Cry Baby Hollow (26 page)

Aubrey felt a wave of intense relief. “But what?”

“You are related. He may be an uncle or a cousin.”

“But not my father?”

“Nope, no way.”

“Aren’t all the Melungeons closely related?” She asked after a minute’s thought. “Isn’t interbreeding the reason they have the extra fingers sometimes? A reinforced recessive gene or something?”

“Somethin’ like that,” Joe admitted. “But that wouldn’t account for these results. Your relation to the Mosley line is recent. You gotta remember, I’ve studied your family tree. I know who your kin is better than I do my own at this point, and I have to say, I think it’s a pretty good bet your father was one of Mitchell’s close relatives. I don’t specialize in paternity, you understand. I track mitochondrial DNA which is an entirely different kind a test. But I did some checkin’ on this and I’m pretty sure. Can’t you just ask your Mom?”

Aubrey sighed.

“I did. She insists it was some guy she met at a Bread concert. I confronted her about the affair with Mitchell when she called, but she said it was only a fling and she knew he couldn’t have been my father because she only stayed with him in Knoxville for a few days, until her friends showed up to take her to the music festival, and she was on the pill. She said she lost her pills later in the trip and that’s how she knew it couldn’t have been him. She never told him because she knew he’d have a fit if he found out she’d been cheating on him.”

Joe looked distracted.

“Are you on the pill?” He asked, surprising her. It seemed an odd time to be discussing birth control. She thought about telling him that they wanted to sterilize her, but decided he didn’t need to know.

“Why? You think you’re gonna get lucky?” She asked, trying for a light tone but failing.

Joe grinned and shook his head.

“Just thinkin’ about somethin’ else. Anyway,” he said, changing the subject, “Your doctor says you can leave here as soon as they get you on real food, so it should only be a few days.”

“You talked to my doctor?”

“I had to,” Joe told her sheepishly. “While you were sick, someone had to make the medical decisions, and Vina’s been deemed incompetent so they weren’t about to let her. Your Mom is your next of kin, but she couldn’t make decisions from Italy and she couldn’t make it back so… We kinda had to lie about how long you and I were dating, but she signed you over to me.”

Aubrey closed her eyes and leaned back against the pillows. So he probably already knew about the stairs and the babies and all the other things she’d never be able to do.

He kissed her on the cheek and left.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

Two days later
, just as Joe had predicted, Aubrey was released from The Home. Vina and Charlie came to pick her up, and she made it out to the car using only a cane, though she had to nap for the entire drive bac
k to the hollow to recover. They brought her to the cabin and helped her get settled in.

Everyone in the neighborhood had insisted she stay with them until she was fully recovered, but the cabin was the only place with a shower stall, and apart from the loft, everything was within easy reach. A twin size bed had been set up in one of the alcoves behind the shoji screens and draped with a fully curtained canopy to give her some privacy, and the washer/dryer had been raised up on a platform, because she couldn’t bend over without getting light headed.

Drake returned, ridiculously glad to see her, and together they sunk into a quiet, arduous routine. First thing in the morning someone would stop by with three Tupperware containers that held her breakfast, lunch and dinner. They had worked out a schedule, so that it was always someone different, and Aubrey was too grateful to protest much. It was usually just leftovers of whatever they’d had for dinner the night before, but it was always better than the frozen dinners she would have made for herself.

At nine, the first of her physical therapists arrived and ran her through a series of exercises that would have seemed laughable to her before but now left her sweating and gasping for breath. After that she took a shower, which took her forever, and Lettie would arrive to help her with the web page.

This, at least, she could have handled on her own, but when she saw how much Lettie enjoyed the job she let her continue to come. Lettie confessed that while Aubrey was gone, she had often stayed late, puttering around the internet, and had become shamelessly addicted to message boards and chat rooms. Aubrey insisted that she keep up the habit and the two usually split Aubrey’s lunch of leftover casserole while Lettie filled her in on everything from cryptozoology to feminist science fiction.

After lunch, her second physical therapist would come and put her through her paces again. Another shower and then she and Drake would go out to the dock and she would throw the tennis ball for him for an hour. She took a nap, got up for dinner, tidied up, and then laid on the couch watching TV until it was bedtime. It would have been unbearably boring if it hadn’t been so exhausting.

After a week the physical therapists agreed that once a day was enough and stopped coming in the mornings. Aubrey got out her cane and Drake’s leash and started walking to fill the time block.

The front steps were tricky, but solid. It was once she got to the gravel drive and the road that she had to be careful. She walked along, using the cane for support as little as possible and Drake trailed along beside her expectantly. After she’d gone twenty steps, she threw the ball and he raced after it. She waited until he’d returned with it to move on and in this way, they both got what they needed. Drake got to run, and Aubrey got an excuse to rest.

The first time she didn’t even make it to Joe’s and had to rest for half an hour before she could make it back to the cabin. Lettie was waiting for her on the porch, obviously in a panic, when she arrived. She didn’t chide Aubrey or say anything about the incident, but the next day when Aubrey set out, she felt eyes on her and turned to see Micejah and Emaline walking arm in arm a few dozen yards back. They ambled along, pretending not to know she was there, but they kept pace with her and when she turned to go home, they waited until she got a comfortable lead and then turned to follow her.

That evening, Vina and Betty arrived with a pumpkin and a measuring tape.

“We gotta measure you for your costume,” Vina told her.

“I don’t want to go to the party,” Aubrey said quietly.

“I don’t wanna die,” Vina countered. “We all gotta do what we gotta do. You’re going to the party. If we have to tie you up and stick you in a box with only your head showing, you can be the magician’s assistant who gets sawn in half. But you’re going.”

Betty handed Aubrey the pumpkin. It felt light and strange. Aubrey flipped it over and saw the word
Funkin
in a raised seal on the bottom.

“It’s fake,” Betty told her. “We each do one every year and they last forever. We must have a hundred of them by now. You carve it just like you would a normal one.”

They measured every bit of Aubrey, from the circumference of her head down to her shoe size, and then measured Drake as well, though Aubrey couldn’t fathom why.

Another week passed and Aubrey spent her evenings working on the pumpkin instead of watching TV. He arms were still weak enough that the knife work was taxing, but she took her time and was pleased with the results.

Her physical therapist informed her that her insurance had decided she’d had enough, and if she wanted him to keep coming, she’d have to pay out of pocket. With Lettie’s help, the website was actually doing better than it had been before she got sick, but she was tired of leg lifts, so she told him to get lost. She could walk all the way to Joe’s and back without stopping now, though she leaned on her cane heavily toward the end, and although she woke up sore every morning, she had no intention of giving up.

She bought an Xbox and a Kinect to augment her training. She couldn’t play it during the day, the light from outside made her projection TV useless, but she would ski and do yoga in the evenings and then play the less strenuous games until bed. It wasn’t much of a life, but it was better than watching movie characters get up from a car accident and just walk away.

One night Aubrey awoke from a dream in which giant spiders were biting her, instantly turning her flesh black and rotting, only to find Drake sitting bolt upright beside her, growling low in his throat.

She looked up, and was annoyed to see that she’d forgotten to draw the curtains on the canopy again. She was careful on weekends, when Joe might be across the lake, but during the week she was often so tired she forgot. She looked out at the lake and was momentarily distracted by the way the moonlight played along the wind tossed surface of the water. Returning to an inspection of the shoreline, she saw a group of figures retreating down Joe’s dock. She couldn’t see them clearly, once they were in among the trees the darkness there swallowed them up, but she counted at least four.

She couldn’t stay in bed after that. Although the shoji screens provided no real protection, they at least made her feel less exposed. She retreated to the sofa, closing all the screens as she passed them, and sat there until morning, gripping her stun gun and telling Drake over and over again how glad she was that he was there.

When morning came she began making phone calls. As she made the calls and waited on hold, she checked the surveillance photos from the night before. Only the camera at Joe’s had been motion activated and recorded video. The images were dark and grainy, but she could see a dog bound into view from the road, heading past Joe’s toward the dock. It was jumping around like it was on fire, or it never would have activated the sensors. She’d tried adjusting them lower, to catch more of what went on, but ended up with a disc full of video of squirrels and raccoons. Right now she had them set to catch anything man-sized, but she was beginning to doubt if there was any point at all. She ‘d tested them herself, and even a person, if they moved slowly and carefully, didn’t turn them on. A person running past would, but they only stayed in the cameras field of view for seconds.

The dog stopped in the middle of the driveway and looked directly at the camera, for all the world as if it knew it was there. Aubrey wondered if the camera made any noise when it came on. She’d never heard it, but then she didn’t have a dogs hearing. The dog turned abruptly and slunk under Joe’s RV. She watched, but nothing happened. She wondered if it had crawled under and left from the back, out of her line of sight.

The camera would only record for a minute after the motion stopped, but just as Aubrey had given up hope of seeing anything else a person stepped into view from the dock. Then, a step behind, came two more. She could see the boots of a fourth, but they remained out of the shot. They were all wearing jackets with the hoods pulled up. All Aubrey could see was boots and jeans. They ranged in size from short and slight to very tall, it was hard to gauge from the angle of the film, but Aubrey guessed six feet, and one was a little plump. Aubrey sighed.

Even if she gave the pictures to the FBI, what would they be able to do? Could they pick out a label on a pair of jeans? If so, how would that help? The only clothing store in town was a consignment shop and the Walmart. Anything else came from Morristown or beyond. Her breath caught in her throat. Just as the last figure, the tallest one, was leaving the frame, it held up a gloved hand and raised its middle finger, waving it around. Did they know the camera was there? Well hell, everyone from the entire Mosley clan down to Vina’s hairdresser knew they were there. A moment after they vanished, the dog came out from under the RV and trotted along after them, then the video stopped.

She switched to the camera that pointed out at the dock and checked the stills. She had one shot of four people on the end of the dock, looking over at her with their backs to the camera, and one of them walking back, looking down at the ground. Useless. She ran through the other cameras, only to find hundreds of still photos of leaves and bark and blackness. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. Could they all have been jostled by squirrels or wind? If it was sabotage, then why leave the cameras at Joe’s active. The only other one that seemed to be working was the one in her own yard. Was it worth it to try to fix them? And if so, how the hell was she supposed to manage it in her current condition?

She gave up and went back to her calls. By ten she had a builder in Knoxville scheduled to come out that afternoon and measure the cabin for a spiral staircase to replace the ladder up to the loft. He had a warehouse full of them, and said if he could find one that fit, and she wasn’t too picky about what it looked like, he could get someone out to put it in after the weekend. As soon as she’d done that, she called Matt.

They hadn’t spoken much since she got sick, partly because she was a witness in an ongoing investigation, but mainly because Aubrey found the company of fit, healthy young people to be entirely too depressing, and the sympathy of friends to be repugnant.

“Heck,” he answered.

“Heck yes or heck no?” She asked, more out of long habit than because she felt like banter.

“How the heck are you?” He asked.

“I’m fine,” she lied. A sleepless night was not something her body was willing to tolerate any more, and she felt like she’d been run over by a train. “I need a favor,” she told him, eager to avoid any more questions about her health than were strictly necessary.

“You name it,” he told her with what she recognized as forced nonchalance. Everyone was so eager to be helpful. She thought she’d scream if someone didn’t tell her ‘no’ soon, but she hoped they didn’t start today.

“I’d like you to find me a Mossberg 500, an M9, and an M4 and bring them up here as soon as you can along with some ammunition.”

There was a long pause.

“Is there something going on I should know about? I’ve got state police cruising through there several times a night and they haven’t reported anything.”

“It’s just nightmares,” she told him.

“Those are pretty bad dreams if you want an M4. You know their illegal for private citizens, right?”

“Which is why I called my FBI buddy instead of going to a gun show,” she explained. She decided that the pity card was going to have to be played. “You know I can’t even tie my own shoes?” She asked him quietly. “I wake up in a cold sweat, thinking I’ve heard someone in the house. I know they can’t get in with the dog and the security, but it doesn’t matter. I have panic attacks over it, and they can’t give me anything to calm me down because of the damage to my heart. I’ll just feel better if I have something here... If I know I can handle anyone who might come.”