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

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