The Highwayman: A Longmire Story (10 page)

“So, Kimama was Butterfly, your nanny.”

“I . . . I guess so.”

“Are you okay?”

She leaned against her car and crossed her arms, the snow collecting on her slicker and then quickly melting. “Yeah, just a little shaken, I guess.” She was silent for a while. “It was like hearing a voice from your past, you know?”

“I would imagine.”

She drew in a deep breath and looked up at me, her eyes fogged with tears. “I need to talk with her.”

“I bet.”

“No, I mean now.”

I glanced at Henry, sitting on the Dodge’s grill guard with his back to us as though he weren’t paying any attention. “Well, we can cover your duty while you go run her down. It won’t take very long to catch that beater.”

She glanced around, unsure of herself but finally making a decision. “No, I need to stay here in the canyon. Can you go and get her? Bring her back so I can talk to her?”

It seemed like a strange streak of logic. “Tonight?”

“Now. I need to talk to her now. Please?”

“Okay.” I glanced at Henry, who had turned and was looking at us from over one shoulder. “Let’s go.”

We piled into my truck and drove north in the direction that the Toyopet Crown had headed, the flurries seeming serious all of a sudden, and I hoped this was not going to turn into one of those spring blizzards. I wondered why Rosey had insisted on staying in the canyon but figured she wanted to in case the radio transmission came through again.

“Why do you suppose she wants to stay there?”

“I am not sure—maybe she is expecting another radio call?”

I flipped on my windshield wipers. “But why does she care at this point? We heard it, so she knows it’s not
a ghost—so why does she feel compelled to stay there?” I thought back about something I’d heard, something someone had said. “There was something Jim Thomas said about Mike Harlow—that he made mention that no one ever really got out of the canyon, so why not stay?”

“Perhaps Rosey has fallen prey to the same psychosis.”

“You think there’s a geographically specific psychosis?”

He glanced up at the towering granite walls. “It is a unique place, and it is possible that people are responding to it in a particular way.”

Hustling through the curves, I spotted lights up ahead. “Wouldn’t be the first time.”

There were a pair of dim headlights, but the vehicle looked too large to be the Toyota and, with its lights pointed toward us, it was going the wrong way. As we slowed, I could see that it was the Coleman oil tanker, the driver probably pulling over to cool his brakes.

The outlaw was out of his truck and was kicking something underneath the tanker, maybe trying to eke out another couple of miles from the old Diamond Rio.

Figuring he wasn’t my problem at the moment, I accelerated through the turn and could see the taillights of
the vintage car heading around the next curve. I hit the gas and caught up with Sam in the next straightaway. Switching on the emergencies, I blipped my siren and pulled them over near the rock wall between the reflector posts.

Jumping out, I slammed the door behind me and moved through the eighth of an inch of slush that was trying to decide if it was going to turn to ice or melt. I got up to the driver’s side and tapped on the window. Sam cranked it down and looked at me. “Rosey wants to talk to Kimama.”

“What about?”

I leaned down to look across at her. “She thinks you might’ve been her nanny when she was young.”

Lowering herself over the center console, she squinted at me. “Bucket, have you been drinking?”

“When she was a child, she lived here—well, down in Riverton—and she told me that she had a nanny who was called Butterfly, who used to call her Little Mouse. Does any of that sound familiar to you?”

Her eyes widened, and her hand came up to cover her gaping mouth as she leaned across the car to look at me closer. “The flat-hat, she was a child here?”

“Yep.”

“When?”

“I’m not sure—thirty-five years ago?”

Her hand fumbled across Sam as he reached out and steadied her. “Kimama, are you all right?”

“The flat-hat, where is she?”

I nodded due south. “Back at the tunnel. Why?”

“I must go to her.”

I stepped back. “C’mon, you can ride with me.”

Sam held fast. “No, I will bring her. You go ahead, and we will follow.”

“Okay.” I started to go but then turned and pointed a finger at both of them and spoke in my authoritative voice. “Hey, put on your seat belts.” I carefully jogged back to the Bullet, where Henry was waiting. Closing the door, I started the ten cylinders and turned back south. “Why’d you stay in the truck?”

“Because I could not get out—you lodged it against the cliff.” He looked at the old Toyota. “What did Kimama say?”

“She knows her. Has to—it’s too much of a coincidence. The names, the timing, and she said she needed to see her immediately.”

“The same thing Rosey said.”

I turned on my emergency lights. “Yep.”

“Thirty-six years.”

“Kimama said thirty-five but close enough.”

“That would have been approximately when Bobby Womack died.”

I thought about it as I swerved to miss the slow-moving tanker that Coleman had gotten back on the road, then watched as he steered into the pullout behind me and ground to a stop, probably in an attempt to avoid any more brushes with the law. “Yep.”

The Bear turned to look at me in the dim light of the cab, the greenish glow of the instrument panel reflecting off the sharp angles of his face. “What has changed in the canyon?”

I flipped off the emergency lights. “What?”

“The conversation we had previously about what could have been the catalyst for all this.”

I thought about the conclusion we’d drawn, the one that hadn’t seemed to make sense at the time. “Rosey.”

He turned toward the Wind River. “Rosey.” His voice resounded against the closed window, his breath fogging the surface. “She was there, too.”

More than a few hairs stood up on the back of my neck. “The night Bobby Womack was killed.”

He turned to look at me. “Yes.”

“She was with Kimama?”

“Kimama said that she used to come up into the canyon to visit him while they were having their affair, and if she was babysitting for Rosey she must have brought her with her.”

I sputtered. “Okay, let’s say she was there. What in the world, or out of it for that matter, would’ve started these radio communications after all these years?”

He raised his hands and gestured at the cliffs. “Rosey returning to the canyon.”

I shook my head and laughed. “Henry . . .”

“She became what he was, a trooper. Someone made the connection between the two. Bobby never had children, suppose he made some kind of spiritual link with Rosey. Her return could have triggered all of this.”

“Just so you know, you are way out on a limb with this hypothesis.”

He braced a hand on the dash as we made the last turn. “Do you have another?”

I put my foot on the brakes and slowed, feeling the rear of the three-quarter-ton break traction before pulling into the service area in front of the north tunnel. “Not yet, but I will.”

I’d barely gotten stopped before Rosey was at my
window, the heat of her breath fogging the glass the way Henry’s had. “Did you find her?”

“We did—they’re coming along behind us.” She looked back up the road, but they had yet to appear. “Look, Rosey, I wouldn’t get my hopes pinned on all this. It’s just a coincidence.”

She kept looking north. “It’s not.” Her eyes turned to me, and the blue there was otherworldly. “I’m remembering things.”

 • • • 

Sam Little Soldier joined us at the truck with the spring snow collecting on him as it would on a mountain, and we watched the two women from a distance as they stood by his vintage import and talked. “This gladdens my heart.”

“You knew.”

He turned to look at Henry and nodded. “About the relationship, yes.”

“But not about Rosey’s connection with it?”

“No. That was not something Kimama mentioned. I had had my suspicions about her and Bobby, but she had never said anything, and neither did he.”

“Then who did?”

He glanced down at the snow, the slush soaking his moccasins. “I would rather not say.”

I went ahead and threw in my two cents’ worth. “I’d rather you did. All things considered, I don’t give a hoot in hell for who’s involved with whom, but when it starts having an effect on the performance of a Wyoming trooper and a friend of mine, I want answers.”

Sam stepped away from us and turned, his hands still in his pants pockets. “This is not a criminal case.”

“No, it’s personal.” I waited a moment before continuing. “I can find out from Kimama, but I’d rather spare her that.”

He stared at me a good long while in the glow of the revolving emergency lights on Rosey’s cruiser, glistening yellow from the reflection of the granite canyon walls. “Mike Harlow.”

“The trooper?”

“Bobby Womack was his training officer and in that time, he became . . . umm, aware of the situation.”

Henry and I looked at each other as I turned back to Sam. “And he kept his mouth shut?”

“The thin blue line.” Sam smiled. “And they were friends.”

“Did Harlow make the connection between Rosey and the little girl that used to accompany Kimama?”

“I doubt it—none of the rest of us did.” He shrugged. “Besides, all you blond-haired blue eyes look alike to us.” His eyes came back up to mine. “And it was thirty-five years ago, man—she was a toddler.”

“But . . .” I glanced at the Bear. “Just for argument’s sake, why would Womack’s soul bond with that little girl anyway?”

Henry took a few steps toward the two women and then turned, his voice carrying back to us. “Kindred spirits.”

“There has to be more.” They both looked at me. “That night, the night that Bobby died, something happened. Something with the money . . . I don’t know.” I pointed a finger toward the women. “But at least one of them does.”

We watched as the two women finished their conversation and then hugged, long and hard. They stood there holding each other and maybe it was me, but the tall trooper in her long slicker and the tiny medicine woman seemed to change places, and I could almost see them as they had been all those years ago, the sha-woman and
the little blond girl who must’ve loved her more than life itself and gone everywhere with her. It was strange the paths the human heart chose to take and the attachments it made along the way. The surest sign of the altruistic nature of the organ is its ability to ignore race, color, creed, and gender and just blindly love with all its might—one of the most irrefutable forces on earth.

They broke apart, arms still entwined, as they held each other at arm’s length, a miracle of synchronicity.

Rosey placed an arm over Kimama’s shoulder, and they walked toward us but stopped where Sam’s Toyopet Crown sat waiting. They looked at each other again, hugged once more, and then Rosey helped Kimama into her seat, giving Sam a quick look as she closed the door.

“Gotta go.” He swung away from us, and he and Rosey exchanged a few words over the metallic blue top of the vehicle before he wedged inside and began cranking on the starter.

Rosey walked toward us as the ancient Toyota finally caught and belched a cloud of bluish black smoke before dying. Sam cranked the starter again, and the Toyota started on the fourth try, rattling to life, stuttering and pulling out, only to die one more time.

Rosey looked back, shaking her head. “I think we may have to push that thing to get it going.”

“Maybe.”

She slapped the snow from her hat as she cracked open the door of her unit while Henry and I stood by, me pulling my pocket watch from my jeans and reading the time to her. “It’s 12:32, in case you were wondering.”

She settled in the seat, still watching the Toyota as Sam ground the starter. “You know what? I really don’t care.”

I smiled down at her. “I’m glad to hear it.”

“I can’t help but think that it’s all over, you know? That Kimama and I were meant to find each other and now that we have, that it’s done.”

“Maybe so.”

Pulling his duster closed and folding his arms, Henry leaned a hip against her car. “Perhaps that is what this was all about.”

I continued to smile, but something caught the corner of my eye as I glanced at the road heading north, something shiny. I turned my head, but it still glistened, a sparkle in the snow-dusted road.

Stepping off, I walked toward it down the scenic byway, passing the Toyota as it finally caught and started
again. It was up the road, but even in the falling snow it caught the light like a beacon.

Rosey’s voice called out after me. “Walt? What are you doing?”

Hoping against hope that it wasn’t what I thought it was, I kept walking with my back to them and then stopped. I thought about kicking it to the side of the road and pretending that it wasn’t really there, but that’s not how the fates work; they align themselves like gears in a giant and inevitable machine, the spanner kicks forward, and the teeth mesh in an inexorable whir, a noise that decides your fate like a roulette wheel.

Walking to the centerline, I turned and knelt, picking up the silver dollar. There were only a few flakes on it and it was warm, very warm. Carefully palming the pocket watch I still held in my right hand, I turned the face upward and read the time.

12:34.

Automatically and in that slow motion that overtakes you in those lean moments of disaster, my eyes went to the tunnel, but no apparition was there, only the sputtering Toyopet Crown, which had shuddered and died once again, stalling just in front of the entrance of the tunnel and coasting to a stop.

As Sam Little Soldier tried the starter again, I turned back to Rosey and Henry, the trooper sitting in the driver’s seat of the Dodge with the Bear standing by the door, both of them looking at me. As I stared past the coin, it became more obvious that they were not looking at me but farther up the road.

The whir of foregone conclusion was like a meshing of time and place as I pivoted to my right in time to see the Coleman Heating Oil truck, only a quarter mile away, careen against the guardrail with sparks flying, as the driver overcorrected and bounced off the stone wall on the opposite side of the road. Trailing a rooster tail of sparks, the decrepit tanker shot forward unimpaired, the grimy yellow headlights of the runaway splitting the distance between me and the stalled car at the mouth of the tunnel.