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

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 the 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