'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.
