Authors: Aimee Love
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
The sheriff took
a left before reaching Broad’s, and Aubrey noticed a sign, tacked to a tree, for the first time.
Doctor Doolittle’s Exotic Petting Zoo and Park
Day Care Center
Birthday Parties
Summer Camp
The cruiser wound back into the hills along a road paved so long ago that it was hardly more solid than gravel, but there was no sign of the
promised zoo. As the cove opened up, the trees abruptly thinned and she saw it on their right. It had pens made from split rail fences along the roadside, so weathered they were a dull gray, an open central area with a few picnic tables, and a row of rusty chain link cages at the back. At first, she couldn’t see anything more exotic than a few filthy sheep and goats, but as they bumped past, she spied a mangy peacock strutting through the tables and a sign above one of the cages that said “Painter”.
“What’s a painter?” She asked the sheriff without thinking. He’d been silent for the entire ride in spite of her repeated attempts to get him talking about Noah’s case.
“That’s what they call panthers in these parts,” he told her. “But they ain’t got one no more.”
“Did it escape?” She asked, wondering if a panther could rip a young man’s head off.
“Nope,” was all he said.
Aubrey didn’t see a single person at the petting zoo, not even an employee in case a visitor showed up, and she wondered how the place could stay in business. It had none of the charm of Doctor Doolittle. She decided they should rename it Madame Fortuna’s after the sad, derelict traveling zoo in The Last Unicorn.
She glanced across the street and saw a tiny old house, the kind that hardly looked big enough for a single room. It had a rusted tin roof and peeling green paint. A boy, perhaps thirteen, with bright red hair and very bad skin, was sitting on the front stoop, watching them pass. Aubrey wondered if it was his job to keep an eye out for customers at the zoo and call someone.
Next to the house was a stack of cars, some of them surprisingly new and whole looking. They were piled in a heap and Aubrey wondered how until she saw an ancient backhoe sitting off to the side. The entire arrangement seemed very disturbing. It had the look of a place that tourists happened across accidentally only to be eaten by the demented proprietors and have their car scrapped in the pile. She ran through an entire scenario where one father actually escaped and made it to the sheriff’s station to get help, only to discover that the sheriff himself was the ringleader.
She remembered the sign. Birthday parties? Who would have a kid’s party at a place like this? Or worse, drop their kids off here for day care or summer camp and then leave them? She shuddered, but consoled herself with the fact that the place was deserted. Perhaps people were smarter than she gave them credit for.
They rounded a bend and she lost sight of it only to be confronted with another clearing, this one packed with houses. At the center was an ancient looking cabin of dark, rough timber and thick, pale caulk. It was raised off the ground several feet and underneath she could see pile after pile of old newspapers, probably to keep drafts from coming up through the floor. A few yards away stood another tiny house, the twin of the one by the zoo except that its peeling paint was a dingy white. Behind them both was a little brick ranch house with an above ground pool and trampoline in its front yard. One of the pools sides had collapsed and inside she could see a foot of green, slimy water. They rounded another bend before she could take a good look at the others, but she did see another pile of rusting cars, this one augmented with several old appliances.
The next clearing hardly qualified as such. It was just a weed choked patch with a single wide trailer parked on it at an odd angle. Its roof had apparently gone, because a sort of lean-to of corrugated plastic had been erected over it. There wasn’t even a driveway leading to it, but as they passed, she could hear an old Eagles tune drifting out of one of the windows, so she imagined it must be occupied. She couldn’t help but feel a banjo solo would have been more fitting.
The sheriff turned off the main road and onto a deeply rutted dirt track that branched off into its own little cove. The hills sprang up around them, suddenly close, and they came to a small stone building with deep set windows that reminded Aubrey of the empty, gaping eye sockets of a skull. The sheriff pulled up in front of it and shut off the car.
“I suggest you behave yourself,” he told her quietly and led her into the house.
The front door was unpainted and secured with a latch instead of a knob, but who would worry about someone breaking in to a place like this? The sheriff opened it without knocking and ushered her in to the dark interior. When her eyes adjusted, Aubrey saw that they were in a long, narrow room that ran the length of the house. It had a trestle table with two benches at one side and covered with the remnants of long forgotten meals. A cockroach perched, unafraid, on the rim of a tin cup and wiggled its antenna at them.
On the stone floor, a faded floral area rug was so threadbare Aubrey could see the mesh it had been woven on poking through in more than one place. At the other end of the room there was an old pot bellied wood stove with a fire going inside it in spite of the oppressive heat outside. It was badly vented, as the soot stains on the ceiling gave testament to, through a window who’s glass had been removed and replaced with a tin sheet with a circle for the stove’s stack to exit through. In front of it sat the room’s only other furniture, an overstuffed, black, fake leather, recliner that contrasted so sharply with the rest of the décor that it would have been laughable if not for the woman who occupied it.
The sheriff led Aubrey over to stand in front of the chair with a firm hand on the small of her back.
The woman looked impossibly old and Aubrey was reminded that when her grandparents had gotten married, this woman had already had four children. She was small and dark, her skin the same deep, patchy brown as badly tanned hide. She was so thin that her bones protruded and her cheeks were sunken. Her hair was thin, the texture of straw, and was dyed a ridiculous jet black with an inch of stark white roots showing at the scalp. Her fingers were gnarled and topped with thick, jagged nails that looked like they’d been trimmed with teeth. Obviously not the old woman’s own, since she had nothing but a few rotten stumps left in her mouth. The nails had once been painted a bright red, but the polish had chipped to the point that only a small red blotch remained at the center of each. Her bare feet, swollen and covered in thick calluses, were propped up on the recliner’s foot rest and Aubrey tried to keep the revulsion from showing on her face when she saw that her toenails too, looked chewed down.
“Celestine Wynn,” Aubrey said, aware that the woman was giving her the same thorough examination.
“And Aubrey Guinn,” the woman crooned in response. Her voice, unlike her body, was strong and clear. “How nice that we rhyme.”
Was there a proper response to something like that? Aubrey didn’t know, and didn’t bother trying to come up with one.
“You’s lucky I place such a store by blood,” the old woman went on, speaking with painfully deliberation, lingering over each and every syllable. “I was done fed up with you. If’n it weren’t for my Mitchell, telling me you were my kin, you’d a shared your grandma’s fate. You’s lucky your mama was such a whore.”
Aubrey ignored the slur against her mother. God knew she’d called her worse herself. She tried to keep her face stony as inside her chest, her heart soared in triumph. She had been desperately trying to come up with a way to bring up her grandmother’s death, and here the woman had done it for her.
“You’d have burned me?” She asked.
The woman cackled.
“Laws no. I didn’t burn ‘er. That was her man’s doin’. He found her as I’d left her and started that blaze to protect me. No,” she crooned. “I didn’t burn ‘er.”
Aubrey waited. If she’d had any faith at all, she would have prayed.
“I gutted ‘er,” the old woman said, hitting the lever on the side of the chair to bring down the footrest and raising slowly to her feet. She took a step toward Aubrey and her hand shot out, grabbing Aubrey’s wrist and pulling her in close. Aubrey could smell her foul breath and something dark and earthy, like mushrooms, underneath the stink. “It was like watchin’ a bad cook try to separate an egg,” she told Aubrey in a horse whisper. “The yolk spillin’ over the lip of the shell and them jugglin’ it around to try to catch it. That’s what she did with her guts. Tried to grab ‘em before they broke. Tried to shove ‘em back in.”
Aubrey let her horror show and waited in wonder for the woman to finish digging her own grave. Did she realize Aubrey could reach up and snap her neck before the sheriff could even react? Did she assume the rest of the world played by the rules even though she obviously didn’t?
“Then I kissed her,” she said, clamping down harder on Aubrey’s wrist. “And I sucked out her eyeballs as she begged me to spare your mama. But I spit ‘em out on the floor. They tasted like her fever.”
“After she was dead, I ripped off her head and strung her guts around her neck. Pale, glistenin’ intestines hangin’ there like pearls before the swine she was.”
Aubrey decided she’d heard enough. She put her hand on top of the old woman’s, pried her fingers free, and stepped back from her.
“I hope you realize you just confessed to murdering my grandmother in a way that resembles Noah Mosley’s death very closely,” she told the woman calmly. “And in front of the sheriff, no less.”
Celestine let out a cackle of pure glee.
“You think my Mitchell will arrest me?”
“I think he will if he wants to remain sheriff for very long. Did you kill Noah as well?”
“If a person says somethin’ should be done, and other people do it, who’s to blame?” She breathed, sitting back down and pulling up the footrest with the loud clang of a damaged spring.
“Legally, that’s called conspiracy and you get to blame them all,” Aubrey informed her. “Who did you tell to kill Noah? And why?”
Celestine ignored the question.
“You know, you look like your grandma. I almost wish I’d a let her live long enough to see our blood minglin’ in you.”
Aubrey felt the sheriff’s hand on her shoulder.
“I suggest you let me take you back to your car now,” he said into her ear, “and then I suggest you hurry home to pack. You’re leaving this place one way or another.”
“I’d like to know who killed Noah before I go,” Aubrey said loudly.
“You’s not goin’ anywhere,” the old lady told her. “You’s mine now and what’s mine don’t go no place without my say.”
“Everyone saw her come here with me,” the sheriff said. “She just came to talk, remember?” He spoke in the soothing tones you might use on a mad dog as you backed away from it. His grip on Aubrey’s shoulder tightened.
“No,” Celestine barked. “She confessed to you about havin’ killed the boy.” Her eyes narrowed to a squint and for the first time since arriving, Aubrey felt a little tingle of fear dance up her spine. “You were takin’ her in to arrest her, but she got your gun. She made you drive her away into the forest, and then she hit you on the back a the head and run off. I’s be surprised if they never found her.”
Aubrey looked up at Mitchell Dunn, who may or may not have been her father, and saw an expression of calculation that chilled her to her core. The cell phone on his belt rang, but he reached down and switched it off.
“You let a confessed murderer with military training ride in the front with you?” She asked him. “That’s not going to fly and you know it.”
She heard a scrabbling sound outside and wondered how many Mosleys were lurking there, waiting to carry out the old woman’s plan. Then she heard another sound, further away but coming closer.
“Are you sure you don’t want to tell me who killed Noah before you take me into the woods and kill me, Sheriff?”
“You did,” Celestine cackled but Aubrey ignored her. She swung around to face Mitchell instead.
“I expect you’ll find out before the days over,” he told her flatly.
Aubrey swore.
“I expect I won’t,” she said with a sigh, hearing the sound of cars out front. “My rides here.”
She lifted her T-shirt to expose the small, black device that was secured to her belly with first aid tape. The sheriff’s eyes went wide. He spun around to the sound of boots approaching the front of the house. Aubrey didn’t get a chance to enjoy his shock. She was knocked forward onto her stomach as something thumped into her back and latched onto her. A sharp, bright pain pierced her side and something hot and wet probed her neck. She kicked back hard, dislodging her attacker and rolled away, coming up in a crouch.
Celestine Wynn lay panting in a heap on the floor. Blood dripped from her hand and mouth.
“Kill you,” she croaked, her eyes mad with fury. “I’s gonna
kill you.”
The door burst open and three men rushed in. They were wearing Tennessee State Police uniforms under their Kevlar vests and carrying big, nasty looking guns.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Vina was sitting
on the steps leading up to the front deck of the cabin when Matt finally brought Aubrey home that afternoon. He pulled in behind her gold Buick and Aubrey h
eld up a hand for him to wait in the car. She had violated a direct command to stay away from Celestine Wynn in a very big way and she was sure the repercussions were going to be intense.
“Is it true?” Vina demanded as Aubrey walked gingerly over to her. Aubrey wondered if she could pretend not to know what she was talking about.
“Did they really haul
The Bitch
away?” She persisted, her arms crossed over her chest.
“Yes,” Aubrey admitted, bracing herself for whatever was going to happen next, but completely unprepared for it when it did. Vina surged toward her and hugged her so hard Aubrey thought her new stitches would pop out.
“Ouch,” she squeaked when Vina showed no sign of letting go.
“Did she bite you?” Vina asked, releasing her.
“Gummed me is more like it,” Aubrey told her ruefully.
“Ha!” Vina crowed triumphantly. “I still have all my teeth.
The Bitch
probably didn’t floss enough. Is that your G-man?” She asked, and Aubrey turned to see Matt coming toward them. She started to protest that they weren’t called G-men and he certainly wasn’t hers, but Matt reached them before she had a chance.
“Guilty as charged,” he told Vina, sticking out his hand. “And you must be the famous Vina. I’ve been hearing about you for over ten years. I’m glad I’m finally getting a chance to meet you.” He smiled down at her.
Vina shook his hand, then turned to Aubrey and made a salacious purring noise in the back of her throat. “You could do worse,” she told Aubrey, as if Matt weren’t standing right there. Aubrey was spared any further humiliation when a dark mini-van pulled into her driveway and two young men in starched khaki pants and polo shirts got out and came to join them.
“Did you get all your shots?” Vina asked Aubrey suddenly. “I hear
The Bitch
is like a Komodo dragon. Her saliva is supposed to be so rank from the thrush that she gets you all infected.” She didn’t wait for Aubrey’s answer, but turned to Matt and asked, “Did you get any video? I wanna see the look on her face when they hauled her off.”
“Sorry,” he told her. “We only got audio, and that’s already been taken in to evidence.”
Aubrey left Vina to interrogate him and opened the door. Drake bounded out and she tried to subdue him without hurting her side. She let him run around for a minute and then brought him back inside along with the two techs. She filled Drake’s water, apologizing for being gone so long, and then went and showed the men around her computer and security system. When they were all settled, she went into the kitchen and poured herself a shot of bourbon, using it to wash down one of the pain pills the hospital had given her. Her side had required a dozen stitches where Celestine’s jagged nails had raked across her flesh, but it was her neck, with its o-shaped wound, that throbbed.
“So they had to tie her up?” Vina was asking as she led Matt into the cabin and helped herself to the bourbon on the counter.