Cry Baby Hollow (6 page)

“Still single,” Rose told her with a big grin.

Everyone sat around the table and Vina pulled a deck of Bicycles from her purse and shuffled them.

“We’re playing hearts tonight,” Vina told Aubrey. “On account of otherwise I’d get stuck being your partner.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

“Come in for
a drink before you leave,” Vina told Aubrey after she pulled the car into the garage and locked it. She was in a foul temper, having trounced them all by an unacceptably slim margin, and stated the invitation
more as a demand than a request. “It’s bad enough I can’t drink while we play. Don’t make me drink alone.”

Vina led the way, going out the side door of the garage and locking it before crossing the narrow corridor of grass to the house. She went straight to the kitchen, took two glasses from the dishwasher, filled them with ice and then poured in a healthy dose of bourbon.

“I don’t have any syrup,” Vina told her apologetically. “So we’ll just have to drink it straight.” The idea that there were things besides mint syrup that you could mix with bourbon was a foreign concept to Vina.

They heard the crunch of tires going much to fast on gravel, followed by a loud thunk and a riotous cheer as if someone had just scored a winning touchdown.

“God damn it,” Vina screamed. She slammed her drink down hard enough to send the ice cubes bouncing out and raced out of the room and down the hall.

“What is it?” Aubrey called, running after her.

Vina threw open the hall closet and pulled out a shotgun that was almost as big as she was.

“Vina!” Aubrey made a lunge for the gun but missed.

Vina threw open the front door and fired blindly into the night.

“Next time you come round here,” she yelled at the top of her lungs, “I’m gonna fill you so full of rock salt people will lick your ass before they take a shot of tequila!”

Aubrey stared at her, dumbfounded.

“Hooligans,” she spat, slamming the door and replacing the gun in the closet.

“Is that registered?” Aubrey asked, already sure of the answer.

Vina ignored her and walked over to the hall table where the phone sat. She picked up the receiver and dialed.

“Because having a loaded, unregistered firearm in the house is the kind of thing a judge might frown on,” Aubrey told her pointedly. “It’s the kind of thing that might make them think I wasn’t being a very good guardian.”

Vina held up a hand to silence her and Aubrey heard a muffled voice querying on the other end of the phone.

“Mailbox,” Vina said and slammed the phone down, not waiting for a reply.

“I’m an elderly woman living alone,” Vina informed Aubrey over her shoulder as she walked back to the kitchen to retrieve her drink as if nothing had happened. “
Not
having a loaded gun in the house would be crazy.”

Aubrey tried repeatedly to steer the conversation back to the gun until finally Vina got fed up and finished her drink in one huge gulp.

“You are no longer in some Yankee city,” she informed Aubrey as she led her to the front door. “In these parts, they don’t even register handguns, let alone shotguns and rifles. All they do is keep track of purchases, and I doubt they got a record of that one on account of my Daddy bought it over a century ago.”

Vina held open the front door and ushered Aubrey through, then closed it behind her without another word.

Aubrey walked to her car, plotting on the best time to break in to Vina’s and make sure it was really loaded with rock salt. She wondered if the key was still under the gnome. As she drove home, she looked around at the silent trees and was grateful that there wasn’t any fog.

“You sleep naked
every night or did you just forget to do laundry?” Joe asked.

Aubrey shot out of bed, realized her mistake, and dove back in.

“What the hell are you doing here, Joe?”

He was standing half-way up the ladder that led to the loft, with only his head and shoulders visible above the floor.

“At the moment, I’m admirin’ the view,” he said. “What do you figure the odds are that you’re gonna do that again?”

“Slim to none,” she told him, bunching the sheet around herself more tightly. “What the hell are you doing here, Joe?” She repeated. “You do understand that you can’t just wander into my bedroom anytime you want to, right? How did you get in anyway? I know I locked all the doors.”

Joe held up a key and tossed it over to the end of the bed, uncertain which question he should answer first.

“You never did take it,” he explained. “I was on my way over to fix Vina’s mailbox and I realized I left some tools in your shed. When I came to get ‘em I saw that you got hit too.”

“Hit?”

“Your mailbox in down,” he explained.

“I didn’t even notice when I got in last night,” she wiped at her eyes blearily.

“Anyway,” Joe continued. “I decided to slip the key under your door since I was already here, and then I heard you screaming, so I popped up to check on ya. I guess it was just a nightmare though. What were you dreaming about?”

“The deer,” Aubrey admitted reluctantly, unwilling to mention the half-seen form that was lurking behind it in her dream.

“You know,” he told her, “a few coyotes can strip an animal clean and leave nothing but the hooves behind. That’s why we got so many donkeys around.”

“Donkeys?” Aubrey asked, unable to help herself, but knowing she’d regret it.

“Yeah, you see a bunch of cows grazing and then there’ll be one donkey in with ‘em. It’s a watch donkey.”

She wasn’t sure exactly how to respond to the concept of a watch donkey. She wondered if it was too early for Joe to be drunk.

“Anyway, I figured it’d be rude to sit here and watch you sleep, what with you bein’ naked and all, so I woke you up. You want a donut?” He asked. “I got a whole box of fresh Krispy Kremes from the Gas and Sip in my truck,” he told her.

“Yes, please,” she told him.

He looked surprised at her easy acceptance, but he jumped off the ladder and headed outside.

Aubrey grabbed the key and crept to the top of the ladder, wrapping the sheet around her firmly and tucking it in place. As soon as she heard the front door open and close she raced down the ladder. The sheet caught between her foot and one of the rungs, and she went sprawling, slamming her head into the edge of the sofa. She popped up and raced to the door, reaching it the same time as Joe came up to it from outside.

He smiled and held up the box of donuts.

She slammed home the dead bolt and stalked off.

“I thought you wanted a donut,” Joe called, his voice muffled by the door.

“I’m on a diet,” she told him over her shoulder and went to get dressed for a run.

“Hell,” Joe told her retreating form, amused at the peculiarities of women, “you ain’t even a little fat.”

Three weeks passed
and Aubrey remembered why, as a teenager, she had called the hollow
The Land of Slow
. Every day seemed endlessly long and yet they were all so much the same that they blended together. Time took on a strange, bent quality, where it didn’t seem to pass at all and everything boiled down to now. Small happenings took on the characteristics of major, life altering events and would be talked over for days.

Aubrey’s moving truck came and went. Her satellite was installed. Joe had to replace her mailbox twice more. Helen bit an orderly and it became infected. Aubrey got caught breaking into Vina’s while she was at The Home for card night and the two didn’t talk for a week. Betty moved back to her own house. Katie Carmichael, twice-divorced and a Mosley on her mother’s side, tried to seduce Joe and got shot down. A local boy was killed in Iraq and everyone from three counties came to the funeral. The price of fuel at the Gas and Sip shot up twenty cents. It rained a lot.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Aub
rey grew tired
of running along the lake road almost immediately. It only contained ten houses and had almost no traffic, but she knew everyone and they all wanted her to stop and chat as she passed.

She tried staggering the time of her run, but it was as if one person saw her pass and called to all the houses along the line. People were waiting for her on their front porch and just happened to be going to check the mail or pick up the paper as soon as she came into view.

Eleven people was a lot to stop and talk to and Aubrey got more gossip than exercise. She spent a rainy afternoon searching the internet and quickly found the answer. Cherokee National Forest was riddled with trails.

There was an app for her phone, but she found the maps it provided almost impossible to follow on the tiny screen. Instead, she settled for ordering several online and sketched out a small portion of one that looked promising. The trail head was supposed to be located near the junction of Murder Creek and the French Broad, which meant it was in Broad’s parking lot. It followed the creek toward the lake, but cut away and up into the hills just after the bridge.

The next morning, Aubrey slathered on mosquito repellant and put on hiking boots and jeans instead of her usual running gear.

She walked to the bridge and searched the roadside, but there was no sign of a trail. Refusing to give up, she continued down to Broad’s. This early in the morning, the parking lot was deserted and she had to fight back the urge to peek in the windows, reminding herself that anyone driving by would see her. She walked to the French Broad through the knee high grass that bordered the parking lot and easily found the trail marker. It was a wooden post with a box at waist height that had a slot for donations and an old padlock on the back. A chain was fastened to it, and at the end there was a laminated topographical map of the area with the trail clearly marked. She saw her mistake immediately. The trail didn’t
follow
Murder Creek where it crossed the road, the creek
was
the trail. She was mildly heartened to see that it left the creek after only a short distance and came close to the lake road just opposite Joe’s. If she could find where, she could enter it there from now on.

She followed Murder Creek across the main road and into the trees. At first she tried to avoid the water, but after a few minutes she realized that the mud along the bank was much more unpleasant than the clean, pebbly creek bed. After that she splashed along happily, getting wet up to her knees but not caring in the heat. It took her longer than she expected to reach the bridge where the creek crossed the lake road for the first time, and she decided that for today it would be enough to find the entrance near Joe’s. She climbed up the slippery verge, crossed the road, and slid in the thick mud all the way back down to the creek on the far side. She peered under the bridge, wondering if the next time she came this way she might just crawl under, but the two cement pipes that carried the creek under the bridge were barely sufficient to handle the water flow and one of them was almost entirely blocked by a dam of flotsam half-way through. She dismissed the thought and was turning to go when she saw something out of the corner of her eye.

Aubrey leaned in, but the water was too high in the blocked pipe for her to get close, and she didn’t have a flashlight. She splashed back to the bank and fought her way up to the road, creating deep furrows in the bank. She trudged across the road and slid back down the other side. From the back, the clear pipe was full but the one that was blocked only had a trickle of water coming through. She got down on her hands and knees and crawled in.

The pipe was only about ten feet long and the block was right in the middle. She reached it easily and tried to get a better look. From the other side she had only been able to see branches, mud and leaves with a hint of something else behind. From the back it was obvious that something large had caused the obstruction, and the rest had simply been caught against it. She didn’t want to touch it, already sure of what it must be. She pulled at one of the branches that had poked past it, hoping to dislodge it so that she could see it in the light of day.

The entire damn shifted when she pulled on the branch and the obstruction broke free. Aubrey found herself pushed backward out of the pipe at the head of a column of water. She slid out of the concrete pipe on her belly, her shirt pushed up under her chin and her face full of mud and flotsam. Her stomach scraped against the rough surface and she lost a layer of skin. When she came out of the pipe, the current spun her around and all the leaves and branches caught at the flesh of her arms and face as they rushed past her. She came to rest and opened her eyes to find herself staring into the huge, opaque eyes of the deer.

Joe was fishing
on his dock. When he heard the clop of heavy boots on the wood he turned and saw Aubrey rushing toward him. The long black hair she normally kept so carefully pulled back had come free in places and long strands of it were plastered to her face. Her wet shirt clung to her heaving chest and belly, and blood was soaking through it all along her torso. Blood also welled up from the numerous small scratches that laced her arms and cheeks, and flowed freely from at least one deep gouge. It mixed with the water dripping off of her to trail in a thick snaky loop down her arms and drip from the tips of her fingers.

Joe’s heart leapt into his throat. He jumped up and met her along the dock, half-expecting her to collapse into his arms. Instead she took his hand and turned in mid-stride, pulling him back the way she had come.

He was prepared for hysterics and a near incoherent account of what had befallen her, but her insistent tugging and urging for him to hurry up and get some shoes on baffled him.

He did as he was told and wordlessly followed her back down the road toward the cabin. They passed it without stopping and continued on to the bridge. Aubrey finally stopped and pointed over the side triumphantly.

Joe looked down into the creek.

“What am I looking at?” Joe asked her.

Aubrey gaped at him. She turned and looked down at the empty creek. Water rushed below them placidly.

“It was here,” she insisted.

“What was?” Joe asked, completely confused.

“The deer! I found the deer! It’s been trapped in the culvert under the bridge this whole time.”

“What were you doing under the bridge?” He asked her, baffled.

“Hiking.”

“Under a bridge?”

She nodded.

“Okay,” Joe said skeptically.

“Come on,” she grabbed his arm and tried to pull him toward the slope down. “It must have been washed further downstream.”

“Okay,” Joe said again, not budging.

“Come on,” she tugged harder.

“Why?” He asked her.

“So you can see it,” she released his arm and turned to face him. “It’s horrible. I guess the cold water preserved it. Its entire body is ripped open and its organs are all gone.”