Cry Baby Hollow (29 page)

“You’re joking,” Aubrey gasped, taking a fold of the ‘skin’ in her hand and examining it. It was some sort of thick, molded rubber.

“It inflates!” Vina grinned maniacally.

“Oh stop,” Betty nudged her with an elbow. “That one’s not yours,” Betty told Aubrey. “She’s just bein’ mean.”

Vina glowered at Betty for having ruined her fun. Betty reached into the bag and pulled out a neat pile of clothes and handed it to Aubrey. “Go try this on, hon,” she said gently. “I still have time for a few nips and tucks if it needs ‘em.”

Aubrey took the pile from her and retreated to the bathroom, grateful for anything other than the fat suit. That is, until she saw how little there was of it. She poked her head out of the bathroom door.

“I can’t wear this!” She squawked.

“Just try it on,” Betty insisted. “There’s nobody here but us girls.”

Aubrey sifted through the spandex and sequins, trying to decide where to start. When she had finally finished, she had to admit that the costume was quite lovely, although it did nothing to hide her deformities.

“Does it fit?” Vina called in.

“Yes,” Aubrey admitted hesitantly.

“Don’t worry about your scars,” Vina hollered through the door. “We didn’t forget ‘em. This is just a fitting. Erma will be by tomorrow afternoon with the rest of it and your make-up.”

“But what am I supposed to be?” She asked, sticking her head back out.

“It’s a surprise,” Vina told her. “Oh, and we’re taking your dog. Come on Drake,” she and Betty were already packed and ready at the door. Drake hopped up at the sound of his name and trotted over to them.

“Taking him where?” Aubrey demanded.

“He’s got a costume too,” Vina said mysteriously. “Erma will bring him with her tomorrow when she comes. He’s gotta stay with Charlie and Rose tonight.”

Aubrey wanted to protest, but didn’t have the heart. It was obvious they were all going to a lot of trouble on her part.

“He better not come back looking like a two headed calf,” she warned them and gave him a very thorough pet goodbye.

Aubrey wasn’t sure
if she was happy or sad about the fact that Devil’s Night wasn’t going to be eventful. She had actually been looking forward to chasing teenagers off the property with threats of grievous bodily harm, but she hadn’t relished the idea of trying to get the toilet paper off of the cabin’s steeply pitched roof.

She tried to remember the last time she’d experienced it, and realized it had been when she was in elementary school in New Hampshire. Their house had been hit heavily year after year. By the time she was in middle school and might have participated in the holiday herself, her mother had changed husbands and she’d been shipped off to boarding school.

She watched Halloween I and II, trying to get into the spirit of things, and then hobbled up to the loft to go to sleep. She woke to Drake’s low, rumbling growl and the quiet but persistent beep of the security system. One of the cameras had been triggered, probably by whatever was upsetting the dog. She looked down at his bed, wondering why she hadn’t thought to bring it up next to hers, and then stopped dead when she remembered that Drake was with Rose and Charlie for the night. Had she only imagined the growl she heard?

She eased down the stairs, one careful, slow step at a time, fighting off the urge to turn on the light. The shoji screens were all askew from her TV watching and Aubrey tried to stay low so that her shadow wouldn’t hit them. She limped to the bathroom, closed and bolted the door, and went into the closet. She turned on the monitor for the security system and saw that all three of the remaining cameras were currently running.

In front of her house, the wolf was back. As close as it was to the camera, there was no question in her mind that it wasn’t a dog. She couldn’t be sure if it was the same wolf she’d seen in the woods and in front of her house before, but having encountered it before she didn’t find it particularly threatening. That is, until she looked at the two camera’s that were running over at Joe’s and saw how many more there were. Five or six, she thought, though they were moving in and out of the two camera’s ranges and it was hard to keep track. Then, from in their midst, one of the wolves seemed to stand up on its hind legs.

Aubrey did a double take and realized that it wasn’t a wolf at all, but a man in a costume. A million questions raced through Aubrey’s mind at once. Was this the same person that she kept seeing at Joe’s, or someone different? She had thought the creature she saw with the group on the dock was a dog because it seemed to be following the people, but it might just as well have been a wolf. Were the Mosleys breeding wolves and keeping them as pets? Was it illegal to breed endangered animals, or only to kill them? She really had no idea. Surely that kind of thing was supposed to be done in zoos or some other regulated environment. She sincerely doubted that Doctor Doolittle’s Petting Zoo was accredited.

She remembered the naked girls and Vina’s talk of fake witches. Were the wolves part of some kind of ritualistic cult? Witches in movies and books often kept familiars. Though it was usually a cat, Aubrey supposed wolves might also fit the bill. Aubrey wondered if Devil’s Night and Halloween were really pagan holidays or if this was just someone trying out their costume a night early.

As the masked figure walked out to the end of the dock and looked across to the cabin, Aubrey decided that she didn’t much care who it was or what it was doing, she grabbed the M4, checked its load, slid on the night scope, and went out to show the asshole how she felt about stalkers.

Aubrey walked to the shoji screen in front of the rear sliding glass door and knelt behind it, glad that the sweat pants and T-shirt she had chosen to sleep in were both black. It wasn’t just slimming, it was also tactically sensible. She lifted the scope to her eye and looked out at Joe’s dock.

Unlike her surveillance cameras, which were designed for extremely low-light but still produced a deeply shadowed black and white image, the night vision scope made the world a bright, obnoxious green. It also had a 4x magnification, so although Joe’s dock was fifty or sixty yards away, the figure looked like it was less than fifty feet away. It was crouched down, possibly to blend in with the wolves that had followed it.

Was the costume an attempt to foil the security cameras? Why, when they hadn’t seemed to mind being caught on tape just a few days ago. Was something different going to happen tonight? Something more illegal than a simple case of trespassing? Aubrey remembered the wolf in her front yard and wondered if it had wandered away from the others, or if it too had a human companion that was simply outside the view of her camera. She ignored the possible implications of that and concentrated on the person she could see.

He looked like he had an actual wolf carcass draped across his back, with its head fitted on top of his own. Aubrey slid forward to the sliding glass door and then stopped, checking the scope to make sure her movement hadn’t alerted her watcher. She reached over and popped off the magnetic security sensor so the alarm wouldn’t go off when she slid open the door, then threw the latch and pulled out the pin that kept the two pieces of the sliding glass door locked together, acting as a dead bolt. She checked the scope again and saw the person across the way turn and say something to the wolves. Were they trained? She used the distraction to slide the door open a few inches.

Aubrey braced herself the same way she had for her practice shot, her right foot against the door frame and her arm against her leg to steady it. She threw the fire control from safety to semi-automatic and looked through the scope to take aim. The figure had turned back and was crouched low. Aubrey felt, with a dreadful certainty, that he was looking straight at her. She took aim at the head. It would be an easy shot, she knew, but she sighed resignedly and lowered her aim, searching for a leg amid the crouching man’s fake fur. She was fairly certain that you couldn’t claim self-defense if you needed a magnifying scope to hit someone.

She took a deep breath and halfway through her exhale, squeezed the trigger. The figure dropped and the wolves let out a horrible group howl. Aubrey reached up and replaced the security sensor. The alarm instantly sensed the open door. The siren began to wail and flood lights around the cabin went on, lighting up the entire area like a beacon. Aubrey slammed the door closed, threw the lock and replaced the pin. She pushed herself up onto her feet and hurried over to the stairs. When she was half way up, she risked a look out the back door through the scope, but she couldn’t see anything. She limped back down the stairs, feeling like an idiot. The bright flood lights made the night vision scope useless. She hobbled to the closet, locking the bathroom door behind her, and put in the code to shut down the system and kill the lights. She checked the cameras but nothing was active. That meant no motion on any of them in over a minute.

Aubrey swore under her breath. She put the M4 back on the shelf and grabbed the Beretta, holster and all and clipped it hastily on. She picked up the shotgun and pulled the slide, chambering a round. She remembered an old friend of hers who’s favorite expression had been, “Nothin’ puts the fear of God into a man like the sound of the shuckin’ of a shotgun.” She hoped he was right. She wanted whoever was out there to be terrified. Aubrey had taken her turn, now it was theirs.

She slid the night scope off the M4, since the Beretta’s wasn’t magnified, and eased back out into the main room. She walked toward the back door, staying well back from the glass, and held the scope up to her eye.

Nothing.

No wolves.

No body.

Nothing.

She swore again, this time with a lot more imagination, and stopped only when her cell phone rang. She opened it and gave a tired, “Hello?”

“You need backup?” Vina asked.

“No,” Aubrey assured her. “It was just a false alarm.”

“Right,” Vina said incredulously. “And you wanted to test one last exploding pumpkin before the party.”

Aubrey took a deep breath.

“Call if you need me,” Vina told her. “My aim sucks on account of my hands shake, but I make up for it by keeping plenty of ammo around. If you fire often enough you’re bound to hit somethin’.” She hung up.

Aubrey called 911 and told the operator that she’d seen some kids in costumes trying to break into her neighbor’s house and fired her gun into the air to try to scare them away. They said they’d send a deputy by to make sure the kids weren’t still lurking around and advised her to lock her doors and stay inside. No shit.

A few months ago, Aubrey would have gotten in her car and driven over to Joe’s to check things out. In her current condition, not knowing if she had even hit her target, she knew that was stupid. Instead she dragged herself up to the loft, sat with the shotgun aimed at the stairs and her back against the chimney, and waited.

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

Aubrey woke at
first light, stiff from sleeping propped against the chimney and ashamed of herself for nodding off at all. She checked the alarm clock. It was still too early to call Matt, but someone should be at the sheriff’s office. She dialed, told the girl who answered who she was, and before she
could explain what she wanted she was placed on hold.

“Heard you had a little excitement last night,” a man’s voice said after only a moment of muzak. “Sorry. This is Larry. You okay?”

“Hi Sheriff,” Aubrey said, surprised he was in this early and that a report of a prowler warranted his personal attention. “I’m fine. I just wanted to check and see what was going on. I didn’t mean to bother you.”

“It’s no bother,” Larry assured her. “For one thing, you got my predecessor fired so I guess I better keep you happy. For another, Joe keeps an eye on my girls while they’re down at school, least I can do is return the favor.”

“Well, I appreciate the personal service,” Aubrey said with a grin. “But as long as you don’t conspire to kill me, I’ll let you keep your job.”

“Deal,” he told her. “So tell me what happened. Everything I got was third hand from a deputy who talked to the dispatcher.”

“There’s really not much to tell,” Aubrey admitted. “I saw someone over at Joe’s. I’m not sure how late it was… I’d been asleep.”

“Your call came in a little after 3 a.m.,” he told her helpfully.

Aubrey hadn’t realized it had been so late. She hoped her antics hadn’t woken the entire neighborhood, and wondered what Vina had been doing up at that hour.

“I sent a car over, but they didn’t see anyone. I told ‘em not to bother you unless your lights were on. I hope that was okay. They circled the lake until the shift change just a little while ago. I don’t guess you got whoever it was on tape?”

“No,” Aubrey lied. “Like I said, they were all the way over at Joe’s.” She didn’t know if you could see her muzzle flash on the tape, or if Larry would know the difference between an M4 and a Beretta if you could, but she wasn’t going to risk it. She’d let Matt take a look at the footage first, since he’d be in as much trouble over it as she would if it came out that she had a machine gun.

“Well, they musta been scared off,” Larry told her. “Tonight shouldn’t be a problem, since me and half the sheriff’s department will all be over your way for the party, but tomorrow I’ll step up the random patrols we’ve had goin’. I reckon you and I both know this wasn’t just some kids messin’ around. I also reckon you’ll be wonderin’ about who you hit.”

Aubrey sucked in her breath.

“There’s a good bit of blood on the dock,” he told her quietly. “But I didn’t wanna run any tests on it yet. I’d have to file a mess of reports and I figured I’d just pass the buck to Agent Heck as soon as his office opened. He can have a state police boy over there in no time, and his forensics are better and faster than mine. I’ve had a watch on all the area hospitals and clinics, but nobody’s been in with any suspicious injuries. Any idea where you hit ‘em?”