The Wood Wife by Terri Windling (good books for 8th graders .TXT) 📗

The other woman looked nervously up the road in the direction of her own house. “I should let my husband know I’m home first.”

“Why don’t you bring him over too? I’ve got a bottle of wine if you’d rather. Or I could make margueritas.”

“I vote for margueritas,” said Dora, climbing back into her battered truck. “I’ll fetch Juan and be back in a sec. It’s not very far to our place—down the wash on the left, past the bend.” She shifted gear, gave a jaunty wave, and backed the truck from Davis’s drive; then she gunned the engine and headed up the dirt track, dust flying behind her.

Maggie laughed as she watched Dora go. The woman drove like Tat as well, as though the internal combustion engine ran on raw enthusiasm instead of gas. She watched the truck bounce over the rutted road. No wonder it was so banged up.

She turned and walked back toward the house, her fear of the darkened mountain dispelled. She’d remember to take a flashlight with her the next time she went walking at dusk. No doubt she’d feel less jumpy here if she had some friends just up the road—someone beside ol’ Johnny Foxxe, and that disturbing man on the hill.

Maggie wondered then if Dora’s husband was the beautiful man she’d met up there. It would probably be just as well, she decided, if he was attached to someone else. The very last thing that she needed in her life was a schoolgirl crush on a total stranger. Or worse, another half-baked romance—like the last one, in Mendocino. Romance, unlike friendship, was not a skill she seemed to practice with any great success. She’d written Tat just a few days ago that she planned to swear off men for a while. She’d be an “art nun,” as Tat laughingly described those solitary stretches. That is, if her life could be called solitary with Nigel always on the phone. And with Davis Cooper’s ornery presence, even now that the man was dead.

Maggie reached the porch, and stared at it. The French doors to Davis’s study were open. The blue front door was standing ajar even though she was certain she’d locked it. She stepped into the hall and turned on the light. There were muddy prints leading into the kitchen, and the trace of an acrid, unpleasant smell.

She looked into the kitchen, appalled. The heavy wood table had been knocked over, glasses smashed on the hardwood floor. Mud and leaves were everywhere, and animal prints were tracked in the dirt. Before the hearth was a pile of vomit containing the bones and half-digested organs of some rodent or bird. Something had spattered the front of the woodstove, a rusty color like blood.

The living room was in better shape, although the couch had been overturned and one tall bookcase lay facedown, its volumes scattered across the floor. Davis’s bedroom had been spared. The door to the back room remained safely locked. The door itself had been clawed and battered; deep gouges marred the length of it. The worst of the stench came from Davis’s office. She flicked on the overhead light with dread. The poet’s desktop had been swept clear, its papers strewn across the rug. The floor was thick with mud and puddled urine and piles of shit.

Maggie took a deep and steadying breath. Then she turned the light back off again. She went outside, shut the front door and sat down, shivering, on the porch steps. Soon Dora and her husband would come. Maybe they could make sense of this. Maybe they could explain what the hell had just been inside Davis Cooper’s house.

• • •

Juan took a rag to the canvas, wiping away an hour’s worth of paint and work. It wasn’t right. The rhythm wasn’t there. The paint didn’t sing, it sat there, so much lifeless pigment in linseed oil, blended into shades of mud.

He threw down the cloth, disgusted. He could feel the rhythm pulsing in his hands, see the colors dancing behind his eyes. Why couldn’t he translate that insistent pulse into paint or plaster or clay? It wasn’t right, it just wasn’t right. Nothing had been right for months. He knew what he saw when he closed his eyes, he just couldn’t put it onto canvas.

He left his easel and sat down at the drawing board instead, picking up a charcoal stick, opening a hardbound sketchbook. He sharpened the stub of charcoal and began to draw random shapes and patterns. Spirals, linked together in intricate designs like a Celtic knot. Patterns that seemed to pour from his hands, bypassing conscious thought. It was the only work that pleased him now. The only thing that satisfied. The rest was skill, empty of art—the paintings he’d made for all these years. He had painted surface shadows only, the skin of the earth without the bones, flayed from the organism beneath. The shape of the mountains without their voice—oh, Cooper had been right about that.

And look where being right got him, said a calmer, steadier voice in Juan’s head. The practical voice. The Dora voice. All right, so he wouldn’t go out tonight. His feet were raw and painful anyway; his muscles ached. He’d stay indoors. He’d already shut the windows tight, locked the big doors of the barn. Tonight he would watch television with Dora and ignore the singing of the stars.

Bandido stirred and lumbered to his feet. Juan put down the drawing charcoal. The old mutt always knew when Dora was approaching, long before he could possibly hear her truck coming down the road. Juan switched off his work light, wiped his hands and headed for the kitchen. He had a pot of chili cooking and brown bread rising, ready for the oven. He was resolved to be a more satisfactory husband to Dora tonight.

As he stepped into the house he tried to avoid looking closely at the