The Third Magic Read online

  Glancing toward the creek from her place in the long line winding toward it, Ginger unconsciously touched the bruise on her cheek.

  "This way, please," a young volunteer said, urging her along. The volunteer was a pretty young girl Gwen's age. She was actually one of Gwen's classmates, although neither acknowledged the other.

  The volunteers were a big improvement on Zack Diamond's original setup. He had thought only to offer the water to the public; he had not anticipated the huge crowds the water would draw.

  The creek itself had become a muddy, slippery mess almost as soon as the place opened to the public. Now, even though a wooden deck covered the entire area of what had once been the frame house's front lawn and a double rail running the length of the creek had been installed, Miller's Creek was still a problem for the large numbers of disabled persons who visited it.

  For this reason, a bevy of helpers was recruited from local churches, businesses, charities and, during summer months, among the high school population.

  Gwen Ranier was herself one of the volunteers, a fact that astonished most of the administrators at Dawning Falls High. She certainly did not appear to be the sort of student who typically offered her time in community service.

  "Was that one of your friends, dear?" Ginger asked in a voice that approximated what she thought good mothers should sound like.

  Gwen laughed mirthlessly. "Girls like that don't have friends like me."

  "Well, maybe—" her mother began, but she was distracted by John, the man of the moment, who was squeezing her buttock.

  Gwen turned away, disgusted. The man was so recently sobered that he still reeked of alcohol, his hair slicked back after a morning shower, his skin pasty, his eyes red and unused to the early hour. Despite Ginger's rhapsodic enthusiasm for him, Gwen recognized him as the latest in a long string of losers who had come to violate her mother and her home. When he looked back at her, she stuck her finger in her mouth and pantomimed vomiting. He made a face. Gwen gave him the finger and left the line.

  "Don't go, honey," Ginger said. "Please. I want to try the water. It's been here all this time—"

  "Go ahead," Gwen said. "I'll wait for you. Don't lose your place in line."

  Ginger smiled. "Thanks," she said, rushing back to John's side. She tried to put her arm through his, but he shook it off.

  John didn't like Gwen, Ginger thought, disappointed but not surprised. Most of her boyfriends didn't take to the girl.

  But that hadn't all been their fault. Gwen had never made an effort to get them to like her. And then, inevitably, they had ended up being cranky with Ginger for burdening them with a surly teenage girl.

  Ginger wished she could explain to them that Gwen was really a good girl at heart. She just didn't know how to make people like her, that was all. One of Ginger's basic beliefs was that if you were a woman and you wanted to get by in life, you had to get people to like you. Especially men. You didn't want to antagonize men, because they could cause God-knew-what kind of trouble for you if they wanted to. They could take you to the stars, but they could dump you in the garbage, too, so you'd better make sure you were on their good side. That put you in control.

  Throughout all of Ginger's relationships with men, no matter how abusive or humiliating those experiences had been, she had always boasted to Gwen that she was really the one in control because she knew how to get back on a man's good side.

  Unfortunately, Gwen did not show signs of knowing how to handle men. She certainly hadn't known how to handle her mother's boyfriends. It was getting to the point where Ginger was embarrassed to introduce her daughter to anyone, because more often than not Gwen would sneer at them without a word, roll her kohl-encircled eyes heavenward, and saunter away, leaving Ginger to make lame explanations about teenagers.

  Gwen did have one thing going for her, though: She could draw. Some of her sketches were pretty good. Ginger knew because she, too, had been able to draw well at one time.

  At Gwen's age, Ginger had been offered a scholarship to Cooper Union, one of the best art schools in New York City. Unfortunately, she got pregnant. Three years, a baby, and a number of emergency room visits later, Ginger was once again unwed, and Cooper Union was no more than a name.

  Ginger felt herself blushing. Hot flashes, she told herself, but she knew better. It was shame, red-hot and unforgettable.

  To turn down a scholarship to Cooper Union! What might she have become?

  Nothing, she thought dimly. I probably wouldn't have made it anyway.

  Gwen was every bit as talented as her mother, but even less ambitious. She wouldn't even apply for the scholarship, Ginger thought with dismay. And with her attitude, no one was likely to offer her one if she did.

  As they neared the front of the slow-moving line, John removed his shirt, revealing a dramatic line of nine deep scars across his stomach. "Machine gun fire," he explained, displaying his torso to the staring crowd. He pointed to a large tattoo of the Marine insignia on his right arm. "'Nam," he intoned.

  When they finally took their places at the creek, John made a show of splashing water all over himself and everyone around him. "Got to make sure I get enough," he said.

  Ginger put up her hands, trying to protect her hair from the spraying water. "John, please—"

  "Hey!" He was looking down at his belly. Then, dripping and sodden, he turned toward the crowd, and a gasp of amazement went up around him.

  "Praise the Lord!" someone shouted.

  "Amen!"

  Not a trace of the nine deep scars remained. John laughed and shook hands with everyone in the line who was willing to touch him. "Well, don't that beat all," he said, thumping the unbroken expanse of skin across his stomach. "I'd say I need to get me a beer after that." He tugged at Ginger's arm. "Come on."

  "Wait a minute, sweetie," she said, dabbing water prettily on her wrists and behind her ears, as if it were perfume. With a swift gesture she swept some of the water across her swollen cheekbone. "There we are!" she said, patting her hair in place.

  "That was frickin' unbelievable!" John said, putting on his shirt as they walked away.

  A pretty blond woman gave him a wink. He kissed the air in her direction.

  Ginger pretended not to notice as she took a compact out of her purse and scanned her face with it. "Oh," she said, faltering.

  "What is it, baby?"

  "Oh, nothing. Just stumbled over a stone or something." She smiled as she replaced the compact.

  Gwen walked over to them, peering to get a look at her mother's face. "Mom, let me see—"

  "Goodness, but it's getting hot out here!" Ginger exclaimed, rushing past her daughter over the boardwalk. "John, honey, I think I'll just go back home now, if you don't mind."

  "You can go anyplace you want, but I'm getting me a beer." His glance wandered back to the blond woman.

  "Certainly. You go ahead. I'll see you later."

  "How are we supposed to get home?" Gwen shouted after John's back as he loped off. "Jerk."

  "It's all right, honey. We can walk."

  John was making a beeline toward the blonde.

  "Looks like your boyfriend has a short attention span," Gwen said. Her mother barely glanced up. "Well, you can't keep them on a leash, can you," Ginger said perfunctorily, her heels clattering against the wooden flooring, her skirt billowing.

  "Mom, wait a minute."

  "What?" Ginger asked irritably, out of breath from her sprint away from the creek.

  "Let me look at you."

  "Oh, don't be—"

  Gwen took her mother by both arms and stood facing her head-on. The bruise over Ginger's cheekbone was still there, even more prominent now that some of her makeup had been rinsed off by the water. "It didn't work," she said, puzzled.

  Ginger tried to twist away. "I probably just didn't put enough on," she said. "Doesn't matter, anyway. It's only a bruise."

  Gwen continued to stare at her.

  "Come on," Ginger said, pulling
her daughter with surprising strength down the hill.

  Chapter Six

  UGLY WOMEN CAN DANCE, TOO

  Ginger Ranier had known that the water did not heal everyone. That fact had been known almost as soon as its healing power was discovered. The question was why. Why did it work on some, and not on others?

  Among those who achieved perfect wellness after visiting the water were young people, old people, sick people, people with injuries, people of all races and all beliefs, atheists and zealots, drunks and addicts, the hopeless and the saintly, bulimics and overeaters, carnivores and vegetarians, people who had been kept alive by drugs, and people who had never visited a physician.

  The same mix of people were left unaffected by the water.

  This led to all sorts of speculation. New Agers proclaimed Miller's Creek to be a vortex of extraterrestrial vibrations. The movement of the planets was their explanation for why the water might cure one twenty-year-old woman's case of multiple sclerosis and not another's, or one brother's cleft palate while leaving the other afflicted.

  Almost every religion had some sect or other claiming the water's healing as the exclusive property of their particular deity. A surprisingly large number of people voiced the opinion that the government was behind the phenomenon in some way. These people insisted that, despite the fact that use of the water was completely free of charge, hardworking citizens were in some way paying for it all in the end. And, predictably, there were those who proclaimed it all to be the work of the devil.

  Had the water affected everyone in the same way, Miller's Creek might have been accepted by the Catholic Church, or even by the medical establishment, as a bona fide place of miracles. But the fact that many who came to the waters in good faith left unhealed and heartbroken (including a number of small children with pathetic disabilities) caused both the media and the general public to slough off the place as a fraud or, at best, a psychosomatic "cure" for the gullible.

  As a result, the flow of visitors, while always heavy, did not require any major changes to the simple setup. And after an initial flurry of media attention, the press ceased to maintain an interest in the authentic but inconsistent miracle of the water from Miller's Creek. This was disappointing for the young man who had purchased the land, because it had been his hope that the healing water would serve as the cornerstone for a great center of metaphysical study. To keep his dream alive, he found it necessary to spend almost all his time traveling the country soliciting funds to pay taxes on the property, keep up insurance policies, and maintain a minimal staff of two to oversee daily operations.

  Miller's Creek's two employees were a night watchman, to ensure that people did not remove the water from the creek—that would eventually cause a drought in the pine forest downstream—and an administrator working out of the ramshackle house on the property to take care of the myriad details of a nonprofit enterprise.

  In this, the owner had been lucky. The night watchman, Enrico Santori, was a local septuagenarian whose grandson was the chief of police of Dawning Falls. Miller's Creek was patrolled every hour of every night from six in the evening to six in the morning.

  And the administrator was a woman whose prodigious powers of organization kept everything running so smoothly that one would not have guessed that there was any work at all involved in keeping a shrine visited by millions of people each year. Her name was Emily Blessing.

  Ms. B, as she preferred to be called by the local populace, had appeared in Dawning Falls seemingly out of thin air, and looked like everyone's idea of a small-town librarian. Perched on her nose were a pair of black-framed, mannish glasses that were so old that they had actually become more fashionable than they had been when new. She always wore her hair parted in the middle and pulled into a severe bun on the back of her head. Her wardrobe reflected a sense of style so undeveloped that a number of women in town speculated that Ms. B might be a renegade nun.

  They were wrong. What she had been, back in the days before her life became so utterly, unalterably changed by circumstances she still did not fully understand, was a prime mover at the Katzenbaum Institute, a think tank devoted to exploring the implications of science on society. She had been an intellectual, a scientist, and an atheist. She had also been the reluctant guardian of a child she had never wanted, a child she had lost one day, whose loss had made her radically reassess her life.

  Most of the populace of Dawning Falls neither knew nor cared about her background, however. What was interesting about Ms. B was that she had come to Miller's Creek covered by a twisted mass of scar tissue that ran from the base of her right ear all the way down her arm, and that it had never gone away.

  Emily Blessing was the first person to have been unaffected by the healing waters.

  "I'm a reminder to everyone who visits here that the miracle doesn't always work," she told Gwen Ranier's high school class in the same crisp, matter-of-fact manner that she explained the molecular structure of the curative water or the history of other "miracle" sites around the world. Part of Ms. B s job was to drum up volunteers to clean the grounds around the creek.

  After hearing her speak. Gwen went to the makeshift office at Miller's Creek the next day to volunteer. She had returned every week since then, mostly for the chance to speak with Ms. B.

  Gwen admired the woman's factual, unemotional approach. After the teary, fairy-tale world in which she had been raised, Gwen's head nearly spun from the freshness of the air around this woman of ideas.

  And there was another reason Gwen liked to spend time around Ms. B. The woman never commented on Gwen's appearance. Most people had a quite strong reaction to her. Either they were afraid of her, or they found her disgusting. But Ms. B seemed to notice nothing about her but her mind.

  "Why do you suppose the water helps some people and not others?" she asked Gwen pointedly on the first day she came to volunteer.

  The girl had looked around awkwardly, her kohl-rimmed eyes reluctant to light on either Ms. B's face or her scarred body.

  "Look at me," Emily snapped. "These marks are from burns. They're part of who I am. You don't insult me by seeing them. You insult me by wanting not to see them."

  Gwen blinked. She had spent her entire life around people who had wanted her to be different from what she was. She gulped and met Ms. B's eyes.

  "Again," the woman said. "Why do you think the water heals some people and not others?"

  "Why do you want to know?" Gwen countered, folding her arms defiantly over her chest. "Are you looking for advice?"

  Ms. B's eyes widened, then crinkled into a deep, quiet smile that Gwen recognized and appreciated. "No," she said, "I am not, thanks all the same. Actually, I am interested in learning how you think. If you think."

  Gwen inhaled sharply. She had not frightened the woman with her attitude. Ms. B had not grown suddenly insecure and ordered her out of her presence.

  "Well?"

  No one had ever spoken to her this way. As if what she said mattered, if only as an intellectual exercise. "Some people think the water's magic," she said tentatively.

  "Do you?"

  "I don't know. It might be. That is, it may only work if you believe it does. Deep down, that is. Some people act like skeptics, but they really believe. Or want to."

  "Do you think I don't believe?"

  Gwen shrugged. "I don't know. I can't think for you, Ms. B."

  Emily sat back. Gwen felt—knew—that she had gone too far. She liked this woman. But, as usual, she had blown all possibility of making contact with Ms. B by a useless show of bravado.

  "I... I didn't mean that," she said, feeling stupid.

  "Mean what?" Ms. B asked crisply. "That you can't think for me?" She cocked her head. Her expression was that of someone engaged in an interesting conversation. Which was to say, she was not smiling, but neither was she visibly angry. "I would say that, with that comment, you have shown me that you possess a teachable mind."

  Two hectic spots of color rose i
n Gwen's cheeks. "Can I come back tomorrow?" she asked.

  Emily Blessing smiled. "Anytime," she said.

  That evening, Emily thought about children. She had heard about Gwen Ranier and her unfortunate mother, and could see for herself the direction the girl's rebellion had taken. Mothers were of paramount importance to the development of their offspring, she thought, whether they did anything or not.

  She stayed awake all that night, as she did many nights, fighting off the memories of another child. For Emily had once been offered the chance to be a mother, even though her body had not borne an infant. She had once had a boy to raise. And she had failed that boy utterly.

  The last time she saw Arthur had been four years before, in a hotel in Tangier, Morocco. She had only caught a glimpse of his face before the fire that would nearly claim her life had broken out. He was there, waiting to see her, and she was walking over to him, nervous, anxious, excited...

  They had never made contact. The fire had swooped into the room like an army of avenging angels, spreading destruction and terror in a heartbeat. The ceiling had fallen; the people inside the building had run, screaming, in all directions. Emily had fallen and been trampled by the mob. She woke up days later in a hospital room, looking like some nightmare beast.

  Afterward, during the long months of her painful recuperation, she had seen Arthur on television, delivering some sort of apocalyptic message. But Emily had paid no attention to what he said. It was enough to know that he was alive. She had reached for the phone then, determined to find him somehow. He was alive! Arthur had made it out of the fire without a scratch.