Do You Believe Her?

The 10 who talked were with Gagne on 11 of 13 holes-in-one (eliminating the three aces for which there is no record of her playing).

I talked to them in separate interviews, on different days, asking each only to describe the events as they saw them. All were delighted to have been part of such a serendipitous happening. Their stories had two more things in common:

No one suspected chicanery. And no one actually saw a hole-in-one.

Only one of 10 witnesses saw a Gagne hole-in-one tee shot land on a green. Twice it happened for Don Balletto, a friend from Canada. His is the most plausible supporting testimony -- the only plausible testimony -- but even he expresses surprise. He saw Gagne's ball slide over swales and disappear. "We'd go up there," he says, "and the damned ball would be in the hole."

Though Kreedman was there for both shots, she is fuzzy on details. The first one, she doesn't remember at all: "Gosh, I'm so sorry." On the second: "All you can see is that she's right on the money. When you get there, there's no ball, and you look in the hole. Boom, there it is. That's all I can tell you."

The last two holes-in-one that Kreedman saw, she didn't really see. "I do have Lasik surgery," she said by way of suggesting that her distance vision might not have been good enough on May 25. "You can see the ball going. Did I see it actually drop into the thing? No."

Then, as for July 13, she says, "I didn't see the ball flight at all. So I was uncomfortable with that one."

Curiouser and curiouser, all this. But, as Kostis did, Kreedman offered an explanation for the phenomenon: "Jackie just has this gift." She says Gagne's "senses are very elevated. Hearing, vision. She just has an ability to see the line."

By this time in my search for an explanation that made sense, I had expressed my skepticism to a lot of people, so many, in fact, that reports of my questions had been relayed to Gagne and, as I now learned, to Kreedman.

Kreedman said, "Jackie heard you called her a liar."

"I'm not that stupid," I said.

"You might not use the word, but you're clearly insinuating. She also heard that you said she planted people on the course to put the ball in the hole."

"No, no, but I have asked, 'How did the ball get in the hole?' "

Anyway, Gagne and I had talked only briefly, but it was clearly long enough for her to decide she didn't like the way it was going. When I asked if she could help me find the SilverRock witnesses, she said, "Nope."

"Why not?"

"They've already been interviewed."

"I haven't seen a word from them," I said.

She said, "I'm really getting tired of this."

She thought the Kostis chatter should have convinced me. "He's the No. 1 golf man. He believed it when he saw how I read the greens and how I hit it." She said she would have her public-relations person call Golf Digest to complain that I had not done my work professionally. (Someone did call the magazine and left a voice mail without identifying herself. To me, it sounded like Gagne.)

Then I asked, "So when can we get together?"

"You and I will never sit down. Thank you for your time."

The next morning, I noticed more changes on her website. The references to a 17th hole-in-one had been deleted. Beyond its brief website appearance, number 17 was never made public.

Two days later, in another edit, the website no longer directed readers to Gagne's public-relations outfit. I e-mailed the firm's boss asking, "Do you still represent her?" A reply came not from the firm but from Gagne.

She wrote, "You are walking a fine line of harassment. My attorney has been notified. Clearly there is something wrong with you."

I heard from Jackie Gagne one more time. She called after a week of tumult that ended with her in a hospital.

Her relationship with Barbara Kreedman had come unraveled, becoming a matter of public record when each woman filed a restraining order against the other.

Witness affidavits described an angry confrontation at the Kreedman/Gagne home, followed at the address three days later with what Riverside County Deputy Sheriff Herlinda Valenzuela told me was closed out as a "disturbed subject" call; Gagne, in a voice mail to the Golf Digest office, said she had suffered an epileptic seizure.

That day late in August, Gagne was hospitalized. When I heard that she had been discharged and had been to lunch at Mission Hills, I asked her friend Judy Scrafford to relay a message that if she wanted to talk, I wanted to listen.

Gagne's call was a voice mail in which she proposed a deal of the sort that no reporter can make. She would sit for an interview if I first faxed to her lawyer the name of a source in my reporting along with what that source had said.

She also said, "You can quote me on this. It's pretty sad, when someone's down, you can get kicked around by a news reporter as well as my partner, Barbara Kreedman. That's pretty low."

So we never really talked again, but I did speak with Judy Scrafford, who described Gagne as "doing great now." I asked Scrafford if she expected her friend to play golf soon.

"Oh, my God, I hope so," she said.

Then, a laugh. "And I'm hoping she makes some more holes-in-one."