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.'
