anything except Ray. They didn't know each other well enough to open up, to be emotionally truthful and share their feelings, and the three of them had been assiduously avoiding the one subject they'd each been thinking about. Ray had been the catalyst between them, the one who enabled them to speak honestly in front of one another, and with him gone there was a stiltedness to their interaction. He felt the way he had when Todd Ingalls , his best Mend from kindergarten through third grade, had moved away and he'd been forced to play with John Wakeman , a casual friend, a backup friend, someone with whom he eventually found out he had almost nothing in common. Now Frank and Mike were his backup friends, and while they seemed like good guys, it was not the same, not the same at all.
He hadn't realized how much he had come to rely on Ray, how close the two of them had become. There was deep sorrow within him when he thought about the old man, and as he looked out the windows at the crowded deck, it hit him that they would never again sit out there barbecuing and discussing the Big Issues. Or just shooting the breeze.
It was as though a huge chunk of his life had simply been cut out and discarded, and what was left behind was a painful emptiness.
Along with the sadness, however, there was anger. He had not yet figured out how, but he knew in his gut that the association had been involved in Ray's death. Not directly, that's not the way they worked, but in a circumspect, roundabout way, not doing the deed themselves but bringing about the circumstances that allowed it to happen. From across the room, he caught the eye of Greg Davidson, who nodded a weary hello. Greg and Wynona, he knew, were moving out this week, priced out of their own home by Bonita Vista's gate. That's how the association operated. They were facilitators.
He thought aboutDekeMeldrum , lying dead in the ditch as a crowd gathered in the darkness.
Sometimes they were direct, though. Sometimes they did the dirty work themselves.
There's no telling what they're capable of.
Maureen and the other wives brought Liz by to say hello and accept condolences, and the three men reiterated what they'd said at the funeral, how sorry they were for her loss, how much they'd miss Ray, he was a great friend. Barry kept his words short and sweet. He was unnerved by the listlessness of Liz's gaze. It was like looking at a completely different woman than the one he knew, and he glanced at her for only brief seconds before turning his attention back to Maureen. It was pathetic and heartless and selfish and self-centered, but he felt extremely uncomfortable. He was not one of those people who was good with the sick or the troubled or the dying. He could write about it, but in real life he was a complete washout when it came to offering others emotional support. Thank God there were people like Maureen, who always knew the right thing to do and who had the constitution to follow through.
"Can you help us in the kitchen for a moment?" Maureen asked.
"Sure." He followed the women, leaving Frank and Mike to their own devices.
Audrey and Tina busied themselves at the sink and dishwasher, while Maureen led him over to the breakfast nook, where an old leather suitcase sat atop the table. She glanced toward Liz and lowered her voice. "Ray's books," Maureen said. "For some reason, she packed a whole bunch of them in this suitcase and then put the suitcase here on the kitchen table. I don't know how she even lifted the thing. We could barely move it."
Barry nodded. Grief did strange things to people, and somehow this irrational act, more than anything that had gone before, more than the words and the tributes and the funeral itself, brought home to him the enormity of Ray's passing. Liz had obviously loved him a lot.
"What do you want me to do with it?"
"Take it into his den," Maureen whispered. "Just get it out of the way. We'll figure things out later."
He nodded. Grabbing the handle of Ray's suitcase, feeling the heaviness of the books inside, the anger rose within him. "God damn that homeowners' association," he said. "I know those bastards are behind this."
He was speaking to Maureen rather than Liz, but it was Liz who reacted, who responded to his accusation. She strode over, her gaze hardened, suddenly focused. "I don't want to hear anything about that association stuff," she said fiercely. "That craziness was why he was out there on that deck to begin with. If he hadn't been so paranoid about those people, he'd probably be alive today."
Barry said nothing. He did not want to argue with her, did not want to cause her even more pain, and he picked up the suitcase and looked over at Maureen. His wife's expression was unreadable.
Walking out of the kitchen, he saw Liz revert, her body slump, the tension that had momentarily animated her giving out and disappearing as if vacuumed away. He carried the heavy suitcase down the hall. How had she lifted it? He was struggling with it himself. He found the closed door and placed the oversized piece of luggage on the floor of the darkened den. Glancing about, he saw the hulking shadow of Ray's empty desk in the otherwise spartan room and he quickly hurried back out to the hallway, unaccountably feeling as though he were intruding on the couple's privacy. He closed the door behind him.
Had the association really been behind Ray's death?
He wanted to think that was the case, but he realized that he was grasping at straws, ready to believe any conclusion save the logical one: his friend's death had been an accident.
Barry took a deep breath. He was turning into one of those conspiracy nuts, those loonies who saw government plots behind all ill events, who believed in Bigfoot and UFOs, who refused to believe in luck or chance or even fate and attributed even the smallest occurrence to the complex and illogical machinations of a group of ultra-organized human beings.
And he was forced to admit the possibility that Ray had been one of those people, too.
Sometimes, he thought, the simplest explanation was the real one.
Sometimes what was obvious was what was true, and looking for elaborate reasons was just a waste of time.
Still, he was glad there was no one from the association who had come by to offer sympathy, that there'd been no official attempt at wishing Liz condolences. It would have been hypocritical at the very least and an insult to Ray's memory.
He walked back out to the living room. Frank had wandered off somewhere, but Mike was still in place, talking to a woman with a broken arm, and Barry grabbed a drink off the coffee table and joined them.
"Moira? Barry," Mike said by way of introduction. "Moira and her husband, Clan, live around the side of the hill in that stilt-job. Clan used to be a contractor, and he's the one helped Ray figure out how to build that famous storage shed."
"He couldn't make it today," Moira explained. "So I came alone."
"Barry's a writer. Hooked up with Ray because of their mutual hatred of the homeowners' association."
Already, that description sounded embarrassing, childish, and he found that he was ashamed to be identified in such a way.
"What happened to your arm?" Barry asked in an attempt to change the subject. He gestured toward the cast and sling.
The woman reddened, became suddenly taciturn, the openness of her expression closing down. "It was an accident," she said in a voice that didn't sound at all sure that that was the case.
Over her right shoulder, Mike was shaking his head, making a slashing motion across his throat that Barry interpreted to mean stay away from that subject.
Spousal abuse, he thought, and was surprised at how calm he was with it, how un shocked and unfazed he was. In his dreams, in his fantasies, he was one of those people who got involved, who alerted the authorities, who stepped in and put a stop to wrongs and made them right. But here he was confronted with a situation, and he did not rise to the occasion. Like Mike, he felt more comfortable staying out of it, minding his own business and tiptoeing around that five-hundred-pound gorilla in the middle of the room.