Cry Baby Hollow

by Love, Aimee

Aubrey hopped to her feet easily and looked down at him smugly. His posse took a step back.

  “You hit like a girl,” she told him and sent a vicious kick into his kidney.

  Joe smiled. This was much more like it. Now he looked prepared, not to dive in and help her, but to pull her off.

  “I’ll kill you, you bitch,” the punk finally gasped, his voice breaking at the last word.

  She ignored him and looked at the other boys.

  “This wasn’t revenge,” she told them. “This was just for my personal gratification.” She pulled a tiny chip the size of a postage stamp out of her pocket and held it up for them to see. “This is revenge,” she turned the memory card in her hand, admiring it. “These cards can hold gigabytes of information,” she told them. “This one, for instance, has several week’s worth of footage taken from surveillance cameras I placed all along Red Bank Road. One mailbox might not be worth the sheriff’s time, but there’s enough property damage recorded on here to constitute a felony, not to mention underage drinking and DWI’s.” She placed the card back in her pocket. “Cry Baby Hollow is now off limits,” she informed them. “The next bad thing that happens there, I’m going to assume it’s your doing and send this to the county prosecutor, the newspaper, the sheriff, and your mothers.”

  She turned and walked back toward Joe’s truck.

  “We can go now,” she told Joe and Larry as she passed them.

  Joe raced passed her and opened her door for her, then went back around and got in himself. As he started the truck the three boys were helping their fallen friend to his feet.

  “I didn’t know you installed cameras,” Joe said as he backed into the driveway to turn around.

  Aubrey pulled out card and shrugged.

  “Pictures of my last vacation,” she admitted.

  He chuckled.

  “There ain’t enough frozen peas in the county to take away that boy’s pain,” he observed.

  “Frozen peas?”

  “They make good ice packs,” Joe explained.

  They drove on in silence, passing the old lady who still rocked back and forth on the decrepit swing set.

  “So you stocked recreational facilities, huh?” Joe finally asked as he turned back onto the Dixie Highway.

  “Eventually,” she admitted. “But before that I blew stuff up.”

  Joe flashed her a brilliant smile.

  “You know,” he told her, “everybody in the Hollow’s gonna chip in and buy you the nicest mailbox in Cocke County.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  That afternoon, after Aubrey had hosed down the entire area around the mailbox, she gave herself a treat. As Joe worked on the new mailbox, she puttered around in the carriage house, ostensibly getting it ready to be converted into a garage for the Mini, but really watching him work. He was wearing only his cargo shorts, work boots, gloves and mirrored sunglasses. Bare to

  the waist, she could watch his muscles bunch and release with every swing of the sledge hammer he was using to break up the old concrete. Whenever he broke a section free he would bend down to pick it up and toss it into the back of his truck and Aubrey’s heart would skip a beat.

  He stopped to mop the sweat from his face with a rag from one of his pockets and caught her staring.

  “I don’t pay for sex,” he told her, apropos of nothing.

  It took her a moment to realize he was still worried about her knowing he frequented Broad’s.

  “I never suspected you did, Joe,” she assured him with a smile and a shake of her head.

  He laid aside the sledge and took up a shovel, using it to pry out the last of the concrete from the hole. Aubrey watched for another moment before getting to work herself.

  After an hour of throwing junk into boxes, she plopped onto an old lawn chair for a break and saw that Joe was still hard a work. He felt her eyes on him and glanced over his shoulder.

  “Am I doin’ it wrong?”

  She shrugged. “Is there a wrong way to break up old concrete?”

  He shrugged back and gave her one of his lopsided grins. “Usually, when you look at me like that, it means you think I’m doing somethin’ wrong.”

  “Actually,” Aubrey admitted, “I was just thinking how lucky I am to have such a handy neighbor. Vina must be bribing you with something good for you to be doing all this work for me.”

  “Hell, she ain’t bribin’ me,” Joe protested, insulted.

  “Then why do you do it?” Aubrey asked. “It certainly isn’t because I’m nice to you.”

  Joe stuck the shovel into the ground with enough force to leave it standing upright and walked slowly toward her. He got to within a foot of her without saying a word and his hand came up and wrapped around her, coming to rest in the small of her back. He pulled her closer and his other hand came up under her chin, tipping her head back so he could look her in the eye. His heavy leather work glove felt rough against her skin and she could smell the subtle musk of his clean, fresh sweat and the beer on his breath.

  “If you don’t know why,” he said in a husky whisper, “Then you’re a damn idiot.”

  He kissed her, delicately at first, as if taking her in, and then with a growing passion. His lips pressed into hers with enough force to bruise and his hand on the small of her back pulled her against him until their bodies were pressed so tightly together that she could feel his muscles bunching against her breasts. The hand under her chin tipped her head higher and he left her mouth and began to work down her neck with a slowness that made her blood pound in her ears.

  She reached up, putting her hand on the back of his head and holding it there. His hair was damp with sweat. She knocked off his sunglasses and her other hand snaked around under his arm and came up to rest on his bare shoulder.

  She let out a low moan and wondered how they would ever make it up the ladder to the bed.

  “You got any beer in the house?” Joe asked.

  Her eyes flew open and she saw him standing in the doorway, watching her.

  “Daydreaming?” He asked.

  She blushed furiously and shook her head, getting up from the lawn chair. “I was just trying to figure out what to do about the door,” she told him.

  He nodded skeptically and she wondered if the moan had actually come out.

  “There’s beer in the fridge,” she told him. “Are you done with the sledge? I need to knock out the workbench before I do anything else.”

  He nodded and headed into the cabin for a beer.

  “You want one?” He called back as he climbed the stairs to the deck.

  She remembered the imagined taste and smell of him; beer and sweat. Sweat she had in abundance from an afternoon spent clearing out the stuffy carriage house in the fierce July heat.

  “Sure,” she said, surprising him. “A beer would taste great right now.”

  It rained that night and Joe showed up at her door just after dusk. He was cleanly shaven, still damp from a shower, and bored.

  “I thought there might be something good on TV,” he told her. In spite of the elaborate aerial on top of his RV he only picked up one snowy channel.

  “The satellite is out because of the storm,” she told him but opened the door for him to come in.

  “Would you like to play some cards?” She asked.

  He shook his head vehemently.

  “Not against you. Vina says you’re damn good.”

  Aubrey laughed.

  “That’s funny, she always tells me I suck.”

  Joe shrugged.

  “You know she wouldn’t let you within a mile of her game if you couldn’t give her a run for her money. That woman loves a challenge.”

  He thought for a moment.

  “Don’t you have any board games?” He asked. �
��You sell ‘em, right?”

  She nodded and walked over to the sofa, flipping up one of the cushions. The storage bin underneath was stacked with boxes of games, most of them with foreign titles.

  “I doubt I have anything you’ll know how to play,” she said apologetically.

  Joe shrugged, picked one at random, and took it over to the dining room table.

  She spent twenty minutes explaining the rules of Carcassonne to him and by the third game he was making her work to beat him.

  “You aren’t half as dumb as you pretend to be,” she said without thinking as she tallied the final score of their fifth game.

  “Hell,” he said, getting up to fetch another beer from her fridge. “I got me a PhD. I ain’t dumb, I’m just on vacation.”

  “They offer PhD’s in beer?” She asked with a grin. “I don’t remember that from when I was in school.”

  “Then you went to the wrong school,” he told her, returning.

  “Besides,” he continued seriously. “Beer isn’t an occupation, it’s a vocation.”

  Aubrey drove into town the next day for groceries and stopped in at Burdette’s. Noah was behind the counter again and he grinned hugely when Aubrey walked in.

  “Hey Miss Guinn,” he greeted her warmly. “Can I help you find something today?”

  “Do you have machetes?” She asked, knowing it might take her all day to search the store and find them on her own.

  He bounded out from behind the counter like a puppy playing his first game of fetch and disappeared down an aisle.

  He came back with a large, wooden handled blade wrapped in an army green sheath.

  “You want it sharpened?” He asked her.

  “They don’t come sharp?”

  He shook his head.

  “Not very, but we’ve got a wheel in the back and I can put a nice edge on it for you, free of charge.”

  “Thanks Noah,” he lit up like a light bulb when he realized she’d remembered his name.

  “It’ll just take a little while,” he promised.

  “Can I do my grocery shopping and come back for it?”

  “Sure,” he said, though he would clearly have preferred she stayed and watched him work.

  When she returned an hour later, her car laden with bread and soy milk and the beer she used to bait Joe into staying, Noah presented her the machete as if knighting her then took out the blade and used it to cut cleanly though a piece of paper.

  She noticed his name tag for the first time and let out an involuntary gasp. She dug into her purse for her wallet to cover her shock.

  “I didn’t realize you were a Mosley,” she said conversationally as she paid for the machete.

  Noah looked down at his tag and scoffed.

  “I’m no relation to those crazy Melungeons if that’s what you mean,” he assured her.

  “I didn’t realize the Mosley’s were Melungeon,” Aubrey told him. She had heard a lot of talk of Melungeons growing up. Both her grandmother and Vina had Melungeon blood and so, she supposed, did she. Aubrey had looked them up once, but it seemed as though no one knew much more about them than she did. They were a reclusive group of people who had been here when the first European settlers arrived. Though they had pale skin, their language didn’t seem related to any European tongue or Cherokee. People speculated that they were the remnants of a Viking colony or survivors from Roanoke or even the lost tribe from the Bible, but no one knew for sure. She had asked Vina where they were from once but Vina had only informed her that while she was very old, she wasn’t old enough to remember back quite that far.

  “The Mosley’s aren’t,” Noah told her. “But my Granddaddy’s brothers married into a Melungeon family and most of the Mosley’s you find around here are kin to them.”

  Aubrey nodded and smiled, glad that the boy wasn’t more than distantly related to any of the Mosley’s she’d encountered and felt free to like him again.

  When she got home she put on her hiking boots and jeans, grabbed her new machete, and went to try the trails again. She waded into the underbrush across from Joe’s. The going was tough at first. The roadside was thick with brambles and weeds grown to enormous proportions, but as soon as she got away from the area cleared for the road the trees took over and the undergrowth gave up for lack of sunlight. She had only gone in twenty feet when she picked up the trail. She used the machete for the first time to hack a notch into the closest tree so she would know where to head back for the road and then abandoned the machete at the tree’s base. She would inspect the trail and see if it was suitable and if so, she would hack a path to the road through the brambles so she could get to it more easily. If the trail proved to be too rugged to run on or otherwise unusable, she wouldn’t bother.

  She walked along it, heading deeper into the hills and further from the lake. The trees were large and old - mostly hardwoods - with only ferns and other shade loving plants flourishing beneath them. The trail was hard packed dirt and wide enough for two people to walk abreast easily. Though it climbed steadily, it was only truly steep in a few spots, and Aubrey decided it would be the perfect place to run.

  She continued on, eager to see where it went and lost in the peace and quiet. She knew there were roads nearby, and that she must be close behind Wayne Mosley’s garage by now, but the noise was swallowed up by the all encompassing forest.

  A path crossed her trail as if summoned there by her thoughts of the Mosley clan. She was walking along, parallel to the ridge, and the little path - more of a game trail than one designed for people - cut across the ridge above her and headed down to the lake, right where she guessed his garage was. In spite of its narrowness, it looked well used and she wondered how often he came this way. She decided that from now on she would carry a pack. If she was going any real distance, it would be smart to carry water, and she now felt as if her stun gun might not be a bad idea either. It was one thing to encounter an irksome redneck on a road with houses to either side, but quite another alone in the woods. Aubrey had a great deal of faith in her ability to handle men, over a decade in the military had taught her a lot of tricks for getting rid of unwelcome suitors, but she had also learned that having superior firepower never hurt.

  She ambled along for another thirty minutes and was just starting to think about turning back when she came to a branch in the trail. She examined all the nearby trees, searching for the little metal tags that were used by the forest service to mark the trails. She found one on a tree beside the main trail that was a small yellow square with a black diamond in the center. The trail she assumed was an offshoot, because it looked narrower and rougher, didn’t have a marker that she could find, though she found a tree with a scare in its bark that looked like it had once held one. She walked up the offshoot, curious, but had only gone a few yards when she saw a “No Trespassing” sign tacked to a sapling.

  Aubrey was sure she was still on National Forest land. They owned the hills that circled the lake entirely. She wanted to press on and see where it led, but knew it was possible that the trail ahead was closed because it was dangerous. She was standing motionless and undecided when suddenly all of the noise of the forest, the cacophony of birds and bugs that were so constant her mind had tuned them out almost immediately, became deafening in their absence.

  She turned around and started when she saw that the trail behind her was blocked by a wolf. It was a beautiful creature, white and gray with a faint hint of red at the ears and along the legs, or at least it would have been beautiful in a photograph or a zoo. Alone in the woods, it was more than a little disquieting. It didn’t growl or menace her in any way. Its teeth weren’t bared and its hackles were smooth. It just stood watching her with its head cocked to one side, as if curious about what she was doing in its forest. She wondered how long it had been silently padding along behind her. She had look
ed up red wolves when Vina mentioned them and knew that they had never been known to attack people, but she also knew that only two pair had ever been released into the Smokey Mountains and all of those had eventually been relocated to a group of islands off the Carolinas. It wasn’t supposed to be vicious, but it also wasn’t supposed to be here.

  She pulled out her phone, careful not to startle it and hit the button on the front to unlock it. She lined up the shot, but just as she hit the button to take a picture the wolf shot away into the ferns. It looked back over its shoulder at her accusingly and then disappeared into the trees.

  Aubrey walked back to where she left the machete at a sedate pace. She casually looked from side to side, hoping to catch a glimpse of the wolf with her peripheral vision, but it never returned. Or if it did, she didn’t see it.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Two hours, four blisters and countless mosquito bites later, Aubrey

  had a small path carved from the trail to the road across from Joe’s. She left the bramble closest to road mainly intact, deciding that getting a few scratches was better than having Wayne Mosley know she was running alone in the woods behind his house every day.

  She tromped down the road feeling tired but satisfied with her day’s work. Rounding the bend before the cabin, she pulled up short. A sheriff’s car was parked in her driveway and Deputy Larry, she realized she didn’t know his last name, was sitting on her front deck waiting for her.

  She forced a smile, knowing that this couldn’t bode well.

  “Hello,” she called, walking over.

  His expression was grim and his only reply to her greeting was an unenthusiastic wave.

  She clomped up onto the deck and kicked the mud from her boots.

  “We need to talk,” he told her quietly.

  She led him inside and motioned him over to the dining room table while she went into the bathroom.