“And that,” said Fox softly to Maggie, “is why Dora’s okay, and Juan is not.”
Maggie met Fox’s eyes. He might be right. Then she thought about her encounter with Crow, when the face he’d shown back to her had been her own. She wondered what she should make of that, and what that meant about her own psyche.
Dora was shaken, but there was color in her cheeks and a spark of life coming back to her eyes, replacing that dull, defeated look that she’d worn when she first came up the wash, alarming Maggie more than the bruises.
Maggie said, “How long has Juan been gone now?”
“We fought just after I got home from the bar with you, night before last. Then he walked out and he hasn’t been back.”
Fox asked, “Did he take anything with him? Camping gear, anything like that?”
Dora shook her head.
“Then I think we should call out Search and Rescue,” Fox said.
Maggie protested. “If the mountain is crawling with people, it’s going to scare off Crow and the others. And they may be the only ones who know where Juan is now.”
Fox considered this. “You’re right,” he said, “but we’ve still got to go out there and find him. Juan is completely unequipped for the desert. He’s got no water if he strays from the creek; he’s got no protection from exposure. There are mountain lions, and rattlesnakes—yes, I know I’m scaring you, Dora, and I mean to. This is serious.”
“John and Lillian will help us look, won’t they?” said Dora anxiously.
“And Tomás,” Fox said, “if he’s home. I’ll call him. But we can’t go off half-cocked, like Juan. That means hiking boots, water, food, sunscreen, and first-aid supplies.” He ticked these items off on his fingers. “I’ll bring my Search and Rescue pack; some climbing gear; cedar and sage…” His eyes met Maggie’s. “We don’t know what we’re going to find out in those hills.”
She suspected finding Juan would have more to do with Crow and his kind than it would with mountaineering. Yet she found Fox’s physical competence and knowledge of the desert comforting nonetheless. She said, “I’ll go get dressed. Then I’m going to scramble up some eggs—I think we should eat before we go. Dora, try to think if there is anything that Juan has mentioned that might be useful. Or anything that Cooper might have told you, for that matter. Anything at all.”
“I’ll try,” she said.
Fox went home to get his gear and Dora stepped into Cooper’s kitchen to put in a call to the Alders. She came into the bedroom and reported, “They’re expecting us over there within the hour. I told them we’d explain it all then.”
She sat down on the bed while Maggie dressed, her eyes lingering on Fox’s silver bracelet resting on the bedside table. She gave Maggie a speculative look, but when she spoke it was about the Alders.
“What are we going to tell them?” she asked.
“That Juan is missing in the hills. It’s up to you how you want to account for that black eye—but if it were me, I’d tell the truth.”
“I meant about the Drowned Girl and the rest.”
Maggie sighed. “As little as possible, I reckon. At least for now, anyway. You believed me, and Fox believed me. I’m not sure I want to push my luck.”
Dora put her arms around her knees. “Are they beautiful?” she asked wistfully. “Juan said that they’re much more beautiful than us.”
“Did he? Crow is beautiful. And Thumper—”
“Thumper?”
Maggie smiled. “That’s my name for her. She’s beautiful like wild animals are, or else like the trees and cactus are. They look just like they should look. No more, no less than that.”
Dora herself looked rather forlorn. “Juan said that we’re pathetic next to them.”
“Well now, if Fox’s theory is right, that’s how Juan is feeling about himself—not about you.” Maggie sat down on the bed and put her arm around the smaller woman. “Look, Dora, we’ll find him.” At least she hoped they would; and if they did, that he’d want to return. Old folktales were running through her head, about men entranced by beautiful fairy women, spirited away into the fairylands for seven years … or the rest of their mortal lives.
Dora leaned her head against Maggie’s shoulder. Then the phone began to ring.
“Oh god, that’s probably Nigel,” Maggie said. She sighed deeply; she didn’t want to answer it.
Dora sat up. “I’ll get it,” she said. “I’ll tell him that you can’t talk now.”
“God bless you, dear,” said Maggie gratefully.
She followed Dora into the kitchen. It took the other woman a while to get back off the phone again.
“Nice voice,” said Dora as she hung up the receiver. “But he’s persistent, isn’t he? He kept saying he just had one little itty bitty question. Something about a guy named Harvey? He didn’t want to take ‘no’ for an answer.”
“That sounds like Nigel all right,” Maggie said.
“He’s always like that? No wonder you left,” Dora muttered, rolling her eyes.
Maggie took out eggs, peppers, tortillas. She heated oil in a frying pan. Something was nagging at the back of her brain. Something about that familiar word, “mage.” She thought about where she’d heard it before… Thumper had said she could ask her questions of “a mage, a witch, a shape-shifter.” Lines from The Wood Wife drifted into her head; she repeated them silently as she broke the eggs:
… and the mages gathering,
a crescent moon,
the land stretched taut between them, between
tree and stone; west and south;
north, the solemn slumbering rock;
east, there is only poetry,
the poet stumbling, the broken moonlight.
Mages. The word was plural there. Were there other mages in Anna’s paintings? She stopped suddenly, remembering Anna’s letters. Mages. That’s where she’d heard the word before. She turned the flame off under the frying pan just as Fox came through the door.
“What is it?” said Fox when he saw her expression.
“I’m not sure,” Maggie admitted. “But come back to Anna’s room with me.”
In the small studio, she took out the packet of letters and explained what they were to Fox and Dora. She shuffled through them, and found the one she wanted. It was dated November 9, 1948. She sat on the table, her boots resting on the seat of the chair, and read the letter aloud.
“My dearest M.,” she read to them, “I have learned so much. I have learned at last how to talk to the paint, and through the paint to the fire, the water, the stones, the wind in the mesquite. There are seven paintings that must be done, and yet I only know six of them:
The Windmage
The Rootmage
The Floodmage
The Woodmage
The Stonemage
The Nightmage.
Those are their names. I have not discovered who the Seventh is, or even if the Six are true images, or merely the reflection of my own ideas. But I work hard every day. I am thin and strong. I can walk for hours into the hills. I will learn to walk the spiral path and when I do, ah, then how I shall paint!…”
Maggie looked up them.
Fox said, “See? This fits. She’s worried that her own ideas might shape who they are—and it sounds like she wants to get beneath the shapes she created, down to the ‘true’ essence.”
Dora’s eyes were narrowed with concentration. “Where have you put those journals, Maggie, that I was looking at the first day we came in here?”
Maggie pointed to the shelf beside the desk. Dora knelt down and began to pull them out. “I’m trying to find the one that I was looking through that day,” she explained. “Remember I said there were notes for paintings in there? Well, this is all beginning to sound familiar: the Nightmage, the Stonemage…” She flipped through the pages of a journal, then pulled another out. “No, these are Mexico City journals … wait. Here we are. The Rincons.” She bit her lip as she turned the pages. She stoo
d and brought the journal over to the others. “Here it is. See?” She set the book down on the table, and they looked at it together.
The pages were filled with thumbnail sketches for paintings Maggie recognized: the white girl of Dora’s canvas; a tree woman like the one in Fox’s cabin; a sleeping figure made of stones like the painting up at Tomás’s place; and a stag man like the pencil sketch that Tomás also owned. Maggie pointed to an owl-feathered boy. “That one’s in here,” she said to them.
Fox nodded. “Cooper used to have that one hanging in the living room.”
“I’ve got it back here, in storage. As well as the one of Crow.” Then Maggie pointed to the sketch of the Stag Man. “Tomás has a larger sketch of this. But where is the painting now?”
Fox shook his head. “I’ve never seen one. It’s not here?”
“No, definitely not,” she said. She pointed to another sketch of a bright-eyed, wrinkled woman with a stone tied to her back. “I haven’t seen this one before either.”
“Cooper gave that to the Alders,” Dora told her. “Anna called it The Root Mother. He said it reminded him of Lillian, since she’s a botanist and all—and then Lillian pretended to be offended, saying she wasn’t that old and wrinkled yet.” She smiled. “I’ve always liked that one. It’s not so dark or sad as the others.”
Maggie turned the page. There were notes printed in Anna’s neat handwriting and, unlike the titles under the sketches, they were written in her own language. “Can you translate?” she asked Dora.
“Yes, but Fox’s Spanish is better than mine.”
He frowned down at the journal. “Can you give me a pen and some paper? I’ll copy out the list she’s made.” He took a notebook from Maggie and wrote:
The Guardians
Windmage/Owl Boy: Sky
Rootmage/Root Mother: Earth
Floodmage/Drowned Girl: South
Woodmage/Wood Wife: West
Stonemage/the One-Who-Sleeps: North
Nightmage/Stag Man: East
Seventh mage: ???
Fox pointed to a note in Anna’s margin, next to the name of the mage of the east, the Stag Man.
“What does that say?” Maggie asked him.
“It says: The Muse. Guardian of our hills.”
“Well, we’re in the east here in the Rincons,” Dora pointed out. “East of Tucson anyway.”
“Anna calls them guardians?” said Maggie.
“Ángel de la guarda is the term that she uses.”
“Guardian angels?” Maggie said, and he shrugged.
“She was Spanish Catholic, right?” said Fox. “So she’s put a Catholic spin on it. If she’d been Irish, she probably would have called them fairies. And Tomás would call them spirits, I reckon.”
“Tomás? Has he ever seen them?”
Fox smiled drily. “You ask him,” he told Maggie “Maybe he’ll give you a straight answer.” He looked down at the page again. “This reminds me of something he told me once. He said there are seven directions. North, south, east, west. The sky. The earth.”
“Then what’s the seventh?”
“The seventh lies within the heart. He says that we carry it inside of us.”
Maggie met Fox’s eyes, his clear grey gaze. She said, “Let’s go find Tomás.”
“Breakfast first, remember?” said Dora. “And John and Lillian are waiting for us.”
“Breakfast first,” Maggie agreed, closing the studio door behind them.
When the meal was finished, Maggie put on her English walking boots and one of Cooper’s hats. She filled up a knapsack with apples, chocolate, a bottle of water, Fox’s warm shirt, a flashlight, a trail map of the Rincons. She handed Fox his silver bracelet, and she put Anna’s bracelet on her own wrist. “Are you wearing any turquoise?” she said to them.
“There are turquoise beads on my choker,” Dora answered.
“I’m not wearing any,” said Fox. “Does it matter?”
“They say turquoise is for protection. Even Tomás told me that.” Maggie handed him a small turquoise stud. “If you wear this earring, I’ll wear the other one. Maybe it won’t do anything at all … but you never know, do you?”
Fox took the stud from her hand, and replaced his gold earring with it. “Look out,” he teased her, repeating her own words to her, “you might not get it back.”
Maggie smiled, meeting his warm grey eyes. “I can live with that.”
While Fox climbed the hill to look for Tomás, she followed Dora over to her house, standing in the doorway as Dora fetched her hiking boots. Maggie gazed around the big room with surprise. It was remarkably neat and tidy now. But all the long walls were bare.
They left the house with Bandido between them, catching up with Fox by Coyote Creek. Tomás Yazzie was with him, and Maggie gave the mechanic a timid smile. There was something about the older man’s quiet self-assurance that always made her feel a bit shy. His fierce, broad face turned gentle when he answered her smile with a smile of his own. He had a blue bandana tied around his brow, and his black hair hung in two long braids. He reached out and touched the copper band on Maggie’s wrist. She saw that he wore one too.
“This is Anna Naverra’s,” Maggie explained to him.
He nodded. “May I see it?”
She took it off and gave it to him. He looked at it closely. “Yes, they are the same.”
“Can I ask where you got yours?” she said as he handed Anna’s back to her.
“From my spirit-brother,” he answered her, but he volunteered no more than that.
At the Alders’ ranch, Lillian and John were waiting for them anxiously; and as Fox had predicted, their reaction to the news of Juan’s disappearance was to insist on calling Search and Rescue.
“Juan may have hitched a ride down the mountain,” Fox extemporized, his eyes flickering to Maggie’s. “Maybe he just needed to get away for a while, and he’s down the valley with a friend. Let’s not put the alarm out until we know that there’s a reason to be alarmed.”
John fetched his pack. “All right,” he said dubiously, “we’ll begin the search ourselves—I appreciate that it’s a delicate situation, and you want to keep it in the family. But if he’s not been heard from by tonight, then I’m going to let the sheriff know.”
Maggie watched Dora carefully as the six of them left the Big House together, heading down the long drive again and into the Rincon hills. Dora’s mouth was set in a thin white line, her face was bloodless, her shoulders tensed, and Maggie prayed that they’d find Juan on the mountain long before nightfall. They stopped at the Red Springs trailhead, and agreed to split the group into three. John and Lillian hiked to the north, on the ridge that ran above Coyote Creek. Dora wanted Fox as her partner—his presence seemed to give her strength. The two headed south on the lower path, Bandido following behind them. Maggie and Tomás took the Red Springs trail, running east along Redwater Creek. They would cover familiar ground until the Springs, and then Tomás would lead the way as they climbed higher, farther back into the wilds of the mountain.
As they started up the path, he touched Maggie’s arm and stopped her, pointing to the left. Behind a stand of paloverde trees, a white Ford truck had been parked off of the road. “I know that truck,” she said to him.
“The poacher,” Tomás guessed accurately. “John told me you had a run-in with him.”
“He’s after the coyotes.”
“No, he’s after the deer. He’ll shoot coyotes if he’s a mind to, but it’s that white stag he’s after.”
“How do you know that?”
The older man shrugged. “I’ve talked to the stones, the wind. They know. That big white buck’s a rare prize.”
Maggie frowned. “Should we go back and call the sheriff’s office? They’re supposed to be looking for him.”
Tomás shook his head. “The poacher can wait. The stag never shows himself before sundown. He’s quick, he’s smart, and he’s no fool. He’s more than a match for that on
e. Right now, we need to find Dora’s husband.”
“All right, let’s go,” said Maggie. She muttered under her breath, “Damn hunters.”
“I hunt,” said Tomás, in a soft, almost conversational tone, as if he’d said: The sun is hot. Then he added, in the same uninflected voice, “But I wouldn’t hunt that big white buck. I look for the lame, the weak; I hunt as coyotes hunt. For food, and not for sport.”
“We’re not coyotes. We can get our food from farms and grocery stores,” she said flatly.
“From farms? From factories, that’s where it comes from. Tell me why such a death is better than a clean kill, with respect and prayers?”
“Why kill at all?” she challenged him back.
He turned his stern, chiselled face to her. “Life feeds on life. We are part of that circle. Two-legged, four-legged, the green nation of the trees and plants; it is all the same.”
Then he was silent, his face expressionless, as they followed the winding trail through the tall saguaro, the creosote scrub, spiney green cholla and thorny sticks of ocotillo. The mountains embraced them, the Rincons to the east folding into the rugged Catalinas to the north. The sun beat down. Maggie angled her hat to shade her eyes from its fierce white glare. A jackrabbit darted across the path. Maggie called to it. It ignored her. It was browner, larger, than Thumper had been, and probably just a jackrabbit after all. But Maggie thought about Thumper, and Crow, hoping that thought, desire, expectation, might draw her closer to them.
They followed the creek to the circle of stone and white sycamore that surrounded Red Springs. It was empty, as Tomás had predicted. Maggie hoped that it would stay empty, that the big white buck would not appear—not as long as the poacher was out today, wandering the beautiful Rincon hills with the ugly weapon he carried. They sat by the springs to catch their breath, refilling their bottles with clear, fresh water. Maggie thought that no other water had ever tasted so good and so sweet.
The Wood Wife Page 25