Introductions were repeated.
'Let's go inside before we melt,' Liz said. 'I've made some Red Zinger iced tea. Or there's wine if anyone is so inclined.' She paused. 'I'm a little off wine myself at the moment.'
Maureen's surprise must have shown on her face.
'I'll tell you all about it when we get inside.'
The interior of the house looked exactly the same as it always had.
Maureen wasn't sure what she'd expected, but ordinarily after the death of a spouse mementos were hidden or highlighted, objects and photos with special meaning either put away so as not to cause pain or moved to places of respect in order to honor the deceased. There'd been no need for that here.
Liz poured iced tea for all of them, and she did indeed tell them why she was not drinking wine these days. She described the hell into which she'd descended, dealing with the anguish of her husband's unexpected death and then with the escalating harassment of the homeowners' association that kept her from working through her grief in any sort of natural way. She'd get drunk to numb the pain, to shut out not only the memories of Ray's gruesome demise but the voices and noises she heard at night, and it was only in the past few days that she'd been able to pull herself out of despair.
The rest of them were silent after that, and Maureen reached over and grabbed her friend's hand, squeezing tightly.
Liz looked from Tina to Maureen. 'You two have been great. Audrey and Moira, too. I know I didn't act like it, but it meant a lot to me each time you stopped by or called, and knowing you were there for me helped give me the strength to climb out of that hole I'd dug myself into.'
Danna looked embarrassed, but Lupe was smiling sympathetically.
Liz wiped her tearing eyes. 'Enough of this self-pity,' she said.
'Catch me up on gossip and current events. I want to know what's going on out there.'
Tina was full of news about which neighbor was feuding with whom, about men and women who'd lost or changed jobs, about a new house that was being built over on Fir Street, but as it always did, the talk naturally shifted back again to the association, and it was Tina who brought up Bonita Vista's ever-deteriorating relationship with the town of Corban . Maureen was surprised when the other woman placed the blame squarely on the board, and she couldn't help recalling Tina at the annual meeting, her hand enthusiastically shooting into the air to support Jasper Calhoun's edicts and approve the revised C, C, and Rs .
Actions spoke louder than words, as the saying went, and while Tina might speak out against the association with them here in private, she was not divorced from it, not separate from it, she was a part of it.
And she supported its actions.
Maybe this was all part of some plot, Maureen reasoned, maybe the only reason Tina was here was to spy, to listen to what they said and report back on it. Hell, maybe she was even wearing a wire.
Or maybe the association's hidden cameras were recording all this for posterity.
Maureen knew she was being as paranoid as she'd accused Barry and Ray of being, but she knew also that her feelings were totally justified.
Liz grimaced. 'Pretty soon, we'll be cut off from the town entirely.
What then? Is the association planning to open its own grocery store and gas station, build a power plant?'
'They're ambitious,' Tina said. 'I'll give them that. But I don't think they'd go that far.'
'But what do they hope to gain by angering the town?'
It was a question Maureen had been wondering herself, and it was one for which none of them seemed to have an answer.
There was a significant pause in the conversation.
Maureen broke the silence. 'Speaking of the association,' she said, 'wasn't there a gay couple at one of your parties? I think one of the guys was named Pat?'
Liz nodded soberly. 'Wayne and Pat. They're gone.'
'That's what I was wondering about. We were going through the C, C, and Rs last night and saw an anti gay rule and an anti-living-together rule.'
'Yes.'
'Gone?' Maureen said, the word finally sinking in.
'They disappeared. I'm sure their house is untouched and all of their clothes are in the closets, but... they're gone.' Her voice dropped, as though she were afraid of being overheard. 'It happens around here.'
Maureen thought of all the empty houses in Bonita Vista, the ones she'd assumed were vacation homes with absentee owners. In her mind, she saw fully stocked refrigerators filled with rotting food, place settings at dining room tables covered with dust, and suddenly their calm, quiet neighborhood no longer seemed so benign.
'As for not allowing couples to live together, that's resulted in more than one enforced marriage.'
'You're kidding.'
Both Liz and Tina shook their heads.
'It's true,' Tina said. 'Jeannie and Skylar Wells moved here from Phoenix where they'd been living together forever. They got a little nudge from the association, and the next day--the next day--they went down to the justice of the peace and got hitched.'
'A 'nudge'?' Maureen said.
Liz looked at her. 'They won't talk about it.'
Lupe cleared her throat. 'I want to know about this anti minority rule. How strictly is that enforced? I'm Hispanic.' She smiled. 'As I'm sure you can tell. Say I wanted to retire up here.'
'You want the truth?' Liz asked.
'Of course.'
'There's no way I would buy a home in Bonita Vista if I were you.
Discrimination is illegal and, who knows, maybe if someone took them to court over that provision, it'd be struck down.' She leaned forward in her chair. 'But no one has.'
The statement had an ominous ring to it, and Maureen felt an unwanted shiver tickle her spine. Her mouth felt dry, and she sipped her iced tea. 'You mean this place wasn't always all white? There've been minority homeowners in the past?'
'There was a single man, white man, had a place up here, over on Blue Spruce Circle. A vacation home. He came maybe every other summer, stayed for two weeks or so. Usually to paint his house, clear brush, comply with whatever warning the association sent to him. One year he showed up with his new wife, a Vietnamese woman. Two days later, he'd cleared out, and a week after that, the house went up for sale. We never saw him again.'
'What do you think they did?' Lupe asked. 'Threaten him with a fine or something?'
'More than that, I'm sure. But what it was specifically I can't say.'
'And that's it?' Maureen asked. 'There's never been another nonwhite person up here?'
'That rule keeps them out. They don't buy here. And in case you haven't noticed, Utah is not exactly a hotbed of diversity to begin with.'
Everyone laughed, everyone except Liz, who grew even more serious. 'The thing is,' she said, addressing Lupe, 'they've used that rule on guests as well as residents. I don't want to scare you or anything--'
'I don't scare easily,' Lupe insisted.
'--but apparently in their minds, this provision applies to visitors.
Some friends of ours—the Marottas ,' she said to Maureen. 'I think you met them at one of our parties--had a brother or cousin or something who'd married a black woman. They all came up for Thanksgiving a couple of years ago, and the wife was found naked and crying the next morning in the ditch in front of the Marottas ' house, half frozen in the snow. I don't know exactly what happened, but Tony and Julia still won't talk about it. They refuse. And they've never had Thanksgiving here again.'
'They try anything with me and Jeremy, they're going to be sorry they were ever born.' Lupe's voice was firm, her expression set.
