The Highwayman: A Longmire Story (Walt Longmire #11.5)(2)

My friend Henry Standing Bear was talking to his contacts on the Wind River Reservation in my truck, so I’d gotten out and had trudged to the edge of the canyon in the early-morning fog that had settled in the passage and would stay there until the sun reached its zenith to burn the great mystery away.

Decades earlier, close to fifty bighorn sheep were reintroduced to the canyon, first transported in horse trailers and then flatbed cars on the Burlington Northern line that runs along the other side of the river. The animals are still there along the crags when the cloud cover is not too low, like pale, solitary sentinels keeping an eye on the white water of the Wind before it escapes the gorge.

She leaned forward, looking at the cliffs on the other side, and I started to run, feeling that sharp shock as I realized she was preparing to jump. “Hey!”

She stopped moving but didn’t turn toward me.

Afraid she might not have heard me, I shouted again. “Hey!” The sound of my fog-muted voice echoed off the rock walls. “Hey . . . Hey . . . Hey . . .”

With a slow arc of my hand, I waved, and she turned her face to look at me but gave no indication that she recognized or even saw me. She just stood there.

? ? ?

Route 20 runs some thirty miles through the Wind River Indian Reservation from milepost 100 in the tiny town of Shoshoni to milepost 134 just north of Thermopolis, home of the world’s largest mineral hot springs. In good conditions it can take as little as forty minutes to drive the Wind River Canyon Scenic Byway, and in bad, it can take a lifetime.

“I’m not crazy, Walt.”

“Nobody is saying that you are.”

We sat there in her spiffy Dodge Charger and watched the traffic thread its way through the canyon on a cold April morning. The fog had cleared a bit, and we could see where the late frost had caressed the aspens, the chartreuse buds still glowing with an unearthly desire for life. Every once in a while a few husks would break loose, would catch the breeze, and then flip through the air before they fell onto the frigid surface of the blue-black river.

“They’re wanting me to go in for a psychiatric evaluation.” She laid an arm on the sill of the Wyoming Highway Patrol cruiser and focused her eyes on the traffic like a blond-haired hawk.

“That doesn’t necessarily mean they think you’re crazy.”

She studied the road. “Have you ever been called in for one?”

Usually it’s the weather that impedes travelers who attempt to navigate the narrow canyon, snow that chokes the tapered passage like a mountain pass, drifting so that the highway disappears, or clouds that descend and fill the gorge like a funnel, rolling down the highway as if it were a tsunami, just as blinding and inevitable.

Then there is the wind for which the canyon and the river are named, howling whistlers of over forty miles an hour that shoot their way through the tunnels, singing an end song that dies over the whitecaps of the reservoir, a sound that no human can hear.

I glanced over at Rosey Wayman, who was rolling a large coin between her fingers. Tall and blond, lean and mean, she had blue eyes like searchlights that set you back when she looked at you. I’d known her for more than a few years when she’d been assigned to the Highway Patrol division in our part of the state. Through a few mutual cases, I’d observed her and come to the conclusion that she was one of the best HPs with whom I’d ever dealt.

“How long have you been in this division?”

“Troop G?”

“Yep.”

“About three months now.”

There was a call that came through from down near Shoshoni, the town south of the canyon, and we both glanced at her radio. “When did it start?”

“The first week.”

“Every night?”

“No.”

“But the same time each night?”

She sighed, and I watched as she stopped rolling the coin. Some of the tension left her body as she realized that finally somebody was taking her seriously. “Yes.”

“Standard frequency?”

“Our frequency, 155.44500 RM.”

“What time?”

“12:34 a.m.” We looked at each other, the two of us aware of the importance of that particular time around these parts.

“You mind if I ask you a different kind of question?”

She shifted in her seat and turned toward me, giving me all the blues I could handle as she went back to rolling the coin over her knuckles. “Go ahead.”

I gestured toward the mist-swept cliffs ahead of us, the vibrations of the falling water still discernible in the cruiser. “Out there on the edge of the cliffs, when I called out to you and you first saw me—why didn’t you answer?”

Sometimes it’s the rockslides that surprise the tourists, the state geologists, and the Wyoming Department of Transportation, unsure as to how they could’ve happened at all—things that may not impede travelers but certainly make their journeys more interesting, because the Wind River Canyon Scenic Byway holds a distinction unlike any other road in Wyoming.

She turned her head, placed a fingernail under the coin, and flipped it to me. I caught it in my right hand and opened my fingers to look at it. “Because I wasn’t sure you were really there.”

I studied the silver dollar, which was in surprisingly good shape considering its age, and mused on the stories I’d heard my entire life. You see, the Wind River Canyon Scenic Byway is haunted.