch to the process. They were too young to realize they were all "discovering" the same "well." Probably a buried sprinkler head.
The Millennium Revelation had indeed proved Hamlet right that "there are more things in heaven and on earth than are dreamed of”-including a large dose of Hell that would have really bummed out the Melancholy Dane. But some superstitious water dowsing wasn’t among them. We had weather witches in Kansas who could play a lot of tricks with rain, wind, and fire, so why bother dowsing for water? It was a pre-Millennium Revelation cheat and outmoded anyway.
The guy, another under-thirty, surely, returned his gullible little friends to a very grateful mama, plucked his jacket off the picnic table, slung it over one shoulder, then looked right at me.
The tables had turned so fast that I couldn't pretend to be glancing away. And he was coming straight for me over the grass on those braided leather Italian shoes anyway.
Chapter Nine
“You're a skeptic," he said.
"Um, yes. It's a fun game for the kids, but water dowsing is small stuff nowadays."
"Giving children attention and a sense of accomplishment isn't small stuff." His look was corrective and cool.
What an arrogant twit! Although I'd just been touched by his ease with the kids, it obviously didn't translate to adults.
"No," I answered, "but making them think they can find underground water with Witch-Hazel's twig is deceiving them to make yourself look good." I'd been deceived a lot in my childhood, and still resented it.
He lifted the twig, which I hadn't seen him holding at his side. It was slender and rough-barked.
" Mesquite?" I scoffed. "Doesn’t it have to be willow?"
" Willow is traditional but not essential. I can dowse with anything that has three legs. A wood twig. A reformed wire hanger. A midget with a hard-on."
My shock couldn't help coming out as a laugh. His mouth was unsmiling but his dark eyes glinted with humor and challenge. "Why don't you try it? You might have the gift."
"I doubt it. I don't have a gift for anything but my work."
He shrugged and held out the stupid stick.
I stood and took it. It'd been…oh, fifteen years since I'd touched a dead stick, probably to prod an icky bug out of my path.
"All right. What do I do? Walk around with the two branches in my hands and the third one pointed dead-ahead like-" Well, I wasn’t going to say what it was pointed straight out like.
"Right."
Only then did I realize that he had no accent to go with the sleek Latin looks.
"Watch my purse," I ordered, and began circling aimlessly over the grass, "driving" a featherweight twig ahead of me. I went to where each child had jumped for joy, and then paused. "This is the place, isn't it? The sure-thing spot?"
He had perched on the picnic table to watch me. "That's the spot. You're an ace detective."
"I'm an investigator, but not that kind."
"Don't tell me: you investigate fraudulent phenomena."
"Sometimes. See? Nothing's here. Nothing's happened."
"That's because I'm not there."
I was thinking that might be a shame but it didn't prove anything.
He got up, draping his jacket over my purse so it wasn’t thief-bait, and came up behind me. Then he put his arms around me. but not close, and touched both thumbs and forefingers to the twig in front of my curled fists. The touch brushed my knuckles, no heavier than a butterfly lighting on my skin.
The slim branches in my palms swiveled fast enough to give me an Indian burn. The third branch jerked down as if drawn by an invisible hand, one that could pull as hard as a Great Dane on a leash. It pointed straight down at the ground.
"Ohmigod!"
"You did feel that?" he asked.
"Oh, yeah." I had. Along with a peculiar sharpening of all my senses, particularly smell, like the sun-lit ironed odor of his shirt enveloping me, the damp mossy perfume of grass under my feet, a musky citrus odor of men's cologne at my back. My own slightly acrid sweat from the warm day.
I stepped away from him and his soft touch and scents. The powerful pull against the twig wilted in my hands.
"You found this spot before," I pointed out. "It does this sort of thing. Maybe the minerals in the ground are a certain blend here. Maybe there's iron in the fertilizer for the trees. Something chemical."
"So you do believe in chemistry?"
I didn't miss the double entendre. My hard-nosed skepticism only amused him.
He was watching me with a faint smile, as benign as the one he'd shown the kids but more prickly, more prodding. I glimpsed the sliver of white teeth between his well-arched lips. Maybe he was a daylight vamp; some could "pass" as human if you didn't look too close, like Undead Ted. Vamps were always drawn to my Black Irish pallor and I hated that, like the girl in the old ballad who wanted to be loved for more than her yellow hair alone.
He glanced down at the grass. "You think this spot is a 'plant.' Tell you what. Take the twig somewhere else, wherever you want to go."