Cry Baby Hollow (11 page)

“Here we are,” he told her. He hopped out and ran around to open her door.

“I’ll just be a few minutes,” she told him and walked in through the swinging glass door.

It was ten
before she came back with a deputy in tow.

“Hey Joe,” the deputy said. He was a pudgy, dour-faced man of around fifty in an ill-fitting uniform. He looked like he would rather be doing almost anything else.

“Hey Larry,” Joe greeted him. “How are the girls?”

“Expensive,” Larry told him with a grin.

“Larry has three girls at UT,” Joe explained to Aubrey.

“Beth Ann says she wants a masters,” Larry told Joe, going over to a patrol car and unlocking it.

“She home for the summer?” Joe asked him.

Larry shook his head.

“She’s workin’ at the Outback near the mall in the city. She says the tips are real good.”

“Yeah,” Joe told him. “That place is always packed.”

“You know, arresting this boy is gonna cause us both a mess a trouble,” Larry said, apparently tired of small talk.

“I don’t want him arrested,” Aubrey assured them.

They both looked at her, their shock written plainly on their faces.

“You don’t?” Joe asked her.

“Then why am I comin’ along?” Larry asked.

“You’re my insurance,” she told him, hopping up into Joe’s truck before he could get the door for her.

Joe drove back down the Dixie Highway, passing Broad’s and continuing on.

“I thought you said the Mosley’s were in the hollow before ours?”

“Ours is a hollow, theirs is a cove,” he corrected, “and what makes you think it’s a Mosley?”

“Well, Vina said the Mosley’s were almost all bad and that one of them was sheriff, which would explain why the sheriff’s office doesn’t pursue it… What’s the difference between a cove and a hollow?” Aubrey asked.

“The sheriff is Mitchell Dunn, but his mother was a Mosley before she married. The kid we’re going to find is Darren Mosley. His mom never has married his Dad, though they got a bunch a kids. He’s a long-haul trucker and isn’t in town much, thank god. I was at Broad’s one night and he was on one of those girls so bad they kicked ‘em out. You understand Broad’s isn’t in the habit of throwing men out for pawing the ladies. It’s kinda the whole point.”

Aubrey’s jaw dropped.

Joe grinned.

“I just go for the beer,” he explained, making a left. “They’ve got the coldest beer in Cocke County. They keep it a freezer set just low enough that it doesn’t pop.”

She still didn’t say anything.

“As to the difference between a cove and a hollow, look out the window and see.”

They were winding between two hills on a deeply rutted dirt road. Unlike the hollow, it didn’t show any signs of widening. She also didn’t see any water or very many plants. The earth was a dusty gray and covered in patches of weeds and scrub and there were hardly any trees.

An ancient farmhouse appeared on the right. It had a washer/dryer on the front porch and its paint, if it had ever had any, had peeled off long ago leaving its old, grey wooden slats to face the world alone. Several rusting cars stripped to little more than frames sat in it’s yard. Aubrey would have guessed it was long vacant if it wasn’t for the fresh wash hung on the line and a pair of hens scratching in the unfenced yard.

“Are those chickens?” She asked. They were grayish-brown and their feathers looked shorter and sleeker than she thought a chicken’s should.

Joe shook his head.

“Guinea fowl,” he told her. “People say the eggs and flesh are a little gamey, but they eat their weight in ticks.”

The empty beer bottle in the bed of the truck bounced around with every jolt on the uneven road, beating out a staccato rhythm and alerting everyone for miles that they were on their way.

Another farmhouse, even more disreputable looking that the first, appeared on their right. It had an old, rusty swing set in the front yard. All of the equipment was gone except for the little glider with its pair of benches that faced each other. A tiny old woman sat in one and swung laboriously back and forth. The swing set wasn’t fixed to the ground properly, so it rocked up with every swing, pulling two legs a foot off the ground and then slammed down as the glider returned. The old woman watched the truck with the deputy’s car close behind it pass, but never slowed down her swinging.

“So if this is the Mosley cove, how is it that Wayne Mosley lives on the other side of the ridge?”

“They aren’t confined to one cove,” Joe told her. “They’ve spilled out.”

“Delightful.”

“Not all these folks are Mosley’s,” he explained as they passed a grouping of three shacks close together. There was an ancient school bus parked beside them and it wasn’t until a naked, filthy child ran out of one, its mother hard on its heels, that Aubrey realized they were tenanted. The woman grabbed the toddler by the hair and they both froze and watched the little convoy pass.

“The way I understand it, the old matriarch, Celestine Wynn, had four daughters and three of ‘em married Mosleys. These people all are related to her, some of ‘em in more ways than one.”

“What does that mean?” Aubrey asked.

The road forked ahead and Joe slowed down and went right.

“Let’s just say that their family tree doesn’t branch as often as it might,” he said.

Aubrey cringed.

“Celestine and Vina were said to be quite the rivals in their day,” Joe told her. They pulled up in front of a surprisingly nice double wide with a basketball hoop in the paved driveway and a teal pickup with fancy airbrushed stripes parked beside it.

“Was she as old and mean as Vina?” Aubrey asked as Joe stopped the truck and turned off the ignition.

“Not was,” Joe corrected, nodding. “Is. And God help you if you ever meet her.”

Aubrey hopped out of the truck.

“Don’t come unless I call for you,” she told Joe and pointed to include Larry as well.

She went to look at the teal pickup. The entire passenger side was covered in florescent green splatters, smeared where someone had tried to clean them off.

Aubrey smiled.

The front door opened and four young men came out. They were all wearing shiny running pants several sizes too big, ribbed sleeveless undershirts, and backward baseball caps, as if they lived in East L.A. instead of East Tennessee. Two of them had green paint splattered on their faces and necks and red-rimmed, swollen eyes.

Joe and Larry both got out of their vehicles, standing ready.

“What the hell do you’uns want?” Their leader asked. The whites of his eyes were brick red and his nose was raw and puffy. His arms were green up to the elbows.

Larry and Joe both took a step toward Aubrey defensively, but she held up her hand for them to stop.

“I just wanted to gloat,” she told them truthfully. “You’ve cost me a lot in mailboxes in the last month, but I think repainting your truck is going to cost you more.”

Realization dawned on him.

“Fucking cunt!” He spat in her face and, ignoring the presence of Joe and the sheriff’s deputy, backhanded her, hard.

She collapsed to her knees and Joe raced forward with Larry right behind.

Joe had clearly thought she must have some sort of plan or be a master of martial arts. It had obviously never occurred to him that she would egg them on and that they would risk hitting her with a deputy present.

She held up her hand again and Joe skidded to a halt, grabbing Larry’s sleeve as he almost ran past.

She was on her knees in front of the kid and he loomed over her, his feet spread shoulder distance apart.

“I think she likes it on her knees,” he told his cronies and they all laughed.

“While you’re down there…” He leered down at Aubrey.

She smiled and looked up at him seductively.

“That’s just what I had in mind,” she told him and smiled as she sent an uppercut into his groin with enough force to make him gag. She slammed her elbow into the side of his knee and he fell to the ground in the fetal position, his hands cupping his damaged goods.

Aubrey hopped to her feet easily and looked down at him smugly. His posse took a step back.

“You hit like a girl,” she told him and sent a vicious kick into his kidney.

Joe smiled. This was much more like it. Now he looked prepared, not to dive in and help her, but to pull her off.

“I’ll kill you, you bitch,” the punk finally gasped, his voice breaking at the last word.

She ignored him and looked at the other boys.

“This wasn’t revenge,” she told them. “This was just for my personal gratification.” She pulled a tiny chip the size of a postage stamp out of her pocket and held it up for them to see. “This is revenge,” she turned the memory card in her hand, admiring it. “These cards can hold gigabytes of information,” she told them. “This one, for instance, has several week’s worth of footage taken from surveillance cameras I placed all along Red Bank Road. One mailbox might not be worth the sheriff’s time, but there’s enough property damage recorded on here to constitute a felony, not to mention underage drinking and DWI’s.” She placed the card back in her pocket. “Cry Baby Hollow is now off limits,” she informed them. “The next bad thing that happens there, I’m going to assume it’s your doing and send this to the county prosecutor, the newspaper, the sheriff, and your mothers.”

She turned and walked back toward Joe’s truck.

“We can go now,” she told Joe and Larry as she passed them.

Joe raced passed her and opened her door for her, then went back around and got in himself. As he started the truck the three boys were helping their fallen friend to his feet.

“I didn’t know you installed cameras,” Joe said as he backed into the driveway to turn around.

Aubrey pulled out card and shrugged.

“Pictures of my last vacation,” she admitted.

He chuckled.

“There ain’t enough frozen peas in the county to take away that boy’s pain,” he observed.

“Frozen peas?”

“They make good ice packs,” Joe explained.

They drove on in silence, passing the old lady who still rocked back and forth on the decrepit swing set.

“So you stocked recreational facilities, huh?” Joe finally asked as he turned back onto the Dixie Highway.

“Eventually,” she admitted. “But before that I blew stuff up.”

Joe flashed her a brilliant smile.

“You know,” he told her, “everybody in the Hollow’s gonna chip in and buy you the nicest mailbox in Cocke County.”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

That afternoon, after
Aubrey had hosed down the entire area around the mailbox, she gave herself a treat. As Joe worked on the new mailbox, she puttered around in the carriage house, ostensibly getting it ready to be converted into a garage for the Mini, but really watching him work. He was wearing only his cargo shorts, work boots, gloves and mirrored sunglasses. Bare to
the waist, she could watch his muscles bunch and release with every swing of the sledge hammer he was using to break up the old concrete. Whenever he broke a section free he would bend down to pick it up and toss it into the back of his truck and Aubrey’s heart would skip a beat.

He stopped to mop the sweat from his face with a rag from one of his pockets and caught her staring.

“I don’t pay for sex,” he told her, apropos of nothing.

It took her a moment to realize he was still worried about her knowing he frequented Broad’s.

“I never suspected you did, Joe,” she assured him with a smile and a shake of her head.

He laid aside the sledge and took up a shovel, using it to pry out the last of the concrete from the hole. Aubrey watched for another moment before getting to work herself.

After an hour of throwing junk into boxes, she plopped onto an old lawn chair for a break and saw that Joe was still hard a work. He felt her eyes on him and glanced over his shoulder.

“Am I doin’ it wrong?”

She shrugged. “Is there a wrong way to break up old concrete?”

He shrugged back and gave her one of his lopsided grins. “Usually, when you look at me like that, it means you think I’m doing somethin’ wrong.”

“Actually,” Aubrey admitted, “I was just thinking how lucky I am to have such a handy neighbor. Vina must be bribing you with something good for you to be doing all this work for me.”

“Hell, she ain’t bribin’ me,” Joe protested, insulted.

“Then why do you do it?” Aubrey asked. “It certainly isn’t because I’m nice to you.”

Joe stuck the shovel into the ground with enough force to leave it standing upright and walked slowly toward her. He got to within a foot of her without saying a word and his hand came up and wrapped around her, coming to rest in the small of her back. He pulled her closer and his other hand came up under her chin, tipping her head back so he could look her in the eye. His heavy leather work glove felt rough against her skin and she could smell the subtle musk of his clean, fresh sweat and the beer on his breath.

“If you don’t know why,” he said in a husky whisper, “Then you’re a damn idiot.”

He kissed her, delicately at first, as if taking her in, and then with a growing passion. His lips pressed into hers with enough force to bruise and his hand on the small of her back pulled her against him until their bodies were pressed so tightly together that she could feel his muscles bunching against her breasts. The hand under her chin tipped her head higher and he left her mouth and began to work down her neck with a slowness that made her blood pound in her ears.

She reached up, putting her hand on the back of his head and holding it there. His hair was damp with sweat. She knocked off his sunglasses and her other hand snaked around under his arm and came up to rest on his bare shoulder.