Craig Johnson - A Serpent's Tooth - A Walt Longmire Mystery

My eyes focused on a massive water buffalo whose head was slightly turned and who looked out into the street as if he might pull the rest of himself from the wall and make a break for it.

“Sheriff?”

I turned to see a woman coming down from a mezzanine at the back of the main room. She was in her sixties and holding in her hands what appeared to be a Crock-Pot, using a set of dish towels as oven mitts as she came. Handsome with a good spread to her shoulders, light brown hair streaked with gray, and, partially hidden behind a pair of cat’s-eye glasses, direct, blue eyes—almost cobalt. She glanced at my deputy, who had stalled out by the case of books to the right, and then at me.

“Expected you earlier.”

I tipped my hat. “We got here as quick as we could.” With a curt nod, she walked past me around the center counter, where she used a hip to try and slide open a large, iron-trimmed door. “Can I help you with that?”

Without waiting, I gripped the steel handle and pulled the door open, revealing a short hallway between the Merc and the bar next door.

Her voice echoed after her as she walked through. “Come along, and I’ll buy you a beer.”

Seeing no reason to loiter, I glanced at Vic, who shelved her book and followed with an eyebrow arched, as usual, like a cat’s back.

The doorway from the Merc opened up to the left of the bar, and it appeared as if I was going to get my Rainier. I ducked under a large rattlesnake skin tacked to a board and continued around the coolers on one end of a bar made from old barn siding. The surface had been sealed with polyurethane, entombing what looked to be close to fifty more snake skins. “Lot of rattlers around this place?”

She set the Crock-Pot onto the flat surface, reached into the cooler, and placed two ice-cold, longneck bottles of Rainier beer in front of us. “Not anymore.”

I glanced at the labels. “You know my flavor.”

“Everybody in this county knows your flavor, Walt Longmire.” She stuck a hand across the bar and winked. “Eleanor Tisdale. I used to be on the library board with your wife. Sorry for your loss.”

“Thank you.” I shook her hand and nudged one of the wooden stools out with my boot for my undersheriff. “My deputy, Victoria Moretti.” They shook, and I asked, “You own both places?”

She nodded and adjusted her glasses that trailed a set of pearls around the back of her neck. “Run the library, too, but people also borrow books from the Mercantile.” She was classic Wyoming, that indiscriminate age between thirty and a hundred where the women find a comfort for themselves and just settle in. “I keep the door closed to discourage drunken shopping.” She reached up with hands that had seen hard labor and effortlessly twisted the caps off, sliding the pair of Rainiers further our way. “You found my daughter?”

Vic sat beside me, and I turned my eyes to the bartender. “Well . . .”

“She’s in trouble?”

I paused for a moment, took a sip, and tried to decide how I was going to play this. “Possibly.”

“That would follow. It was always her signature.” She leaned her elbows on the business side of the bar and sighed. “My husband was in the oil business.”

“Was?”

“Dale died about three years ago. Light-plane crash down in Mexico.”

“Sorry to hear it.”

She gestured away my condolences with a wave. “Not as much as I was. Sold the majority of the family ranch to those yahoos over at East Spring before he died.” She thought about it. “Sarah was a lot like him. Headstrong to the point of idiocy. He once told her that he wasn’t going to save the ranch for her if she left, so in predictable Tisdale manner, she did and he didn’t.”

I nodded, not quite sure what to say to that. “When was the last time you had contact with her?”

She stared at me as if I’d just joined hands with the point-of-idiocy group myself and then laughed. “Seventeen years ago, come August 6th.” She crossed her arms and settled the cat’s-eye glasses on Vic and then back to me. “Sheriff, maybe you better tell me what you are wanting.”

“Um . . . Eleanor, how about you take a seat?” She looked concerned but remained standing. “We had a young man show up in Durant this weekend; looked like a runaway, about fifteen years old. I tracked him back to Butte County, South Dakota, where the sheriff there informed me that a woman approximately the age of your daughter, who identified herself as Sarah Tisdale, had come into his office and reported that her son was missing.”

The tension in the woman’s back pulled her up a little straighter. “Son?”

“When I called him and told him I had custody of the boy, he drove up to where it is your daughter was supposedly living, but the people there said they’d never heard of her or the boy. Interestingly enough, the map she left with the sheriff had a phone number scribbled at the bottom—your phone number.”

Eleanor Tisdale groped for a stool and pulled it underneath herself. “Do you have any photographs, anything that might . . . ?”

I fingered the Polaroid that we always take to keep track of lodgers from my shirt pocket and held it out to her. “This is the boy.”

She read the single word written in red Magic Marker at the bottom border. “Cord?”

“That’s his name.” She took it gently and held it as if it might vanish. “We don’t have any photographs of your daughter, and to be honest we don’t know where she might be.”

“Oh, my.”

I lowered my head to get in her line of sight. “I take it he looks familiar?”

“The spitting image.” She got up and punched NO SALE on the cash register at the end of the bar and walked back to us with a school photo of a pretty young girl with long, blond hair and deep, sapphire eyes. “Where is he now?”

I took the photo and studied it; the resemblance was, as they say, uncanny. “He’s safe in Durant at a friend’s. I didn’t see any reason for him to be shuttled off to a foster home since he has a mother looking for him and relatives in-county.”

“Have you heard any more from Sarah?”

“Unfortunately, no. I was kind of hoping you had.”

She shook her head. “No. Nothing in seventeen years. Dale, when he was around, wouldn’t even say her name; he used to refer to her as ‘that ungrateful child.’” Her eyes unfocused for a moment and she began a familiar verse. “‘Turn all her mother’s pains and benefits . . .’”

She faltered, and I continued the Shakespeare for her. “‘To laughter and contempt, that she may feel / How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is / To have a thankless child.’”

The cobalt eyes stayed distant and then focused on the photo in her trembling hands. “He’s fifteen?”

“Yep.” I watched as she continued to finger the photograph like a holy relic. “The math works out, doesn’t it? How about we trade photos, and I’ll get this one back to you after we find her?”

I was about to add more when the bar door swung open to the accompaniment of an attached jangling bell. The middle-aged man in the doorway was pale and painfully lean, with red hair and a sharp face half-hidden under the bill of a black John Deere ball cap. His clothes, an off-white nylon dress shirt and a powder blue blazer, were rumpled and hung off him like a bad hanger. Slung over his shoulder was an expensive, spacey-looking tactical shotgun with a small flashlight mounted underneath the barrel.

Eleanor’s voice sounded behind me. “Can I help you?”

I leaned to my right to see around Vic, who gave him a quick look and immediately dismissed the odd character as Ichabod Double-Ought Buck. She sipped her beer. “What, were you born in a barn?” She placed the bottle back on the bar and murmured to herself. “Yeah, you probably were.”