The Association

She blinked, caught off guard. "What?"

Calhoun smiled, and once again she shivered, unnerved by the odd appearance of his face, by the thick layer of flesh-colored makeup that here, outside in the open air, lent him a weirdly unnatural aspect. Had he always looked this way? Either she couldn't remember or she hadn't noticed. She was reminded of the time she'd seen the filming of a car commercial back in New Jersey. The commercial announcer had looked perfectly normal on television, but in real life the amount of pancake makeup he'd been wearing made him appear grotesque. Perhaps Calhoun did the same thing, tailoring his appearance so he would look regal and magisterial conducting a meeting on the dais of a room with dim lighting, even though it had the exact opposite effect in direct sunlight.

But why would he be wearing makeup? What was he trying to hide under there? Her chill refused to go away.

"We would be very grateful if you would accept our offer to join the Bonita Vista Homeowners' Association Board of Directors."

"Why?"

Calhoun put on what he no doubt thought was a friendly, inviting expression. "You're a full-time resident, you've been here a long time, you know and are friendly with a lot of the newer, younger homeowners. You also have time enough to handle the workload. Frankly, we can't think of a better or more appropriate candidate."

This made no sense. What were they trying to do? Buy her off? She took a deep breath, tried to think this through logically, but she'd barely slept for the past week, had been under constant pressure, and her thought processes were scrambled.

What would Ray do?

"How about it, Elizabeth? What do you say?"

She spoke slowly. "Let me get this straight. You killed my husband, and now you want me to join your tea party?"

Calhoun's smile disappeared, the expression on his face hardening.

"That is a false and scurrilous accusation, one that will not be tolerated. I am sorry for the loss of your husband, as are we all, and we are prepared to allow you a certain amount of leeway. But there is no way that we can allow you to go around spreading lies and vicious rumors--"

"I'm the best candidate, huh?" She snorted. "I don't know the real reason you're asking me to join, the real motive behind this farce, but I know you, Jasper Calhoun. I know all of you. Now get off my property and don't come back."

The smile had returned. "You're making a mistake, Elizabeth."

"It's mine to make."

They stared at each other.

Had she made the right decision? Her heart said yes but her head said no, and she closed the door on the president, hooking the chain lock and turning the deadbolt with trembling fingers, not daring to look through the peephole until she heard the old man's engine start up in the driveway, heard the clatter of gravel from underneath tires, heard the sound of Calhoun's Lexus fade away and disappear.

Barry finished the new novel in a weeklong frenzy of activity.

He sent off the manuscript via the post office's Overnight Express, and they celebrated the way they always did by getting ice cream sundaes, a ritual left over from their earlier, poorer days. The teenaged waitress who worked at Dairy King, the local Dairy Queen knockoff, either didn't know or didn't care that they were from Bonita Vista, and when Barry asked for extra nuts, the girl heaped them on. They ate outside on rickety metal tables under un adjustable umbrellas that completely failed to block out the mid afternoon sun, but the ice cream tasted all the better for the rough and uncomfortable surroundings.

On the way back, the Suburban's left rear tire blew out, and Barry crouched by the side of the highway for the better part of an hour, sweating and swearing, trying to loosen the undersized spare from the bottom of the vehicle and unscrew the seemingly cemented lug nuts from the blown tire's rim.

He finally finished putting on the spare, and he stood up, getting ready to toss the flat in the back of the vehicle, when a beer can tossed from a speeding El Camino nearly hit his head, missing by inches and splattering against the side of the Suburban. His clothes and hair were soaked with warm sticky liquid, and he heard a joyfully honked horn as the El Camino sped around a curve.

"Goddamn it!" he yelled. He angrily tossed the tire into the back and tried to wipe off his face, hands, and clothes with leftover napkins from Dairy King.

At home, the upstairs toilet had overflowed, although neither of them had been in that bathroom today. He used the plunger, and when he flushed everything was fine, but he worried that this might be the harbinger of septic tank difficulties, the first sign that they had a plumbing problem.

"Maybe you should call Mike or someone," Maureen suggested. "See if they know anything about this."

"Yeah," he said absently, but he wasn't really in the mood. He spent the rest of the afternoon mopping up the bathroom floor and washing the throw rug, leaving it on the upper deck to dry out.

It was a hot day and it segued into a hot night, and when they went to bed they left the windows open and turned on a fan.

They were undressing on their respective sides of the bed when, from the road outside, there came the sound of screeching brakes.

And a muffled thump.

"Jesus shit! Is this day ever going to end?" Barry pulled his pants back up, threw on his shirt, and stormed up the stairs.

He assumed that someone had hit a deer or javelina , and he expected to find a worried driver out of his car and checking the grill and front bumper for dents while an animal corpse lay on the asphalt illuminated by headlights, but that was not the sight that greeted him when he stepped outside.

It was a hit and run. The vehicle--whatever it was--was speeding away, down the hill, already lost in the pines, but in the last faint vestiges of red taillight glow, Barry saw a small crumpled form on the road. His first thought was that a child had been hit, and he ran down the driveway, legs j pumping as fast as they could. But halfway there, he knew it wasn't a child.

It was Stumpy.

Barry reached the street. The deformed man lay unmoving in the center of the roadway, his limbless body twisted into a shape that caused Barry's breath to catch in his throat.

He looked back toward the house and was grateful to see Maureen standing on the porch. "Call 911!" he screamed. "Stumpy's been run over!"

He felt for a pulse, placing his fingers on the clammy and heavily corded neck, but that was something he'd written about and seen in movies, not something he actually knew how to do, and though he felt nothing he was not sure if that was because Stumpy was dead or if it was due to his own medical ineptitude. He leaned down, placed his ear next to the open mouth, listening for the sound of breathing, but could not hear anything.

He knew enough not to move the body, but he didn't know CPR or any resuscitative techniques, and it wasn't until Maureen came out with her flashlight that he was certain Stumpy had been killed.

"He's dead," she told him. "There's no way he could've survived being run over like that. You can see where the tires went over him."

Indeed, now that he looked more closely, Barry saw blood seeping from beneath the body, saw pieces of intestine poking through rips and tears in the side of the callused torso. The eyes were staring glassily at nothing.

Just in case, Maureen bent down and felt the neck, touched the lips, pressed an ear to the chest, but in answer to Barry's quizzical look, she shook her head.

They were expecting a platoon of people: sheriff, deputies, firemen, ambulance drivers, medics, the whole gamut of emergency workers that such an incident would have brought out in a civilized area of the country. But ten minutes later a single ambulance pulled up, lights and siren off, and Sheriff Hitman emerged from the vehicle alone.Hitman walked toward them with a not particularly hurried gait, a notebook in his hand.

Barry pointed an accusing finger at Stumpy's body. "He's dead!"

The sheriff nodded curtly. "Yeah."

"You took your goddamn time getting here! And why aren't there any paramedics? How did you expect to revive him or treat him or ... or stabilize him?"

"I knew he was dead," Hitman said simply.

Barry wanted to punch the sheriff's reptilian face. He was filled with anger, but he knew that anger was only partially directed at the sheriff's dereliction of duty.

"I didn't say that he was dead when I called 911," Maureen pointed out.

"Yours wasn't the only call."

Barry looked over at Maureen, and they shared the same thought without saying a word. No one else was out this late, there were no other homes on this immediate section of the street, no crowd had gathered or onlookers had come by. The only other person who could have called it in was the driver who had hit him.

They told this to the sheriff and he dutifully took the information down, promising to trace the call and find out where it came from, but Barry had the feeling that Hitman would do no such thing. After describing how they'd heard the accident from inside the house and rushed out to find the body, the two of them stood next to each other and watched the sheriff lift Stumpy and deposit him into the rear of the ambulance. There was no stretcher, no body bag, just the naked battered corpse crumpled on the metal floor of the vehicle.

Hitman shut the double doors. "Thanks for all your help," he said without looking at them. He strode to the front of the ambulance, got in, and drove away.

"That was weird," Maureen said, stunned.

"No shit."

"He didn't even take photos of the crime scene or anything. Don't you think that stuff is pretty standard in any kind of investigation?"

"I don't know what to think," Barry admitted.

"What kind of sheriff is he?"

They walked back into the house, shutting and locking the door behind them. Once again, they undressed and got into bed, but as much as he tried to divert his mind to other subjects, Barry kept seeing Stumpy's broken body and dead staring eyes, kept feeling the clamminess of the man's rough skin, and it was a long, long time before he fell asleep.

They'd arranged several days earlier to play tennis with Mike and Tina in the morning, and after a quick breakfast of Total and orange juice, they walked down to the courts, rackets in hand. It was a Sunday and it was early, but the Stewarts were already there and had obviously been warming up for some time. Mike's light blue shirt had a huge sweat stain on the back, and the court was littered with fluorescent balls.

"Practicing," Maureen whispered. "They're afraid we'll beat 'em."

"Yeah." Barry smiled thinly. Playing tennis was the last thing on his mind right now, and he was here only because Maureen had said it would be rude to cancel. "We need all the friends we can get," she told him.

They walked past the Stewarts' Acura and Barry opened the metal chain-link gate.

"Howdy neighbor!" Mike raised his racket in greeting.

"Good morning!" Maureen answered.

They stepped onto the court, the two women hugging, the men shaking hands. Barry had not yet told Mike about his encounter with Audrey, and he'd asked Maureen not to tell Tina anything either. The Stewarts and Hodges seemed to be closer to each other than either of them were to Barry and Maureen, and he could not be certain where their loyalties lay. He did not think either Mike or Tina were into anything kinky or were aware of Audrey's proclivities, but their friendship with the other couple might make them predisposed to believe any alternate version or explanation, no matter how far-fetched. And at this point, the last thing Barry needed was an eroding of his reputation.

They decided to volley first, and they split up: men on one side, women on the other. It was an easy, non taxing back-and-forth, allowing them to talk as they warmed up, and Barry described the night's excitement, explaining how Stumpy had been run over in front of their house and how the sheriff had made little effort to disguise the fact that there wouldn't be an investigation.

Mike looked taken aback. "What?"

"That's what happened. Then Hitman drove away ..." He shrugged, leaving the sentence unfinished.

"That's not possible," Mike said. "I just saw Stumpy less than an hour ago."

Barry felt a familiar tingle at the back of his neck. "Stumpy's dead."

"No, he's not. I saw him."

"Where?"

"I was running the loop. You know, the same way we ran that time?" He gave Barry a warning look. "And I saw him sitting by the side of the road off Ponderosa Circle. Well, not sitting exactly. Lying. Or whatever the hell he does. Anyway, he was there and making those retard noises--"

"Mike!" Tina admonished.

"Well, they are! And, as usual, I said hi to him, pretended to be polite, and ran on by. That was it."

Mike obviously believed what he was saying, did not appear to be lying, and that was what was so disturbing. Both of them couldn't be right.

And if neither was wrong ... A man passed by. He smiled and waved.

"Hey, Travis!" Mike called out. "You heard anything! about Stumpy being killed in a hit-and-run accident?"

"Killed? I don't think so! That geek was rootin ' around in Merl's compost pile this mornin '! I had to chase him out with a shovel!"

"Thanks!" Mike called out.

The other man nodded and kept walking.

"I know what I saw," Barry insisted.

"I saw it, too," Maureen added.

Mike shrugged. "Well, I know what / saw." He shook his head. "Let's just forget about it. You two get your butts on , the other side of that net. Me and Tina are in the mood to whip 'em."

But Barry could not forget about it. His distraction probably cost them the match, but he didn't care, and after they said their good-byes and walked back up the hill to home, he told Maureen he was going for a walk.

"Oh no you're not," she said.

"What are you talking about?"

"You think you're tricky? I know what you're planning to do."

"What?" "Look for Stumpy."

"How do you do that?" he demanded, caught.

"I know you. I've lived with you all these years, and I know the way you think."

He tried to explain. "Look, we both know Stumpy's dead. We both saw it. I just want to confirm the fact."

"Why don't you call the sheriff?"

"Yeah, like we'd get an honest answer from him."

"Well..."

"You're welcome to come if you want."

Maureen shook her head. "I've had enough exercise for one day. I'm going to take a nice cool shower and read a good magazine. You can play Hardy Boys by yourself."

"Wish me luck."

"Luck."

He walked down to the bridle trail and headed up the path toward where he had first seen Stumpy. The trail ran through the forest just below Ponderosa Circle, where Mike claimed to have spotted him this morning.

He had no idea what Mike and that other guy had seen, but no matter what they thought, it had not been Stumpy, and he was going to prove it.

The dirt pathway wound through a copse of manzanitas and dipped into a muddy runoff channel. Barry avoided the mud by stepping on a series of half-protruding rocks, then followed the trail between an oversized boulder and an exposed section of hillside before it once again leveled off and continued through the trees and foliage.

He'd gone much farther than he had that first time, and he stopped for a moment to rest. As he'd expected, as he'd known, there was no sign of Stumpy. He had no idea what was going on, why anyone would try to fool others into thinking Stumpy was alive, how they could actually do such a thing, how they could physically accomplish the deception, but he had no doubt that the association was mixed up in it somehow. The motives were murky, and he couldn't figure out what anyone could hope to gain from such a ruse, but it appeared to be what was happening nonetheless.

He was about to turn back and make that call to the sheriff when he heard a noise off to the left. A heavy rustling in the bushes. Barry's heart leapt in his chest. It could have been a bird, could have been a javelina, could have been a mountain lion, could have been a hundred other things. But he knew it wasn't. He'd heard that sound before.

He recognized it.

No, he told himself. It wasn't possible. Stumpy was dead. He'd seen the broken body. Maureen had checked it. Hitman had confirmed it.

A branch snapped, leaves soughed.

This really was something out of one of his novels, and I in his mind he saw the sheriff dropping the body off at the j coroner's, saw Stumpy resurrected, saw the limbless body snaking out of the morgue, flopping up the highway in the dead of night, inching through the underbrush to get back to Bonita Vista.

There was the sound of moaning coming from somewhere around ground level, and he turned, got ready to run. What if Stumpy was a zombie?

Or a vampire? Or something worse? It was broad daylight, but he felt like a little boy confronted with the prospect of walking down a dark alley after seeing a scary movie.

Stumpy flopped onto the path, crying out.

Only... It wasn't Stumpy. It was someone else. Another dirty naked man with no arms or legs who forced himself forward with spastic thrashing movements, head and chest bobbing up and down, bloody genitals scraping dirt and twigs. Burrs and bristles were caught in the wild hair, and the face had only one eye, that one clouded and opaque. The other was a deeply hollowed out hole. Two cracked teeth were all that was left in the bruised and puffy mouth.

There was something familiar about that mutilated face, and though he was seized with panic and the instinctive urge to flee, Barry remained rooted in place, staring. He knew why Mike and that other man had been fooled. At a casual glance, even at a not-so-casual glance, this looked like Stumpy. But the differences were there if one bothered to take a look, and as the limbless man squirmed across the path toward a thicket of ferns, screaming incoherently while jagged stones scraped underbelly skin, it came to him.

Kenny Tolkin .

He squinted, staring, imagining a blue patch over the missing eye. He recognized those features, distorted as they were, and his mouth was suddenly dry.

"Kenny?" he said.

The new Stumpy looked up at him blankly and howled intongueless impotent rage.

Barry finished off another beer and dropped the can on the wooden floor of the deck with the others. He was living in a horror novel. His life had become his work--only he wasn't sure he could actually sell such oddball shit to readers and have them buy it. Psychotic friends, yes. Ghosts and ageless demons, sure. But a malevolent homeowners'

association that dismembered members for being late with their dues? It was too close to reality to be truly fantastic and thus allow readers to suspend disbelief, yet not realistic enough to be taken seriously on any sort of naturalistic level.

He grabbed another can from the ice chest, popped the top, took a swig.

He ran down a list of titles in his mind. Horror fiction was his reference point, and if he could just ascribe a cause to what was happening, if he could just determine a source, he could at least start to think about strategies, at least know what he was up against and plan for it. But there didn't seem to be a ready explanation. Bonita Vista was not built atop burial grounds to his knowledge, it wasn't the scene of some heinous murder or historic wholesale butchery. He doubted that the homeowners' association was an ancient fertility cult a la Harvest Home or The Ceremonies, and the likelihood that Satan was behind it all was practically nonexistent.

So what did that leave?

He didn't know, and that was what frustrated him.

Thinking about Kenny Tolkin squirming along the ground with his newly cauterized stumps dragging his damaged genitals, it occurred to him that the homeowners' association had killed Stumpy and that they had done so in order to hide what they'd done to Kenny. Hitman was oh Obviously in on it, and their plan to quietly dispose of the deformed man's corpse and substitute the other, pretend as though nothing had happened, probably would have worked had Stumpy not been hit in front of Barry's house. They'd screwed up there. That had been a miscalculation. The new Stumpy had obviously fooled Mike, and he would probably pass muster with everyone else as well. But he and Maureen had seen. They'd been there when it happened.

Despite what Ray had said about the courts siding in favor of homeowners' associations and ruling against the rights of individuals, a lot of this shit was illegal. It had to be. There was no way that mutilation and murder would be sanctioned by any law enforcement agency or member of the judiciary.

Except, of course, for Corban's beloved sheriff.

He tried to think this through logically. If he called the FBI or some outside law, would they be able to prove that what he said was true?

Kenny had no fingerprints to match, no teeth to correspond with dental records. If his DNA was on file somewhere, that might work. Or his blood type. But chances of that were pretty damn slim.

Hell, would they even be able to find Kenny, or would the association have him hidden away by then?

Or killed?

And what were the chances of finding Stumpy's corpse? It was no doubt scattered ashes by now with no paper trail documenting the steps.

Barry finished the beer, dropped the can on the pile, his brain starting to throb.

And what if he did turn them in, what if he did report the association?

Would that make him and Maureen targets? Would that put a price on their heads?

He tried to think about the situation from a novelist's perspective, tried to figure out what he would do, how he would have his protagonist get out of this predicament if this happened in one of his books, but he could not seem to come up with anything remotely helpful. The alternative-sitting on his ass and saying nothing--was morally repugnant. As was the thought of flight, escaping under the cover of darkness or anonymity and disappearing into the outside world, never to return to or think about Bonita Vista ever again.

So what were their choices?

He wished Ray were here. The old man could always be counted on to offer a balanced view of any situation and to come up with plausible courses of action. He also had a knowledge of Bonita Vista and the association that came with history. He'd possessed insider insights, something that Barry would never have and that was irreplaceable.

But Ray was dead.

They'd killed him, too.

Barry sat alone on the deck, staring out at the canyon lands as the sun went down, watching the shadows of the pines lengthen and take over the land.

And from somewhere in the trees, he heard Kenny howl.

The meatloaf was nearly done, Grandma Mary had already arrived, and the rest of the family was moving chairs and pulling out the leaves of the table for Sunday dinner, but there was still no sign of Weston.

Laura Lynn looked out the dusty glass of the kitchen window, but the yard was empty: the swing set deserted, the tree house vacant. The boy had been gone since just after breakfast, off with that no-good Tarley Spooner no doubt, and she wasn't too surprised that he was late.

She was angry.

But not surprised.

She turned off the oven, stirred the string beans on the stove. Weston knew everyone was coming over for dinner today. She'd made it very clear to him that he could only play outside if he promised to be back well before noon, and he'd assured her that this time he would not forget. She'd believed him, so sincere were his promises, and she thought now that she should have been firmer with him, less trusting, less lenient.

Claude walked into the kitchen, looking for a preview of the meal as always. "Somethin' sure smells good!" he said.

She hit his hand before he could dip a finger in the mashed potatoes.

"I swear, you're worse than the kids!"

He tried to steal a roll from the plate on the countertop, and she pulled the plate out of his way.

"Speaking of kids," he said, "have you seen Wes?"

"I was just going to talk to you about that."

"Don't worry. I'll find him." Claude quickly grabbed a spoon and took a bit of Jell-O from the bowl on the sideboard before walking over to the screen door.

"Claude Richards!"

"I'm starving!" He opened the screen and yelled into the backyard:

"Wes!"

No answer. He waited a moment, called out again. "Weston! It's time to eat!"

"Go find him," Laura Lynn said.

"I'll find him all right." Claude pushed open the screen, let it slam shut behind him.

She watched through the window as he checked the tree house, the storage shed, all of the boy's usual haunts.

Haunts.

Claude disappeared around the side of the house, and Laura Lynn suddenly had a bad feeling about where this was heading. It wasn't like Weston to lie, to disobey her once he'd specifically promised not to do so. He might be a little rambunctious, a little headstrong, but he was basically a good kid, and the feeling in her gut told her that he had promised her he'd be back in time for lunch and he would have been back in time for lunch--if he could have.

She wiped her hands on a dishrag, hurried outside after Claude.

"Weston!" she called. "Weston Richards!"

They were in the front yard now, and the rest of the family was filing onto the porch, having heard the commotion. "What is it?" Grandma Mary asked.

"We can't find Weston!"

Claude turned to look at her, frowning. "What are you overreacting for? He's probably playing with Tarley somewhere."

"No." Laura Lynn shook her head firmly, afraid that by giving voice to her fear she was ensuring its inevitability, but unable to keep from speaking her mind. "Something's happened to him. I know it."

Ford, Charley, and Emma came immediately down off the porch, while Grandma Mary herded Rachel and the little ones inside.

"Weston!" Ford called out.

"Weston!"

"Weston!"

"I'm going to check Tarley's house," Claude announced.

Laura Lynn looked around, and her gaze was drawn to the empty field on the east side of their property. She started walking in that direction. "Weston!" she yelled, quickening her stride. "Weston Richards!"

Then she saw it.

A small, unmoving form lying in the dead weeds next to a scraggly black oak tree.

Laura Lynn sucked in her breath. "Weston?" She was running before the whisper was completely out of her mouth, her legs pumping with a fury and purpose that they had never known before. She was dimly aware that the others were following her--Claude and Ford and Charley and Emma--but her focus was on the still, small body in the weeds ahead of her. She knew even before she reached it that it was Wes, and she prayed to God and the Lord Jesus Christ that he was only sleeping or only injured or only knocked out, that he was not dead.

Her prayers went unanswered.

It was indeed Weston. His head was crushed. Blood, some dried, most still wet, puddled in the broken indentation that had been the side of his skull. She could see a cockeyed ear dangling at the edge of the break, and in the midst of the liquid red were fatty flashes of white that could only be brain.

But that was not all of it.

For there was foam coming out of his mouth, a thick peachy froth that looked like bubble bath suds or shaving cream.

She looked up, looked away. Something sparkled, and on the hills north of town, she saw the noonday sun reflected off the windows of the big houses in Bonita Vista, like flecks of mica on a granite rock.

She looked back down at her son's still form and fell to her knees, registering but not really feeling the pain as her kneecap hit a jagged pebble. She touched the blood, touched the foam.

Claude grabbed her from behind. "Laura Lynn! Laura Lynn!"

And she started to wail.

There was something wrong, and Maureen sensed it the second she walked through the door of the title company. It was nothing she could put her finger on--they weren't all staring at her, conversations were still being conducted at normal levels--but she was suddenly uncomfortable, the warm acceptance she'd experienced in previous visits nowhere in evidence now. She passed the secretary, made her way past the agents' desks. She was an intruder here, an outsider, and though there were no overt gestures, though nothing was said, the fact was brought home to her in subtle, almost imperceptible ways as she walked through the office: the slight turning away of a chair, a quickly averted glance, an overemphasis on busywork.

She'd been assigned a temporary cubicle in the far corner, a desk surrounded by three modular walls, and she headed toward it, nodding hello and smiling at the people she saw, pretending not to notice that the return nods were nearly nonexistent and that there were no smiles for her. She was intercepted on the way to her desk by Harland Souther, the title company's manager, and he asked her if she would step into his office, prefacing his request with a nervous cough that she knew did not bode well.

He closed the door behind them after they'd stepped into the room. "Have a seat," he offered, moving behind his desk.

Maureen sat down warily. "What is it?" she asked. "What's the matter?"

"I'm sorry," he said, "but we will not be able to use your services."

"You're contracted to have me audit your payroll records."

"I understand that. And, as you know, there is an out clause that enables us to rescind the contract and pay you a kill fee. We will be exercising that option."

She faced him squarely. "May I ask why?"

Harland shifted uneasily in his seat. "It's this whole controversy.

We've decided not to do business with anyone from Bonita Vista. It's nothing against you personally," he added quickly. "You seem like a nice woman, and I know you're good at what you do. You're new here, and it's not really fair that you've gotten caught in the middle of all this, but..." He shrugged helplessly.

"I don't understand."

"You know ..."

She shook her head. "What?"

"Oh." An expression like surprise crossed his features, and it was replaced" almost instantly by a sheepish, embarrassed look.

"There's..." He trailed off, coughed nervously, obviously unsure of how to begin. "There have been some poisonings in town. Of pets. No one knows who's behind it, but a lot of people seem to think it's the Bonita Vista Homeowners' Association because ... well, for a lot of reasons. Last week, a little boy accidentally ate some poisoned dog food and now he's in a coma in the hospital in Cedar City. Yesterday ..." He looked away, sighed heavily. "Yesterday, another little boy's body was found in the vacant lot next to his house. He was poisoned and his head was bashed in. Now I'm not saying who did it, and for all I know the sheriff already caught someone who's in custody right now. But because of all this, the decision's been made to cut off all business with Bonita Vista. There's nothing I can do about it. My hands are tied." This last was said quickly, without pause, almost as though he feared her reaction and was trying to stave off a return assault.

Maureen sat there, stunned. She was tempted to argue with him, to point out that such a policy was discriminatory and probably illegal, but she understood the feelings of the people in town, and to a large extent shared them herself.

She thought of the gate, thought of Ray, thought of all the reasons she and Barry distrusted the homeowners' association, and she could not fault the people of Corban for hating and fearing Bonita Vista.

"I know you're caught in the middle of this," Harland repeated, "and, like I said, this really has nothing to do with you--"

Maureen stood, nodded tiredly. "I understand."

"We'll pay you your kill fee--"

"I understand."

Back at home, she checked her E-mail, scrolling down to view the list of messages she'd received that morning. The subject headings were all over the map, but though the specific names were different, the substance of each was the same.

All of her local clients had dropped her.

It was not totally unexpected, not after what had happened at the title company, but it was still overwhelming to see it laid out like this, to witness in cold, flat type such complete rejection.

She didn't even have Frank and Audrey anymore.

She would have laughed if it wasn't so sad, would have cried if it wasn't so infuriating, but instead she just sat there blankly staring at her screen.

He hadn't eaten at the coffee shop for over a week. Barry told himself that it wasn't intentional, that he wasn't avoiding the place, that he'd simply had errands to run and leftovers to get rid of and that a legitimate series of circumstances had led to him eating at home or in his office or even skipping lunch entirely.

But he knew that wasn't the truth.

Today, though, he was determined to return. Things had to have cooled off since last time, and he doubted that there'd be the same tension.

There was no way Hank could stay angry for this long. Joe maybe. Or Lyle. But Hank was more reasonable, more sensible, and since he was their ringleader, Barry knew that the old man would exert a tempering influence and calm everyone down, remind them that Barry was on their side and was one of the good guys.

But he was wrong.

He sensed it the second he walked through the door. A coldness that had nothing to do with the air-conditioning hit him the instant he stepped into the coffee shop, and he didn't need to look around to know that all eyes were upon him. The only noise was the muted sizzling of the grill back in the kitchen and the pl inking of fork on plate as someone at one of the tables continued eating.

He walked self-consciously over to his usual table and sat down, trying not to notice the complete lack of conversation, the air of hostility that overhung the eatery. Lurlene looked over at her father first, getting his okay before angrily slamming down a menu and a glass of water. The water splashed over the table and onto Barry's lap, but he forced himself to smile and keep his voice calm as he picked up the menu and handed it back to the waitress. "I don't need this, Lurlene .

I'll just have the usual."

She grabbed the laminated menu from his hand and stormed off without saying a word.

Something had happened since the last time he'd been here. He had no idea what it was, but it had to have been big to engender this kind of anger, and he only wished he knew so he could fight against it.

He used his napkin to wipe up the spilled water and took a sip from the half-filled glass. He was thinking about approaching Hank, just walking over to the old man's table, coming right out and asking what was the matter, when Joe stood up from his place near the counter and strode purposefully over to Barry's table.

Barry wasn't sure how to react, so he just remained where he was, took another sip of water, and watched the other man coming.

Joe faced him squarely. "Didn't think you'd have the nerve to show your face in here."

There was anger in his voice. No. Not just anger. Rage.

Barry's heart was pounding. He could not remember the last time he'd gotten into any sort of physical altercation, but he had the feeling that Joe was going to try and goad him into one right here, right now, although he still had no idea why.

He stood but tried to remain relaxed and friendly, though that was getting increasingly hard to do. "I don't know what you're talking about, Joe. Whatever's happened ..." He spread his hands in a gesture of innocence. "... I'm out of the loop. You're going to have to clue me in."

"Weston Richards," Joe said, practically spitting out the name.

The man stared at him for a long moment, and Barry shook his head, still unaware of the intended meaning.

"I don't know what this Weston's done," he said, "but--"

"Weston didn't do nuthin '!" Lyle shouted from his table near the door.

"He was killed. You guys poisoned him!"

Barry looked toward Hank. "There was another accident?"

"This weren't no accident," Hank said, and Barry could see the fury in the old man's eyes. "They killed that boy on purpose. The Richardses didn't have no dog."

"And his head was bashed in!" Lurlene glared at him.

There was a sinking feeling in the pit of Barry's stomach. "I don't know anything about this. This is the first I've heard about it."

Hank nodded. "That's the problem. No one knows anything about it."

"But we know who's responsible," Ralph said from his seat at Lyle's table.

"Look--" Barry tried to be reasonable. "--I hate that stupid homeowners' association as much as you do. More probably because I

have to put up with their shit and abide by their damn rules."

"But you're still a part of it," Lyle pointed out. "You're still a member."

"I have no choice! If I live there, I have to pay dues!"

"You have a snowplow!" a woman near the window shouted.

Barry looked over at her. She was someone he had not seen before, an overweight woman with an over bite and too-large breasts, and he didn't understand either her reference to the snowplow or the anger he saw in her eyes. "What?" he asked her.

"In the winter. You have a snowplow up there. But it's only for Bonita Vista. Our plow broke down last year and we were snowed in for nearly a week. Snowed in! But you wouldn't help us, wouldn't let us use your plow, wouldn't clear off any of our roads!"

"What about the water?" Ralph said quietly.

There were nods all around.

"Look, I wasn't even living here last winter. I'm not involved with the water. I have nothing to do with this Weston thing--"

"Our utility rates went up in town because of all the electricity you use!"

"The runoff from your carved-up hills is contaminating thecrik !"

"I just live there," Barry said defensively. "I don't--"

"Weston's head was bashed in," Lurlene repeated. "He was poisoned and frothing at the mouth and the top of his head was bashed in. I knew that little boy."

"I didn't do it!" Barry said.

"No," Hank said, and his voice was loud enough and grave enough to silence all the others. "But you didn't do nothin ' to stop it neither."

They stared at each other, and Barry realized that there was no way he was going to ever win here, no way he was going to change any opinions or convince anyone that he should not be tarred with the same brush as his neighbors.

"They're trying to kill off our kids," the woman near the window said.

"They're mad that we won't go along with their plans, and now they're trying to kill off our kids."

Joe's voice was seething. "Pets ... kids ... Who knows what's next."

Barry wanted to be able to argue with this, wanted to be able to fight back, but he couldn't. Such an idea might seem ludicrous, but he couldn't dismiss it out of hand, and there was no way he would stoop to defending the homeowners' association.

"I think you'd best get your food to go," Bert said to him from behind the counter, and it was clear from his tone of voice that this was an order, not a suggestion.

Barry's eyes focused on the small white sign propped up on top of the cash register: we reserve the right to refuse SERVICE TO ANYONE.

He had the feeling that this was going to be the last meal he would ever order from this place. Or be allowed to order.

He stood, finished off the last of his water, and walked over to the cash register.

He would not be surprised if Bert kicked him out of the office as well.

And if the sentiment of the coffee shop regulars was any indication of the local attitude toward Bonita Vista, he doubted he'd be able to find another office very soon.

With the association banning him from writing in his own house, it'd be the old rock and a hard place dilemma.

Maybe he'd just stake out a campsite in the forest, get himself a generator to power the computer, and write out there.

With a frown, Bert handed him the greasy bag of food and took his money, silently proffering change. Barry did not look at anyone as he walked straight through the center of the coffee shop to the door. His footsteps sounded embarrassingly loud in the stillness.

Once outside, he breathed a little easier. The claustrophobic tension that had been pressing in on him dissipated in the open air, and he walked back to his office across the open field, feeling as though he'd awakened from a paranoid dream and was back in the real world.

Fifteen minutes later, he had finished his lunch, abandoned the real world, and was in the realm of death and supernatural horror, the unpleasantness at the coffee shop pushed to the back of his brain, existing for the moment only as a possible element he could add to his new novel.

He was in the middle of a monster-POV chapter, flying along, his fingers barely able to keep up with his mind, when the silence of the office was suddenly shattered by the crash of glass. A baseball flew through the window next to his desk, sending shards flying inward, and Barry instinctively ducked. It could have been kids, a foul ball hit in the wrong direction during a pickup game, but somehow he knew that it wasn't. When there was no follow-up, he quickly sprang to his feet and sprinted the three steps to the front of the office. He yanked open the door, saw a man running across the field back toward the coffee shop, but could not tell who it was.

Was this merely a warning, he wondered, or the beginning of regular organized attacks against him? He didn't know, but neither possibility was promising, and he backed up his files on diskette and took the diskette with him as he locked up the office.

It was nearly midnight, and they lay in bed, not speaking, listening to the soft murmur of the television.

"Maybe we should move," Maureen said softly.

"No." Barry could feel the resolve stiffening within him as he spoke.

"I'm not giving those bastards the satisfaction."

She answered in an exaggerated western drawl. "No one's gonna run us out of town before sundown."

"That's right."

"But it's cutting off your nose to spite your face. No one in town will hire me. I'm not exaggerating. No one."

"We don't need these assholes. I'm making enough for us to live comfortably."

"Yes, but I have a career, too, and I don't want to give it up for some stubborn, misguided pissing contest you feel you have to win."

"What about your old clients from California?"

"There are a few," she admitted, "but that's not the point. If we were back in California, I could triple that number."

"You have your e-accounting empire."

"I could do that better in California, too."

"I don't want to turn tail and run. And I resent being blamed for something we had no part of."

"We're getting it on all sides, from the association and the association's enemies. I don't see any reason for us to stay."

"Because we like our house. Because we like the area. The reasons to stay are the same reasons we moved here in the first place. Nothing's changed. So we have a few less friends. Big deal."

Maureen sighed. "If we'd bought property in town instead of up here, none of this would be happening."

"Wewouldn't've bought property in town," he said. "Ray was right.

We're only here because we like the view and the paved streets and the nice homes. We wanted to live in a sanitized, movie version of rural America and now we're paying the price." He looked at her. "Can you honestly say you'd be happy living in a trailer or one of those rundown shacks that the townies live in?"

"We could've built our own house."

"And lived down there with the rednecks and the wife beaters, staring up at Bonita Vista?" He shook his head.

"So it's a class thing, huh?"

"Yeah," he said. "I guess it is. No one likes to talk about that anymore, we all pretend it doesn't exist, but it does. There's a gulf.

We're educated and fairly well off, and these are people who've graduated from high school at best and have probably never even left the state. We're not like them, and we wouldn't fit in." He thought of the day he'd invited the guys from the coffee shop up here, and it scared him that his attitude toward them seemed to coincide with that of the association.

"We don't fit in here either," she said.

He smiled at her sweetly and batted his eyelashes. "But we have each other."

Maureen was silent for a moment. "I'm not putting up with this forever," she told him. "You can write anywhere, a house in California or an apartment in New York as well as here. But I don't work on my own. I'm an accountant. I need people for my business. I'll see what I can do with conference calls and faxes and E-mails, but I'm not promising anything. If I start going stir crazy, we're out of here, we're gone."

She was wrong, though. He couldn't write anywhere. He was not allowed to write in Bonita Vista, and there was a good likelihood he would soon be evicted from his little teapot museum office. That would be cutting off his nose to spite his face, but, to throw another cliche ' into the mix, he'd cross that bridge when he came to it.

Neither of them said any more after that. Maureen scooted down on her pillow, put her arm around his midsection, snuggled next to him, and they both fell asleep listening to the quiet, comforting murmur of the television.

"Barry?"

He opened his eyes groggily.

"Barry?"

There was a hint of panic, a touch of fear, in Maureen's voice that drove away the sleepiness and caused him to sit up instantly, wide awake. The sun was streaming through a part in the curtains, and when he looked at the clock, he saw that it was after nine. He'd been asleep nearly twelve hours.

He glanced over to see Maureen standing by the side of the bed, holding up a copy of the Carbon Weekly Standard. Her hands were shaking, and the rustle of the newspaper sounded strangely amplified in the silent house.

He was filled with a sense of dread, and he reached out and took the paper from her, reading the banner headline:

CHILD POISONED, BONITA VISTA BLAMED

"It says there's going to be a rally tonight. The people of Corban , the parents of Corban , are planning to meet outside the gates of Bonita Vista at eight to protest the poisonings."

Barry read through the article. The rally was being organized by Claude Richards, the father of Weston, and it was his goal to intimidate the guilty parties within Bonita Vista--the people who had made the decision to lay out the poison and the people who had actually done the deed--into giving themselves up.

He wanted to put pressure on the homeowners' association and all of the residents, a tactic that each of the individuals quoted in the article as well as the newspaper itself seemed to support wholeheartedly.

Surprisingly, there was no quote from the sheriff, and Barry wondered where Hitman would stand on this, whose side he would take. No matter how great his loyalty to Bonita Vista, no matter how much he was being paid off, there was no way he could turn a blind eye to a killing. Not of a child. Not in a small town. Not if he wanted to keep his job.

"I don't like the sound of this 'rally,"" he said, handing back the paper.

"Me either. I see a bunch of drunk bubbas bringing their shotguns and talking themselves into mob violence."

"There's nothing scarier than groupthink," Barry agreed.

"So what should we do?"

"What can we do?"

Maureen sat down on the bed next to him. "I thought we could take a trip. There's probably more national parks within driving distance of this place than anywhere else in the country, and we haven't been to any of them. Why don't we drive out, find someplace to stay in Cedar City, and go to Bryce or Zion or Cedar Breaks."

"You've really been thinking about this."

"I've been looking through our Triple A book," she admitted. She took his hand. "I don't want to be here tonight. I have a bad feeling about it."

He leaned over and gave her a quick kiss.

"I'm serious. There's the potential for danger here."

"From which side?"

"I don't know. It doesn't matter. I just don't want to be here when it happens."

Barry sighed. "I don't think anything will happen--"

"How can you say that!"

"We have a gate with an armed guard. And even Hitman can't ignore something like this. The sheriff'll make sure things don't get out of hand."

Maureen laughed shortly. "Right."

He was about to argue that their home was far enough up the hill that even if the Corban protesters got through the gate and went on some kind of rampage, the mob would probably be stopped or spent by the time they reached their place Rampage --but he stopped himself. What the hell was he doing? What was he thinking? After everything he'd seen, after everything he knew or suspected, was he honestly arguing for the probability of normalcy reasserting itself? This wasn't a normal situation, this wasn't a normal place. Normal logic did not apply. Shit, if he didn't know better, he'd think that he'd been influenced or corrupted, bombarded with association mind rays or magical spells to make him more complacent and compliant and agreeable to the party line.

"You're right," Barry admitted.

"So we'll go?"

"Yeah," he said. "After breakfast, after I take a shower. Just pack enough for overnight, though. We're coming back tomorrow."

"To survey the damage?"

"Hopefully not."

She kissed him. "You're a good man, Charlie Brown." She stood up.

"Go take your shower."

"Want to join me?"

"Tonight," she promised.

Barry had finished his shower and was up in the kitchen pouring himself some coffee when he heard a loud knock at the front door. Maureen, already downstairs, answered it and a moment later called his name.

He moved around the corner and looked over the railing to see Mike enter the living room, newspaper in hand. "Hey!" Barry called, walking downstairs. "How's it going?"

Mike held up a copy of the Standard. "I assume you saw this?"

Barry nodded.

"They're calling it a 'rally,"" Mike said angrily, "trying to make it sound like some sort of happy high school thing. It's a planned assault is what it is, an attack on us. They want to get enough people together so that they can storm the gates and ... I don't know what."

"That's why we're leaving," Barry said. "Mo wants us to spend the night in Cedar City just in case things get too hairy."

"I don't..." Mike shook his head, confused. "What are you talking about?"

"I have a bad feeling about this," Maureen said. "I don't claim to be psychic or anything, but I just think we need to get out of here.

Something's wrong. Something's going to happen."

"Yeah, something's going to happen. They're going to vandalize our property. You'll come back to smashed windows and shot-up car tires and ... who knows what all."

"Exactly. That's why we don't want to be here when it happens." Mike turned toward Barry. "What's the matter with you?" he asked. "This is your home. This is your property. You can't tell me you wouldn't stay and fight a fire to save your house. Hell, we'd all be up on our roofs with hoses, wetting down everything in sight."

Barry nodded reluctantly.

"Same thing here. I know the association is fucked up, but we have no choice but to back them on this. Besides, this is what the association is supposed to be doing. Protecting Bonita Vista, standing up for the residents."

"There wouldn't even be this rally if the association hadn't..." He looked into Mike's eyes. "If those kids hadn't been poisoned."

"It's a deal with the devil," Mike admitted. "But we have no choice.

Whether we like it or not, those Corbanites see this as an us-versus-them situation. And we're 'them.""

Barry tried to smile. ""What do you think they'll do? Burn down our houses?"

"Vigilante justice is not exactly unheard of in this part of the world, and, yes, that is something I think they might try to do."

"Me, too," Maureen said. "That's why I don't want to be here. You can't fight a mob, you can't reason with a horde of angry stirred-up people, particularly ones whose children have been killed."

"I understand your feelings," Mike said to her. He turned to Barry.

"But why are you going? Because you fear for your personal safety?

That's okay if it is; that's a legitimate reason. But if you're doing this to get back at the association, because you think it'll somehow hurt them, then you're wrong. You read that article. They blame us, all of us, not just the association, and I don't think the rest of us should suffer collateral damage because of it."

It was the fire analogy that had gotten to him. As much as Barry hated to admit it, as much as he wanted to stick with Maureen and the promise he'd made to her, Mike's argument made sense. He should stay with his house, make sure his home was safe. It was his duty.

And there was something else.

"We can't leave," he told her. "Not this macho bullshit!"

"Who's going to protect our house--"

"What, you're going to buy a gun and sit on the porch to shoot at intruders? Come on! This is craziness! If there is any damage, our homeowners' insurance will cover it. Half the homes here are unoccupied! They're vacation homes! What about those people? They're not rushing back for the last stand at the O.K. Corral." She looked into his eyes. "There's no reason to do this."

"What if it's a test?" he said quietly.

"What?"

"What if the association just wants to know who's willing to stay and fight?"

"Fight?" she practically screamed.

"Figuratively, not literally. What if they're just trying to gauge the mettle of their opponents? Us."

"I'll let you two discuss it," Mike said, backing off toward the door.

"I think you should stay, though. There's strength in numbers, and we need all the bodies we can get. Like she said, there aren't a lot of full-timers up here, and we don't have a newspaper recruiting people for our side like they do." He stepped outside, and carefully closed the screen. "It's something to think about."

She slammed the door behind him. "It's not something to think about."

"Mo..."

"You promised me we'd leave."

"I know."

"What is this? The great iconoclastic horror writer Barry Welch is afraid of what his neighbors will say about him? Fuck them! If you want to show someone that you have balls, show me, your wife, and stand down this peer pressure and get the hell out of here for the night."

That was the problem with being a writer, Barry thought. He could see things from both sides. It was his job to get into characters' heads, to articulate the thought processes behind opposing points of view.

Maureen was right, but Mike was right, too. He spent each day engaging in such schizophrenic empathy, and it was why he was always aware of the duality in any given situation.

But he'd never seen things from the association's side.

That was true. And that was why his logic broke down when it came to the homeowners' association.

It was still not inconceivable to him that the association wanted him to agonize over this choice, that they were behind this entire scenario and had placed him in this position in order to observe him and study his reaction, like scientists examining the behavior of a lab rat. Such Byzantine deviousness might seem absurd, the product of an overactive imagination, but when all of the events since their arrival here were viewed as part of a continuum, it was a conclusion that did not seem at all farfetched.

"What if this is all part of some elaborate scheme on the part of the association?" he asked. "I'm serious about this. What if it is a test?"

"Now you are being paranoid. Get real. They poisoned pets and children because they knew it would get the populace up in arms and they'd descend on Bonita Vista with baseball bats and guns and then Barry Welch would be forced to decide whether or not to remain home for the evening? You don't think that's being just a little egocentric and self-absorbed?"

He grimaced. "Well, when you put it that way ..."

"It's about time you came to your senses. Now let's get out of here before some other version of Satan tries to tempt you away from the path."

"Mike's Satan?"

"Just get ready to go."

Barry nodded. "Okay." He happened to glance over at the television^

"Wait a minute. Let's check out the Weather Channel, see what the weather's going to be like." He picked up the remote from the coffee table and started flipping through channels, trying to find the station.

"Hey," Maureen said. "What's ... what's that?"

"What?"

"Flip it back a few."

He pressed the down button and the channels reversed.

"There!"

Barry frowned. What was this, some kind of community access station? A fuzzy, nearly colorless videotape of a tennis match, seen from above, was being broadcast. There was no sound, only the bird's-eye view of an elderly couple in matching whites stumblingly attempting to dash about the court despite an obvious lack of athletic ability.

"That's the tennis court!" Maureen pointed. "Our tennis court!" She picked up the list of cable channels from the top of the television.

"Sixteen," she said, her finger running down the station lineup.

"BVTV." She frowned. "BVTV? What's ..." But the expression on her face said that she'd already figured it out.

"Bonita Vista Television." Barry stared at the match on screen. "So that's what that camera's for." He looked triumphantly at Maureen. "I

knew it wasn't just security."

"My God."

They watched the man awkwardly try but fail to return the woman's serves.

"I've seen those two before," Maureen said. "I think they live down by Audrey."

"What else do you think they're taping?" Barry asked quietly.

As if in answer to his question, the scene shifted. Now it was a live video feed from inside someone's house, the camera focused on the movements of a lone woman.

Liz.

She was not doing anything, merely sitting on the white living room couch, hands in her lap, head looking up, sobbing, but the scene was so intimate, so invasive, that Barry immediately shut off the television.

He could not watch. After only those few seconds of unsolicited voyeurism, he felt dirty and guilty. It was uncomfortable to see a person in so private a moment.

He wondered if the board members were watching on Their own televisions.

And if they were smiling.

The thought filled him with white-hot rage, a righteous , anger. He had never hated the homeowners' association more than he did at that moment. He thought of that weasel Neil Campbell, of the prissy seriousness of that unrepentant toady, and he realized that to him Campbell was the face of the association because he had never actually seen a member of the board. He'd seen Jasper Calhoun's car and his house, but he'd never seen Calhoun himself. And he'd never seen any of the others, either. Hell, he didn't even know their names.

A tear snaked down Maureen's cheek, and she drew in a ragged breath.

"How could they do something like this?" "Liz told you the board was after her."

"I'm going to call, let her know about this." Maureen ran upstairs, picked up the phone from the dining room table where they'd left it, and punched in Liz's number as she walked back down the steps. It obviously took several rings for Liz to answer because Maureen was at the bottom of the steps before she started talking, and Barry imagined the old woman pulling herself together, wiping the tears from her face, breathing deeply before picking up the phone.

And doing it all on camera for the amusement of her neighbors.

"You're on BVTV right now," Maureen said. "There's some kind of hidden camera in your house. We turned on the TV and saw you sitting on the couch ... crying. There's no sound, so we can talk, but get away from the couch, get away from the living room, they can see you."

There was a long pause as Maureen listened to her friend. "Uh-huh ...

Yeah ... No ... No ... I understand ... Yes we are ... Same to you.

Bye." Maureen hung up the phone, looking stunned. "She says she knows."

"She knows?"

"She saw herself on TV last night." Maureen's jaw tightened. "Going to the bathroom."

"But how--"

"It's not live. It's edited, on tape. She wasn't crying just ] now, she said that was probably taken last week sometime, I She was in the kitchen, cleaning. She was up half the night j trying to find where the camera in the bathroom was hidden, but couldn't find a thing. Now she thinks her whole house is probably under surveillance."

"What's she going to do?"

"File a complaint."

"That's it?"

"Keep looking for the cameras, I guess. And try to ignore them until she does."

"Jesus."

"Let's get out of here," Maureen said. "Let's go to Cedar City."

Ten minutes later, their bags were in the Suburban and they were ready to go. Maureen looked back at the house. "Do you think we should boa id up the windows first, just in case?"

Barry shook his head. "I don't want to show fear. I don't want the association to think we scare easily. As far as they're concerned, we just decided to take a little trip for a few days because we wanted to see the country."

"Okay."

"Besides, we'd have to go down to the lumber yard, buy some plywood, nail it up. I don't know how I'd reach those top windows--"

"I said okay."

"Okay."

They got into the SUV and Barry pulled out of the driveway onto the road.

They were stopped at the gate. "I'm sorry," the guard said, walking out of the kiosk. "No one is allowed to enter or leave Bonita Vista."

He was wearing an expression of grim determination. The olive garb was gone, replaced by a crisp black uniform, the shirt adorned with silver epaulets and insignias, feet, clad in knee-high black boots. His usual clipboard was nowhere in evidence, and his right hand rested on the bolstered pistol at his side.

"What?" Barry said.

"You may not leave Bonita Vista. It's been deemed a security risk, and I'm afraid that for your own safety, you are not allowed to depart the premises."

"What the fuck is this? The association's declaring martial law?"

The guard met his gaze. "Exactly."

He'd meant it as a joke. Well, not a joke exactly, but a cutting barb, an exaggeration intended to embarrass the guard and draw attention to the absurdity of such a situation. Instead, he was confronted with a flat acknowledgment that his sarcastic overstatement was the truth.

He looked over at Maureen in the passenger seat. Her face was red, livid with anger, and she leaned around him to address the guard.

"Listen, you! We are the homeowners' association and you work for us!

Our dues pay your salary! Now open that goddamn gate and let us through!"

The guard looked at her coldly, then turned his attention to Barry. "I

suggest you back up and turn this vehicle around."

"What is your name?" Maureen demanded. "I'll have your job, you insolent son of a bitch!"

"My name is Curtis. And as you know, I also live in Bonita Vista." He leaned forward, resting an arm on the open window frame of the Suburban, letting the tip of his face cross over the invisible boundary that separated the inside of the vehicle from the outside. "And I'd appreciate a little respect from you, you insolent cunt ."

He smiled, pulled away, tipped the black cap that covered his blond brush cut. "Good day, ma'am, sir."

Barry put the transmission into reverse and backed up the way they'd come. At the tennis court, he swung into the small parking lot, turned around, and headed up the hill.

"We're trapped," Maureen said incredulously. "We're trapped here and we can't escape."

"Let me think," Barry told her. "We'll go back home for J a minute and try to figure something out."

"There's nothing to figure out. I suppose we could walk out of here, but it's a half-hour hike to town and that's the only place we could get to. Besides, that would be going into the lion's den."

He smiled. "We could pull a C.W. McCall."

"Huh?"

"Crash the gate doing ninety-eight."

"Don't think it's not tempting."

Barry pulled into the driveway, turned off the ignition. "He had a gun. Did you notice that?"

"Yes," she said quietly.

They sat in silence for a moment.

"So what do we do?" Barry asked. "Do you have any ideas?"

"No." She sighed. "God, I can't believe this is happening."

"Let's go inside. Maybe we'll think of something."

They got out of the Suburban, walked around the Toyota, but even before they'd started up the porch steps they saw a notice on the screen door.

They'd been gone five minutes, eight at the most, but somehow someone had managed to come onto their property and leave a message from the homeowners' association.

"Are we under surveillance?" Maureen asked. "Do they spy on us and wait until we leave so they can rush in and put this crap on our door?

This can't be coincidence."

"Nothing's coincidence." He remembered the note they'd found in the closet.

They're doing it. They're keeping track of it. Don't think they aren 't.

Barry freed the paper from the grating and read it. "It's an order for all residents to attend the Bonita Vista anti- rally at eight o'clock tonight."

"Order?"

"That's what it says." He handed her the notice, then used his key to unlock the door. They walked inside.

"According to this, they'll fine us if we don't show up. Is that legal?"

"I don't know. I have a feeling that it is, though. That's one thing they don't seem to screw up on. However outrageous their actions, they always seem to come down on this side of the law."

"According to Sheriff Hitman . Not exactly an unimpeachable source in my mind."

"I'll call Jeremy. He'll be able to tell us." He locked the door behind them, threw the deadbolt.

Barry went downstairs and dialed Jeremy's number, but midway through the first ring, a robotic female voice came on the line and said, "I'm sorry. Due to a heavy call volume, all circuits are busy. Please try again."

The call was cut off, leaving only a dial tone.

He tried again.

And again.

And again and again and again. Over an hour period, he must have dialed Jeremy's number thirty times, but in each instance he received the same recorded message. He finally gave up, throwing the phone across the room in frustration. It bounced harmlessly on the carpet.

Not only couldn't they leave, but they could not contact the outside world. They were cut off here, effectively isolated, and he could not help thinking that it was entirely intentional, that it was part of the association's goal. He would not be surprised to learn that Bonita Vista had its own switchboard and that all incoming and outgoing calls were routed through there, giving the association the power to censor and monitor all of its residents' phone messages.

Neither he nor Maureen could think of any way to get past the armed guard save the Convoy option, and they so tired of staring at each other across the living room as they fruitlessly tried to brainstorm.

Maureen finally went down-1 stairs to work on her web page while Barry headed upstairsf to make himself an early lunch.

Mike called just after noon. "Did you get the notice?"

"You're the one who left that for me?"

"No. I got one, too. I was just wondering what your plans are."

"I don't know yet."

"They can level a fine against you. And if you don't pay it, they can put a lien on your house."

"I'm so glad we live in a democracy."

"We live in a gated community," Mike corrected him. "The two are mutually exclusive."

"What are you going to do?"

"Go."

"Me, too, I suppose."

"I've got an extra baseball bat if you want one," Mike said.

Baseball bat? Barry felt an unfamiliar shudder pass through him as he thought of wielding a weapon against another person. "You really think there's going to be trouble?"

"I have no idea, but I want to be prepared. Better safe than sorry, as they say."

Barry hung up and told Maureen that he was going to attend the anti-rally, explaining that if there was any hope of preventing violence it would be through a show of strength, a display of numbers.

He'd expected an argument, but she was defeated and resigned and said that she'd go, too, that since they'd been forced into this situation and there was no way they could avoid it, they might as well face it head on.

They spent the afternoon restlessly, trying to find tasks with which to occupy their minds and take up time, but the hours crept by slowly as they shifted desultorily from one unfinished household chore to another. Maureen finally ended up reading a magazine on the couch, while Barry watched Court TV and then a political talk show on CNBC.

Neither of them was hungry, but they forced themselves to eat an early dinner and then wash the dishes together.

They watched the local news, the national news, Entertainment Tonight.

And then it was time to go.

There'd been only a half hour of rain in the late afternoon, but the temperature had not returned to the high heat of midday and the evening was unusually cool. Maureen put on a jacket, Barry changed into a long-sleeved shirt. They locked up the house and started walking.

The sun had gone down only recently and they'd been able to see from the house before they left that the western sky still carried a tinge of orange, but it was dark down here among the pines. Night arrived early on the forest floor.

There were others on the road ahead of them: two couples and a family of four. Barry could see their silhouetted forms in the occasional swatches of porch light that spread out from the driveways of the dispersed houses. Neither he nor Maureen spoke, but there was a low-grade murmur audible through the trees and bushes at the bottom of the hill. The sounds of a crowd.

The noise grew louder as they rounded the curve in the road. From a side street, another couple emerged, carrying flashlights trained on the pavement before them. Barry was tempted to say hello, to try and talk with them, find out if they knew anything more about what was happening than he did, but they were not people he recognized and for all he knew they could be association supporters.

He and Maureen were walking hand in hand, and he squeezed her fingers and slowed the pace, holding back until the other couple moved far enough ahead.

She understood without him having to say a word.

"You can't tell who's on which side," she said quietly"I after the couple pulled away.

He nodded. "It's best to be careful."

The trees on the left disappeared, the land flattening out as they came to the cleared site of communal property. The pool was done, Barry saw, and filled, the water reflecting back the blackness of the sky above. To the right of the pool, a rough wood frame and cement foundation were already in place for the community center.

The volunteers had been busy.

They walked quickly past the site. In horror fiction, even his own, evil was usually ascribed to locations that were old, that had troubled histories, not to places that were not even finished, that had only a future and not a past or present. But everything was bassackwards here, and the newly completed pool and partially constructed community center seemed imbued with malevolence and engendered within him a shivery sense of revulsion.

They passed Frank and Audrey's house, passed the lighted tennis courts.

The street straightened out.

Here was the crowd.

There must have been close to a hundred people milling around. Powerful halogens atop the guard shack illuminated a large section of road and gave the surrounding trees a flat, painted look. Although most of the residents had walked down, there were quite a few cars and trucks--the people who lived on the other side of the hills, no doubt. They were parked in rows in front of the gate, as though to buttress the defenses. The sheriff's cruiser was behind the kiosk, by itself.

It looked like a block party. People were laughing, talking, drinking beer. The only indication that anything was out of the ordinary was the strict line of demarcation, the gate, beyond which was dark, empty silence. And the fact that nearly everyone was armed. He saw no guns, other than those being examined by the sheriff and the guard inside the kiosk, but people were carrying hammers and bats and tire irons. He saw a woman with a carving knife talking to a man wielding a pool cue.

"I don't like this," Maureen whispered.

Barry didn't either. There was something unsettling about seeing ordinary people, upscale neighbors and casual acquaintances, gathered together for the purpose of fighting an opposition mob from the wrong side of the tracks.

"Here they come!" someone yelled.

Barry looked south, over the vehicles, through the interstices of the gate. There was a line of headlights visible through the trees, snaking up the road toward Bonita Vista. He was reminded of Universal's Frankenstein films and the hoary cliche ' of angry villagers storming the mad scientist's castle, pitchforks and torches held aloft.

There'd be no pitchforks or torches this time, though.

Flashlights, maybe.

Possibly guns.

The crowd grew momentarily silent, as though the gravity of the situation had suddenly and simultaneously sunk in with all of them, as though they realized that there was a very realistic possibility of violence. Barry felt a knot of dread forming in the pit of his stomach.

Pickups and old Chevys, boat like Buicks and battered Jeeps began parking along the dirt shoulder abutting the ditch outside Bonita Vista and quickly became so numerous that succeeding vehicles were forced to spread out into the middle of the street.

He looked over at Hitman standing next to the guard, the two of them loading their weapons, and he wondered again why the sheriff was so pro-Bonita Vista, why he would sacrifice the integrity of his job to do the bidding of the home-1 owners' association. It didn't make any sense. He didn't| even live here.

Did he?

The thought had never occurred to him before, and Barry was surprised at himself for overlooking so obvious a connection. Greg Davidson was a local boy made good who'd moved up into the environs of Bonita Vista.

Maybe die same was true for Hitman . It would account for a lot, and he thought it was more than possible that Hitman had been lured to Bonita Vista, that the sheriff had been actively solicited by the association's board and perhaps given a deal on financing and annual dues in order to recruit him to their side.

Beyond the gate, car doors were being slammed, engines were shutting off, though no one was stepping forward. A buzz passed through the crowd of Bonita Vistans , a repeated phrase that did not quite make it to where Barry and Maureen stood.

Moments later, the Corbanites started marching en masse, a ragtag group of angry ranchers, construction workers, mechanics, and business owners who appeared ready to storm the gates. Barry recognized some of the people in the crowd. Hank. Joe. Lyle. Bert. He felt sick to his stomach, but self preservation trumped loyalty and social conscience any day of the week, and he was prepared to help fend off an assault.

Mike was right. He couldn't stand idly by while his home was under attack.

He just hoped there wouldn't be any injuries.

Or dead is He took Maureen's hand, squeezed it. Her fingers were cold, her body shivering. To his right was the ruddy-faced redneck who'd harassed the Mexican handyman. The fat bastard was in his element, grinning from ear to ear as he pulled a crossbow from the back of his pickup.

"My old buddies," Maureen said, nodding to her left, and Barry saw Chuck Shea and Terry Abbey walking purposefully forward, swinging bats.

In his mind, he'd considered the Bonita Vista people soft compared to the townies, rich, pampered, slumming city folk as opposed to rough, tough, hard scrabble manual laborers, but he saw now that that was an incorrect generalization. If anything, the Corbanites , despite their very visible and understandable anger, seemed awkward and amateurish, unorganized in their opposition, while the Bonita Vistans seemed prepared, methodical, and capable.

Was it the association's influence?

Barry thought not, and that was the frightening thing. They were this way on their own.

The sheriff and the guard aligned themselves near the stone pillars at each end of the gate, many of the more gung ho and enthusiastic residents filling the space in between.

All of a sudden, the crowd grew completely silent, individuals stopping in place, their attention drawn to someone or something in the pines behind him. Barry turned and saw a line of six old men in black robes standing at the edge of the lighted area, next to the trees. Odd gold stripes and insignia decorated the formal garb, and for some reason he thought of that jackass William Rehnquist during Bill Clinton's impeachment trial, decked out in the robes of a Supreme Court Justice that were desecrated by ridiculous homemade gold stripes supposedly inspired by Gilbert and Sullivan. There was the same sort of absurdity here, only there was also an element of menace, a hint of something dark, dangerous, and fundamentally wrong.

All eyes remained on the six figures. He thought the men would move forward and take charge, but they remained in place and there was something odd about that, too. The one in the middle appeared to be the leader, and Barry had no doubt that this was the president, the famous Jasper Calhoun. Liz had told Maureen something about Calhoun's peculiar appearance, had said there was some-1 thing unnatural in the way he looked, and while it could have been the angle of the lights, could have been the fault] of distance, Barry thought that all of the board members seemed strange, each of their too-white faces bizarre and abnormal.

The townspeople had reached the gate and were massing behind the giant iron barrier.

"You killed our son!" a woman screamed, her face red and teary, features distorted by rage.

Another man grabbed one of the ornamental crosspieces and started shaking the gate. "Murderers!" he cried. "Murderers!"

Other voices were raised, threats and epithets were shouted.

"Call out the volunteers," the president said in a loud stentorian voice, and his speech overrode all competing sounds. He raised his right hand. There was the faint noise of a whip cracking, and from the trees behind the board members emerged three rows of shirtless men. The volunteers marched onto the road and pressed past Barry and Maureen, heading toward the gate. They were the same men who had been working on the pool and the community center, and this close he saw that some were missing hands. Others had serious facial scars or walked with limps. He thought of Kenny Tolkin's eye patch.

Greg Davidson passed by him, staring blankly, the right side of his head shaved, that ear gone. The crowd parted before the volunteers, allowing them through. They carried no weapons, bore no clubs or guns or blades, but there was about them the hard, unyielding purpose of those who would stop at nothing to achieve their goal. They were Bonita Vista's army, Barry thought, and he wondered if their appearance was as big a surprise to everyone else as it was to him. Nearly all of the residents had brought weapons of some sort, obviously assuming they would be needed, but it appeared now that they would only be a last-ditch backup. The volunteers would be the first line of defense.

Barry watched them go past, far more than he and Maureen had seen before.

"Why are they acting like that?" Maureen said, a quiver in her voice betraying the fear she felt.

"I don't know," he admitted.

"They look like they're ...hypnotized or something."

Unseen, Frank Hodges had moved next to her. "They're indentured," he said shortly. "They couldn't pay their dues."

Neil Campbell, ever-present clipboard in hand, was suddenly on the other side of Barry. "Read your handbook. It explains all about indenture."

"Open the gates!" the president commanded, and the twin metal doors swung slowly outward, pushing protesting townspeople out of the way.

"You bastards can't treat us like this!" a woman screamed.

Bert from the coffee shop raised a shotgun. "You know what you did! We know what you did! And we won't stand for it!"

The volunteers marched through the open gateway.

And the fighting started.

There was a sick feeling in Barry's guts as he watched the shirtless men remorselessly punch grieving mothers in the stomach, watched them grab rifles from townspeople and use them to club the owners' heads. It felt odd to be standing here like this, overseeing the battlefield like generals while others fought on their behalf, and he was suddenly disgusted by his neighbors, by himself, by everyone involved with this travesty.

Surprisingly, thankfully, there were no shots fired, but the conflict was brutal nonetheless, with both sides actively attempting to maim and injure their opponents, and his horror intensified as he saw an one-armed volunteer use his one hand to gouge at the eyes of an elderly man in rancher's J overalls.

He'd wondered where Hitman's deputies were, and just \ as the volunteers appeared to be gaining the upper hand, the lawmen drove up, sirens blaring, lights on. They were forced to park behind the townies' vehicles, which were blocking the road. The flashing lights of their cruisers reflected off metal roofs and shone through glass windshields, bathing the entire area in garishly surrealistic circus colors, while a deep, distorted voice boomed through a megaphone:

"Break it up! Break it up!"

Uniformed deputies ran between the cars and pickups, nightsticks raised, and began to disperse the crowd, collaring and arresting those who refused to obey the orders to cease and desist. Unmolested, undisturbed, the shirtless volunteers, many of them battered and bleeding, turned and walked back through the gateway into Bonita Vista.

Barry looked over at Hitman , and in the strobing red and blue of the lights, he saw the sheriff smile.

Frank had moved between Maureen and Barry. "I heard you tried to fuck my wife," he whispered.

"Elizabeth Dyson's filing a complaint against you with the board," Neil Campbell said on the other side of him. "Claims you forced her into giving you a BJ after Ray's funeral."

"That's a lie!" Barry yelled. "You're both lying!"

The men moved away, laughing, disappearing into the crowd. Someone passed by, bumped him. Another shoved a hand in his back. The scene was becoming more chaotic, and though there weren't nearly as many people here, he was reminded of the climax of Day of the Locust.

He looked desperately around for a friendly face. Mike or one of those anti-association people from Ray's parties'. But there were only antagonistic glares from unfamiliar individuals, and the uniformity of this response made him think that perhaps it was dictated, perhaps it had been ordered.

"Stay here," he told Maureen. He started toward the trees, toward the board. The robed men were watching him, their wrinkled faces serious but their eyes mirthful.

It hadn't been distance or a trick of the light, he realized as he approached. Something about them did look peculiar. Liz was right.

Something was off.

"You must be Barry Welch," the president said as he came closer.

Barry pointed a finger at him. "Don't fuck with me!" he ordered.

Jasper Calhoun smiled slightly, nodded.

Someone bumped him, and he turned to look at the gathered residents and the milling volunteers, but he could not see who'd done it. He again faced the board.

They were gone.

Simultaneously, the lights of the guard shack winked off, and the strobing red and blue of the cruiser lights diminished as several deputies drove their vehicles and prisoners away. Around him, individual flashlights were turning down toward the pavement, moving up the road as homeowners started to disperse. The old men had faded into the woods, and he did not understand how they'd been able to disappear so quickly. Had they turned and run, dashing through the trees, their robes flapping behind them? He couldn't imagine such a retreat by those pompous old men, but the only alternatives were scenarios more appropriate for one of his novels, and those he didn't want to think about.

"They're watching you," a woman said to him as he passed by, and Barry recognized the old lady who lived across from the tennis court. He didn't know if it was a friendly warning or an intimidating threat.

Barry strode angrily back toward where Maureen stood, now talking to Mike and Tina. The people before him moved sullenly aside, strangers casting suspicious and hostile glances in his direction.

"Is everything okay?" Mike asked worriedly.

Barry shook his head.

"What did you do?" Maureen asked. "What did you say to them?"

"It's war," he told her.

Maureen finished answering the five measly E-mails that her web page had generated over the past three days, knowing even as she typed them that their senders would not engage her services. It was disheartening to realize that something on which she had spent so much time and for which she'd had such high hopes was simply not panning out.

Thank God for her California clients.

She leaned back in her chair, postponing leaving the room. In here, she was cushioned from the realities of the outside world. She could pretend that she was not in Bonita Vista, that she was merely an accountant in an office, and that the things happening on the other side of these walls did not affect or concern her in any way.

Barry was still angry, still stubbornly defiant, but he was worried as well.

Maybe it was time to give up, she'd told him, maybe they should return to California.

That was the wrong thing to say.

"Who's going to fight them if not us?" he demanded. "Would you just abandon Liz and all the other people terrorized by these murderous bastards? We're not just doing this for us! This is our chance to make a difference, to stand up and be counted!"

She'd nodded, raised her hands in acquiescence. She knew better than to press the issue and paint him into a corner If she left him an out, he might eventually take it, might: eventually see that it was the smartest of all possible options and that they could always continue their Quixotic battle from afar.

She shut off her computer, switched off the monitor. The strangest thing, the most unsettling thing, was their temporary alliance with the association. It felt wrong to her. And to Barry, too, she knew. The association had poisoned dogs in town and, intentionally or unintentionally, two children had been killed as well. The sheriff had refused to do anything about it, so families, friends, and neighbors had taken matters into their own hands and staged a rally to draw attention to the problem and intimidate the guilty into giving themselves up. It was a just cause, a moral purpose, and she and Barry and all of their neighbors had only opposed it because they were concerned for their own safety and for the condition of their houses.

They were practicing self-defense, went the rationalization, the most natural and legitimate reaction a human could have. But it did not feel that way to her. It felt as though they were shallow, self-absorbed assholes more concerned about their own real estate values than the lives of other people's children.

She and Barry had participated unwillingly, as a result of a threat, but they had participated nonetheless, and that made them morally culpable. She felt guilty about that, and she wished to Christ that they'd defied the association, that they'd at least attempted to stay neutral by remaining home and sitting it out--even if they'd had to pay a fine. They should not have lent their support or given their tacit approval to anything the association had done.

To her surprise, they were still able to shop at the market in Corban .

Even after all that had happened. It had been a nerve-racking trip for groceries yesterday when they'd made their first post-rally trek into town, and they'd invited Mike and Tina, and the Stewarts' friends Lou and Stacy, to go with them in case there was trouble, but neither the clerk at the checkout stand nor the store's two other customers had said a word. They'd bought enough groceries for the next two weeks with no problem.

Perhaps the sheriff's deputy stationed by the cash register had something to do with it.

Even if it was only Wally Addison.

They were already making contingency plans, though. Mule Park was the closest town to Corban , and while it was forty miles to the south, they could easily make the trip there and back in the space of a morning and stock up enough food and necessities for a month. The people of Corban had to be resentful of Bonita Vista residents and of the sheriff's obvious partiality, and it was only a matter of time before that resentment bubbled up and boiled over.

She stared at the blank monitor and found herself wondering if she and Barry weren't barking up the wrong tree by attributing everything to the homeowners' association. It seemed to her that Hitman was the real power behind the throne. He was the one straddling the two communities, enforcing the laws as he saw fit, allowing Bonita Vista to run roughshod over the town. He could have--and should have--sided with the families of the victims and investigated the poisonings and brought the perpetrators up on charges, but instead he'd ignored the situation, allowed it to fester, and when people had tried to take the law into their own hands, he'd reasserted his authority, allowing them to be beaten by the volunteers before he had them arrested. Now he'd stationed a deputy at the market to ensure that Bonita Vistans could purchase groceries and assigned another deputy to guard the gas station and make sure they were unmolested and able to buy gas.

It was as if the sheriff had declared martial law in Corban , and it occurred to her that he could have accomplished all of this without the association.

That was wishful thinking, though. The sheriff was just a pawn. He was the muscle. The association was the brains.

No, he was not even the muscle. Or not all of it. She remembered those shirtless volunteers with their missing fingers and hands and ears beating the hell out of local farmers and ranchers, using the Corbanites' own weapons against them, and she shivered.

Hitman might be keeping Corban safe for Bonita Vista residents, but Barry had not returned to his office. Not yet. For all they knew, it had been ransacked and vandalized, his computer smashed, but he was not ready to see for himself. His landlord and his old pals from the coffee shop had been in the forefront of the skirmish at the gate, and it did not seem prudent to provoke them.

He'd write on her computer for a while, Barry told her. He'd go back, pick up his equipment, and clear out his office after the furor died down a bit.

Mike was still working at the Cablevision office, and his friend Lou at the telephone company, but it was tense, they said. Several Bonita Vistans worked in town, and Maureen wondered how the rest of them were handling it. No doubt there'd be more than a few fights during breaks and lunches as tensions spilled over, and she just prayed that no one got seriously hurt.

She looked out the window, saw green pines against a clear blue sky.

God, she wished that they'd never driven through Utah, never found this place.

She stood, left her office, and walked upstairs to where Barry was lying on the couch watching a political talk show. On the coffee table beside him was the pen he'd planned to use to jot down notes for a new novel, and a spiral notebook turned to an empty first page.

"Doesn't look like you got much done," she said. "My brain's not working."

"I'm not working either. No one wants my e-services. Want to sit here with me and watch some BVTV?" "Very funny," Barry said. "Very funny."

They went to bed early, both of them tired and fatigued not from any physical exertion but from stress.

They were awakened in the middle of the night by banging, thumping, and heavy scraping that sounded as though furniture was being moved. The bedroom door was closed, but from underneath the door shone a strip of yellow light. Someone was upstairs.

Maureen sat up quickly, looking into Barry's face and seeing there an expression that mirrored the way she felt. "What do you think they want?" she whispered.

Who do you think it is? was what she'd originally intended to ask, but she already knew the answer to that and so did he. These weren't burglars who had broken into their home. And while she didn't know the specific identity of the individuals who were searching the house, she knew what they represented, she knew where they were from.

The homeowners' association.

"I'm going to find out," Barry said grimly. He threw the covers off, grabbed his bathrobe, and angrily opened the bedroom door.

She quickly picked up her own bathrobe and put it on over her nightgown, and the two of them walked into the lighted hallway and up the stairs to the living room.

They should have brought along some type of weapon, she thought. A

heavy blunt object. Just in case it was a prowler. But their first instincts had been correct. The man who stood in the center of the well-lit room, smiling at them, was obviously not a criminal. He looked more like a stockbroker.

"Sorry to disturb you," the man said cheerfully. "We were trying to be quiet."

There were five men all together, each of them dressed in identical business suits, each with a pen and clipboard. Two of them were in the living room, reading the titles of books on the bookshelf, examining the artwork on the walls. The three others were upstairs in the kitchen, loudly opening cupboards and digging through drawers.

"What the hell is this?" Barry said.

"It's time for your four-month inspection."

"How did you get in here?" Maureen demanded. She felt vulnerable, violated, more exposed than she ever had in her life. Upstairs, a familiar click-squeak told her that someone had opened the refrigerator.

"The association has the master keys to all locks in Bonita Vista." The man continued to smile at her, and she thought now that there was something not nice about that smile. He was looking at her as though he could see through her bathrobe, and she instinctively looked down to check, to make sure nothing was being exposed.

Barry stepped forward, crowding the man. "Who are you?"

"My name's Bill." He held out a hand.

Barry's voice was calm, even, and all the more threatening for it. "Get the fuck out of my house, Bill. Now."

The man smiled, nodded. "I think we've seen enough, Mr. Welch." He started scribbling on the paper clipped onto his board. "Let's hit it, boys!" he called out.

The three men upstairs came down the steps, writing on their own clipboards, unclasping the forms and handing them to Bill. The other man by the bookcase did the same.

Bill finished with a flourish, tore off the top sheet, and handed a pink piece of paper to Barry. Maureen looked over his shoulder, reading along.

"It should be self-explanatory. You are required to place out of sight all photographs and personal keepsakes. This includes but is not limited to souvenirs from vacation spots, family heirlooms, and knicknacks that serve no functional purpose." Bill's voice was all business, and there was a coldness to it that belied the happy, hearty act he'd put on for their benefit. Behind him, the other men were filing out of the house silently. "You must have a minimum of three bare walls in each room, and the fourth wall may only have artwork that has been approved by the association's interior design committee. All walls must be white or off-white, and sheets, pillowcases, and bedspreads must be solid colors, preferably earth tones." He smiled again. "But as I said, it's all pretty self-explanatory."

Maureen now understood the lack of a personal touch in Liz's house, the general sparseness in the interiors of the other homes she'd seen. She could not recall reading anything about this in the sacred C, C, and Rs, but she had no doubt that they would find it in the document if they looked through it right now. She stared at the short-haired yuppie's falsely friendly face and was filled with anger and the type of stubborn rage that Barry must have been experiencing. There was no way on God's earth that she was going to rearrange her house according to the dictates of the association. No one could tell her how to decorate her own home, and she'd be damned if an impersonal document created by a cabal of her most fascistic neighbors was going to impose some type of lunatic standards on her taste.

Barry was on the exact same wavelength. "What gives you the right to come into our house and pry into our private life and tell us what we can and can't do in our own fucking home?" He started out speaking at a normal volume, but by the end of the question he was shouting.

"I'm chairman of the inspection committee," Bill said brightly, walking away from them. He nodded as he stepped out the door. "Good night to you." He closed the door behind him and they heard the lock turn.

"Didn't we have the deadbolt and chain hooked up?" Maureen said, turning toward Barry.

He nodded. "I was thinking the same thing."

"How did they--"

"I don't know."

Every light in the house had been turned on. Downstairs, lights in the hall, bathroom, and Maureen's office were blazing, and the thought that those men had been snooping through her belongings while she was asleep in the next room chilled her to the bone. But she was far more angry than scared, and she remembered a horror movie Barry had forced her to watch in which parents had booby-trapped their house to catch their daughter's murderers, and she wished she could do the same thing here.

Right now, the thought of Bill and his smug little lookalikes speared on some make shift shiv sounded mighty appealing.

Neither of them had bothered to look at the time, but as they went from room to room, checking to make sure nothing was broken or stolen, turning off the lights, she saw by the clock in the kitchen that it was two-thirty.

It was another ten minutes before they were back in bed, and although Barry was snoring almost instantly, it was a long time before she was able to fall asleep.

As early as was polite, she called Liz.

Barry was taking his shower, and she poured herself a cup of coffee while she dialed her friend's number.

The voice that answered halfway through the first ring was wary and suspicious. "Yes?"

"Hello, Liz? It's me, Maureen."

"Maureen." Her name was repeated in a disassociated monotone that raised the hackles on her neck and set off alarm bells in her head.

"Liz? Are you all right?"

"Fine. I'm fine." But the monotone remained, her friend's voice drained of its usual life.

"What happened? What did they do?"

Liz didn't answer.

Maureen spoke quickly before her friend hung up. "It's the association," she said. "That's why I'm calling. They've come down on us for ... for... shit, for our interior decorating. We woke up in the middle of the night and five of those assholes had broken into our house to 'inspect' it. They told us we had to get rid of family photos and personal effects, and we had to rearrange our entire house."

Liz's voice exhibited its first sign of emotion.

Fear.

"The middle of the night?"

"Yes."

"They always come in the middle of the night." Again the monotone.

"What happened to you?" Maureen asked once more. "No. Don't say anything. I understand that you can't talk over the phone. I'll come up--"

"No!" her friend said sharply.

"Liz..."

"Do. Not. Come. To. See. Me." The words were bitten off.

"I know you're--"

"It's not safe."

The old woman's voice was replaced by a dial tone. She'd hung up, and Maureen stared blankly down at the phone for a moment, unsure of what to do. If she called back, Liz probably wouldn't answer--and if she did answer, she'd be angry. She'd been specifically ordered not to go to Liz's house, so that was out of the question.

Tina.

Maureen found the other woman's number and called.

Mike answered the phone, and she asked to speak to his wife. A minute later, Tina was on the line, sounding sleepy. "Hello?"

"This is Maureen. Did I wake you up?"

"Sort of."

"Sorry, but it's kind of an emergency." She explained about their nighttime visitors and about her unsettling call to Liz. "First things first," she said. "What do we do about Liz?"

"What can we do? You know what happened last time. We all tried to help her, but she just shut us out. I'll call her myself later, go up there if she'll let me, and maybe call Audrey and Moira, too. But I'll tell you true, I have a feeling it's going to be the same situation.

There may be nothing we can do. She might have to just work it out herself."

"And if she can't?"

Tina didn't answer.

"What about our situation?"

Tina sighed. "I wondered when they were going to crack down on you."

"You knew about this?"

"I guess."

"Why didn't you say anything? Why didn't you tell me?"

"I thought maybe you'd squeaked by, maybe they hadn't seen the inside of your house or for some reason didn't want to make you conform. I

didn't want to worry you unnecessarily or draw attention and let them know that you'd escaped them. But... but I guess in the back of my mind I knew it would happen."

"You should have told me about this," Maureen said.

"You're right. I'm sorry." Her voice was wistful. "But it was nice seeing family photos again. And more than one wall of pictures and hangings. And all those collectibles and antiques you have."

"You're still going to see them," Maureen told her. "We're not changing anything."

There was a pause, as if Tina did not know how to respond to that. "But you have to."

"What if we don't?"

Tina's voice grew lower. "The fines will start. And you don't want to get into that cycle. Believe me."

"Then what can we do?"

"There's nothing you can do," Tina said. "It's something we all have to put up with."

"Middle of the night inspections?"

"Well," she admitted, "ours have never been in the middle of the night.

Probably they just wanted to rattle you."

"That's selective enforcement right there, then. They're treating us differently than they treat everyone else."

"I don't know if I'd say that," Tina added quickly. "We've escaped it, but that doesn't mean other people have."

"But you'd stand up for us? You'd tell the truth? You'd sign a statement saying that your inspections have all been at reasonable hours?"

More backpedaling. "Sign a statement? I'd have to talk to Mike about that."

Tina obviously wasn't going to be much help. And if she wasn't brave enough to stand up to the association, Maureen was sure no one else would be. Rather than tempering her anger, the disappointment she felt only fueled it further, and she said a quick goodbye.

She and Barry were in this alone; they'd have to face down the association by themselves.

But that was okay. They didn't need anybody else.

When Barry came out of the shower, she was sitting at the dining room table, staring out the window at the trees, nibbling on a piece of cold toast.

"Did you call Liz?" he asked.

"And Tina."

"And?" he prodded when she didn't elaborate.

She told him about both conversations, about Liz's frightened paranoia and Tina's ineffectual support.

"What do you want to do?" Barry asked. "Do you still want to go back to California?"

"Hell no."

"That's the spirit."

"Fuck 'em," Maureen said, and the words felt good. "We're not going anywhere. We're staying here just long enough to wipe our asses with those damn C, C, and Rs ."

It was another fine.

He had paid none of them yet, but they'd been arriving daily, signed by the association's treasurer--someone named Thompson Hughes. They were all ridiculously inflated, and although he hadn't kept track, the total they owed must be well over three thousand dollars by now. It was ludicrous that they were being penalized in such a way for minor infractions of unreasonable rules, and he'd saved each of the notices for a future court case.

Barry dropped the rest of the mail on the coffee table and tore open the unstamped envelope. This one was levied against them for failure to park both of their vehicles facing in the same direction. For that offense, the association was docking them seven hundred and fifty dollars.

"Seven hundred and fifty this time," he said.

Maureen looked up from her book. "Losers."

With the fine notice was another form, and he unfolded the paper and scanned its contents.

"Jesus," he breathed.

"What's it say?"

"The title is "Bath and Toilet Violations." Does that give you some clue?"

"Let me see that!"

He handed her the paper. "Someone has apparently been monitoring our bathroom habits. It says that you do not| have the right number of tampons or maxipads , that a certain surplus number is required, which you have failed to j maintain, and that we are discharging three gallons more effluent than is allowable for a domestic residence with two I people."

Her face paled as she read. "My God." She looked at him. "You think they have a camera in there?"

"It's possible--and I'm going to get some wallpaper and cover over every square inch of the wall and ceiling just in case--but that maxipad/tampon thing is not something that you could find out with a camera. Someone's been snooping, someone's been in the house."

"But when? We've been home all the time."

"While we were sleeping," he said, and the thought of it curdled his blood. Bill and his inspectors were one thing. As invasive and intrusive as that had been, at least they'd been open about it, at least they had made their presence known. But the idea of people breaking into their home and sneaking around in the dark, checking on Maureen's feminine hygiene products and God knew what else, made his skin crawl. Who were they? And how many of them? The scenario conjured by his writer's imagination had Kenny and the most disfigured volunteers creeping, crawling, and limping silently through the rooms of the house, peeking at and examining their most intimate items:

fingering his condoms, sniffing Maureen's dirty panties.

And the scary thing was that he was probably not that far off the mark.

He did indeed put wallpaper over the walls and ceiling, founding off the corners so there would be no cracks or gaps through which miniature devices could peer. They had several rolls left over from their initial renovation, and it occurred to him that perhaps he should re-wallpaper the entire house--or at least those rooms where they'd painted rather than papered the walls--but the thought was intimidating, He recalled how much work they'd done that first month, and he didn't want to go through that again unless he absolutely had to. Besides, there was no indication that any other rooms were under surveillance.

Maybe they needed to watch BVTV more often.

As he should have expected, the next day they received a notice alerting them that they had made unauthorized changes to a room's appearance without getting approval from the interior design committee.

They were required to both pay an eight-hundred-and-twenty-dollar fine and remove the wallpaper.

"Fuck that," he said.

"I wonder how the people before us survived," Maureen said. "This place was like a bat cave when we bought it. They must have broken at least as many decorating rules as we have."

"Maybe they didn't survive."

She looked at him quizzically.

"Did you notice on all those papers we signed when we bought this place that it said Jordan and Sara Gardner Trust! I wondered about that at the time. I assume it meant that the owners were dead and their relatives were selling off the house."

"Probably to pay the fines."

They spent the afternoon at Mike and Tina's. Liz was still avoiding contact with everyone, hiding reclusively in her house, keeping her door locked and her drapes drawn, and they were all worried for her, though none of them had any ideas of how to help. Maureen had sent her a long letter through the mail, trying to appeal to the old woman's logical side and assuring her that she had a lot of allies and didn't have to face anything alone, no matter what it was, but no one was even sure if Liz was collecting her mail these days.

"I'll tell you one thing," Mike said. "This wouldn't have happened if Ray was still here."

"A lot of things wouldn't have happened if Ray was still here,"

Barry agreed.

Indeed, Ray's death seemed to have been the catalyst for| much of what had occurred since. He had been a sort of un-official opposition leader, the only person with enough influence and gravitas to counteract the association's monopolization, and once he was out of the way, once that domino had fallen, everything else had started to come undone.

Barry wanted to get the names of the people who had attended the Dysons' parties, all of Ray's anti-association acquaintances. "We can put together a petition," he said, "try to get a recall."

"First of all," Mike told him, "there are no recalls. It's disallowed.

There's no such thing here. Secondly, the annual meeting is coming up on Labor Day weekend. That's when they vote for officers, make amendments to the C, C, and Rs , conduct all that sort of association business. It's when they allow us mortals to see the man behind the curtain."

"So that's our big chance."

"Yeah."

"If I can talk to enough people, get them to propose, second, and vote for a number of different initiatives, we can institute some of our own reforms."

"In theory."

"You don't think it's possible?"

"Let's just say I've been to these meetings before. I know how they go."

"Is it true that on the ballot you can only approve the existing board, there's no other choices?"

"Oh yeah."

"You also have to bring your federal income tax forms to the meeting,"

Tina said. "The ones from last year. That's when we turn them in."

Maureen frowned. "Why is that?"

"It's required," Mike said. "As crazy as it sounds, the courts have upheld this. It's perfectly legal. I would've thought it was an invasion of privacy, but an association can require full financial disclosure from any homeowner who belongs to it. And of course our association does."

Maureen turned toward Barry. "That's how they learned about the precariousness of the Davidsons ' finances, why they knew that an increase in property taxes would force them to move."

Mike nodded. "Yep."

"About Greg Davidson ..." Barry said.

"What?"

"At Ray's party, he said they were going to sell their house and move.

His brother or someone had found him a job in Arizona."

"Yeah."

"But they didn't move. I saw Greg. He's one of the volunteers. I

don't know what happened to Wynona, but Greg was helping to dig the pool and he was at the gate the night of the rally."

Mike and Tina exchanged a look. Barry caught it, but he didn't know what it meant, and suddenly he wasn't sure if he should say any more.

He thought about Frank and Audrey Open my box --and realized that he really didn't know Mike and Tina any better. His gut said they were okay, and they seemed to have all the right ideas, but in Bonita Vista you could never tell.

Maureen seemed to have caught the same vibe. "You don't want to talk about the volunteers."

"It's not that," Tina said. "It's just..." She looked over at her husband.

"We didn't find out about them for a long time ourselves," Mike offered. "And, you're right. They're not something that people talk about. Everyone knows they're there, and they help clear the roads after big storms and| stuff, but we like to pretend like we don't know anything! about them."

Barry shook his head. "I don't understand why you--"

"I volunteered for a week myself."

They were stunned, silent. If Mike had said he'd murdered his first wife and met Tina after his release from prison, it could not have been more shocking, and Barry marveled at how sinister such a mundane concept had become in this wacked -out world.

"I truly did volunteer," Mike said. "I was fined a hundred dollars for violating Article Eight, going outside in the morning to pick up my newspaper while wearing a bathrobe. You're not supposed to appear outside the house wearing a robe. We could've paid the fine, but our refrigerator was going, we'd been saving up for a new one, and this would've put us back another month. I'd heard through the grapevine that you could volunteer, that you could work off your fine instead of pay it, and I approached the board and they said okay. I was assigned to pick up trash on the roads and in the ditches for a week."

"And that was it?" Barry asked.

"Not exactly. On Saturday, the last day, I was told to help clear dried brush from one of the green belts and I found out for the first time that there were ... gradations of volunteers. There were people like me, who were assigned specific tasks for a specific amount of time, and there were people who weren't trying to work off anything.

They were just volunteering to help out, and they could pretty much do whatever they wanted to on whatever needed to be done." He licked his lips. "Then there were the indentureds and I'm pretty sure that's what Greg is. They're the ones who've lost their homes but owe so much that even that doesn't cover it. They pretty much sign away their lives, forfeit their rights and are at the association's beck and call until their debts are paid off. They supposedly live together in a bunkhouse somewhere, although I still don't know where that is.

I've never asked."

Barry was expecting more, but apparently Mike was through. "That's it?" he said. "There has to be more to it than that. You were at the gate that night. You saw them. Greg and the rest of them were like robots. They looked like they were drugged or hypnotized or something."

"It's not that," Mike insisted. "I can't explain it, but there's nothing truly coercive involved, no magic or drugs or brainwashing or anything. They really can walk away if they want to, although I have no doubt that they'd have their asses sued off if they did. But they're in so deep to the association that they stay. They'll do anything to get themselves out from underneath mat rock." Another of those looks at Tina. "Anything."

"But--" Maureen looked at Barry. "--they all seem to be... mutilated in some way. There's something wrong with all of them. They're missing ears or fingers or hands."

"Volunteering is not the only way to pay off debts," Tina said through tight lips.

That was as detailed as either of them would get, and Barry wasn't inclined to push them further. There was something else there, but while Mike and Tina were being evasive, it was out of fear, not malice, and he understood their apprehension. Mike, in particular, had to walk a thin line. Although he worked for a national corporation, his office was in town. And while he disagreed with and resented the association, they pretty much left him alone. It was not in his best interest to rock any boats.

After some innocuous chitchat that allowed them all to depressurize a bit, Barry and Maureen finally took their leave, making tentative plans to play tennis with the Stew arts next weekend.

They returned home to find Maureen's garden gone.

They'd only been away for a few hours, but in that time someone the volunteers?

--had not only torn out and disposed of every bushel vine, sapling, flower, and vegetable that Maureen had planted but had packed down the dirt and placed in dozens of dead and dying manzanita bushes.

"What is this? Maureen asked incredulously.

The land on the north side of the house looked like a cruel parody of the property as it had appeared when they bought the house, as though a blight had descended on native shrubs, killed most of them off, and left a few weakened specimens in its wake.

"Guess what?" Barry said. He pointed toward the screen door.

A pink sheet of paper.

"Oh no."

Maureen reached the door first and ripped off the form. Barry read over her shoulder. They were being fined for noncompliance with regulations and would also be charged for the labor and materials supplied by the gardening enterprise, which replaced the offending plants with acceptable local vegetation.

""Acceptable local vegetation'?" Maureen fumed. "They stuck some dead twigs in the ground!"

"Don't worry. We're not paying it."

"That's not the point. They destroyed my garden. My tomatoes still had blooms, and another batch was about to ripen. I had zucchini that was ready to pick."

"I wonder if there's some sort of grievance committee, someplace we could go to complain about an action like this."

"Fat chance."

"They should have to take responsibility for this. We were told specifically, after that first time with Barney, that we were allowed to have a garden and to landscape our property."

"That's not all. Look."

He read the line to which she was pointing. It stated that all flowers and house plants had to be removed from the inside of the residence within forty-eight hours. Otherwise, additional fines would be imposed. The amount was unspecified.

They were both agreed that no changes would be made; their plants would be neither moved nor removed. Since the inspection, they'd been tilting dining room chairs and placing them under the doorknobs in order to discourage intruders, but Bill and his buddies had somehow found a way to unhook a chain latch and throw back a keyless deadbolt, so this extra precaution probably hadn't amounted to much. Still, Barry vowed that tonight he would also duct tape the edges of the doors. At the very least, it might tell them if someone had broken in while they were sleeping.

Maureen decided to walk through where her garden used to be and see if any of her plants had been spared. Barry went inside. He had an idea.

He was pretty sure that Maureen would not approve, so he waited until she came back in and told her that he was going to walk around the property and do his own inspection "Our homeowners' insurance might cover this," he told her. "So after I look around, I'm going to take some photos and call them to file a claim, see what comes of it."

She thought it was a good idea.

He did intend to take pictures and file an insurance claim, but he also had more immediate plans. From underneath the bottom deck where he stored their gardening implements, tools, and leftover renovation materials, he found what he was looking for: a large cardboard box.

Using a pair of clippers, he raggedly cut off one side and then placed it on the ground, and painted a short, crude message. The only color of paint they had was white, but against the dark brown of the cardboard, the letters stood out and were clearly visible.

Barry positioned the sign at the base of a scrub oak, using a large rock to hold it in place, and walked out to the street to make sure his message was legible and could be read by passing cars.

FUCK THE HOMEOWNERS' ASSOCIATION

It was legible all right. He grinned. This would show those bastards.

He'd be fined, but it was worth it to him to make sure that they were aware of his defiance, that they knew he was willing to take his dissatisfaction public.

Besides, he'd just throw the fine notice in a drawer with the others.

He walked back inside, still smiling, and got the camera out. He took pictures of the damage from different directions, then, just for fun, took a picture of the sign.

He was cheered up for about ten minutes, but then he started thinking about all the time he'd wasted on this crap, all of the hours spent worrying and responding and thinking and brooding that could have been used for more productive purposes, and suddenly, he no longer felt so good. His thoughts turned to those creepy old men of the board and the futility of fighting against such entrenched institutionalized power.

Maureen was lying on the couch, watching the Home and Garden channel, mourning her lost plants. She, too, seemed drained. She'd been all fired up after their nighttime inspection, ready to go to war with the entire world if need be, but subsequent harassment had taken its toll, and now she looked positively beaten down.

Was any of this really worth it?

Maureen must have been thinking along the same lines because she sat up, using the remote to mute the television's sound. "Maybe we should move," she said.

He didn't respond.

"We can leave and still save face. We didn't buckle, we didn't cave, we stayed. We showed them. Now let's sell this place and put this hell behind us." There was a quaver in her voice. "Please?"

Barry nodded tiredly. "Okay." "Thank God," Maureen said. "Thank God." And he found that he felt the same way--off the hook, filled with relief.

It's over, he thought. It's finally over.

Barry sat in Doris' office, enduring the hostile stares of her coworkers. The real estate agent was on the phone, discussing a seller's willingness to carry with an obviously jittery buyer, but the fat man and the skinny woman who worked for her had nothing to do and behind her back were fixing him with the type of glare usually reserved for disciples of Adolf Hitler.

He was pretty sure he'd seen both of them at the rally.

Doris hung up and fixed him with a bright smile. "Sorry about that.

What can I do for you?"

"Well..."

"It's not Bert, is it? He's not causing you any problems?"

"I'd ... we want to sell our house."

"Oh." The real estate agent nodded, stood. "Come on. Let's go into the conference room." She led him into the other half of the trailer, closed the door behind them, and pulled out two adjoining chairs from the table. "Have a seat."

He followed her lead. "Your agents don't seem too thrilled to see me here."

"Don't you worry about that. They'll do what I tell them to do and they'll think what I tell them to think, or they'll be fired."

"I understand their feelings. Been running into a lot of it lately. We're not exactly the most popular people in town right now."

"I don't care what other people say," Doris told him. "I understand Bonita Vista. I've sold enough homes there." She smiled at him, leaned over, and patted his leg reassuringly. But the hand remained in place a beat too long, and when she finally moved it away, her fingers brushed his crotch.

He looked out the room's small window, afraid to meet her eyes. He was pretty sure she was coming on to him, but he didn't want to encourage her and tried to think of some way to make it clear that he was not interested, that this was strictly a business meeting.

"I've found that the people in Bonita Vista are very nice," she said.

He turned to face her, and she lowered her eyes in a way that she probably thought was sexy but instead seemed crude and embarrassingly obvious.

It was a class thing, he realized. It was terrible to admit, even to himself, but as much as he hated that damn homeowners' association, he felt more at ease with the residents of Bonita Vista than he did with the people of Corban . He wanted to be a conscientious liberal, to be one with the masses and all that good shit, but when it came down to it, he had money, he was educated, and he just didn't belong with these people.

He looked at Doris with her big hair and loud clothes and overlarge jewelry and there was not even a flicker of interest, no temptation whatsoever. The fact that she was sympathetic to Bonita Vista turned him off even more, and he wondered if everyone who had dealings with Bonita Vista was automatically corrupted. The sheriff. Doris. It seemed like whoever came in contact with the gated community and the association was ... influenced somehow.

He'd been reading and writing too many horror novels.

No.

He wished that was the case, but it wasn't.

"Where do you live?" he asked.

"Out on Barr's Ranch Road." She leaned forward, confiding in him. He smelled too-strong perfume. "But I own a lot in Bonita Vista and I'm going to build a house there in a few years."

The hairs on the back of his neck prickled.

"Well, we want to sell our house," he told her.

"I'm sorry to hear that. I really am. Corban is situated in the most beautiful section of the state. We have four full seasons--"

"I know. You don't have to sell me on the area. We've been living here for over five months now. It's a beautiful place. But we're not happy with the antagonism between Bonita Vista and the town, and to tell you the truth we've been having a few problems with the homeowners' association."

"I understand," Doris said. Again, she touched his leg. "You had a thirty-year fixed, right? Why don't I just go out and get your file, and we can talk this over."

He was glad to be away from her, if only for a moment, and he took a deep cleansing breath, only now realizing how tense her unwanted attention had made him. He moved his chair back, away from hers to give himself some space. He wished there was another real estate agency in Corban , but he was stuck. Doris was the only game in town.

She returned with a manila file folder, closed the door behind her, and sat down in her chair, scooting it forward until they were again right next to each other.

"Do you have any idea what we could sell it for?" he asked. "We'll let it go for the same price we paid if we have to, but if we could make a profit, that would be even better."

"I'm sorry," she said brightly. "You can't sell your house."

"What?"

"Your homeowners' association has invoked a bylaw that allows it to freeze assets--in this case your house and property--should you be involved in any disagreement or dispute with the association. Apparently, you have refused to pay numerous fines and charges levied against you."

"They can't do that!"

"They've done it. I have a note attached here to your file."

"What if I don't acknowledge that? What if we sell it anyway?"

She laughed. "Oh, sugar! It's in the agreement you signed."

"What agreement?"

"Why, your homeowners' association agreement." She sorted through the sheaf of papers. "Hold on. I have it right here."

She handed him a legal-sized sheet of densely packed type. Buried in the reams of contracts and documents they'd signed when initially buying the house was an agreement to abide by all of the bylaws, rules, regulations, covenants, conditions, and restrictions of the Bonita Vista Homeowners' Association. Barry read through the carefully written legalese. They had effectively ceded to the association rights and powers that no sane or halfway intelligent person would ever grant anyone else. How could he and Maureen have signed such a thing? He didn't remember the document at all and couldn't imagine he would put his signature on an agreement without reading it, but there it was in black and white.

"Here," she said, "I'll make you a Xerox."

He nodded, acting calmer than he felt. "Thank you."

Five minutes later, he was outside, holding his copy, blinking in the hot August sun. If before he'd felt paranoid about living in Bonita Vista, now he felt positively trapped. There was no way out. They were doomed to remain here unless they caved in and forked over money for the excessive and unjust fines imposed by the association. He drove back to Bonita Vista distressed, unhappy, and filled with a bleak resignation.

At the gate, the guard smirked at him, as if knowing exactly what had occurred.

He parked the Suburban in the driveway and sat for a moment. He sighed heavily. Maybe they should pay off their fines. Such a thought would have been inconceivable even an hour ago, but principles no longer seemed quite so important. If they could pay off their fines and then sell the house at a profit, they might emerge from this mess at least no worse off than when they started.

He unbuckled his seatbelt and got out of the vehicle, walking over to check the mail before going back inside the house. In the mailbox, in addition to bills and a horror newsletter, was a homeowners'

association form ordering them to trim and/or replace all dead Manzanita bushes on their property or face a stiff fine of up to five hundred dollars for each day the problem was not rectified.

Something snapped within him.

"Fuck!" he yelled. "Fuck! Fuck!" He tore up the notice, ripping the sheet into ever-smaller pieces. They were the ones who put in those dead manzanitas ! They had purposely replaced Maureen's plants with sick and dying bushes and now they were blaming the two of them for the manzanitas' unacceptable condition, using it as a pretense for imposing even more unwarranted fines. "Fuck!"

"Barry?"

He must have been yelling louder than he thought, because Maureen was on the porch steps looking worriedly in his direction.

"They're fining us for the dead manzanitas !" he shouted. "Those fuckers ripped out our plants and charged us for it, replaced them with dead bushes, and charged us for it, now they're fining us five hundred fucking dollars a day!"

She walked over to him, took his hands. "Don't worry.

We're getting out. We don't have to put up with this lunacy anymore."

"No, we're not."

"We're not what?"

"Getting out. Doris said they have some type of lien on our house. We can't sell it or rent it out or do anything with it until we pay off the money we supposedly owe the association."

Maureen paled. "You're kidding."

"No. We're stuck here until we pay the fines. Unless we want to just bail and take a loss on this place, leave it here and let the fines pile up."

"We can't afford that. I mean, we could afford it-barely--but it would be financially irresponsible and self destructive." The accountant in her had kicked in. "The fines would pile up. And all of this would go on our credit record."

"I'm not paying them a dime," he said.

"I know how you feel, but--"

"I would have!" he shouted, in case someone was listening in. "But I'll be damned if I'll let those monkey dicks pull this kind of stunt."

"Then what are we going to do?"

"Nothing. We're staying right here and we're not paying a fucking dime. Let the fines accumulate!" he yelled. "We don't care!"

"What if they try to collect?" Her voice lowered. "What if they send volunteers?"

"Bring 'em on!" Barry shouted out as loud as he could. "You hear me, assholes? Bring 'emon!"

The next morning, the manzanita bushes were gone, replaced with an assortment of thorny, rough-looking shrubs. A notification form stated that the deteriorated condition of their property was unacceptable and that voluntary entreaties had been ignored at this address in the past, so the association had taken upon itself the job of bringing the yard up to code. A bill for both the plants and the labor would be sent to them within two working days.

His anger had faded, and in its place was a familiar sense of hopelessness. He'd been seesawing between those emotions far too often lately, and he had no rational explanation for it. Was it this place doing it to him? He could not dismiss the possibility. He recalled a theory he'd once read about the Superstition Mountains in Arizona.

Prospectors looking for the Lost Dutchman invariably went crazy searching for the mythical mine, becoming paranoid and murderous.

According to this hypothesis, the mountains were magnetic and it affected the brains of anyone who stayed within their borders for too long. Maybe something like that was happening here.

Maybe not.

Days passed, and Barry felt as though they were not only under siege but isolated and completely alone. Neighbors waved to them on the street when they walked; Mike and Tina came over with a list of all the anti-association people they could remember from Ray's parties and stayed for dinner; they played a pickup game of tennis with another couple they met on the court. But everything seemed false and superficial. He and Maureen were putting on public faces that masked the real feelings underneath, and he had the sneaking suspicion that everyone else was doing the same.

Maureen at least was keeping busy, doing work for her California clients, but he himself was lost. Although he'd made token efforts, he had not yet started writing again. Not even a short story. Each time he broke out his pen and notebook and sat down to write, he drew a blank.

Maybe he could sue the association for loss of wages due to pain and suffering.

A week after his trip to the real estate office, they were eating lunch on the deck and the painters showed up. He didn't know who they were at first, assumed they were some type of inspector sent by the association to snoop around their yard. He intended to ignore their existence the same way he ignored the endless stream of fines and notices, but when the four men unrolled a massive plastic dropcloth on the driveway, quickly pulled paint guns out of the back of the truck, turned on a compressor, and started spraying the front of the house, he threw down his sandwich. "That's it!" He pulled open the sliding glass door and ran downstairs and outside. "What the hell are you doing?" he demanded. "This is my house!"

The three men painting the windowless section of the front wall with a coat of brown ignored him completely. But the oldest man, a bald fellow applying masking tape to the windows, looked over as he approached. "We've been hired to repaint this residence," he said.

"The work order's in my truck. You want to see it?"

"I don't give a damn about your work order!" Barry yelled. "This is my house and I don't want it painted! Now you stop where you are and make that section the same color it was!"

"Can't do it, Mac." The old man continued taping up the window. "I

got a work order from your homeowners' association. You got a beef, take it up with them. But the way I understand it is they asked you to change the color and conform, you wouldn't do it, so they called us."

"I don't believe this shit!"

"I'm sorry," the old man said. "But, like I said, you gotta take it up with them. They're the ones paying the bill." He gave Barry a sympathetic look. "That's why I wouldn't live in no neighborhood with a homeowners' association."

Who were these men? Were they from Corban ? They had to be. After his experience at the coffee shop, and especially after the rally, he'd assumed that the townspeople were of one mind and were all antagonistic toward Bonita Vista. But he realized that there was a whole class of workers whose livings were intertwined with the gated community and whose livelihoods depended on it.

Economics made strange bedfellows.

Again, he thought that everyone Bonita Vista touched was somehow corrupted.

"I don't want my house painted," Barry said, and this time it sounded more like a plea than a demand.

"Sorry," the old man said again. "Nothing I can do. I got my work order."

They slept that night with all of the windows closed, but the house still smelled like paint.

The next day, they received a Request for Reimbursement from the homeowners' association for the amount owed the painters: five thousand dollars.

He was sitting on the deck, staring drunkenly at the sunset, when Maureen quietly slid open the door and sat down next to him. In her hand was a stack of pink association forms and a computer printout.

"I've been adding up all of our fines and charges," she said.

"And?"

"It's almost a hundred thousand dollars."

He practically spit out his beer. "What?"

"I know. I couldn't believe it either. But it's over twenty five thousand for the initial landscaping--"

"Twenty-five--"

"Let me finish." She ran down a list of overcharged services and exorbitant fines.

"Well, we're not paying them anything."

"They'll take our house."

"We're going to owe more than the house is worth!"

Maureen's eyes widened. "That's their plan," she said wonderingly.

"That's exactly what they want. They want to take our home and drive us into bankruptcy. Jesus, why didn't I see it before?" She looked at him. "The fines? Okay, they might be settled by taking the house. But the work? The painting, the landscaping, materials, and labor? Those involve tradespeople who have to be paid. Do you honestly think that the association is going to let us off the hook for those charges? Hell no. They'll take us to court, and we'll lose because the work was done, the services were provided, and we owe" She took a deep breath. "They're going to ruin us."

"Should've listened to Greg Davidson," Barry said. "Hey, maybe I could volunteer to work it off."

"Don't even joke about that," Maureen scolded him.

She was right. It wasn't very funny. He wished he had something else to say, wished he had some sort of plan to get them out from under this, but he didn't, and he drank his beer and stared out at the sunset in silence.

She couldn't take it any more.

Liz stared at the phone in her hand for a long while, then took a deep breath, and dialed the number of Jasper Calhoun A chill passed through her as the old man answered. "Hello, Elizabeth."

How had he known it was her? Caller ID, she told herself. A lot of people had it these days. There was nothing unusual or mysterious about it. Still, she thought of his odd face with its unnatural complexion, and the cold within her grew.

"What can I do for you?" he asked.

Even after all that had happened, she had too much pride to beg. She refused to give Calhoun the satisfaction of pleading for mercy. But they'd broken her. For all her tough talk and firm intentions, she had not been able to hold up under the constant onslaught. Maureen and Tina and Audrey and Moira could say they supported her and offer her friendship and hope, but they weren't with her at night.

They weren't there in the house when the bad things happened.

Last night had been the last straw.

She'd heard voices calling her from outside, seen lights shining on various windows even through the drapes, and she turned on the television to distract her. What she saw took her breath away and caused her to fall back onto the couch.

On BVTV, for all to see, was the death of Ray.

It was a re-enactment. She knew that. But, damn it, the man looked a lot like her husband, and she watched as he slipped in the shower and hit his head on the hard porcelain. He lay there for a few moments, head bleeding, then got groggily to his feet and staggered out of the bathroom to the kitchen, where he attempted to pick up the phone. The show was depicting the association's version of events, the story they wanted everyone to believe, and though Liz knew it wasn't true, she wanted to believe it, too.

She could believe it, she decided.

She just wanted all this to stop.

The man who looked like Ray stumbled onto the deck, then fell over the railing to the hard ground below, his already bleeding head landing sickeningly atop an irregularly shaped rock. The camera cut to a scene inside the house where Liz saw herself--her real self, not an impersonator-sobbing on the couch.

She let out an anguished cry, unable to endure this cruel indignity, a whole host of hurtful emotions churning within her. Immediately, the scene switched to a live feed, and she saw and heard herself wailing in real time.

She shut off the television, ran into the bedroom, jumped on the bed, and hid under the covers, pulling in arms and legs and head so no part of her was exposed. There might be a camera in this room, too, but it wouldn't be able to capture her. The camera could focus on her blanket and bedspread all night as far as she was concerned. They would not get another shot of her.

She was filled with bleak despair and a crushing sense of loss. She replayed in her mind the scenes she'd just witnessed on TV. Ray's re-enacted death had been filmed here, at her home, and she wondered when and how that had occurred. She'd left the house only briefly and infrequently since the funeral, and it was impossible for them to have staged such elaborate setups in those brief snatches of time.

At night, she thought. They filmed it at night. That's what she'd heard. That's what the noises were.

But filming those scenes only accounted for some of the noises. What else was going on? What else were they doing here?

She felt even more violated than she had before. Having her suspicions confirmed, knowing with certainty that others had been in her house, gave her not only a feeling of powerlessness but hopelessness. She did not know how much longer she could put up with this. She did not know how much longer she could survive this constant barrage.

So she'd decided to meet the association halfway.

"Elizabeth?" Calhoun prodded.

"I'd like to talk," she said.

The president chuckled. "I knew you'd come around."

"I don't want to be on the board," she insisted. "I just want to--"

"Talk," he said. "I know. Why don't you open up your door and let me in. We'll discuss the best way to handle this situation." Open her door? Liz hurried out of the kitchen and into the entryway, where she looked through the peephole. He was on the porch! Standing on the welcome mat, talking to her on his cell phone.

Don't let him in, a voice inside her said, and the voice spoke in Ray's dulcet tones.

But she could not endure any more of this. She was not as strong as Ray had been, and alone, without his unflagging self-confidence and dogged determination, she could not stand up to their harassment.

Don't... Taking a deep breath, she unlocked and opened the door.

The president stepped inside, smiling, and she shivered as he touched her shoulder. "It'll be all right now," he told her. "Everything's all right. Everything will be fine."

"I guess we weren't invited."

Barry and Maureen stood in the darkened guest bedroom, staring out the open window. The cool breeze, a preview of approaching autumn, carried with it the sound of revelers. Through the trees, a concentration of lights at the community center created an irregular dome of illumination in the moonless night sky.

They'd seen cars driving down earlier. And people walking. He knew from previous flyers that the community center would be having its grand unveiling this week, but they'd never been told a specific date and had received no invitation to the gala.

Other people obviously had.

He moved over to the east window and looked out. He saw more lights than usual twinkling through the pine branches: people had left their porch lights on while they'd gone down to see the new center, "It looks like almost everyone went," he said.

"You can't tell that by looking out the window."

"Call it a hunch."

"I doubt if Liz went," Maureen offered helpfully. He snorted. "Yeah, that makes me feel better."

"Come on. Do you honestly think they're all going to turn into rabid association supporters just because they went to a party? Most of them probably only showed up for the free food and drink. "

"Maybe."

"What's that mean?"

"You know damn well what it means." He turned to face her, seeing only an impressionistic version of her features in the darkness. "They get their way, the association. I don't know if it's ... it's magic or...

I don't know what it is. But these people are on their side! Look at the sheriff. Look at everyone who showed up to head off that rally! We were there under duress, but most of our beloved neighbors were there on their own, happily brandishing their weapons and longing for a fight."

"Then maybe it's a good thing we're ostracized. Maybe they'd convert us, too."

"No," he said firmly. "That could never happen."

"And the same goes for other people. Not all of them, maybe. But some of them. Mike and Tina. A few of the others we met."

He remembered the party at Ray's when Greg Davidson had announced his intention to leave Bonita Vista and everyone had gathered around swapping anti-association stories. "Maybe," he said. "Hopefully." He moved next to her, and they stood at the window, staring into the darkness, listening to the party.

"Labor Day's only a week away," Maureen said softly.

"I know."

"Are we going to go to the meeting?"

"Of course. This is our chance to make everything public. According to the rules, each homeowner gets three minutes to say whatever they want. I'm going to write a speech, and I'm going to suggest amendments, and by the end of it, at the very least, we'll find out who stands where. I'm taking those bastards to task, and we'll see who's with me or against me."

"You? What about me?"

"Us," he amended.

"No, I mean what about me? Do I get to speak, too?"

He was surprised. "Do you want to?"

"No. But is it three minutes for me and three minutes for you, or three minutes total? If we can stretch our time out to six, I'll take up where you leave off and keep talking."

"It's three minutes per lot."

"Then the floor's all yours."

"I have to start working on this now, time myself, try to cram in as much as I can. The annual meeting is the one time a year they even make the pretext that this is a democracy. It's our only shot. We've got to make it count."

A lone skyrocket exploded in the air above the community center, purple sparkles falling down on the trees. A loud cheer went up.

"What do you think will happen?" Maureen asked.

Barry was silent for a moment. "I don't know," he said finally. "I

don't know."

The painters returned in the morning. This time, Barry and Maureen were both in the driveway before the men had emerged from their truck.

"What do you think you're doing here?" Maureen demanded as the painters got out of the cab and walked around to the rear of the vehicle.

They ignored her.

"You just painted our house a week ago."

The three younger men pulled out their tarp and started spreading it on the driveway.

Barry walked up to the old man. "Let me guess," he said. "This color is no longer acceptable. They want you to paint it a different shade."

The painter pulled a roll of masking tape from the bed of the truck.

"Yep."

"Have you done this before? Painted the same house over and over again until the owners go bankrupt?"

He paused for a moment, as if hesitant to answer, then nodded his head. "Yep." He pushed past Barry and started taping up the nearest window.

They left before the painting started, closing up the house and driving out to the lake, where they spent the day hiking and picnicking and pretending that they were a normal couple having a normal day. When they arrived home late in the afternoon, the painters were gone, but their tarp remained draped over bushes on the south side of the house and only half of the building was completed.

"I guess they're coming back tomorrow," Maureen said.

Barry nodded.

They'd slept with the windows closed last time and that hadn't worked, so this time they left the windows open and the fan on, but the smell of paint still permeated everything, and they both awoke in the morning with headaches.

The job took two days. The painters were clearly being more thorough than before, which made Barry think that this sequence had been thoroughly planned in advance. This would turn out to be a more expensive job, he was sure, and while a part of him wanted to physically throw the painters off his property and burn then- truck, he knew they were only following orders and would merely be replaced by someone else.

He thought of another idea, though, and he talked to Maureen, told her of his plan. To his surprise, she agreed.

They waited until the painters were done. After they left, he and Maureen took the white interior latex left over from their remodeling and painted a gigantic happy face on the wall of the house facing the street. On the north wall of the house, they painted a frowning face.

The next day, the workers were back. This time, they were not merely uncommunicative, they were openly hostile. When Barry met them in the driveway, drinking his morning coffee and offering them a hearty hello, they gave him dirty looks and muttered obscenities. "Who does he think he is?" one of the younger painters asked another.

"Stupid fuck," the old man muttered..

His plan had worked. He and Maureen had thrown a monkey-wrench into the association's schedule, had reset the agenda on their terms.

The painters taped off the windows, put down their dropcloth , hooked up the sprayers, and obliterated the left half of the happy face. After they moved to another section of wall, Barry put down his coffee, took out his white paint and started brushing it on the recently completed area, making a series of X's in a random pattern.

The old man stormed over to him. "Just what do you think you're doing?"

"It's my house," Barry told him. "And I'm painting it."

"You can't--"

"It's my house. I can do anything I damn well please, and if you don't get out of my face, I'm going to kick your fucking ass, strip you naked, and paint you yellow like the coward you are."

He expected the old man to threaten him, to tell him that there were four of them and only one of him. He was even prepared for a fight right then and there should the bald asshole rush him. But the painter turned and walked away, spoke to his coworkers, and a few minutes later the four of them packed up their gear and left.

A victory.

The painters did not return, no others took their place, and there was not even any sign of Neil Campbell and his ubiquitous clipboard. No one called, no notices were left in their mailbox or on their door. The half a happy face and random Xs remained on the wall.

That night they made love, and in the middle of it, the phone rang. He wanted to let it ring, but Maureen insisted that he answer, it might be important, so he reached over to the nightstand, picked up the phone, and pressed the Talk button. "Hello?"

The voice on the line was harsh yet whispery. "Throw her another hump for me!"

Click.

Someone was watching them. They were being monitored. He pulled the sheets over their bodies and looked frantically around the room, searching for a hidden camera.

"What are you doing?" Maureen demanded, squirming uncomfortably beneath him.

He rolled off her. His erection was gone. Still hidden by the blanket, he reached down to the floor for his underwear. He pulled on his briefs and ran over to the television, turning it on.

On BVTV was a video of him and Maureen making love. Maureen was on top, and the camera zoomed in on her buttocks as his hand slid down and into her crack.

"Sons of bitches!" Barry yelled. "Sons of bitches!"

The phone rang again, but this time neither of them answered it.

In the morning their house had been painted black.

The Bonita Vista Homeowners' Association Covenants, Conditions, and Restrictions Article V, Security and Control, Section 9, Paragraph A:

The Association and any of its committees or subcommittees has the right to monitor residents on any section of the Community properties or on any jointly owned right of-way in any manner it deems appropriate using any means at its disposal. Residents whose dues are in arrears or who are involved in disputes with the Board may be monitored anywhere at any time including in their private residences.

It was hard writing a speech. He was used to creating dialogue, having two characters express ideas and points of view through conversation, but coming up with a stirring, rabble-rousing address in the real world was quite a bit different from doing so within the boundaries of a fictional universe in which he controlled all of the variables and all of the reactions. He was not and never had been a public speaker, so the fact that he would be performing this himself --and before a hostile audience no less--brought additional pressure.

His first draft clocked in at a whopping fifteen minutes. He pared it down as much as he could, read it to Maureen, and it still came in at twelve.

He would have to be selective, and he would have to be merciless. It was impossible to fit in everything he wanted to say, so he would be able to address only his most important concerns and use the most egregious examples of the association's transgressions.

But he was having a hard time figuring out what those were.

He scrolled down the computer screen, reread his words for the hundredth time.

"Tape!" Maureen called from the living room.

He hurried upstairs. He'd been videotaping BVTV all day and night, fast-forwarding and reviewing the tapes every six hours as they filled up, looking for anything filmed in their house. He had figured out where the camera in the bedroom was from the angle of the shot he'd seen on the television, and he'd torn out that section of wall until he found the device, which he'd immediately smashed. How someone had gotten the camera into that spot was a mystery, and the only thing he could figure was that it had been built into the house during initial construction and had been there ever since.

They'd patched over the hole in the wall as best as two amateurs could, but it still looked like hell and Maureen had hung a framed Georgia O'Keeffe poster over the space to hide the bulging spackle.

So far, they'd seen no indication that any of the other rooms in the house were under surveillance, but he wouldn't put anything past Calhoun and his cronies, and he continued his close monitoring of BVTV.

The day before the association's annual meeting, Barry finally had a speech he was happy with. It still ran long-four minutes instead of three, even speaking fast--but he figured he could keep talking while they told him his time was up and get the last little bit in before he was cut off completely. Celebrities did it on award shows all the time. It was a legitimate tactic.

They went to bed early, both of them exhausted from stress. They made love for the first time since discovering the camera and talked for a while about what they would do and where they would go when they finally escaped Bonita Vista. Gradually, the pauses between their sentences grew longer and their voices slowed as they started to drift off.

He wasn't sure when he finally slipped into sleep, but at some point he was no longer lying in his bed. He was sitting on a hard metal folding chair with all of his neighbors. At a table on a raised stage, Jasper Calhoun and the rest of the be-robed board were gazing imperiously out at the tightly packed crowd.

The president announced in a strong clear tone: "Additions to the C, C, and Rs include a provision declaring that all men may butt fuck Maureen Welch at their convenience, without her permission or the permission of her husband, Barry. All those in favor?"

A sea of hands shot up with Nuremberg precision.

"All those opposed?"

Only Barry's hand was raised.

"Passed!"

He awoke in the morning looking across the pillow into Maureen's open eyes. "Meeting today," she said.

The room was packed. Most of the people he did not recognize, but there were others he did: Mike and Tina; Frank and Audrey; Lou and Stacy; Neil, Chuck, and Terry; individuals from Ray's parties;

homeowners he'd seen at the rally. They were seated on metal folding chairs and there must have been over a hundred of them.

In the front of the room was the board.

In the back were the volunteers.

The layout was remarkably similar to that of his dream, and he experienced an uncomfortable feeling of deja vu as he and Maureen walked into the community center. There should have been voices, should have been talking, the large room should have been filled with the buzz of numerous conversations. But everyone was quiet, each of them glancing through enormous black-bound books that lay in their laps. To the right of the doorway, Barry saw, was a table piled high with dozens of identical volumes.

A man standing next to the table, dressed absurdly in livery, motioned them over. "Please pick up your revised copy of The Bonita Vista Homeowners' Association Declaration of Covenants, Conditions, and Restrictions " he said. "Ratification is the first item on today's agenda."

He handed Barry a book. It weighed a ton and was the! size of the oversized family Bible that his grandmother| used to keep on her dining room table. "We're supposed to read through this entire thing in,|

what, five or ten minutes?" Barry asked. "It's just a formality," the man said.

"How can we make an informed decision if we don't know what's in there?"

The man laughed. "That's a good one." The laugh was genuine, and it made Barry uneasy. The idea that the votes of the homeowners were important and actually meant I something struck this man as legitimately funny. An ominous sign.

Liz was seated near the closest aisle, and she waved j them over. She'd saved the two seats next to her, and he and Maureen exchanged a glance as they walked up.

It was as if nothing unusual had ever happened, as if she had not been a paranoid recluse for the better part of two months, and her normality was disconcerting. Liz smiled as they sat down and said she was glad they'd come, she hadn't been sure they would. She spoke in whispers, and though Barry wanted to talk in a normal tone of voice, wanted to demonstrate that he was unintimidated and unafraid, he found himself whispering back, daunted by the silence of everyone around him.

"There's no way we'd miss this," he said. "I finally have an opportunity to give that board a piece of my mind."

"Please pick up your revised copy of The Bonita Vista Homeowners'

Association Declaration of Covenants, Conditions, and Restrictions,""

the man in livery said from his post near the table as someone new walked in. His voice sounded absurdly loud in the stillness.

"Ratification is the first item on today's agenda."

Barry placed the massive volume on his lap and opened it up. Liz's copy, he noticed, was on the floor next to her. Several of the people around them had also laid their books on the floor, though some were attempting to read through the amended regulations.

He turned pages randomly. There was a rule disallowing the cooking of Asian food at any residence, another stating that all homeowners must own an American flag, although the flag could not be displayed either in or outside the house. He flipped quickly through the book. The regulations grew wackier and wackier. Only Number 2 pencils could be used to write grocery lists; residents were required to wash their hair daily and use conditioner; baldness was not acceptable in public, and homeowners who were losing their hair had to wear toupees outside the privacy of their homes. He was certain that there were dangerous edicts hidden among the frivolous ridiculous ordinances, but there was no time to find them, and he was glad that he'd prepared a speech ahead of time. If people were going to automatically ratify regulations with which they were completely unfamiliar, they needed to hear what he had to say.

He'd told Mike about his planned speech, asked his friend to spread the word, and Barry could only hope that he had. He glanced around the silent crowd. If everything went well, people would respond to his questioning of the board with questions of their own and those old men would find themselves under attack, forced to defend policies and procedures that until this point had been taken for granted. Even the best laid plans went astray--and this was a half baked scheme to begin with--but he had faith that he might be able to at least stir things up here today.

The president's gavel fell on the table with the sharp suddenness of a gunshot, and Barry jumped along with everyone else. All eyes turned toward the raised platform on which sat the board of directors.

"Hear ye! Hear ye!" the man in livery announced from the back of the room. "The annual meeting of the Bonita Vista Homeowners' Association will now come to order!"

Jasper Calhoun, seated at the center of the table, stood and smiled munificently. "Welcome neighbors," he said.

A huge cheer went up, the people around them began ; clapping wildly, and Barry looked at Maureen. He'd been, sitting there waiting for a follow-up sentence, having no \ idea that the president's simple greeting would be an applause cue, and the response of his fellow homeowners was as startling and unexpected as the rap of the gavel had been. He had a sudden uneasy suspicion that this was part of some ritual, like a church service, with programmed cues and responses.

Leaning over Maureen, he spoke to Liz. "How long do these meetings usually last?" he whispered.

"Two or three hours," she whispered back.

Two or three hours?

The president beamed at the crowd, and his smile grew even wider, though that was not something Barry would have thought physically possible. The disproportionate breadth of his mouth gave Calhoun's face a creepy, wolflike appearance. "We will begin this meeting with the most important task facing us today: voting on our Covenants, Conditions, and Restrictions."

Another cheer.

"You've all had time to look over the amended declaration. All those in favor of accepting the revisions raise your hands."

Arms shot into the air.

Barry was thrown off guard. "Wait!" he yelled, leaping to his feet.

"Aren't we going to discuss this? We--"

"Opposed?" the president said.

The gavel was rapped on the table before Barry even had a chance to raise his hand or finish his sentence.

"The amendments are accepted," Calhoun announced.

Barry stood there dumbly, looking around at his seated neighbors, all of whom seemed to be eagerly awaiting the next word from the president's lips. They're all hypnotized, he thought, it's the only explanation. But he knew that wasn't true.

He glanced down at Maureen. She, too, seemed stunned. The idea that such a massive revision of a document affecting the lives and property of everyone here could be approved in a single vote and without any discussion, without time to even fully comprehend all the changes, was unbelievable.

Barry was still standing, and Calhoun pointed at him with the gavel.

"Mr. Welch, would you please have a seat?"

He faced the president. "I want to know why there wasn't any discussion about these revisions. Isn't it normal to vote on amendments individually, after people have a chance to give their opinions?"

"This is Bonita Vista," Calhoun said, as if that explained everything.

"Please sit down so we may continue our meeting."

Barry was aware of the hostile stares directed at him from some of the other homeowners, and he felt Maureen tugging on his shirtsleeve. He still had his speech to give, but this apparently wasn't the time for member comment and since he wanted to win over the crowd and not alienate them, he sat down. He had not expected the other residents to be so in sync with the board, and it worried him.

On the platform, one of the other board members handed the president a slip of paper.

Calhoun nodded at the man, then faced the audience. "A motion has been made to do away with all cats in the town of Corban . As you know, we have begun our process of eliminating dogs, but as the eradication of all pets is our ultimate goal and part of our ongoing effort to bring Corban into the Bonita Vista family, it has been suggested that we begin killing cats. Shall we put this to a vote?"

"Yes!" the crowd shouted.

Again Barry thought of the church analogy. There was definitely a ritualistic element to this meeting that he and Maureen were not privy to and that did not sit well with him. Even more unnerving was the subject matter. He had] known the association was behind the dog poisonings, but! he'd assumed that it was a decision made by the board. The] idea that the entire membership had voted on and approved | such a horrific and inhuman policy threw him for a loop.

Had they approved the child murders as well?

Goose bumps rippled down his skin.

"All those in favor of expanding the pet eradication to; include cats and kittens raise your hands."

Arms shot up all around him.

Barry looked about wildly. Mike's hand was not raised, but Tina's was, and with a sickening drop in his stomach he . realized that his neighbors, even the ones he'd considered! his friends, even the nice men and women he'd met at Ray's parties, were the homeowners'

association. He'd been; blaming the board of directors for everything, as though they were solely responsible for it all, as though the organization was not comprised of himself and his fellow homeowners but was something separate and apart. He knew now that was not the case.

The board members did not operate in a vacuum, and the people who elected and supported them were the ones validating the hatred, racism, and intolerance they espoused.

He could attribute some of it to peer pressure, but peer pressure only went so far, and the enthusiasm with which his neighbors were taking part in this meeting made him realize that despite what they said in public, their true feelings came out here, where they were together with others of their kind. It was the dark side of democracy that allowed a person to actively endorse reprehensible policies and behavior by disappearing into the anonymity of a group.

He understood now why Hank and Lyle and all of his ex buddies at the coffee shop had been so angry. Because, in some sense, he was a part of this. They all were. Perhaps especially those like himself or Maureen or Tina who voted against specific proposals but allowed them to stand, who buckled under to the will of the majority and lent legitimacy to the illegitimate by not refusing to recognize those rules.

"All opposed?" Calhoun said.

Barry and Maureen raised their hands, but Tina, Liz, and the few others who had not voted for the motion were not strong enough to vote against it.

"Passed!" the president announced. He chuckled jovially. "We're on a roll today, people. We will now conduct our formal election for the board of directors. As you know, this will be done by secret ballot, so none of you need feel ashamed if you're not happy with the way Mr.

Gehring here has been doing his job."

The board member next to Calhoun gave a halfhearted smile and wave, and the president slapped him on the back. "Just kidding, buddy."

Two teenage girls dressed in bikinis or underwear--it was hard to tell which--walked from the back of the room, up the center aisle, handing out stacks of ballots and rubber banded bundles of small pencils to the individuals at the end of each row. "Pass them down."

Maureen took the stack from Liz, peeled off a sheet and passed it on to Barry. As Ray had warned him, there was only one word printed next to the six names on the piece of paper: Approve. Next to each was a box.

Barry immediately wrote Disapprove, next to every name, as did Maureen.

Calhoun banged his gavel. "We will now open the floor to comments.

Anyone?"

Barry stood.

"The board recognizes Mr. Welch."

"I have a statement I wish to read."

"Go right ahead, sir."

"I have three minutes, right?"

Calhoun smiled. "That is correct."

"The purpose of a homeowners' association," Barry read, "is to provide for the common good of the community, not to penalize members of that community for failure to abide by unfair, discriminatory, and illegal rules and regulations. I personally--"

"Time!" one of the board members called.

Barry looked up angrily. "I'm entitled to three minutes."

"Time!"

"I personally have been subject to harassment--" he continued reading.

"Time! Time! Time! Timer He was drowned out by the shouting of the seated homeowners. Except for Maureen and Liz, everyone around him--including Mike and Tina-was chanting in unison, smiling as though this were all one big joke or part of a game. Barry pointed at the board members, tried to make himself heard above the clamor. "You're killing animals and killing kids and mutilating dues-paying homeowners you disagree with!"

They were all chuckling tolerantly, and he wanted to lash out at them, wanted to rush the stage and slap the shit out of those strangely formed faces, but instead he kept yelling. "Why aren't there any real elections? Why are you afraid to let people actually run for office and let us have a real choice?"

Calhoun pointed toward the rear of the room. "I'd like to introduce Paul Henri, our sergeant at arms!"

A huge cheer went up.

"Paul? Will you please escort Mr. Welch from the meeting?"

The liveried man from the back table strode up, pushed past Liz and Maureen, and grabbed Barry's arm. Barry tried to pull away, but the sergeant's grip was surprisingly strong. Fingers dug painfully into his muscles, and he felt himself being dragged out to the main aisle.

"This is against the rules!" Barry yelled. "You can't shut me up just because you disagree with me! I refuse to be silenced!

The C, C, and Rs don't allow this!"

"The amended ones do," Calhoun said calmly.

There was laughter all around.

Barry tried to punch the sergeant at arms, tried to pry the vice like grip from his forearm, but the man was unbelievably strong, and he was pulled toward the exit.

"Let's hear it for Paul Henri!" the president called.

The audience joined him in a chant: "Hiphip hurray! Hiphip hurray!"

Barry was shoved outside, the door slamming shut behind him. He turned around, pounding on the door, demanding to be let in, but to no avail.

Looking up at the windowless building, he tried to hear what was going on inside, but the community center was soundproof.

What was going on in there now? Almost everything of importance had been decided and only ten minutes had passed. What were they going to do for the next two hours?

He wasn't able to find out because a moment after his eviction, Maureen was forced out of the meeting as well.

"Jeremy?"

"Dude!"

Barry switched the phone to his other ear, looked grimly over at Maureen. "We're, uh, having a little problem here."

"The same one we talked about?"

"Yeah." He felt better already. Jeremy was automatically being circumspect, not mentioning anything directly in case the phone was bugged. His Mend might be paranoid and overcautious, but sometimes that was a good thing. He smiled reassuringly at Maureen. "Remember you offered to ... to come out here if I needed some help?"

"I'm there, dude. We all are. When do you want us?"

It was as if a great responsibility had just been taken from him. As a writer, as someone who sat by himself in a room all day and typed, he was by nature and necessity something of a loner, an individualist who preferred to handle problems on his own, who saw himself as a solitary warrior against stupidity, hypocrisy, and all of the usual abstract ideals that writers loved so well, a staunch defender of truth, justice, and the American way. He had never been a team player, had never liked committees or collectives. He would rather deal with adversity on his own. But sometimes, he had to admit, it was nice to be part of a group.

Sometimes it was necessary.

He told Jeremy the situation without spelling things out, promising details later, and his Mend said that he'd gather Dylan and Chuck and that the three of them would be on the road as soon as humanly possible.

Sure enough, he and Maureen were eating breakfast the next morning when the phone rang. It was the guard at the gate. "Mr. Welch?" the guard said in an unctuous, disapproving voice. "I have detained the occupants of two vehicles at the gate who claim to be friends of yours--"

"They are," Barry told him. "Let them in."

"I have a Mister Jeremy--"

"I know who they are, and I told you, let them in."

"This is highly irregular at this--"

"You are the guard," Barry interrupted, his voice equally disapproving, anger just below the surface. "You work for us. Now do your job and obey me."

He pressed the Talk button on the phone, cutting off the conversation, smiling as he put it down on the kitchen table. "They're here," he told Maureen.

Several minutes later there came the shave-and a-haircut honks of two distinctly different car horns. Barry shoved the last forkful of hash browns in his mouth, hurried downstairs, and found his friends getting out of their cars and stretching.

"Long night!" Jeremy called out. "We've been driving since yesterday afternoon!"

Dylan emerged from the Saturn's back seat. "With a short stop off in Vegas."

Maureen had followed him downstairs, and she grinned when she saw that Jeremy and Chuck had brought their wives. She greeted both Lupe and Danna with warm, grateful hugs.

Lupe glanced around at the house, the yard, the trees. "It doesn't look like hell," she said.

"Seems like a beautiful place," Danna agreed.

"Looks can be deceiving." Maureen led them into the house. "As I'm sure you've heard before."

Dylan had come stag, hitching a ride with Jeremy and Lupe, and he walked over to the mailbox and back, stretching his legs. "Things have changed a bit since last I was here. Who was that dick wad guarding the castle?"

Barry smiled. "You like that? That's the famous gate I told you about. And he's our personal twenty-four hour-a day guard, making sure that the great unwashed don't try to drive down our streets and look at our homes."

Jeremy walked up. "Things are getting bad, huh?"

"You don't know the half of it."

Barry spent the next half hour describing the situation to them in detail, from the moment he returned from his California trip and saw the board president force the Jimmy driver off the road to the surreal annual meeting and his ceremonious expulsion. More than once, Maureen called for them to come inside, get something to drink, but as sexist as it was, he felt more comfortable talking outside here, away from the wives, and he laid things out in a blunter, more honest way than he would have if the women were present.

Chuck shook his head. "What the hell have you gotten yourself into?"

"This is kind of cool in a way." Dylan looked sheepish as all eyes turned disapprovingly toward him. "Well, not cool maybe, but..." His voice trailed off.

"Trust me," Barry said. "It's not 'cool' at all if you have to live here."

"But do you have to?" Chuck asked. "Can't you just move back?"

"We wanted to," he admitted.

"So what's the problem?"

He explained about the fines and the frozen assets and the very real possibility of bankruptcy. "Besides," he said, "I can't let those bastards think they ran me off. I can't let them win."

"They won't win," Jeremy told him. "We're here."

Dylan grinned "All right!" he said, pumping a fist into the air.

"Time to kick some ass!"

They went inside finally, joining the women, and talk turned to other things, personal things: work, families, lives. Both Barry and Maureen found that they were hungry for news of the outside world, happy to lose themselves in the minutiae of their friends' existence, to receive updates on the southern California lifestyle they'd given up and left behind. All seven of them crammed into the Suburban, and Barry took them on a tour of Bonita Vista and then the town of Corban , including his teapot museum office. They had a greasy and unsatisfying lunch at Dairy King--Chuck had suggested the coffee shop, but Barry vetoed that idea, reminding them why--then did a little touristy sightseeing, taking in nearby Pinetop Lake and walking off a few calories with a short hike along the lake's nature trail.

They returned home between two and three, the hottest part of the day, and continued to catch up on gossip, moving from the living room to the upper deck and then back into the living room when the sun started to go down and the bugs came out.

Lupe suggested that they go get a pizza, but Barry said dryly that they weren't really leaving the house after dark these days, and Maureen said that she'd planned on making tacos.

"That's even better," Lupe said.

Maureen cut tomatoes and onions, while Lupe shredded the lettuce. Danna grated cheese. Maureen sent everyone out of the kitchen while she cooked the meat and fried the tortillas, and then it was time to eat.

Talk of the association was banned at the dinner table, and to Barry it felt almost as though none of that insanity had ever happened. They were cocooned in their own little world here, safe from the harsh and twisted realities of Bonita Vista, and for the first time in a long while he went for over an hour without thinking once about the homeowners' association.

They had wine with dinner and a few beers afterward, and they noisily talked politics and celebrity scandal as they made their way down to the living room. Barry sat down on the floor, motioning for the two couples to take the couch. Maureen settled into the chair, and after looking around and ascertaining that there was no other place to sit, Dylan plopped down on the floor by the fireplace.

"So what about sleeping arrangements?" Danna asked. "I saw only one guest room."

"Two of you take the room," Maureen explained. "Two of you can sleep up here; the couch turns into a bed." She smiled. "Dylan? I'm afraid you're stuck with a feather mattress on the floor of my office."

"That's okay. Can I look up porn on the Internet while the rest of you are asleep?"

Maureen heaved a throw pillow at him.

"That'll be fine." Dylan chuckled. "No problem."

They'd caught each other up on almost everything, and for the first time since their friends had arrived this morning, there was a protracted silence.

"It's too quiet here," Dylan said. "All this nature and stuff. I find it very disturbing. Don't you have some tunes or something?" He pointed toward the television. "You guys got cable or satellite?"

Barry reached up to the TV table and tossed him the remote. "Go wild.

Make yourself happy."

There was nothing decent on any of the broadcast or cable channels, so Barry read through his list of videotapes until they found one they all could agree on: Young Frankenstein.

Jeremy cleared his throat, spoke up. "Bare? Do you have a copy of those famous C, C, and Rs ?"

"Sure. Hold on a sec." Barry went downstairs, grabbed the massive book from Maureen's computer desk, and hurried back up, handing it to Jeremy. "Here you go."

While the rest of them watched the movie, Jeremy pored through the document. "Jesus!" he'd exclaim periodically, but when anyone asked what he'd found, he waved them away.

Finally, he put the book down. The movie had ended some time ago, and they were watching a Dennis Miller rerun on HBO. "I can't believe this is real," he said.

"Tell me about it."

"Did you know that homosexual couples are banned from your little Utopia here? And unmarried couples?" He looked over at Lupe. "And minorities. Which I assume means anyone who isn't white."

Dylan laughed. "I guess you two won't be retiring here in bee-yoo-tee-full Utah then, huh?"

"I need to go through this with a highlighter. I'm not even halfway through it, and I can't even remember all of the craziness I read." He shook his head. "This is one densely shit-packed document."

Barry grimaced. "I'll bet you believe me now, don't your'

"I always believed you. I just didn't think they'd be so obvious about it. They're not only trying to impose their values on the membership, to legislate morality in a blatant way that no federal or local government would even attempt to do, but they're codifying shit that isn't even legal, apparently intending to use the courts' previous up holdings of homeowners' association bylaws as a shield."

"I was hoping you'd say that. I thought so myself, but you're the lawyer, and I figured you could make an informed judgment."

"Jesus."

Using the remote, Dylan had been flipping through channels. "Hey," he said. "What's this? Some kind of community access station?"

"BVTV," Barry and Maureen said in unison.

On the screen, a young woman was jogging on one of the bridle trails.

The camera zoomed in on her jiggling breasts.

"BVTV?"

"Bonita Vista Television," Barry explained. "I guess I forgot to tell you about that. There are security cameras all over this place. They use them to videotape people and broadcast it on their station."

"Sometimes," Maureen added quietly, "they tape people in their own homes."

"My God."

"Don't worry," Barry said. "I've gone over this place with a fine-tooth comb. We're safe in here."

"In here, maybe," Jeremy said. "But outside this house, we all have to be on our guard, watch what we say, put on a happy face. The streets, the green belts the empty lots-it's all theirs, enemy territory."

That cast a pall on the evening, and they broke up soon after, Maureen bringing out fresh linen to make up the sofa bed for Chuck and Danna, then taking Jeremy and Lupe to the guest bedroom. Barry pulled the feather mattress out of the closet and set it up on the office floor for Dylan, tossing him a blanket. He went into their bedroom, closed the door, took off his clothes, and got under the covers to wait for Maureen, but he was more tired than he thought because by the time she returned he was dead asleep.

Liz called during breakfast, It would have been a minor blip on the day's radar under normal circumstances, but considering the present state of affairs, it was a big deal and a cause for celebration. Maureen answered the phone and took the call, and she motioned frantically for Barry to take over the pancakes while she went downstairs to the master bedroom to talk in private.

She hadn't spoken to Liz since the meeting, and the few words they'd exchanged at that time had been stilted and impersonal, but Liz sounded stronger than she had at any time since Ray's funeral.

There was a renewed feistiness in her attitude and a welcome wryness in the older woman's voice as she said, "Sorry I haven't called lately, but I was temporarily overcome with grief, despair, and unbearable self-pity."

"How are you?" Maureen asked, sitting down on the bed.

"As well as can be expected, I suppose. Nothing's ever going to be the way it was, but I think I'm learning to accept that. I'm sorry I've been so out of it lately."

"That's okay. I understand."

"Part of it is lack of sleep. They've been keeping me up every night, trying to break me down, calling me at all hours with weird threatening phone calls, turning my power on and off, throwing things at my house.

It's psychological warfare, and it obviously worked. It cut me off from my friends and made me so nervous and jumpy I was afraid to answer the phone or step out of the house."

Anyplace else, at any other time, Maureen would have thought that, far from the crisis being over, it had kicked into high gear, Liz exhibiting alarming signs of acute paranoia. But she had no doubt that her friend's feelings were justified. "You lost your husband. We didn't expect you to be the life of the party."

"Yes, but we both know my behavior went a little beyond that. And I

want to thank you, all of you, for not giving up on me, for being there when I needed you even if I didn't take advantage of it."

"We're your friends," Maureen said.

"Well, I'm grateful, and I'm sorry for the way I acted. I thought I

could try and make it up to you. I thought maybe you and Tina and Audrey could come up this afternoon for drinks and ... well, just to talk."

"I'd love to," Maureen said. "We have some friends up from California, though." She hesitated, not wanting to de-j cline the invitation for fear of throwing a wet towel on I friend's tentative efforts to pull her life back together, but not sure she'd feel right about abandoning Lupe and Danna] for half the day. "If it wouldn't be too much of an imposition and if you felt you were up to it--"

"Sure," Liz said, and she sounded like her old self. "Bring them along."

"And, uh, Audrey ..." Maureen let the words trail off. She didn't want to burden Liz with additional problems, not; now.

"You had a falling out," the older woman said intuitively .

"Yeah, kind of."

"Consider her uninvited."

"But that's not fair. You've known Audrey a lot longer than you've known me."

"I trust you," Liz said.

It was a vote of confidence that made her feel happy and privileged.

"What time do you want us there?" she asked.

A wry chuckle. "Whenever's convenient for you. I'm certainly not going anywhere. I'll be here all day."

"One o'clock?"

"One o'clock would be fine."

Maureen walked back upstairs and saw that Barry had given Danna and Lupe the two pancakes that had been cooking and now had two others on the frying pan. He greeted her with a quizzical raising of eyebrows.

"Liz," she explained.

"Everything's okay, isn't it?"

"Yeah. She invited me over this afternoon." Maureen's glance took in Lupe and Danna. "All three of us. Seems she's feeling better."

"A friend of yours?" Danna asked, sipping orange juice.

"One of our only friends up here. Her husband was the one who was killed."

"Oh."

Barry nodded. "She's one of us."

"Their house has a really spectacular view," Maureen couldn't help adding. "It's worth a trip up there just to see that."

Barry handed her the spatula, relinquishing his role as cook. "So you think she's okay?"

"I think so. I hope so." There was a pause. "She disinvited Audrey, but I think Tina's going to be there."

"Are you okay with that?"

"I don't know. We'll see." The seven of them spent the morning walking the neighborhood, Barry and Maureen pointing out the pool and community center as well as the home of the association president.

Chuck brought along his palm corder videotaping everything they saw, zooming in on the president's house in particular and recording it in detail. "We need to find out where the other board members live," he said. "Then we tape their houses and go over everything with a fine-tooth comb, make sure they're not breaking even minor rules. Any infraction and we'll nail their asses to the wall, sue them for singling out some people and not others."

Maureen laughed. "I'm glad you guys are here."

"Seven heads are better than two."

After a lunch of sandwiches and salad, Maureen charged Barry with cleaning the dishes and went downstairs to comb her hair and put on some lipstick.

"You sure you want us to go?" Danna asked. "We could just stay here ..."

"It'll be fun. And we won't stay too long. Don't worry."

"But we're going to walk again?"

"This is like a spa vacation," Lupe told her. "Sun and exercise.

We'll return home to California tanned and fit."

"That's one way to look at it."

They kissed their husbands good-bye, Barry told Maureen to say hello for him, and they started off. All three were breathing heavily by the time they reached the crest of the hill, where Tina was waiting, standing in the intermittent shadows of Liz's willow tree in a vain effort to stay out of the hot sun. "I saw you walking up," she said.

Maureen wasn't sure how she felt about seeing Tina again. At the annual meeting, she'd been right there with the crowd, part of it, putting the lie to everything she'd ever said regarding the association. And Tina hadn't said a thing when she and Barry had been ejected from the building.

Still, she was here, being friendly, making overtures, and it was clear that she was ready to stand by Liz in her hour of need. That should count for something.

Maybe she'd just been caught up in the moment.

Maureen nodded hello. "Have you seen Liz yet?"

"I thought we could all go in together."

"Kind of scary, isn't it?"

"It was a surprise when she called," Tina admitted. "And she sounded perfectly normal, like she's back to her old self again."

"I thought so, too."

"She seemed okay at the meeting, too, but I didn't get a chance to talk to her and she disappeared right afterward ..." Tina trailed off, obviously feeling awkward. She cleared her throat and smiled a greeting at Lupe and Danna. "Hello."

"I'm sorry. Where are my manners?" Maureen introduced her friends.

"Tina, this is Lupe Mullens and Danna Carlin, our friends from California. And this is Tina Stew art."

There were greetings all around, and Maureen was about to suggest that they go in and see Liz when their hostess came out herself to meet them. It was a surprise to see Liz out of doors after hiding so long in the house, but it was a welcome surprise, and Maureen impulsively rushed over and threw her arms around the other woman, hugging her tightly. "I'm glad you're back," she whispered.

Liz laughed. "I didn't go that far."