Spitting Image by Patrick LeClerc Read Free Book Online Page A

info and see what I did with it. That would tip them off that I was suspicious.
    Damn it.
    So. How to find Sarah without actually doing any legwork that might tip my hand. That wasn’t tricky or anything.
    Short of a crystal ball or divining with sheep entrails–
    Divining.
    Sarah’s uncle Bob might be able to help. I’d met him last winter when she and I needed a place to hide. His off-grid house up in the White Mountains had been just the place.
    While we were talking last winter, he claimed he could dowse for water. When he’d been in the Army, they’d tried to recruit him for a special project. He went into Special Forces, and Intelligence had wanted men who could find rebels or hidden weapons or downed pilots or whatever.
    It sounded like New Age superstitious bullshit, but what I can do sounds like New Age superstitious bullshit. And I’d met people who could teleport and now some more who could shapeshift, so I wasn’t going to dismiss the idea that Bob might have some ability that seemed supernatural at first glance.
    I picked up the phone and dialed his number. He answered on the third ring.
    “Sean?”
    “Hi Bob,” I said. “How’s things?”
    “Can’t complain. House is patched up. Things are quiet. You’ll have to come up here some time soon. What’s going on with you?”
    I blew out a breath. I thought of how to explain everything that was happening without breaking into a hysterical cackle. “Things are...complicated. I have a question. It relates to things you did in the Army.” Give him a chance to decide if he wanted to talk, or felt safe to talk before I asked directly.
    “Go ahead.”
    “With the things you tried, could you dowse for a person? Find somebody who’s gone missing?”
    “In theory,” he replied. “You missing somebody?”
    “It’s a long story.”
    “I got no place else to be,” he said.
    So I told him my long story.

Chapter 7
    BOB’S HOUSE UP IN the Great North Woods was about a three hour drive from Philips Mills. I got there late afternoon.
    Bob answered the door in his summer dress uniform: tee-shirt, sandals and cargo shorts. He looked good. His beard might have had a bit more grey in it, as did the long hair pulled back into a ponytail, but he didn’t seem to have lost any muscle.
    A patch covered his left eye. I felt a twinge of guilt about that. He’d been tortured by people who were looking for me and Sarah. So that was kinda my fault. But he got captured because he tipped off the wrong people while checking up on me, so he figured it was kinda his fault. I had gone in and rescued him, patched up some other injuries, but I couldn’t fix the eye. He chose to be grateful for the rescue instead of resentful about the loss, but I couldn’t help but feel like he gave me too much credit.
    He looked down at me from his six and a half feet and took my hand in a vast, calloused grip, thumping me on the shoulder with his left hand. It was OK, I heal fast.
    “How are you holding up?” he asked.
    “Worried. But I’m coping,” I replied.
    “Come on in,” he said. “Let’s see what we can do.”
    He led me to the kitchen table. I saw it was covered with maps.
    “Have you done this kind of thing before?”
    “Sort of,” he replied. “I’ve dowsed for odd things, and found them. The intelligence community wanted me to dowse for rebels or weapons, but that’s not easy to do if I don’t have a connection to them. I’ve found personal items for people. I’m hoping to reverse the process here.”
    “OK,” I said. “I brought some things she left at my apartment.”
    I opened the box of Sarah’s things. Bob looked them over, picking them up, feeling them, turning them over. Most were simple and practical. A toothbrush. A hairbrush. He stopped, holding up a necklace.
    “She leaves jewelry behind?” he asked.
    “I think she took it off the last time she took a shower,” I said.
    “And forgot to put it back on?”
    I shrugged. The last time she’d