"You should have told me about this," Maureen said.
"You're right. I'm sorry." Her voice was wistful. "But it was nice seeing family photos again. And more than one wall of pictures and hangings. And all those collectibles and antiques you have."
"You're still going to see them," Maureen told her. "We're not changing anything."
There was a pause, as if Tina did not know how to respond to that. "But you have to."
"What if we don't?"
Tina's voice grew lower. "The fines will start. And you don't want to get into that cycle. Believe me."
"Then what can we do?"
"There's nothing you can do," Tina said. "It's something we all have to put up with."
"Middle of the night inspections?"
"Well," she admitted, "ours have never been in the middle of the night.
Probably they just wanted to rattle you."
"That's selective enforcement right there, then. They're treating us differently than they treat everyone else."
"I don't know if I'd say that," Tina added quickly. "We've escaped it, but that doesn't mean other people have."
"But you'd stand up for us? You'd tell the truth? You'd sign a statement saying that your inspections have all been at reasonable hours?"
More backpedaling. "Sign a statement? I'd have to talk to Mike about that."
Tina obviously wasn't going to be much help. And if she wasn't brave enough to stand up to the association, Maureen was sure no one else would be. Rather than tempering her anger, the disappointment she felt only fueled it further, and she said a quick goodbye.
She and Barry were in this alone; they'd have to face down the association by themselves.
But that was okay. They didn't need anybody else.
When Barry came out of the shower, she was sitting at the dining room table, staring out the window at the trees, nibbling on a piece of cold toast.
"Did you call Liz?" he asked.
"And Tina."
"And?" he prodded when she didn't elaborate.
She told him about both conversations, about Liz's frightened paranoia and Tina's ineffectual support.
"What do you want to do?" Barry asked. "Do you still want to go back to California?"
"Hell no."
"That's the spirit."
"Fuck 'em," Maureen said, and the words felt good. "We're not going anywhere. We're staying here just long enough to wipe our asses with those damn C, C, and Rs ."
It was another fine.
He had paid none of them yet, but they'd been arriving daily, signed by the association's treasurer--someone named Thompson Hughes. They were all ridiculously inflated, and although he hadn't kept track, the total they owed must be well over three thousand dollars by now. It was ludicrous that they were being penalized in such a way for minor infractions of unreasonable rules, and he'd saved each of the notices for a future court case.
Barry dropped the rest of the mail on the coffee table and tore open the unstamped envelope. This one was levied against them for failure to park both of their vehicles facing in the same direction. For that offense, the association was docking them seven hundred and fifty dollars.
"Seven hundred and fifty this time," he said.
Maureen looked up from her book. "Losers."
With the fine notice was another form, and he unfolded the paper and scanned its contents.
"Jesus," he breathed.
"What's it say?"
"The title is "Bath and Toilet Violations." Does that give you some clue?"
"Let me see that!"
He handed her the paper. "Someone has apparently been monitoring our bathroom habits. It says that you do not| have the right number of tampons or maxipads , that a certain surplus number is required, which you have failed to j maintain, and that we are discharging three gallons more effluent than is allowable for a domestic residence with two I people."
Her face paled as she read. "My God." She looked at him. "You think they have a camera in there?"
"It's possible--and I'm going to get some wallpaper and cover over every square inch of the wall and ceiling just in case--but that maxipad/tampon thing is not something that you could find out with a camera. Someone's been snooping, someone's been in the house."
"But when? We've been home all the time."
"While we were sleeping," he said, and the thought of it curdled his blood. Bill and his inspectors were one thing. As invasive and intrusive as that had been, at least they'd been open about it, at least they had made their presence known. But the idea of people breaking into their home and sneaking around in the dark, checking on Maureen's feminine hygiene products and God knew what else, made his skin crawl. Who were they? And how many of them? The scenario conjured by his writer's imagination had Kenny and the most disfigured volunteers creeping, crawling, and limping silently through the rooms of the house, peeking at and examining their most intimate items:
fingering his condoms, sniffing Maureen's dirty panties.
And the scary thing was that he was probably not that far off the mark.
He did indeed put wallpaper over the walls and ceiling, founding off the corners so there would be no cracks or gaps through which miniature devices could peer. They had several rolls left over from their initial renovation, and it occurred to him that perhaps he should re-wallpaper the entire house--or at least those rooms where they'd painted rather than papered the walls--but the thought was intimidating, He recalled how much work they'd done that first month, and he didn't want to go through that again unless he absolutely had to. Besides, there was no indication that any other rooms were under surveillance.
Maybe they needed to watch BVTV more often.
As he should have expected, the next day they received a notice alerting them that they had made unauthorized changes to a room's appearance without getting approval from the interior design committee.
They were required to both pay an eight-hundred-and-twenty-dollar fine and remove the wallpaper.
"Fuck that," he said.
"I wonder how the people before us survived," Maureen said. "This place was like a bat cave when we bought it. They must have broken at least as many decorating rules as we have."
"Maybe they didn't survive."
She looked at him quizzically.
"Did you notice on all those papers we signed when we bought this place that it said Jordan and Sara Gardner Trust! I wondered about that at the time. I assume it meant that the owners were dead and their relatives were selling off the house."
"Probably to pay the fines."
They spent the afternoon at Mike and Tina's. Liz was still avoiding contact with everyone, hiding reclusively in her house, keeping her door locked and her drapes drawn, and they were all worried for her, though none of them had any ideas of how to help. Maureen had sent her a long letter through the mail, trying to appeal to the old woman's logical side and assuring her that she had a lot of allies and didn't have to face anything alone, no matter what it was, but no one was even sure if Liz was collecting her mail these days.
"I'll tell you one thing," Mike said. "This wouldn't have happened if Ray was still here."
"A lot of things wouldn't have happened if Ray was still here,"
Barry agreed.
Indeed, Ray's death seemed to have been the catalyst for| much of what had occurred since. He had been a sort of un-official opposition leader, the only person with enough influence and gravitas to counteract the association's monopolization, and once he was out of the way, once that domino had fallen, everything else had started to come undone.
Barry wanted to get the names of the people who had attended the Dysons' parties, all of Ray's anti-association acquaintances. "We can put together a petition," he said, "try to get a recall."