Water from a Deeper Well by Dick Croy

A Midwestern town’s water supply is contaminated. Love lives have gone bad. Can a dowser (or water-witcher), brought to town clandestinely by a New Age Walter Mitty, help solve both problems?

Is writer and filmmaker Cork Rockner, businessman by default, trying to become a better person by bearing exotic California waters to his Midwestern roots? Or is he only the shallow womanizer that CARLOTTA, a headstrong woman who wants an uncomplicated traditional relationship with him, believes him to be? After Carlotta kicks him out, Cork resolves to apply what he’s still learning in love and life to his next intimate relationship, with Brook, a recent divorcee still fragile from the breakup of her marriage.

Dowser Walter Barry isn’t looking for love but the source of contamination in the city’s drinking water, after Cork persuades a few citizens in his conservative hometown to risk careers and reputations when more conventional methods of exploration have failed. By believing in Cork when he himself has begun to question his own motives and his ability to pull all the pieces of his confidential plan together, Brook, still putting her life back together after her recent divorce, shows him how we can all become dowsers – of water from a deeper well.

Fighting inertia, skepticism and self-doubt, Cork manages to convince his fellow “dowsers” that in a time of malaise, when the water of life is as likely to poison as it is to sustain us, we need to seek open-minded, open-hearted solutions to our common problems.