Barry filed away the entire experience, as well as their reactions, in his mind, knowing that, like his introduction to Stumpy, it would one day come out in his fiction.
They continued walking, spotting a deer eating the azaleas that lined someone's driveway, seeing some sort of bright orange bird land on the dead limb of a juniper. It was like a different world, a perfect place where everyone and everything lived in harmony, and only the far-off pi inking of shovels behind them told him otherwise.
They took a cross-street to the section of Bonita Vista on the other side of their hill, and met Mike halfway up Sycamore Drive. He was standing by the side of the road, bent over and holding his side, breathing deeply. He smiled sheepishly when he saw them. "That slope's a mother."
Maureen laughed. "Come on! If Barry can do it, anyone can do it."
"I resent that," Barry said. He looked over at Mike, who was still breathing hard. "I thought you were supposed to be in shape. You said you played tennis."
"Well, I stand there and hit the ball over the net. I don't run or anything. That's why Tina has me exercising out here. She doesn't think I do enough physical activity. By the way, if she asks, you saw me jogging out here, not gasping for air by the side of the road."
Maureen laughed. "Your secret's safe with us."
"Where're you guys headed?"
Barry shrugged. "Around the loop and back home."
"Mind if I join you?"
"Be our guest."
They continued up the street. Like Mike, Barry could already feel himself getting winded, but he refused to acknowledge it or let on, and he took long, slow, deep breaths in order to keep himself from panting.
The road came down the side of a small rise before sloping up again, and at the low point of the depression another street snaked off to the left.
"Shortcut," Mike said, pointing.
Barry read the sign as they approached. "Ponderosa Circle?"
"It's misnamed. It's not really a circle. Halfway through, it turns into Pinion, which opens onto your street."
Barry took one look at the steep road before them. "We'll take it."
"Cowards," Maureen told them.
"I don't see you objecting."
They turned left. The narrow street hugged the side of the hill before dipping into a hollow. There weren't many houses in this section of Bonita Vista, only occasional dirt driveways on the right that led up to stilted vacation homes. The flat ground to their left remained heavily wooded and wildly overgrown, small metal stakes with lot numbers on them the only indication that the land had been subdivided at all.
And then they saw the house.
It was the biggest home Barry had seen in Bonita Vista, and it sat on an immaculately groomed lot, surrounded on three sides by a virtual wall of dense vegetation. Two, possibly three stories high, it was painted gray, with black trim and a black slate roof. The walls were solid save for two small slits to either side of the door. There were no windows. A wraparound porch seemed an afterthought, an effort to humanize the house, but there was something off-putting about the iron-gray structure, with its lack of windows and its intimidating bulk, something that resisted any and all attempts to soften its appearance.
In the adjacent carport was a silver Lexus.
A localized breeze sprang up, ruffling his hair, blowing cold against his sweaty skin, but leaving the trees and bushes untouched. Barry suddenly knew where'd he'd seen that other volunteer before. He was the nameless Jimmy driver who'd been forced off the road by the Lexus on his way home from Salt Lake City, the fellow Bonita Vista resident whom he'd given a ride.
"Remember I told you about that accident on my way back from Salt Lake City, the Lexus that ran the guy off the road?"
Maureen nodded. "Yeah."
He pointed toward the carport. "That's it," he told her. "That's the car." He turned toward Mike. "Whose house is that? Who lives there?"
"Calhoun," Mike said, and there was something in his voice that made Barry feel cold.
The world was suddenly silent save for the rustle of the breeze and the sound of a metal pulley banging against the empty flagpole in the center of the grassy lawn.
"Calhoun,” Mike nodded. "Jasper Calhoun. The president of the homeowners' association."
Saturday.
They spent the morning puttering around the yard: Barry scraping from the driveway dirt and debris that had been washed onto their property from yesterday's storm, Maureen trimming, feeding, and watering the plants in her garden.
In the afternoon, Maureen concentrated on building a web page, sitting in front of a blank screen on her computer as she pored through the twin textbooks she'd recently received in the mail. Although she had picked up a few clients, her search for local business wasn't going quite as well as she'd hoped, and if she couldn't take over the town of Corban, then she was bound and determined to become a cyber-accountant and turn her business into an online global corporation.
"E-accounting," she told Barry. "It's the wave of the future, and I'm on the ground floor."
"That's a mixed metaphor," he told her.
"I guess I'll let you proofread my prospectus when I take my corporation public."
Barry was at loose ends. He'd been cheating the past week, writing at home--as though anyone would be able to prove he hadn't composed certain paragraphs at his office-but he didn't feel like writing today, and he didn't feel much like doing anything else. He tried to get into a book, but found himself daydreaming and reading the same sentence over and over. He turned on the television but there was nothing good on, and when he perused the video titles in their library he could not find anything that looked interesting.
Maureen finally got tired of his restlessness and gave him an assignment.
"Audrey put together her and Frank's tax returns for the past four years, and I promised I'd go over them. They've had to pay twice now, and she wants to make sure there aren't any surprises coming up in the immediate future. She's afraid they're red-flagged and the IRS will go back and get them for other years. Why don't you walk over to their place and pick them up for me."
"Am I being that annoying?"
"Yes. Now go make yourself useful."
Despite his token protest, he was grateful to have something to do, and he went into the bedroom, where he kicked off his thongs and put on tennis shoes. The logical thing to do would have been to call first and make sure Audrey or Frank was home, but he wanted to walk, and he kissed the top of Maureen's head before heading out. "Be back soon, boss."
The weather was hot and muggy. There would be no storm this afternoon but the air carried enough moisture that it upped the humidity to swamp conditions. Theirs was not the only house that had been deluged by runoff from yesterday's monsoon, and as he walked down the hill he saw several empty vacation homes with driveways full of mud and branches.
He found himself wondering what Stumpy did when it rained. Did the limbless man hide under someone's porch or huddle beneath the branches of a tree? Did he have some sort of lean-to out there in the woods? Or was he so brain-damaged that he didn't notice and didn't care, sitting out in the torrential downpour and howling into the wind, wiggling through the mud, oblivious?
Barry walked around the curve of the road and saw the site of the pool and community center. There'd been no one working either this morning or now, but the volunteers had already made significant strides toward their goal, and on the cleared land he could see the partially dug building foundation and the Olympic-sized pit that would be the pool.
He was glad no one was working now. It was broad daylight and he was a grown man, but he was a grown man with a dark and overactive imagination, and the thought of seeing those zombie like diggers and their harsh taskmaster scared him.