Cry Baby Hollow (5 page)

CHAPTER FIVE

Aubrey took the
long way home, not wanting another confrontation with Wayne Mosley. The first thing she passed was the old cemetery. Her grandfather’s was the only recent grave, and even that was over twenty years old. He had taken Aubrey’s mother away from here after his wife died, but he had insisted on being brought back and buried at her side. The big marble tombstone that marked both of her grandparents was the only one i
n the cemetery. All the other graves had simple granite plaques set into the earth or small crosses with names on them. They dated back to before the civil war, and Aubrey had always meant to come here one day and figure out who they all were, but her short visits had never afforded her the time.

Now she walked through and looked at the sad little markers. Many of them were so pitted and weathered that the names were completely obscured. Of the ones she could read, most were unfamiliar. The residents of the hollow were mostly female, and she realized that she didn’t know many of their maiden names. The only thing that caught her eye was a nearly rotten wooden cross with the name ‘Skinner’ carved into it in crude block letters. Aubrey shuddered and left the cemetery.

Half a mile further on, after the road began to curve back around the lake, she came to Lettie Campbell’s place. It was a small, well-kept little cottage and Lettie was out front, standing by her mailbox with a letter in her hand.

“How lucky I caught you,” Lettie said as if she hadn’t been standing there for ten minutes, laying in wait. Aubrey trotted up to her side and gave her a hug, trying not to get too much sweat on her. Lettie was a spinster of at least eighty years who ran with the little old ladies, but didn’t play cards. Lettie always reminded Aubrey of Tweety Bird’s owner from the Bugs Bunny cartoons. She was what you expected an octogenarian to be. She wore her waist long, gray hair in a big, tight bun held in place with pencils, did the New York Times crossword puzzle with a timer running, and made an excellent cherry pie. She had been the town’s librarian for as long as anyone could remember, and although she was retired now, she still read at least a book a day.

“Have you heard about Betty?” She asked.

Aubrey nodded. “Cataract surgery, right?”

Lettie nodded her head sadly.

“We’re all getting so old,” she told Aubrey, as if it were a secret.

Aubrey was pretty sure she was supposed to protest, but settled for telling Lettie that you were only as old as you felt.

Lettie smiled and waved as Aubrey jogged away. She had only made it thirty feet when she was flagged down by Micejah Sizemore, standing in his driveway next door, puttering around his car.

“I hoped I’d catch you,” he told her, giving her a rough squeeze. Micejah was tall and lean, with a nose like the beak of some great predatory bird. He had been a house painter before he retired, and now he bred racing pigeons and ran a moonshine still in his shed.

His wife Emaline poked her head out of their relatively modern little ranch house and hollered her hello. The two were in their mid seventies and had only come to the lake after retirement. Emaline was a distant relation of Lettie’s, and they were thick as thieves, forming a sub-clique within the close knit neighborhood. Emaline had the largest collection of Beanie Babies in the Southeast, and was prone to dragging unwilling visitors into her shrine and showing them off. In spite of being Lettie’s junior, she looked much older and got around only with the help of a walker, which was fine with her since she’d always been mildly agoraphobic and tended to go out only with Lettie or Micejah close at hand. Aubrey waved to her and made a run for it before she could get sucked inside.

Less than a quarter of a mile further on, Aubrey slowed in front of Betty Muncaster’s painfully quaint little log cabin. It had been added on to a half dozen times over the years but was reputed to be the oldest standing structure in the county. Aubrey thought for a moment that, what with Betty’s upcoming surgery, it would be the one house she could just slip past, but then she saw Betty on the front porch, wearing dark sunglasses and knitting up a storm. She remembered all of the sweaters, scarves and hats that Betty had sent her whenever she’d been stationed somewhere cold and turned in the driveway.

“Well hello,” Betty said as Aubrey walked up the stairs to the front porch. “You look fabulous, honey!”

Aubrey looked down at her sweaty running clothes and laughed. Betty was the Miss Manners of Cry Baby Hollow. She’d gone to Georgia on a trip with her church choir just after high school, met a rich, handsome businessman, and not come home until he died twenty years later. Her time in suburban Atlanta country clubs had instilled in her a different sort of southern charm than was generally found in the Appalachians. She was a raw boned woman, lanky instead of thin, but she held herself with a regal grace and was always so well turned out that no one would argue if you called her beautiful.

“I don’t feel fabulous,” Aubrey told her with a grin. “I feel grungy.”

“Would you like some tea? I made a pitcher fresh this morning.”

“No thanks,” Aubrey told her. “I just stopped in to see if there was anything I could do.”

Betty chuckled.

“You can do me the favor of not treatin’ me like an invalid. You know everyone is so upset. They all want me to stay with them after the surgery or to bring me casseroles. The truth is it’s nothing more than a few hours in a doctor’s office and then a day or two of puttin’ special drops in my eyes. I think they’re just scared because cataracts are something that happens to old people, and if I’m old, well then they must be too.”

Aubrey laughed.

“Or maybe they just know that if it were any of them, you’d be the first one over with a pitcher of tea and a bowl of your famous potato salad.”

Betty put down her knitting and leaned over to Aubrey.

“I’ll tell you a secret, honey,” she said in a conspiratorial whisper, “since I’m goin’ under the knife and might never be able to share it again. I stole my famous potato salad recipe from Edna. The only difference is I use Dijon mustard instead of French’s.”

Aubrey laughed. Edna was one of the best cooks on the planet. The fact that Betty, who normally felt that cooking was something best left to the staff, made better potato salad than she did had always troubled Edna.

“I’ll take the secret with me to my grave,” Aubrey promised.

Betty pulled down her glasses and gave her a huge wink.

Aubrey patted her knee and got up to go.

“You call me if you need anything, okay?”

Betty nodded and smiled. She let Aubrey get a dozen feet away before calling, “Give my best to Joe!”

Aubrey groaned and ran off. The next house belonged to Armistead Bunch, who enjoyed a certain cache as the neighborhoods only bachelor. In spite of the fact that he was only in his fifties, he felt it was his duty to act as escort whenever any of his neighbors needed one. He owned an auto shop in town, and Aubrey was grateful to see that his house was empty. At least someone in the hollow worked for a living.

Germaine’s little farmhouse sat next in the line, vacant now that she had been put in The Home and a very sad sight indeed. Germaine was a champion gardener and her yard had always been the envy of every woman in the county. The impatiens she grew in hanging pots on her Jackson vine swathed front porch won ribbons at the fair every year. Now the plants were scraggly and brown from lack of care and the lawn was ankle deep.

Edna Frisch’s once modest house was the last before the long empty stretch that led to the cabin. When her daughter Rose and Rose’ husband Charlie had moved in with her, they had completely remodeled it and added an entire new wing on the back. It was now the largest and nicest house in the hollow, as befitted Charlie’s position as the town’s only vet. He and Rose were nowhere in evidence, but Aubrey saw Edna out in the front yard, weeding a flowerbed. She picked up speed and ran past before she could be called over. It wasn’t that she didn’t love them all. The people of the hollow had always been like a family to her, sending her cookies and letters when she was at sea and making a huge fuss over her on her annual visits, but there was only so much society a girl could take all at once.

After she passed the turn off to the Dixie Highway, Aubrey slowed to a walk and searched the road, but she reached the cabin without finding any sign of the deer or whatever had attacked it.

CHAPTER SIX

Aubrey arrived at
Vina’s the following evening at five minutes after sev
en.

Vina was waiting for her in the driveway beside her enormous Buick, tapping her foot and looking at her watch.

“You’re late,” she snapped when Aubrey hopped out.

“I couldn’t get Joe to leave,” Aubrey explained. “He keeps coming over and he just talks and talks. Besides, it’s only a few minutes.”

“We were supposed to
be there
at seven,” Vina corrected.

“We aren’t playing here?” Aubrey couldn’t believe it. Local legend had it that Vina had once delayed burying a husband for two days so that the house would be available for card night.

“We have to play at The Home now,” Vina told her. “They won’t let us check Germaine out anymore on account of the last time we didn’t bring her back for three days.”

“That’d do it,” Aubrey agreed.

“I’m driving,” Vina told her, opening the door and reaching across to unlock the passenger side in spite of the fact that the car was less than two years old and undoubtedly had a button that would have done it for her. As they drove around the lake, they passed Joe walking back from the cabin to his RV.

“You sleeping with him now?” Vina asked, waving as they passed.

“Not yet,” Aubrey said with a sigh.

Vina shook her head sadly.

“You’re a waste of space,” she told Aubrey, softening her words with a knowing smile. “But that ‘yet’ let’s me know there’s still hope for ya.”

They drove in silence, a circuitous route that wound through the mountains and several small towns. When they arrived at Placid Crest Assisted Living Community, Aubrey saw that the P, I, and C had been knocked off the sign so that it read ‘Lacd Rest’, a horribly misspelled but appropriate name for the place. Aubrey harbored no doubts about who had vandalized the sign. She looked over at Vina, who pulled up the drive with a look of such innocence and obliviousness plastered to her face that it only confirmed her guilt in Aubrey’s mind.

Placid Crest seemed determined to defy its many names. Not only was it situated in a bowl like depression rather than on a crest, but as soon as they had parked and buzzed to be admitted to the sprawling, single-story, cinderblock building, Aubrey realized that the interior was anything but placid. All of the room doors were propped open to help circulate the stagnant, fetid air. TVs with their volume turned all the way up blared from most of the rooms, and the nursing staff yelled down the hall in order to be heard over the din.

It also felt more like a prison than the community that the sign proclaimed, or even The Home, as Vina called it. Residents wandered the halls, some clad in nothing but a hospital gown, their bare feet slapping against the institutional linoleum. Any regrets Aubrey harbored about moving down were instantly banished.

As if reading her mind, Vina turned and said, “This is where they were gonna put me.”

Aubrey knew it was as close to a ‘thank you’ as she was likely to get, and under the circumstances it was plenty.

Wheel chairs were everywhere, and Aubrey and Vina were constantly forced to plaster themselves to the wall to keep from being run over.

Vina motioned for Aubrey to wait and popped into a room to chat with an old acquaintance, thereby completely foiling any further attempts she might have made to make Aubrey feel guilty for being late.

Aubrey stood against the wall and thought of eighteenth century insane asylums, purgatory and the horrors of being old.

“Miss,” a plaintive voice said.

Aubrey turned her head and saw a gaunt woman with deeply sunken eyes wheeling over to her purposefully. At 5’4”, Aubrey was hardly tall, but she was still shocked to find that, seated in the wheel chair, the woman very nearly looked her in the eye. She must have been a giant when standing.

“Do you want to rent a horse?” The woman asked her conspiratorially.

“Excuse me?” Aubrey asked, sure she must have misheard. She leaned in closer.

“I have a horse I want to rent you,” the woman told her in an insistent whisper.

“I’m afraid I don’t know how to ride,” Aubrey apologized in the same voice she would have used to sooth a child, her heart thick with pity.

Vina strode out of the room, grabbing Aubrey’s arm and unceremoniously tugging her away.

“Don’t get too close,” she cautioned, not bothering to lower her voice. “That’s Helen. She’s a biter.”

Aubrey took a quick step backward and the woman narrowed her eyes and hissed at her, then broke into a fit of malevolent chuckles.

“Come on,” Vina said, leading Aubrey away. “The main lounge is this way.”

They hurried down the hall until they came to a large room with a big screen TV and very little seating.

“The cripples bring their own chairs,” Vina explained as they crossed the open area and headed to the back where Germaine and Rose waited for them.

“I don’t think you’re supposed to call them that,” Aubrey pointed out.

“Oh right,” Vina scoffed. “These people are handy-capable. That’s why they can’t even take a dump without help.”

Aubrey let it drop as Germaine and Rose stood to hug her. She had expected some change in Germaine, some sign of failing health that would justify her residence at Placid Crest, but she looked as hale and leathery as she always had. She was in her mid eighties, but she still had a thick, curly helmet of dyed-brown hair and a hug that could squeeze the breath out of you.

“My Lilli has a lawyer trying to get me out,” Germaine told her reassuringly. “So don’t you worry about this little hiccup.”

Lilli, better known to fans of high-end porn as Lilli White, was something of a local celebrity in Cocke county. She had been head cheerleader, and both home coming and prom queen her senior year in high school.  No one had been surprised when, upon graduation, she’d gone to LA to be a star. They were, however, surprised at the kinds of films she’d ended up making.  The scandal had shocked the small community but not nearly as badly as the fact that Germaine, Lilli’s grandmother, chose to brag about her success rather than disown her.

At only fifty, Rose, like Aubrey, was considered too young to be a full-time member of the group. She was sitting in for her mother, Edna, just as Aubrey was sitting in for Betty. Rose was a cheerful, sweet-faced woman, gone suddenly plump with menopause. When,  Aubrey hugged her she smiled. Rose always smelled like peaches.

“How’s Betty?” Aubrey asked.

“Oh, you know how she is,” Rose said with a grin. “She fussed to high heaven when we insisted she stay in the guest room until her eyes were better, but now she and Mom are acting like girls at their first slumber party. Every time I come in the room they go instantly silent and then, when I leave, they burst into giggles.”

“And how’s John doing?” Aubrey asked politely. Rose and her husband Charlie had a son Aubrey’s age and much to their mutual horror, the little old ladies were constantly trying to fix the two up. As an MD involved in medical research, John thought he was too good for Aubrey and as someone who could take a flight of stairs without wheezing, Aubrey thought she was too good for John. In spite of their disinterest and the fact that John was tall, doughy, and bald and Aubrey was short, athletic, and voluptuous, the ladies insisted they would make a charming couple.