"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.
Barry was on the exact same wavelength. "What gives you the right to come into our house and pry into our private life and tell us what we can and can't do in our own fucking home?" He started out speaking at a normal volume, but by the end of the question he was shouting.
"I'm chairman of the inspection committee," Bill said brightly, walking away from them. He nodded as he stepped out the door. "Good night to you." He closed the door behind him and they heard the lock turn.
"Didn't we have the deadbolt and chain hooked up?" Maureen said, turning toward Barry.
He nodded. "I was thinking the same thing."
"How did they--"
"I don't know."
Every light in the house had been turned on. Downstairs, lights in the hall, bathroom, and Maureen's office were blazing, and the thought that those men had been snooping through her belongings while she was asleep in the next room chilled her to the bone. But she was far more angry than scared, and she remembered a horror movie Barry had forced her to watch in which parents had booby-trapped their house to catch their daughter's murderers, and she wished she could do the same thing here.
Right now, the thought of Bill and his smug little lookalikes speared on some make shift shiv sounded mighty appealing.
Neither of them had bothered to look at the time, but as they went from room to room, checking to make sure nothing was broken or stolen, turning off the lights, she saw by the clock in the kitchen that it was two-thirty.
It was another ten minutes before they were back in bed, and although Barry was snoring almost instantly, it was a long time before she was able to fall asleep.
As early as was polite, she called Liz.
Barry was taking his shower, and she poured herself a cup of coffee while she dialed her friend's number.
The voice that answered halfway through the first ring was wary and suspicious. "Yes?"
"Hello, Liz? It's me, Maureen."
"Maureen." Her name was repeated in a disassociated monotone that raised the hackles on her neck and set off alarm bells in her head.
"Liz? Are you all right?"
"Fine. I'm fine." But the monotone remained, her friend's voice drained of its usual life.
"What happened? What did they do?"
Liz didn't answer.
Maureen spoke quickly before her friend hung up. "It's the association," she said. "That's why I'm calling. They've come down on us for ... for... shit, for our interior decorating. We woke up in the middle of the night and five of those assholes had broken into our house to 'inspect' it. They told us we had to get rid of family photos and personal effects, and we had to rearrange our entire house."
Liz's voice exhibited its first sign of emotion.
Fear.
"The middle of the night?"
"Yes."
"They always come in the middle of the night." Again the monotone.
"What happened to you?" Maureen asked once more. "No. Don't say anything. I understand that you can't talk over the phone. I'll come up--"
"No!" her friend said sharply.
"Liz..."
"Do. Not. Come. To. See. Me." The words were bitten off.
"I know you're--"
"It's not safe."
The old woman's voice was replaced by a dial tone. She'd hung up, and Maureen stared blankly down at the phone for a moment, unsure of what to do. If she called back, Liz probably wouldn't answer--and if she did answer, she'd be angry. She'd been specifically ordered not to go to Liz's house, so that was out of the question.
Tina.
Maureen found the other woman's number and called.
Mike answered the phone, and she asked to speak to his wife. A minute later, Tina was on the line, sounding sleepy. "Hello?"
"This is Maureen. Did I wake you up?"
"Sort of."
"Sorry, but it's kind of an emergency." She explained about their nighttime visitors and about her unsettling call to Liz. "First things first," she said. "What do we do about Liz?"
"What can we do? You know what happened last time. We all tried to help her, but she just shut us out. I'll call her myself later, go up there if she'll let me, and maybe call Audrey and Moira, too. But I'll tell you true, I have a feeling it's going to be the same situation.
There may be nothing we can do. She might have to just work it out herself."
"And if she can't?"
Tina didn't answer.
"What about our situation?"
Tina sighed. "I wondered when they were going to crack down on you."
"You knew about this?"
"I guess."
"Why didn't you say anything? Why didn't you tell me?"
"I thought maybe you'd squeaked by, maybe they hadn't seen the inside of your house or for some reason didn't want to make you conform. I
didn't want to worry you unnecessarily or draw attention and let them know that you'd escaped them. But... but I guess in the back of my mind I knew it would happen."