Cry Baby Hollow

Text copyright © 2012

Aimee Love

All Rights Reserved

PROL
OGUE

Terri buckled the
baby into the carrier and tucked the blanket carefully around the cherubic little body. She carried her daughter, now an unbelievable four months old, out to the laundry room and set the carrier on the floor.

“Now you listen to me, Miss Emma,” she told the baby, her gentle, cooing tones completely spoiling the stern words. “You ain’t gonna give Mama any trouble tonight. We got a lot a road to cover to get to Aunt Lisa’s tomorrow, and Mama needs a good night’s sleep to get us there. Understood?”

Emma ignored her, preferring to gum her own hand. Terri pulled a pacifier from her pocket, rinsed it under the faucet at the utility sink in the corner, and popped it into the tiny, heart-shaped mouth. She picked up the carrier, placed it on top of the dryer, and made sure it was secured to the bungee cords she had set up for just that purpose. Then she picked up a thick, well worn, rubber-backed bathmat and tossed it into the dryer, set the knobs for maximum time and no heat, and fired it up.

Emma began to squirm in protest.

“I know, I know,” Terri told her, reaching over and turning on the little portable radio on the window sill. Soft, mournful country music filled the small room. Terri hit the light and waited.

Some nights, the dryer was enough. The rhythmic vibrations caused by the unbalanced load combined with quiet music and darkness did a fair job of simulating a car ride, and car rides were the only thing that could reliably get the baby to sleep. The doctors called her daughter’s inability to sleep or be soothed colic and assured her it would pass. Wayne’s Mama said it was bad mothering and that she just needed to let the child cry sometimes. Terri had read that in books too, but Emma would cry for hours on end, not the thirty minutes that the books predicted, and Terri just didn’t have the heart to listen to her baby suffering. She invariably caved in and took Emma for a drive.

Emma’s fussing had been the last nail in the coffin of an already disastrous marriage. The baby would cry and Wayne would beat on Terri and yell at them both, as if that would help. Terri was grateful, in a way. If the crying baby hadn’t made Wayne testy enough to beat on her, she might have stayed with him in spite of his drinking and carousing. She knew he’d only married her because she was pregnant, and she’d felt she owed it to him to give him a fair shake. It wasn’t until after her third trip to the shelter that she had decided she’d had enough. Now she had divorce papers, a restraining order, and the hope that if their double wide sold fast enough she might come out of the whole thing only a little worse off than she had started.

Emma settled easily and although her eyes remained wide open, she didn’t fuss. Terri tiptoed out of the room, snatched her jacket from the back of a dining room chair, and reached under the kitchen counter for a tuna can from the trash. She paused a moment to admire the beautiful room before ducking out the front door and sitting down on the stoop.

The agent had told her all about staging a house and she had watched the Home and Garden channel religiously until the cable had been shut off. It wasn’t easy on her Waffle House wages, but she had done what she could. There was a large bowl of fake fruit on the immaculate kitchen counter and the dining room table was set as if any moment the guests for a dinner party might arrive. The beds were always made and fresh towels always stood piled beside the garden tub, waiting for someone to decide to have a relaxing soak.

Terri hugged her jacket tightly around her, glad that she wouldn’t have to drive laps around the lake tonight. She pulled a pack of Basic Lights from her pocket and lit up, making the first long, deep drag really count. Emma had a habit of waiting to wail until she sensed her mother relaxing, and at today’s prices, Terri couldn’t afford to waste a single puff. She sat on the cement stoop, huddled against the cold night air, and clung to the cigarette like a drowning man would grab a life raft.
Tomorrow
, she told herself. Tomorrow she would drive to her sister’s house in Mississippi, and with free room, board and childcare, she knew it wouldn’t take her long to get back on her feet.

A twig snapped somewhere close and Terri’s head came up, instantly alert. The light from the pole at the end of the driveway didn’t do much to alleviate the thick shadows around the house and the fog off the lake didn’t help matters. Terri stood slowly, stubbing out the half-smoked cigarette in her tuna can ashtray as she scanned the yard.

“Wayne?” she called, searching the thick scrub at the roadside for signs of his truck and then craning her neck to check the trees that crowded at the edges of the quarter acre lot. “I’m gonna call the sheriff now,” she hollered, “so you might as well git.”

She tried not to let her fear show as she carried the tuna can back inside, but as soon as the door closed behind her, she threw her back against it and slammed the dead bolt home. She made her way back to the laundry room, pulling closed all the blinds as she went. She was relieved to see that Emma was quiet and content, if not asleep, and she tried to stay out of her line of sight as she slid past the washer/dryer to make sure that the back door was firmly locked as well. Terri peered out of the small window in its center, but there was nothing to see except the empty gravel driveway shrouded in fog and the rear bumper of her old civic poking out of the detached garage twenty yards away. Whoever was out there, they hadn’t set off the security lights.

She crept past the baby again and went into the kitchen, but the cordless phone wasn’t on its base. She hit the page button and listened intently for the beeping handset and followed the sound through the house to  the nursery. The phone was resting on the edge of the changing table, where she must have left it after finishing her call to her sister that afternoon. She stopped in the act of picking it up and looked around the room carefully. Something was out of place, but she couldn’t tell what.

Her crappy insurance hadn’t covered a sonogram so the walls were painted a gender-neutral mint green, and all of the decorations were equally non-specific. There was a yellow quilt folded on the back of an old rocker she’d found at a flea market and refinished, a collection of cutesy cartoon animal prints that she had wanted to frame but settled for tacking up with poster gum, and a black and white mobile - the kind that the books said was the best for early development - swaying above the crib. She watched the mobile move gently in the breeze from the heating vent, and had a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach.

On a hunch, Terri opened the closet door and took down a box from the shelf above the clothes rail. She set it on the changing table and opened the lid, pushing aside the top layer of junk until she was sure that the item she was looking for wasn’t there.

Wayne’s Mama had never liked her, she knew, but she had always behaved fairly civil. His Memaw was an entirely different matter. She was a nasty old crone who snapped at Terri whenever she walked into the room, and she was always very vocal about how she felt about her great-great-grandchild having a mother like Terri. Terri wondered what kind of woman she had expected Wayne to get. He did shift work at the Beanie Weenie plant, spent all of his meager earnings on liquor or getting new rims for his truck, and at the time that Terri had met him, still lived with his mother.

The worst incident had been after the baby shower that Wayne’s numerous relatives had insisted on throwing for her. His Memaw had given her a mobile for above the crib - a family heirloom made by a long dead ancestor - that she presented to her with a great deal of pomp and ceremony and an obvious reluctance. Terri had trouble disguising how repulsive she found it. It was a small, impossibly young and frail looking little red riding hood running in terror from a pack of wolves, and as the mobile spun, the pack seemed to grow closer and closer. The girl was porcelain, repainted often enough that the edges of her features were blurred, but the wolves were rough wood, spiky with sharply pointed fur and fangs. Who thought that was the kind of thing a baby should look at as it tried to get to sleep? They informed her that it had hung over the crib of four generations of their family. Terri had tried to refuse, saying she was terrified it would be damaged, but they had insisted. Terri had taken the gruesome thing home and put it directly into the box. On the next family visit, finding the mobile not where it belonged, Wayne’s Memaw had been so angry she had lunged at Terri, scratching her arm with her ragged, unkempt nails before the family could bundle her off. Terri had refused to see the old woman again under any circumstances and she had tried to get Wayne to take the mobile back to her, but he had refused and so it had sat in the box in the closet all this time… But now it was gone.

Why take it now, Terri wondered, when tomorrow she would be gone and they could have the run of the place? But she was much more interested in how she had known something was wrong. Surely she hadn’t sensed a missing item from a box in a closet. She sniffed the air and smelled something moist and slightly rank. Probably diapers in the pail, she told herself, and hurried over to empty the bag. The realtor would never forgive her if she forgot something like that before she left. She bent down to get a fresh bag from the storage area under the changing table and that was when she saw it; a single dirty footprint, hardly noticeable on the beige carpet, sitting right in front of the crib. She must have caught it out of the corner of her eye, she decided, and her subconscious had picked up on it. She walked over to examine it and froze, the hairs on the back of her neck standing on end. Lying inside the crib, concealed until now by the quilted crib bumpers, was the little red riding hood figurine.

Her mind raced. When was the last time Emma had been in the crib? The baby would only fall asleep in her car seat, and moving her out of it always woke her. Terri knew it wasn’t ideal, but she usually just left Emma in it and placed it beside her own bed. She thought back and then realized it didn’t matter. She knew without a doubt that she had checked the room when she packed up Emma’s travel bag after dinner, and she hadn’t left the house since. Someone had come in and done this, and they had done it while she was home.

Terri pressed the talk button on the phone and dialed 911 with shaking hands.

She hurried out to check on Emma while waiting for the operator to come on the line. The baby was just as Terri had left her, sucking on her pacifier and not sleeping. Terri suddenly realized the line wasn’t even ringing. She hit the talk button again and looked at the little screen. It was on, but when she held the phone to her ear, there was no dial tone. Her knees went weak and she grabbed the edge of the dryer for support. The phone was paid up to the end of the month, and she had told them not to turn it off until then. She didn’t want to give them a forwarding address for her refund check, afraid Wayne might use it to track her down.

She unsnapped the bungee cords, grabbed up the carrier, pulled her keys out of her pocket so they’d be ready, and unbolted the back door. Her backpack with her toiletries and clothes for the morning and Emma’s diaper bag were both back in the dining room, but she didn’t care. She would drive straight to the sheriff’s station and make a deputy come back with her to get them, and then she would drive all night and never think about this horrible place again.

She unbolted the door and looked around warily, gripping Emma’s carrier so hard that her knuckles were white. She stepped out onto the stoop and let the door swing closed behind her, not bothering to lock it. Clearly Wayne had a way to get in, even though she’d had the locks changed.

Her eyes fixed on a low, dark form just inside the tree line on the far side of the driveway. It was darker than the surrounding shadows and it was just the right size to be a crouching man or, she reminded herself  - trying to stay calm - a shrub. She walked down the steps, keeping her eyes riveted on it, barely allowing herself to blink. The fog always made her skittish and she had to fight the impulse to return to the trailer.

Her feet crunched on the gravel as she walked slowly toward the garage, cursing the dumb luck that had gotten her pregnant by such a foul man, at the same time that she prayed her baby would be okay. She was halfway to her car when Emma decided to spit out her pacifier.

Terri stopped and reached down to grab it automatically, but although she was no longer moving, the crunching on the gravel continued. She spun around just in time to take the first blow in the face.

CHAPTER ONE

It was a
long drive and she hadn’t gotten a very earl
y start, so Aubrey had intended to find a place to stop for the night and make the trip in two days. Unfortunately, by the time she started looking for a hotel, everything that was even remotely reputable was flashing a No Vacancy sign. She settled for a light dinner and three cups of coffee at a Cracker Barrel and pushed on, hoping she got in before everyone had gone to bed.

She had to remind herself repeatedly that she was making the trip by her own choice. Her mother had called her over a month ago, frantic with the news that Vina was in trouble. Vina wasn’t exactly family - she had been her grandmother’s best friend and was her mother’s godmother - but Aubrey had gone through three stepfathers and a dozen towns before she was out of high school and through it all, summer’s spent with Vina had been the only constant. She knew her mother sent her there just to get her out of the way so that she could have some of what she called ‘grown-up time’ - a code phrase she used for husband hunting - but Aubrey had never minded. Vina was a hard person to like, but she was comfortingly immutable. She had always been there for Aubrey when she was growing up, and now Aubrey felt duty bound to be there for her.

Her neck ached and the coffee was starting to wear off by the time she finally left the highway behind. She drove past the new Super Walmart and wound her way toward the tiny downtown. Aubry crossed the railroad tracks and the French Broad River that they ran beside and then took a right, following them both into the quiet hills that were carpeted with the dense, slumbering giant of the Cherokee National Forest. She saw the sign for Broad’s, a local landmark of sorts, and slowed down, throwing on her left turn blinker.
Broad’s on the River
was little more than a shack that occupied a narrow spit of land between the road and the river. The name was meant to be clever, since the river in question was the French Broad, and it was reputed to be the center of a drug and prostitution ring. Most of the locals were either regulars there or active on the committee that was constantly trying to close it down, but Aubrey could care less either way. To her, it was just a building that let her know when it was time to turn.

She made a left, noting as she passed that Broad’s was doing a rather brisk business for a Tuesday night, and flipped on her brights. The road wound between two hills and then opened out into a wide, heavily wooded hollow, the center of which was filled with a large shallow pond that all the locals insisted on calling a lake. The road circled the lake and houses dotted the shore. Aubrey slowed down further as the road dipped and a thick fog settled around her. She wasn’t surprised. The lake was fed by two mountain streams as well as a spring, and its temperature was always at odds with the air. She turned off her brights to reduce the glare and hit the button to turn on her fog lights, realizing that this was the first time she’d had an opportunity to try them out. She crossed the tiny bridge where the road crossed Murder Creek on its short trip from the lake into the river, and the road turned to gravel. Then her headlights caught the hazard sign that told her it was time to decide which part of the loop she wanted to take. Vina’s house lay nearly half way around the lake road, so it didn’t matter which way she took as far as distance was concerned. The right half of the loop was wider and had fewer curves and more houses, but she impulsively turned left. Her grandmother, dead long before Aubrey was born, had grown up in the only house on that side of the lake. It had burned down half a century ago, and the land had sat unused until her mother had decided to build a cabin there on a whim. They had only used it a few times before her mother’s romance with roughing it had evaporated, and it had sat dormant ever since. It had been untenanted for so long that it was little more than a mildew sanctuary now, but it made Aubrey smile to see it, even in its derelict state.