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

eye out for her. I don’t want that poacher turning up and finishing off the job.”

Maggie nodded, thinking about Cody and wondering how long she would last in the wild. She was glad that this one had managed to survive, despite the loss of his eye. She watched until he disappeared in the brush on the other side of the wash. “Look, he’s going in the direction of your mother’s old house,” she said.

“He’s going to check out who’s in there. My sisters are here. Angela and Isabella. They turned up again last night.”

“Turned up? You weren’t expecting them, then.”

He shrugged. “I never know when they’ll be back. That’s just the way they are. They’re dancers, with a flamenco troupe, and they spend most of their time on the road. Which is just as well, as that house isn’t really fit for habitation. One of these days Mama’s going to have to let me fix it up.”

“Your sisters are flamenco dancers?”

“That’s right. With a small local troupe. Believe me, you never heard of it. It’s not the big league, like your ex-husband. Or you, for that matter. Or Cooper. None of us kids ever really wanted fame. Which Cooper never understood.”

Maggie looked at him curiously. “Well, fame or no fame, I have to say it’s a surprising crew you’ve got here in the canyon. Dancers. Artists. Wildlife experts. My ex assured me Tucson would be boring.”

Fox leaned back against a porch post, shading himself from the midday sun. “In a place this remote, you’re not going to find your average nine-to-five commuter types, are you? Dora is the only one who has to commute downtown to a job.”

“How long have she and Juan lived here?”

He scratched his chin, thinking. “A couple of years now. Cooper met Dora down at the gallery. Have you been to Book Arts yet? They carry small press poetry editions, so it was one of the old man’s favorite haunts. Cooper really hit it off with Dora, and who wouldn’t when she’s such a sweetheart? She and Juan lived in the Barrio then, and Dora was homesick for the East Coast. She liked the mountain though; maybe because she’d lived in mountains back in Vermont. So Cooper decided he’d sell them the stable. It was just a ruin before.”

“What about Tomás? What’s his story?” Maggie asked him then, with feigned casualness. She’d had another of those dreams last night. She couldn’t quite stop thinking of the man. Fox grinned at her, and she added, “I know. I’m sounding like a journalist again.”

“Tomás,” said Fox. “Well, Cooper met him some years ago at an AA meeting. Did you know Cooper tried to stop drinking for a while? Tomás stayed clean and Cooper went back to the bottle, but they stayed friends all the same—and then Tomás moved into the upper cabin. The cabins were empty when I was growing up. I don’t think Cooper ever used them before.”

“According to his letters, he and Anna used to put their houseguests in the cabins. A lot of their European friends came to visit when they first moved here from Mexico City. All kinds of people have been in those cabins: Anaïs Nin, Dalí, Pablo Casals…”

Fox squinted against the sunlight as he turned his head to look at her. “Houseguests? Cooper? I thought they’d always been reclusive-—Cooper and Anna both.”

Maggie shook her head. “Not at first. Cooper was a real gregarious guy in his youth, a dashing-young-man-about-town type. It was Anna who started turning their friends away after a couple of years in Arizona.”

“When she went crazy,” Fox said flatly, looking away again in the direction of the wash. The skinny coyote was back now, tracking something in the sandy soil.

Maggie asked, “Is that what Cooper told you?”

Fox frowned. “Cooper didn’t talk about Anna. Not to us kids. But that’s the impression I got from things other people said, that she went crazy, right? And then they had to lock her up.”

Maggie shifted uncomfortably on the wooden step. “I don’t know if she was crazy exactly. She had some kind of nervous breakdown, certainly. At which point her parents stepped in, and took her back to Mexico. She wasn’t locked up though. She went to a convent—not taking the veil or anything, but living there in retreat from the world. She died a year later—officially of pneumonia, but there has always been speculation that she killed herself.” Maggie looked at Fox curiously. “You haven’t heard any of this before?”

“The way I heard it, she got very depressed, and then she committed suicide. No one ever really said why. Did Cooper tell you this, or are you finding it in his papers?”

“Neither. I did a profile of Maisie Tippetts years ago for Harper’s. She’d been part of that circle of Europeans who fled to Mexico during World War II. Maisie had met Cooper in a detention camp in France—you didn’t know about that either? That he’d been held by the Nazis?”

Fox shook his head emphatically. “No. In fact, he told me his asthma problems kept him out of the war.”

“Well it kept him out of the army at any rate, but he was living in Paris when the Germans came. Hitler was going after the Surrealists, and Cooper was very tight with that crowd. Maisie and Cooper were fortunate—an organization called the Emergency Rescue Committee got them and a number of other artists out of the camps and then out of the country, just in time. Some of their friends weren’t so lucky, and didn’t survive.

“Talking to Maisie was when I first had the idea of writing a biography of Cooper,” Maggie told Fox. “She and Cooper had stayed friends after the war, and she’d also been very close to Anna. She told me about Anna’s breakdown. I don’t know what precipitated it, and I never had the nerve to ask Cooper about it. But there’s nothing I’m finding now that contradicts the basic facts of what Maisie told me.”

Fox groaned