A Serpent's Tooth: A Walt Longmire Mystery by Craig Johnson Page A

“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,