'Sure.' He followed the women, leaving Frank and Mike to their own devices.
Audrey and Tina busied themselves at the sink and dishwasher, while Maureen led him over to the breakfast nook, where an old leather suitcase sat atop the table. She glanced toward Liz and lowered her voice. 'Ray's books,' Maureen said. 'For some reason, she packed a whole bunch of them in this suitcase and then put the suitcase here on the kitchen table. I don't know how she even lifted the thing. We could barely move it.'
Barry nodded. Grief did strange things to people, and somehow this irrational act, more than anything that had gone before, more than the words and the tributes and the funeral itself, brought home to him the enormity of Ray's passing. Liz had obviously loved him a lot.
'What do you want me to do with it?'
'Take it into his den,' Maureen whispered. 'Just get it out of the way. We'll figure things out later.'
He nodded. Grabbing the handle of Ray's suitcase, feeling the heaviness of the books inside, the anger rose within him. 'God damn that homeowners' association,' he said. 'I know those bastards are behind this.'
He was speaking to Maureen rather than Liz, but it was Liz who reacted, who responded to his accusation. She strode over, her gaze hardened, suddenly focused. 'I don't want to hear anything about that association stuff,' she said fiercely. 'That craziness was why he was out there on that deck to begin with. If he hadn't been so paranoid about those people, he'd probably be alive today.'
Barry said nothing. He did not want to argue with her, did not want to cause her even more pain, and he picked up the suitcase and looked over at Maureen. His wife's expression was unreadable.
Walking out of the kitchen, he saw Liz revert, her body slump, the tension that had momentarily animated her giving out and disappearing as if vacuumed away. He carried the heavy suitcase down the hall. How had she lifted it? He was struggling with it himself. He found the closed door and placed the oversized piece of luggage on the floor of the darkened den. Glancing about, he saw the hulking shadow of Ray's empty desk in the otherwise spartan room and he quickly hurried back out to the hallway, unaccountably feeling as though he were intruding on the couple's privacy. He closed the door behind him.
Had the association really been behind Ray's death?
He wanted to think that was the case, but he realized that he was grasping at straws, ready to believe any conclusion save the logical one: his friend's death had been an accident.
Barry took a deep breath. He was turning into one of those conspiracy nuts, those loonies who saw government plots behind all ill events, who believed in Bigfoot and UFOs, who refused to believe in luck or chance or even fate and attributed even the smallest occurrence to the complex and illogical machinations of a group of ultra-organized human beings.
And he was forced to admit the possibility that Ray had been one of those people, too.
Sometimes, he thought, the simplest explanation was the real one.
Sometimes what was obvious was what was true, and looking for elaborate reasons was just a waste of time.
Still, he was glad there was no one from the association who had come by to offer sympathy, that there'd been no official attempt at wishing Liz condolences. It would have been hypocritical at the very least and an insult to Ray's memory.
He walked back out to the living room. Frank had wandered off somewhere, but Mike was still in place, talking to a woman with a broken arm, and Barry grabbed a drink off the coffee table and joined them.
'Moira? Barry,' Mike said by way of introduction. 'Moira and her husband, Clan, live around the side of the hill in that stilt-job. Clan used to be a contractor, and he's the one helped Ray figure out how to build that famous storage shed.'
'He couldn't make it today,' Moira explained. 'So I came alone.'
'Barry's a writer. Hooked up with Ray because of their mutual hatred of the homeowners' association.'
Already, that description sounded embarrassing, childish, and he found that he was ashamed to be identified in such a way.
'What happened to your arm?' Barry asked in an attempt to change the subject. He gestured toward the cast and sling.
The woman reddened, became suddenly taciturn, the openness of her expression closing down. 'It was an accident,' she said in a voice that didn't sound at all sure that that was the case.
Over her right shoulder, Mike was shaking his head, making a slashing motion across his throat that Barry interpreted to mean stay away from that subject.
Spousal abuse, he thought, and was surprised at how calm he was with it, how un shocked and unfazed he was. In his dreams, in his fantasies, he was one of those people who got involved, who alerted the authorities, who stepped in and put a stop to wrongs and made them right. But here he was confronted with a situation, and he did not rise to the occasion. Like Mike, he felt more comfortable staying out of it, minding his own business and tiptoeing around that five-hundred-pound gorilla in the middle of the room.
This day was just full of surprises.
The afternoon quickly wound down as people who'd put in a token appearance and performed their neighborly duty excused themselves and headed home. This wasn't a party, after all, no one was having fun at this extremely awkward gathering, and Barry could see the relief on people's faces as they expressed their condolences to Liz one last time and escaped out the door, claiming prior commitments and suddenly urgent household chores.
When Mike and Frank left, leaving their wives behind, Barry decided he might as well do the same. Maureen gave him her approval and walked with him to the front door. They'd driven to the Dysons’ house--to Liz's house-- directly from the cemetery, but Barry felt like walking home, and he told Maureen to drive the car back when she was through.
She accompanied him out to the porch, closing the door carefully behind her. 'What do you think?' she asked, her eyes meeting his. 'Do you think it was an accident?'
He was surprised that she was even asking the question. 'Probably,' he admitted.
She nodded, but there was not the certainty in her face he would have expected, and he wondered if she'd heard something or seen something that made her suspect this was not the case.
He didn't ask her, though, didn't want to know, not right now at least, and he said good-bye, gave her a quick peck on the lips, and headed up the gravel driveway.
The air was hot and unmoving, not leavened by even the hint of a breeze, and the only sounds on this still afternoon were the scratchy scuttling of lizards in the underbrush abutting the road, the chirrups of unseen cicadas, and the occasional far-off rumbling of truck engines as Corban pickups headed on or off the highway.
Bonita Vista seemed like a ghost town, as though all of the people had suddenly disappeared, and while in one of his stories that would have seemed creepy, Barry found the absence of audible neighbors almost welcoming.
He felt better being outside, walking, even in this heat. Ray's house had been so close to the man, so filled with his memory, that it had been difficult to think, to sort things through. It was easier out here, alone under the wide blue sky, to remember the good things about his friend, to celebrate his life rather than mourn his passing.
Ahead, Barry saw the entrance to his own driveway and the brown shingle roof of his house above the line of trees. As he drew closer and more of the house became visible, he saw something else, something that made his jaw muscles clench and the blood pump faster through his veins.
A pink piece of paper attached to the screen door.
The association had been here.
He was filled with a rage entirely disproportionate to the offense, a rage he knew to be misplaced anger at his friend's death, but he felt it nonetheless, and he strode furiously up the driveway and up the porch steps. Those bastards had been here, snooping around, while he'd been at Ray's funeral, while he and his wife and their neighbors had been consoling the old man's widow. Did they have no shame? Did they have no respect?
He ripped the paper from the screen and read it.
The association was fining them fifty dollars because the string Maureen had used to tie up her drooping chrysanthemums was white instead of green. All lines or cords used by a homeowner to tie plants to stakes were
