She shook her head. 'No. But thanks for asking.'
'All in a day's work,' he said with an exaggerated southwestern drawl.
'Ma'am.'
Liz smiled. 'Thanks, Chuck. Thanks, Terry. You're good guys--no matter what anyone says.'
'Yes. Thank you,' Maureen said gratefullyT
'No problem. That what homeowners' associations are for.'
'I--' She reddened, caught off guard. 'What--'
'You don't have to say it.' He laughed and looked over at Liz. 'I
know our reputation around these parts.'
'Don't blame me.'
Terry chuckled. 'Conics with the territory.'
'A lot of people bristle at the restrictions,' Chuck admitted. 'But in an unincorporated area like this, an association is the only means we have of taking care of basic needs. You want to be hard-nosed and cynical about it? It helps maintain order. And things like the gate keep out most of the riffraff. But the other side of the coin is that it also fosters a sense of community. You've seen the courts, right?
The tennis courts?'
Maureen nodded. 'We haven't used them yet, but, yeah, I've seen them.'
'There you go. We're also going to be building a community pool, maybe a clubhouse. We have our own little world here, a world that's better than the one surrounding it, and if that means that our standards need to be a little higher, that our rules need to be a little more strict, that we need to put out a little extra effort... well, that's a price that most of our residents are more than happy to pay.' He smiled at Liz. 'Most of our residents.'
'Some of the townies--' Terry gestured down the street, where the sheriff's car had disappeared. '--resent us for that. Chuck and I are on the security committee, which means that it's our responsibility to keep an eye out for unfamiliar faces or suspicious behavior. We don't get too many outside disruptions here, but when we do, it's usually some local yokel who's ticked off at us about something. We have better houses or better cars or better jobs or better retirement plans. I don't know what this particular guy's story is, but nine times out of ten it's something like that.'
'This has happened before?' Maureen asked.
'Oh no,' Chuck said quickly. 'Nothing like this. But there've been...
breaches in security, let's say. And like Terry explained, it's usually some teed-off townie.'
'Teed off or drunk.'
'Teed off or drunk,' Chuck amended.
'You know,' Maureen said, 'someone vandalized our house a couple weeks ago. Well, not our house really. Our yard. And they killed our cat.
Although it wasn't really our cat. It was just a stray and we were feeding it. We'd sort of adopted it.'
Terry frowned. 'Did you file a complaint with the association? I
don't remember hearing about this.'
'Oh no. We just called the sheriff.'
'You should've filed a complaint. In fact, not to be too much of a stickler, you're required to file one according to the C, C, and Rs .'
He held up a hand. 'I'm not blaming you. You're new and you didn't know. But we like to keep up with what's happening here. Particularly if it's something like vandalism, something that could happen to any of us. It helps us know what to keep an eye out for.'
Chuck nodded. 'I wouldn't even be surprised if this guy was involved.
He seems to have been targeting you, and maybe he picked you out as a symbol or something. You're young, good looking, and, probably to him, you're rich. In his eyes, you're probably the perfect candidate for harassment.' I 'Don't worry,' Terry said. 'The sheriff's going to phone me once he has a chance to interview this loser. I'll call and let you know as soon as I hear anything.' He opened the passenger door of the car and Chuck walked around to the driver's side. 'You sure you don't need a ride home?'
Maureen shook her head. 'Thanks, but I'm going to stay and talk to Liz for a while.'
The two men got into the car, waving as they drove down the hill, and Maureen turned to Liz. 'They don't seem that bad,' she said.
'No,' her friend admitted. 'Sometimes they're not.'
Barry was on the couch when she returned, reading over the pages he'd written that morning, and though the immediacy of what happened to her had faded during the half-hour visit with Liz, seeing him comfortably ensconced in the living room, knowing that he'd been sitting here alone and happily self-absorbed while she'd been running up the road in fear for her life, irritated her somehow.
He looked up. 'Hey, what took you so long?'
'I was chased down the street by a psycho and the police --I mean the sheriff--had to arrest him and take him away.'
Barry stood quickly, dropping his papers, and rushed over to her.
'What?'
She explained it all, from the beginning, going into more detail than she had with Hitman , emphasizing the way she felt, the menacing feeling she'd gotten from her hairy pursuer. Barry kept interrupting with exclamations of 'Jesus!' and his genuine expressions of worry and concern softened the resentment she'd felt. They ended up hugging, and she found herself reassuring him that it wasn't really that bad, that she was never in any real danger, that it sounded a lot worse than it was. His first impulse was to drive down to the sheriff's office and confront this guy, make sure that charges were pressed, but she convinced him to wait, to let law enforcement authorities do their jobs.
They walked upstairs together to the kitchen. He poured himself some orange juice, while she had the last of the coffee.
'Kind of ironic that it was two homeowners' association guys who helped you out.'
She shrugged. 'Maybe we've been a little too hard on them.'
Barry looked at her incredulously. 'Too hard? They tore up our yard and killed our cat!'
'I don't think they did.'
'Really? What proof did you suddenly discover that--'
'What proof do you have that it was them?' She shook her head. 'Jesus, Barry, for someone who prides himself on being fair and open-minded and willing to think outside the lines, you sure can be a rigid, linear son of a bitch.'
'I'm sorry. I don't mean to dismiss what happened--'
'Even though that's exactly what you're doing.'
'--but don't go giving credit where credit isn't due. These two guys are part of the association. Fine. They helped you out. Fine. But that's it. They didn't do anything anyone else wouldn't do. Liz is the one who let you in her house, she's the one who called the sheriff.'
'Would you have stopped to help someone you didn't even know?'
'The way you described it, I got the impression that they didn't stop to help you, that you were in Ray's house and they just stopped to check on this guy because he looked suspicious.'
'That's true. It was like a neighborhood watch. Which is even better.
They weren't just looking out for me, they were concerned about what this character might do to anyone in the neighborhood. Would you do that?'
Barry smiled. 'No. But I'm an egotistical, self-obsessed writer focused only on my own career.'
'You're only half joking.'
'Half? I'm not joking at all.'
The phone rang, and Barry quickly moved to pick it up. 'I'll get it,'
he said. They'd left the cordless on the dining room table, and he grabbed the handset and pressed the Talk button. 'Hello?'
He handed her the phone. 'It's for you.'
It was Chuck Shea. He'd heard back from the sheriff, and the man who'd been harassing her had confessed to the killing of their cat and the destruction of their plants. He had apparently vandalized several other homes within
