Bentley Little - The Association

She stared at the blank monitor and found herself wondering if she and Barry weren't barking up the wrong tree by attributing everything to the homeowners' association. It seemed to her that Hitman was the real power behind the throne. He was the one straddling the two communities, enforcing the laws as he saw fit, allowing Bonita Vista to run roughshod over the town. He could have--and should have--sided with the families of the victims and investigated the poisonings and brought the perpetrators up on charges, but instead he'd ignored the situation, allowed it to fester, and when people had tried to take the law into their own hands, he'd reasserted his authority, allowing them to be beaten by the volunteers before he had them arrested. Now he'd stationed a deputy at the market to ensure that Bonita Vistans could purchase groceries and assigned another deputy to guard the gas station and make sure they were unmolested and able to buy gas.

It was as if the sheriff had declared martial law in Corban , and it occurred to her that he could have accomplished all of this without the association.

That was wishful thinking, though. The sheriff was just a pawn. He was the muscle. The association was the brains.

No, he was not even the muscle. Or not all of it. She remembered those shirtless volunteers with their missing fingers and hands and ears beating the hell out of local farmers and ranchers, using the Corbanites' own weapons against them, and she shivered.

Hitman might be keeping Corban safe for Bonita Vista residents, but Barry had not returned to his office. Not yet. For all they knew, it had been ransacked and vandalized, his computer smashed, but he was not ready to see for himself. His landlord and his old pals from the coffee shop had been in the forefront of the skirmish at the gate, and it did not seem prudent to provoke them.

He'd write on her computer for a while, Barry told her. He'd go back, pick up his equipment, and clear out his office after the furor died down a bit.

Mike was still working at the Cablevision office, and his friend Lou at the telephone company, but it was tense, they said. Several Bonita Vistans worked in town, and Maureen wondered how the rest of them were handling it. No doubt there'd be more than a few fights during breaks and lunches as tensions spilled over, and she just prayed that no one got seriously hurt.

She looked out the window, saw green pines against a clear blue sky.

God, she wished that they'd never driven through Utah, never found this place.

She stood, left her office, and walked upstairs to where Barry was lying on the couch watching a political talk show. On the coffee table beside him was the pen he'd planned to use to jot down notes for a new novel, and a spiral notebook turned to an empty first page.

"Doesn't look like you got much done," she said. "My brain's not working."

"I'm not working either. No one wants my e-services. Want to sit here with me and watch some BVTV?" "Very funny," Barry said. "Very funny."

They went to bed early, both of them tired and fatigued not from any physical exertion but from stress.

They were awakened in the middle of the night by banging, thumping, and heavy scraping that sounded as though furniture was being moved. The bedroom door was closed, but from underneath the door shone a strip of yellow light. Someone was upstairs.

Maureen sat up quickly, looking into Barry's face and seeing there an expression that mirrored the way she felt. "What do you think they want?" she whispered.

Who do you think it is? was what she'd originally intended to ask, but she already knew the answer to that and so did he. These weren't burglars who had broken into their home. And while she didn't know the specific identity of the individuals who were searching the house, she knew what they represented, she knew where they were from.

The homeowners' association.

"I'm going to find out," Barry said grimly. He threw the covers off, grabbed his bathrobe, and angrily opened the bedroom door.

She quickly picked up her own bathrobe and put it on over her nightgown, and the two of them walked into the lighted hallway and up the stairs to the living room.

They should have brought along some type of weapon, she thought. A

heavy blunt object. Just in case it was a prowler. But their first instincts had been correct. The man who stood in the center of the well-lit room, smiling at them, was obviously not a criminal. He looked more like a stockbroker.

"Sorry to disturb you," the man said cheerfully. "We were trying to be quiet."

There were five men all together, each of them dressed in identical business suits, each with a pen and clipboard. Two of them were in the living room, reading the titles of books on the bookshelf, examining the artwork on the walls. The three others were upstairs in the kitchen, loudly opening cupboards and digging through drawers.

"What the hell is this?" Barry said.

"It's time for your four-month inspection."

"How did you get in here?" Maureen demanded. She felt vulnerable, violated, more exposed than she ever had in her life. Upstairs, a familiar click-squeak told her that someone had opened the refrigerator.

"The association has the master keys to all locks in Bonita Vista." The man continued to smile at her, and she thought now that there was something not nice about that smile. He was looking at her as though he could see through her bathrobe, and she instinctively looked down to check, to make sure nothing was being exposed.

Barry stepped forward, crowding the man. "Who are you?"

"My name's Bill." He held out a hand.

Barry's voice was calm, even, and all the more threatening for it. "Get the fuck out of my house, Bill. Now."

The man smiled, nodded. "I think we've seen enough, Mr. Welch." He started scribbling on the paper clipped onto his board. "Let's hit it, boys!" he called out.

The three men upstairs came down the steps, writing on their own clipboards, unclasping the forms and handing them to Bill. The other man by the bookcase did the same.

Bill finished with a flourish, tore off the top sheet, and handed a pink piece of paper to Barry. Maureen looked over his shoulder, reading along.

"It should be self-explanatory. You are required to place out of sight all photographs and personal keepsakes. This includes but is not limited to souvenirs from vacation spots, family heirlooms, and knicknacks that serve no functional purpose." Bill's voice was all business, and there was a coldness to it that belied the happy, hearty act he'd put on for their benefit. Behind him, the other men were filing out of the house silently. "You must have a minimum of three bare walls in each room, and the fourth wall may only have artwork that has been approved by the association's interior design committee. All walls must be white or off-white, and sheets, pillowcases, and bedspreads must be solid colors, preferably earth tones." He smiled again. "But as I said, it's all pretty self-explanatory."

Maureen now understood the lack of a personal touch in Liz's house, the general sparseness in the interiors of the other homes she'd seen. She could not recall reading anything about this in the sacred C, C, and Rs, but she had no doubt that they would find it in the document if they looked through it right now. She stared at the short-haired yuppie's falsely friendly face and was filled with anger and the type of stubborn rage that Barry must have been experiencing. There was no way on God's earth that she was going to rearrange her house according to the dictates of the association. No one could tell her how to decorate her own home, and she'd be damned if an impersonal document created by a cabal of her most fascistic neighbors was going to impose some type of lunatic standards on her taste.