The Wood Wife by Terri Windling (the false prince TXT) 📕

school kid and his buddies, messing around down there. Idiot kid nearly drowned.” He sighed and turned to Maggie. “You’ve seen those signs for Upper Falls? In Reddington Pass, as you come up the hill? It’s beautiful there, but treacherous. Seems like damn near every week we’re pulling some fool kid from the canyon. This one broke his leg down there and had to be airlifted out. He’s lucky. People have died there. The water is stronger than it looks, and flash floods come out of nowhere if its been raining farther up the hills. But you can’t keep people away from a bit of water in the desert.”

Fox sat down at the kitchen table, looking completely exhausted. He shook his head at Maggie’s offer of a drink. She didn’t know he never touched the stuff, not after watching Cooper’s slow self-destruction with whiskey and gin.

Maggie refilled her own empty glass, and Juan’s, and topped up Dora’s. Her expression was thoughtful. “I never imagined there would be creeks in dry land like this.” She paused, then added hesitantly, “Is that where they found Davis, then? His lawyer told me he’d been drowned. But I couldn’t understand how he’d been drowned in the middle of the desert.”

Fox shook his head. “No one understands it. He was a good mile from Tanque Verde Creek, or any other water. His body was left in an old wash bed, one that’s been dried out for years. The police don’t know where it was he drowned, but wherever it was, it wasn’t where he was found. That means somebody put him there. That’s how they know it was murder.”

“But who would possibly have done that?” she asked. Dora could hear a mix of confusion, anger and grief in the woman’s low voice. “He didn’t have any enemies, did he? Other than the usual literary kind. And those old feuds, with deMontillo and that critic … what’s his name … St. Johns? Those are decades past. He doesn’t seem to have owned much of value, if robbery was the motive.”

“The land. And Anna’s paintings,” said Fox. “But if anyone had a motive to kill him for that,” he added with an odd, small grin, “well, I reckon it would have been you.”

Maggie shook her head. “I didn’t even know I was in his will,” she told him.

“No? Well, I’ll be damned,” Fox said, looking startled by this.

Dora looked around, suddenly realizing just what was missing from Cooper’s house. “Where are all of Anna’s paintings now?”

Fox looked at Maggie and, at her blank response, he ventured, “Cooper’s lawyer must have had them put somewhere for safekeeping. They’re fairly valuable now, you know. He was always getting letters from museums that wanted to buy them, or even just exhibit a few. But you know Cooper, he’d throw the letters out. The old man couldn’t be bothered.”

“He’d promised Anna the paintings wouldn’t leave the mountain,” Dora corrected him. “At least that’s what he said to me. I had to promise I’d never take the one he gave me away from here.”

“The lawyer wouldn’t take them away,” said Juan, “without informing Maggie. And the cops would have noticed if they were missing. They must be here somewhere.”

Maggie said, “I haven’t seen any paintings. But there’s one room here that’s all locked up; my guess is that they’d be in there.” She looked at Fox. “I meant to ask you for the key to it.”

“I haven’t got a key,” Fox said. “That door has been locked since I was a boy. The mystery room. My sisters and I always wondered what the hell was in there.”

“Surely someone opened up the room for the police investigation.”

“Maybe they did. I don’t know.” Fox shrugged.

“Hmmm.” Maggie smiled suddenly. “Well, here’s your chance to find out what’s inside. Let’s just break through the lock.”

“Maybe the cops still have the key,” said Fox. “Maybe you should give them a call before we break down Cooper’s door.”

“It’s Maggie’s door now,” Dora pointed out.

“I’m not protesting,” said Fox. “Believe me, there’s no one more curious than I am. I can bring my tool box over in the morning and work on the door after we see John.” He grinned suddenly at Maggie. “I admit, I’ve been sorely tempted to break in myself since Cooper’s death. If I were less honest, or maybe just less superstitious, I probably would have. Lord, how we used to scheme to get in when my sisters and I were growing up. But the windows were nailed, the lock couldn’t be jimmied, and old man Cooper never budged. We couldn’t even talk to him about it—he’d go all funny on us.”

Maggie gave him a thoughtful look. “It’s strange to hear you talk about him that way. I never pictured Davis with children around. He seemed so solitary.”

“He was solitary. He was living all alone up here after Anna died, drunk as a skunk.”

“When did your mother come up here, then?”

“Sometime in the early fifties, I think; several years before I was born. Cooper was living at the bottom of a bottle and he needed looking after. He said he put an ad in the paper and my mother answered it.”

“And your father?”

Fox met her gaze steadily. “Truth is, my mother never married. According to Cooper, our father was some local cowboy Mama went out with from time to time; he came and went, and finally went for good, leaving her with three kids to raise.”

“You were born here, in the mountains? Then you must have known Cooper quite well,” Maggie said to him with interest.

“Well sure. I was raised in the house across the wash. The canyon was even more remote back then; we almost never went downtown. My sisters and I got ‘home schooled’ by Cooper—which mostly meant we ran wild on the mountain … and recited a lot of poetry.”

Dora listened to this, fascinated. She’d never heard Fox say more than two words about his past before.

Maggie said, “Would you and your