Cry Baby Hollow

by Love, Aimee

  “Oh, I am sorry to hear that, sir. Is she terribly ill?”

  “Well, that’s excellent news. We have a bus going to pick up several other residents at Placid Crest who will be attending. If you can call there this evening and authorize her release, I can see that she makes it onto the list. You have the number?”

  “Thank you so much, sir. I’ll call Placid Crest in twenty minutes to confirm it personally.”

  “Yes sir, I will. That’s Lieutenant Commander Guinn.”

  “Yes. Thank you for your help, sir.”

  Aubrey hung up and Vina, Germaine, Betty and Erma burst into riotous applause.

  Vina beamed at Aubrey.

  “Come on,” she told Germaine, reaching across Aubrey to take her arm. “Let’s go get you packed.”

  All four of them stood and hurried across the room toward the exit.

  The karaoke machine finally came to life and the lilting strains of an all-too-familiar melody came on. Aubrey wasn’t quite sure what she had expected Joe to sing - maybe something by Jimmy Buffet - but this wasn’t it. Vina froze halfway across the room and waved furiously for the others to stop.

  “We can pack in a minute,” she barked at them and rushed back to sit beside Aubrey on the couch. They all followed, none of them understanding what was going on until Joe sang the first quiet words of the Bread song.

  “And Aubrey was her name, a not so very ordinary girl or name…”

  Aubrey tried to make herself as small as possible.

  “But who’s to blame, for a love that wouldn’t bloom, for the hearts that never played in tune…”

  “He wants you bad,” Vina said in a stage whisper that carried through the whole room.

  Everyone was riveted. They looked like the spectators at a tennis match, turning their heads back and forth to look between the two of them.

  “How do they all know my name?” Aubrey demanded in a whisper.

  “They don’t,” Germaine told her. “But you’re the only woman under eighty in the room and he’s looking right at you.”

  Joe caught her eye as he started on the second verse and winked. He had to sing it an octave lower than the original but the effect was surprisingly lovely.

  “Wait ‘til they find out your Aubrey. You’ll be famous,” Vina added.

  Aubrey started to get up.

  “Where are you going?” Vina demanded, grabbing her arm.

  “To pull the car around,” Aubrey told her.

  “Like hell,” Vina said, motioning for Germaine to get her other arm. The two of them pulled her back down.

  “Joe’s is a nice boy,” Vina informed her unnecessarily, “and he’s my friend. I will not have you hurtin’ his feelings. Now smile.” Out of long habit, Aubrey obeyed.

  She stayed for the whole song, smiling through clenched teeth as Joe belted out the lyrics.

  “And how I miss the girl, and I’d go a million times around the world just to say, she had been mine for a day.” Joe finally finished.

  Everyone clapped furiously. One tiny, shrunken woman in a wheel chair parked in the front row looked so rapturous she probably would have thrown her panties at him if she hadn’t been wearing Depends.

  Vina shot up and grabbed his arm, pulling him back to the sofa.

  “Save my seat,” she told him. “We have to go get Germaine packed. We’re busting her out.”

  “That’s great,” Joe said, plopping down beside Aubrey.

  When Vina and the others had scurried off, Joe leaned over and whispered in Aubrey’s ear, “I didn’t mean to embarrass you.”

  “It’s fine, Joe,” she told him loudly, knowing that whispering would only intensify their observer’s curiosity. “You have a very nice singing voice.”

  Joe laughed.

  “Whenever you say something’s fine, it means it isn’t,” he observed.

  Aubrey sighed.

  “My mother named me after that song because it’s what was playing when I was conceived in the back row of a Bread concert,” she told him. “She never even caught my father’s name.”

  The karaoke machine was being packed up and the small crowd dispersed back to their rooms.

  “Sorry,” Joe told her again.

  “It’s really okay, Joe,” she assured him. “It wasn’t that you sang it. It just isn’t my favorite song.”

  “And people probably sing it to you all the time,” Joe observed.

  “Actually,” Aubrey admitted. “That was the first time. Thankfully, it wasn’t a very popular song.”

  “Next time I’ll stick with Sweet Caroline,” he promised. “It’s a crowd pleaser.”

  When the ladies returned, Joe and the others went out to wait in the cars so they wouldn’t look too suspicious while Aubrey and Germaine went to get in line. They found a place at the end and Aubrey had just started to get bored when a klaxon sounded and red lights above all the exits began to flash.

  “Is it a fire?” Aubrey asked Germaine.

  “Escape attempt,” Germaine told her with a grin. She pulled up her pants leg and showed Aubrey her anklet. “If we try to leave, it sets off an alarm.”

  Aubrey’s eyes went wide. Had Joe found a trash can? She bet he hadn’t. She bet he’d just shoved Helen’s anklet into his pocket and forgotten it was there. She thought about going back and helping him explain things, but decided that the line was long, and they would probably have it all sorted out before she and Germaine were ready to go anyway. Still, it was tempting, if only to see the look on his face.

  Germaine rode back to the hollow with them and insisted that they stop at a fireworks stand on the way. She bought enough to supply half the county and when they dropped her at Vina’s, she insisted that they come back for barbecue the next night and help her fire them off.

  The next four days were spent relaxing on blankets on Vina’s back lawn, getting tan and eating all day, and drinking Mint Juleps late into the night as they shot fireworks off across the lake and admired the reflection of the colors on the water. The entire hollow attended the festivities, with the exception of Wayne Mosley, and thoughts of dead deer and mailboxes and old people being treated like prison inmates were completely banished until the night of the sixth.

  After Aubrey had dropped Germaine back at Placid Crest, she parked at Vina’s and walked home with Joe. They sat on her dock talking for a while, but she turned in early and was just dozing off when she heard a booming crash from her front yard. She fell asleep with a smile on her face, convinced that everything was right with the world.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Joe was sitting in what Aubrey had come to think of as his ‘usual spot’ when she came out the next day. His truck was parked in the driveway, and he was leaning against it, drinking a beer.

  “Don’t touch the goop,” she warned him unnecessarily.

  “Is that the technical term for this stuff?” Joe asked, looking at the piles of viscous, green sludge splashed around the vicinity of what was left of the mailbox. The box itself was in the yard where it had undoubtedly been hit by a baseball bat. All that was left of the pole was the rebar coming out of the cement base and a few shredded wisps of the black plastic drainage pipe.

  “I can see why you haven’t been parkin’ here,” Joe told her.

  “I was actually wondering if you could help me set up the shed as a garage for the Mini,” she said.

  “Sure,” Joe told her.

  “But not right now,” she grabbed her purse, locked up the cabin, and walked down to Joe’s truck. “Right now, I’d like a ride.”

  “Where to?” Joe asked, finishing his beer and opening the truck door. He reached across the bench seat, grabbed the cooler from the passenger side, put it in the bed, and tossed his empty bottle in after it. He came around and
opened the door for her.

  “Oh, you can just dump me at Vina’s and I’ll drive myself,” she offered.

  “And where are you headin’ after that?” He asked.

  “To get a deputy and track down the guys who’ve been doing this,” Aubrey told him.

  “There’s no trackin’ down about it,” Joe told her. “Everybody knows who it is. We just ain’t got any proof is all.”

  “Well, now we have proof,” Aubrey said. “He’ll be the green one. Now will you take me to my car?”

  “Are you shittin’ me?” Joe asked. “I wouldn’t miss this for anything.

  “Sheriff’s station then, please,” she told him.

  “What was in that stuff?” Joe asked as he drove.

  “Jell-O, pepper spray, and florescent paint,” she told him.

  He shook his head and turned right at Broad’s.

  “You need the main one or is the substation okay?” He asked.

  “Whatever’s closest,” she told him.

  “What was it you used to do in the Army?” Joe asked her.

  “Navy,” she corrected. “Most recently, I worked for MWR stocking facilities with games and recreational equipment.”

  “So that’s how you got into the toy store business,” he realized.

  She nodded.

  Joe pulled into an abandoned gas station that had been converted into a sheriff’s department sub-station just outside town.

  “Here we are,” he told her. He hopped out and ran around to open her door.

  “I’ll just be a few minutes,” she told him and walked in through the swinging glass door.

  It was ten before she came back with a deputy in tow.

  “Hey Joe,” the deputy said. He was a pudgy, dour-faced man of around fifty in an ill-fitting uniform. He looked like he would rather be doing almost anything else.

  “Hey Larry,” Joe greeted him. “How are the girls?”

  “Expensive,” Larry told him with a grin.

  “Larry has three girls at UT,” Joe explained to Aubrey.

  “Beth Ann says she wants a masters,” Larry told Joe, going over to a patrol car and unlocking it.

  “She home for the summer?” Joe asked him.

  Larry shook his head.

  “She’s workin’ at the Outback near the mall in the city. She says the tips are real good.”

  “Yeah,” Joe told him. “That place is always packed.”

  “You know, arresting this boy is gonna cause us both a mess a trouble,” Larry said, apparently tired of small talk.

  “I don’t want him arrested,” Aubrey assured them.

  They both looked at her, their shock written plainly on their faces.

  “You don’t?” Joe asked her.

  “Then why am I comin’ along?” Larry asked.

  “You’re my insurance,” she told him, hopping up into Joe’s truck before he could get the door for her.

  Joe drove back down the Dixie Highway, passing Broad’s and continuing on.

  “I thought you said the Mosley’s were in the hollow before ours?”

  “Ours is a hollow, theirs is a cove,” he corrected, “and what makes you think it’s a Mosley?”

  “Well, Vina said the Mosley’s were almost all bad and that one of them was sheriff, which would explain why the sheriff’s office doesn’t pursue it… What’s the difference between a cove and a hollow?” Aubrey asked.

  “The sheriff is Mitchell Dunn, but his mother was a Mosley before she married. The kid we’re going to find is Darren Mosley. His mom never has married his Dad, though they got a bunch a kids. He’s a long-haul trucker and isn’t in town much, thank god. I was at Broad’s one night and he was on one of those girls so bad they kicked ‘em out. You understand Broad’s isn’t in the habit of throwing men out for pawing the ladies. It’s kinda the whole point.”

  Aubrey’s jaw dropped.

  Joe grinned.

  “I just go for the beer,” he explained, making a left. “They’ve got the coldest beer in Cocke County. They keep it a freezer set just low enough that it doesn’t pop.”

  She still didn’t say anything.

  “As to the difference between a cove and a hollow, look out the window and see.”

  They were winding between two hills on a deeply rutted dirt road. Unlike the hollow, it didn’t show any signs of widening. She also didn’t see any water or very many plants. The earth was a dusty gray and covered in patches of weeds and scrub and there were hardly any trees.

  An ancient farmhouse appeared on the right. It had a washer/dryer on the front porch and its paint, if it had ever had any, had peeled off long ago leaving its old, grey wooden slats to face the world alone. Several rusting cars stripped to little more than frames sat in it’s yard. Aubrey would have guessed it was long vacant if it wasn’t for the fresh wash hung on the line and a pair of hens scratching in the unfenced yard.

  “Are those chickens?” She asked. They were grayish-brown and their feathers looked shorter and sleeker than she thought a chicken’s should.

  Joe shook his head.

  “Guinea fowl,” he told her. “People say the eggs and flesh are a little gamey, but they eat their weight in ticks.”

  The empty beer bottle in the bed of the truck bounced around with every jolt on the uneven road, beating out a staccato rhythm and alerting everyone for miles that they were on their way.

  Another farmhouse, even more disreputable looking that the first, appeared on their right. It had an old, rusty swing set in the front yard. All of the equipment was gone except for the little glider with its pair of benches that faced each other. A tiny old woman sat in one and swung laboriously back and forth. The swing set wasn’t fixed to the ground properly, so it rocked up with every swing, pulling two legs a foot off the ground and then slammed down as the glider returned. The old woman watched the truck with the deputy’s car close behind it pass, but never slowed down her swinging.

  “So if this is the Mosley cove, how is it that Wayne Mosley lives on the other side of the ridge?”

  “They aren’t confined to one cove,” Joe told her. “They’ve spilled out.”

  “Delightful.”

  “Not all these folks are Mosley’s,” he explained as they passed a grouping of three shacks close together. There was an ancient school bus parked beside them and it wasn’t until a naked, filthy child ran out of one, its mother hard on its heels, that Aubrey realized they were tenanted. The woman grabbed the toddler by the hair and they both froze and watched the little convoy pass.

  “The way I understand it, the old matriarch, Celestine Wynn, had four daughters and three of ‘em married Mosleys. These people all are related to her, some of ‘em in more ways than one.”

  “What does that mean?” Aubrey asked.

  The road forked ahead and Joe slowed down and went right.

  “Let’s just say that their family tree doesn’t branch as often as it might,” he said.

  Aubrey cringed.

  “Celestine and Vina were said to be quite the rivals in their day,” Joe told her. They pulled up in front of a surprisingly nice double wide with a basketball hoop in the paved driveway and a teal pickup with fancy airbrushed stripes parked beside it.

  “Was she as old and mean as Vina?” Aubrey asked as Joe stopped the truck and turned off the ignition.

  “Not was,” Joe corrected, nodding. “Is. And God help you if you ever meet her.”

  Aubrey hopped out of the truck.

  “Don’t come unless I call for you,” she told Joe and pointed to include Larry as well.

  She went to look at the teal pickup. The entire passenger side was covered in florescent green splatters, smeared where someone had tried to clean them off.

&nbs
p; Aubrey smiled.

  The front door opened and four young men came out. They were all wearing shiny running pants several sizes too big, ribbed sleeveless undershirts, and backward baseball caps, as if they lived in East L.A. instead of East Tennessee. Two of them had green paint splattered on their faces and necks and red-rimmed, swollen eyes.

  Joe and Larry both got out of their vehicles, standing ready.

  “What the hell do you’uns want?” Their leader asked. The whites of his eyes were brick red and his nose was raw and puffy. His arms were green up to the elbows.

  Larry and Joe both took a step toward Aubrey defensively, but she held up her hand for them to stop.

  “I just wanted to gloat,” she told them truthfully. “You’ve cost me a lot in mailboxes in the last month, but I think repainting your truck is going to cost you more.”

  Realization dawned on him.

  “Fucking cunt!” He spat in her face and, ignoring the presence of Joe and the sheriff’s deputy, backhanded her, hard.

  She collapsed to her knees and Joe raced forward with Larry right behind.

  Joe had clearly thought she must have some sort of plan or be a master of martial arts. It had obviously never occurred to him that she would egg them on and that they would risk hitting her with a deputy present.

  She held up her hand again and Joe skidded to a halt, grabbing Larry’s sleeve as he almost ran past.

  She was on her knees in front of the kid and he loomed over her, his feet spread shoulder distance apart.

  “I think she likes it on her knees,” he told his cronies and they all laughed.

  “While you’re down there…” He leered down at Aubrey.

  She smiled and looked up at him seductively.

  “That’s just what I had in mind,” she told him and smiled as she sent an uppercut into his groin with enough force to make him gag. She slammed her elbow into the side of his knee and he fell to the ground in the fetal position, his hands cupping his damaged goods.