Cry Baby Hollow (10 page)

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The parking lot
was crammed and Aubrey was glad they’d taken her car. Joe was delighted at being able to pull easily into a spot that everyone else had abandoned as being too narrow, the suburban in the next spot having parked half over the line. They walked
up to the door and got buzzed in, then went in search of karaoke.

The halls were deserted and most of the rooms they passed were empty. Aubrey figured only a few people preferred reruns of “Everybody Loves Raymond” to watching their friends and neighbors humiliate themselves. They rounded a corner and almost collided with Helen’s wheelchair.

“Hi,” she said listlessly. “Can you help me?”

“Why sure,” Joe told her. “Whatcha need?”

“My ankle hurts,” Helen told Joe, tugging up her polyester slacks at the knee to reveal a bony expanse of leg. A hospital ID tag was affixed just above the joint of her ankle and it had rubbed the skin raw.

“It’s too tight,” Helen whined pitifully. Aubrey stood close behind Joe, remembering Vina’s warning and ready to pull him back if Helen turned vicious.

Joe squatted down and examined the tag. It had a snap with a plastic cover that didn’t seem designed for easy removal. He tugged at it experimentally and Helen let out a little moan and flinched away.

“Cut it,” she begged.

Joe stood up and looked around. “Maybe there are some scissors at the nurse’s station,” he suggested.

“No,” Helen insisted in her dreamy, plaintive voice. “Use this.” She leaned forward and pulled out a cheap butter knife that she had secreted between her back and the wheelchair.

“I don’t think that will get the job done,” Joe told her regretfully.

Aubrey reached into her purse and pulled out a Swiss Army knife. She folded out the scissors and leaned down, snipping off the anklet.

“Thank you,” Helen breathed euphorically, reaching down and smoothing her pants back into place. Joe grabbed the anklet off the floor where it had fallen and looked around for a trash can.

A young black orderly, her pink scrubs wrinkled and stained, appeared out of one of the rooms and hurried over. She snatched the butter knife from Helen’s lap and rounded on Aubrey and Joe.

“Did you give her this?” She demanded.

“No, ma’am,” Joe assured her.

She turned back to Helen.

“Did you take this from the dining room?” She asked Helen.

“Would you like to rent a horse?” Helen asked her.

“Where did this come from?” The woman demanded, not falling for it. She held the knife up for Helen to see. “Everybody knows not to give you nothin’ sharp!”

“I have a horse I’d like to rent you,” Helen told her, smiling listlessly.

“Come on,” the orderly told her, going around to the back of the chair to push Helen back to her room.

As soon as she was out of her line of sight Helen reached a hand up to her face as if to scratch it and surreptitiously put a finger in front of her mouth in the universal ‘shush’ sign. She gave Aubrey and Joe a conspiratorial wink.

The orderly gave them a knowing look and shook her head, turning her eyes to heaven.

“Come on Miss Helen,” she told her. “Let’s go see what’s on TV.”

Aubrey and Joe found the main lounge just in time to hear the closing bars of ‘Mandy’ being tunelessly sung by a sour faced old man who leaned heavily on his walker. He went back to his seat amid a half-hearted smattering of applause from the dozen or so people in the audience. They saw Vina, Germaine, Edna and Betty occupying the room’s only two sofas and headed over.

“Where is everyone?” Aubrey asked. “The parking lot was full and the halls were empty. I thought this place would be packed.”

“You musta come in the south hall door,” Vina observed.

“I came in the same way we did last time,” Aubrey said.

“That’s the south hall,” Vina confirmed. “They’re doing check-outs in the north hall for the holiday weekend and there’s a line of cripples and families with screaming kids a mile long.”

Aubrey looked at Germaine.

“Your family isn’t checking you out?”

Germaine shook her head. “No, thank god. A weekend at the beach with those bratty great-grand kids of mine would kill me for sure. Lilli is the only one of my descendants that’s amounted to anything.”

“Who’s next?” A young man at the front of the room hollered as he fiddled with the karaoke machine. He had long, greasy, brown hair pulled back with a baseball cap and wore a black Metallica T-shirt.

When no one answered, he smiled in satisfaction and started packing up.

“What?” Vina looked at her watch. “We can’t be done yet!”

“I’ll take a go at it,” Joe told her and he walked to the folding table in the front and started flipping through the books of song lists.

“We can’t check you out?” Aubrey asked Germaine.

“Nobody but Gerald,” Germaine assured her sadly. Gerald was Lilli’s father and although selling his little dry cleaning business in town and running off to Asheville had turned out to be an excellent move for him - he now owned a whole chain of stores there - he was still bitter that his daughter’s infamy had forced him to flee. The fact that Germaine took Lilli’s side in the matter had only made things worse.

“Do you have his cell phone number?” Aubrey asked.

Germaine nodded and dug into the enormous handbag that rested at her feet.

“It won’t do no good,” Vina told her. “He’s a complete sonofabitch.”

Germaine nodded in agreement, but she fished out her wallet and pulled out his business card, handing it to Aubrey.

Aubrey punched in the number and Germaine and Vina scooted over so she could sit on the sofa between them.

Joe let out a triumphant, “Hot damn,” and pointed out the song he wanted to the kid who was managing the machine.

Aubrey cupped her hand around her phone to try to screen out the noise as someone picked up on the other end.

“Hello, am I speaking with Mr. Gerald Kleckner?” She asked in her most officious and soothing tone. “This is Lieutenant Commander Guinn. I’m the morale officer at VAMC Mountain Home, the Veteran’s Hospital.”

“No sir, nothing like that. We’re organizing a Fourth of July picnic for Veteran’s and their families. My records show that your mother has attended a number of our functions over the years, but when we tried to reach her this time we found that her number had been disconnected. Your number is listed as an alternate contact.”

“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.