The Wood Wife Read online

  He looked around the cafe with displeasure. Maggie had picked the place, a little Czech bakery popular with film students and would-be poets half her age. She imagined that he would have preferred some trendy new restaurant where he could make a point of paying the extravagant bill. But this was her turf, not his, for once in their lives. She needed every advantage she could get. And he’d be mollified once he tasted the pastry. Good food, in Nigel’s book, always won out over ambiance.

  “For god’s sake, there you are.” Nigel threaded his way through the students to her table in the corner. She stood for his embrace. In her boots with the heels she was even taller than he was. He kissed her on both cheeks, the European way, and said, “You’re looking well. Fantastic, in fact.”

  Maggie shrugged off the compliment as lightly as it was given. Unbidden came the image of Nigel’s current wife, a skinny young Parisian fashion model.

  “How are you, Nige? You look … tired,” she said.

  He sighed as he sat, rested his chin on his hand, and gave the grin that had won her heart years ago. “What day is this? Thursday? Still Wednesday for me. I never got home to bed last night. We play Toronto this weekend, Chicago on Tuesday, my alto is sick and my percussionist has just discovered his wife is sleeping with the soundman. So what’s good here?”

  “The coffee. The strudel. Any of the unpronounceable Czech pastries. The French ones will disappoint you.”

  He signalled the waitress, a young woman with hair dyed an alarming shade of magenta wearing a “Kafka in Prague” T-shirt covered with paint. Nigel ordered for both of them without consulting Maggie, a habit she’d never been able to get him to break. He remembered this too late, and gave her a guilty smile. “Is there something else you wanted? I’ll call her back.”

  Maggie shook her head. “So long as there’s coffee and lots of it. Look, Nige, I can’t stay that long. I’ve got a plane to catch at four.”

  “Today?” he said, genuinely taken aback. “I thought you’d be in L.A. a while.”

  “This is just a stopover. To pick up a few things. And see you.” She rolled a fork across the table nervously. “Actually, I’m headed for Tucson.”

  “Tucson? As in Arizona? Whatever for?” He leaned back in the chair and asked the question casually, but she knew that she had rattled him. His transatlantic accent shifted back to his native British whenever he was feeling out of sorts.

  Despite her nervousness, she took a certain malicious pleasure in telling him, “I’m going to live there for a while. I found another tenant for the house here; I told that piano player of yours he could have it. He’s made an offer to buy it, and I think we should consider it. I can’t honestly imagine coming back to Los Angeles.”

  Nigel sat still, with the ominous quiet he sunk into whenever something displeased him. She envied him that. She always spoke first and thought after—and usually regretted it.

  The waitress brought their order as Maggie waited for the inevitable barrage of questions. She picked up the coffee cup gratefully, letting its warmth dispel her anxiety. She didn’t need Nigel’s permission or blessing. She needn’t have told Nigel any of this at all. So why did she feel nervous as a cat on a griddle, as her granddaddy in West Virginia used to say?

  For all Nigel’s attempts at cool British reserve, his emotions were as tangible in the static field around him as if the air had changed color. Surprise shaded into suspicion and anger. It was not that he needed her here in L.A. But he didn’t like things happening outside of his control. They still co-owned the little house by Venice Beach where she’d lived for several years after the divorce, and it was his plan that she should come back to it. They prided themselves on a “friendly divorce.” She went to his concerts and he went to her book signings, the former considerably more frequent and star-studded than the latter; she was seen in the better L.A. restaurants in the company of Nigel and his current wife Nicole.

  But for the last two years she’d been renting out the beach house, determined to stay away from L.A. and the circle of friends who still thought of her as half of the Nigel-and-Maggie Show. First she’d gone up to San Francisco, living on a boat owned by an actor friend of Nigel’s who was filming abroad for the winter. Then farther up the coast to Inverness, and then even farther to Mendocino. Each time, although the destination had been her choice, the way had been comfortably paved by Nigel. Accommodations had miraculously appeared which she never could have afforded on her own—always “on loan” from some friend of his but subsidized, she suspected, by Nigel’s wealth.

  It was still odd to think of her ex-husband as wealthy, although he had always assumed he would be. The popular and financial success of the medieval music group he directed had taken everyone but arrogant Nigel by surprise; whereas the fact that she was barely making it on a writer’s income came as a surprise to no one. It was not that she worked less hard than he did, or that she was any less well known in her field; but sales on poetry and essay collections, along with the occasional teaching gig, rarely earned enough to pay all the bills. Too often it was Nigel who paid them.

  Nigel picked up his pastry and took a bite. His expression was bland, but there was thunder in the air. Then he pinned her with those lovely blue eyes that she’d never been able to withstand. “Why on earth Tucson, Arizona? I played a concert there once. There’s nothing in that city but two-stepping cowboys and retired old dears from Long Island. Have you looked at the map? There’s no ocean in Tucson. It’s the desert, and hotter than bloody hell.”

  “Do you remember Davis Cooper?”

  He nodded. “The cranky old dodger whose poetry you’re so enamored of. I know he’s dead. I saw it in the papers—what was it, last spring?”

  “Yes. Six months ago.”

  “Awfully sorry about that, Puck. You were still corresponding with him, weren’t you? You know, I hadn’t realized he’d won the Pulitzer ’til I read it in the obit.”

  “I’ve inherited his house. In Tucson.”

  For the second time that day she had the sweet pleasure of startling her ex-husband. He choked down his pastry and said, “Good lord, why? I thought you’d never actually met him.”

  She shrugged. “I hadn’t. To be honest, it was just as much a shock to me. We’ve been writing for years now, but he always put me off when I suggested a visit. I wanted to write a book on him, remember? No one’s done a definitive biography of Davis Cooper. He said ‘no’ flat out, but then he kept writing and we got to be friends. Of a sort. He’s left me his house, and his papers. I assume this is his way of letting me do the book now that he’s gone.”

  “What about his family? Wife? Children?”

  She shook her head. “His ex-wife is dead; his lover is dead; neither had any children. There’s just an elderly housekeeper, and he’s left the rest of what he has to her. Not that there’s much. The royalties on his books, some of which are still in print. A small life insurance policy. Some other bits of property in Tucson.”

  “Arizona is a damned odd place for an Englishman like Cooper to have ended up,” Nigel said testily. “It’s a long way from Dartmoor to the desert.”

  “His lover was Mexican, remember? Anna Naverra—the painter. He met her down in Mexico, then they moved over the border to Tucson. Naverra died a few years later, but he never left the desert again.”

  “As I recall,” Nigel said, interest warring with his anger and interest winning, “there was some mystery surrounding Naverra’s death. And now your Cooper has died under mysterious circumstances as well, hasn’t he?”

  “He drowned. Isn’t that strange? In the middle of the desert, with no water anywhere nearby. Murder, definitely. But no one knows why. His house was ransacked, and yet everything of value seemed to be untouched. The police never found out who did it. Poor old Davis. What an awful way to go.”

  She stared down at her coffee cup, swallowing her anger. Death had touched her life before, but nothing so brutal as murder. It maddened her that Davis had died when t
he streets outside were full of people who would never give anything half so fine back to the world they lived in. Why on earth would anyone want to murder an elderly poet?

  “Hey Puck,” Nigel said, leaning forward and encircling her wrist with his hand. “I’m real sorry. I know you admired old Cooper. I still remember when you did your master’s thesis on The Wood Wife. You had a copy of the book under your arm the day we met.”

  “You remember that?” She looked up and smiled. It was a detail Maggie had forgotten herself. She remembered the scene, in an artist’s studio in a bad but trendy part of London. The artist had been her good friend, Tat. Nigel had been her good friend’s lover. The electricity between them had been immediate although it was two years, two lovers, and two cities later before they finally got together.

  “I remember everything about you,” Nigel said, giving her a look calculated to melt bones.

  “You’re married. Stop it.” She smiled as she said it, but she withdrew her hand and picked up her cup.

  “And whose fault is that?” he countered.

  Whose fault? His as much as hers, surely. She might have been the one to end the marriage over his protestations, but the Parisian fashion model, and any number of other lovers, each more beautiful and empty-headed than the last, had preceded the divorce, not followed it. “I’ve a weakness for stupid women,” he’d told her at the time, “they’re just so restful. But you’re my life.”

  “Well, your life is walking out the door,” she’d snapped. Out of the door but not out of his orbit. She was moon to his sun, still trying to break free; and never quite certain it was freedom she desired.

  “So it’s research you’ll be doing,” Nigel was saying, framing her departure in more comfortable terms. “All right. I understand now. You’ll probably get a good book out of this, even if Davis Cooper isn’t exactly canon anymore. Second-rate Yeats, they called him at Oxford; too fairy-taley I suppose. But still, a Pulitzer …”

  “For his war poems. Not The Wood Wife. The critics savaged that one.”

  “Ah, well that explains it. Look, you should talk to Jennifer, my editor friend at HarperCollins. A book like this would be right up her street. Give me your phone number in Tucson and I’ll have her get in touch.”

  “Nigel, wait,” she said as he flipped a leather-bound notepad out of the pocket of his Armani suit jacket, identical to her own jacket. They’d bought them together a couple of years ago; she always wore men’s clothes, in basic black. “I don’t know what I’m walking into,” she explained. “I don’t know what I’m going to write, or when. I’m just going down to check it all out.”

  “But nonetheless you want to sell our house in Venice Beach,” he said, looking at her sharply. “It sounds to me like you intend to be there a while.”

  She made a helpless gesture with her hands. Unlike Nigel’s other women, she knew herself to be neither beautiful nor stupid; so why did he always make her feel like an incompetent child? “I don’t know where I want to be yet. Maybe New York or Boston for a while. Maybe back to Europe. I’ll spend some time in Arizona, go over Davis Cooper’s papers, and try to figure out my next move. The only thing I know at this point is I don’t want to come back to Los Angeles. There’s nothing for me here now.”

  “That’s not true, and you know it,” said Nigel, his voice seductive, pinning her eyes with his own.

  “Stop it,” she said, and this time she did not smile.

  He sighed. “All right, I won’t call Jennifer for you. But I’ll send you her number, just in case. Give me your address, Puck. I’ll send you silly postcards from Toronto. You weren’t planning to disappear into the desert altogether, were you?”

  Irrationally, she didn’t want to give it to him. But of course he had to have it. They were friends, weren’t they? They still moved in the same circles; he still had her cat, an arthritic Abyssinian who loved Nigel more than the air she breathed and pined when parted from him.

  He claimed her address, then restrained himself from asking after her affairs again. Instead he regaled her with stories set in his international Early Music world, courting her with his wit and his brilliance, nuggets of gold from his glittering life, clearly intended to remind Maggie Black of just what she had given up.

  He succeeded. By the time she boarded the plane from LAX to Tucson, it was Nigel’s parting embrace she carried with her, hot as heat rash upon her skin, and not the embrace of the perfectly adequate man she’d been dating up north. She watched the sprawl of L.A. diminish as the plane leapt up into the clouds.

  “Goddamn you, Nigel,” she said to herself as the city faded from her sight.

  • • •

  Fox sat on the steps of his adobe cabin breathing in the intoxicating smell of the desert after the rain: the pungent scents of creosote and sage, and the spicy scent of mesquite wood burning in a house farther up the mountain. The rains had brought autumn wildflowers to the rock-strewn mountain slopes. Yellow brittlebush blanketed the hillside and orange globe mallow lined the sides of the wash. The small oval leaves of the cottonwood trees were turning autumnal gold. In the stillness of early evening he could hear the call of the mourning doves, a lone coyote high in the hills, and the sound of someone approaching, tires sliding on the old dirt road. An engine revved, revved again, then silence. A string of steady curses.

  Grinning, Fox got to his feet and ambled down the path to his truck. Someone was stuck in the wash again. He wondered who it was this time. Dora, he wagered with himself. In Juan’s new jeep, looking guilty as sin.

  He got in his truck and drove down to the wash. The vehicle that was stuck was unfamiliar, a small Toyota with rental car plates, totally unsuitable for mountain terrain. The car had got halfway through the wash bed, then stuck in the sand on the eastern bank. A stranger emerged from the driver’s seat, a tall, dark-haired woman with a thin, unusual face. She looked up as his truck approached, her expression a mixture of worry and embarrassment.

  He backed his pickup close to the Toyota, parked, and took the chains from the bed. “Don’t feel so bad,” he said to the woman. “It happens all the time.”

  She followed him as he hooked the chains to her car, looking as rattled by the unrequested rescue as she was by the car sunk in water and mud. “I saw the sign,” she said, pointing at it: DO NOT ENTER WHEN FLOODED. “But I thought it looked so shallow…”

  “I know. The water’s just rain runoff. By morning the streambed will be bone dry. Right now, there’s no traction under there; you ought to pay attention to the signs.” He grinned. “But we all ignore them half the time. I don’t want to tell you how many times I’ve been stuck myself. Go get in your car now and put her in drive.”

  The woman got back into the Toyota. Fox couldn’t quite peg her. The clothes—a loose and mannish black suit over a casual white T-shirt—were pure New York or Los Angeles, her short haircut was artsy and European, but the accent was something altogether different. Kentucky? Virginia? He couldn’t tell. He knew who the woman was, however. She’d come to live in Cooper’s house and write a book about him. He’d pictured someone older and more stereotypically librarian-ish. Not a tall, dark woman with a voice like Kentucky bourbon. He shook his head as he started up the truck. That son of a gun, Cooper; six months dead and he was still full of surprises. The truck protested the weight on its tail, but it slowly pulled the Toyota up out of the water and onto dry land.

  He parked under the paloverde trees and unhooked the car behind him. The woman rolled down the window. “I’m looking for Redwater Road.”

  “This is it,” he said. “You’ve found it. It runs for another three quarters of a mile and then stops at the Red Springs trail-head.”

  She got out of the car and looked around at the valley wedged between two mountain slopes. The road had wound through the lower slope, a ridge topped with boulders, populated by tall cactus. On the far side of the canyon, Mica Mountain rose from the desert floor to a height of fifty-five hundred feet, a part of the
Rincon Mountain range that stretched across the eastern horizon.

  To the north, the Catalina Mountains dominated the sky and local imagination. Most hikers, horse riders and climbers favored the taller Catalinas, or the Tucson Mountains at the city’s western edge, leaving the Rincon range in the east to the deer,, the mountain lions, the botanists and the rangers who fought off the lightning fires each summer. The Rincons were a secretive range; there were no roads up to the heart of it. To learn its secrets, one went on foot, climbing hour after hot weary hour, through cactus and scrub at the base of the mountain, up through gnarled groves of live oak, to the forests of pine at the peak.

  Although designated as a federal wilderness, there were still a few places in the Rincons where old land claims permitted people to live, removed from the sprawl of city life below: the cattle ranches of Reddington Pass and along the Happy Valley Road, and the dude ranch in Red Springs Canyon, nestled in the northern slopes. The ranch had been built in 1912 out of oak, mesquite, adobe, and stone. Its buildings were scattered across the small valley, connected by footpaths and one rutted road. The dude ranch had flourished for a handful of years; a hunting club had owned the property for several more; and then the land had been broken up, the buildings sold off one by one. Each cabin had its own history now of owners and tenants who had come and gone; yet together they still formed a loose community close to, but separate from, Tucson.

  Fox prided himself that he knew damn near everything there was to know about the history of the canyon; after growing up here, he knew these mountain trails far better than the city streets below. To him, this was a beautiful land, dramatic, surprising and mysterious. But he could tell by the look in the woman’s eyes that she was not One of Them, as Dora would say. One of Them, with desert heat in her heart and a desert wind singing in her bones. She looked around at the loose, dry soil, the spiny cactus and ocotillo thorns, with an edgy, city-bred wariness as thought it was an alien moon.