The Association

by A. K. Caggiano

  The light from the bathroom was bright and white, and yet they all stared into it without blinking. That is, after all, what most people do the first time they see a dead body.

  It’s not always apparent that a body is just a body and not an otherwise unconscious individual, but in the case of Rufus Vlcek, there was little to deliberate. He was sat on the toilet, his head lolled back, a dribble of vomit down his chin, pants down around his ankles. It wasn’t the most dignified way to die, but it would be easy cleanup, at least.

  Safiya’s gasp said it best as she lost her balance against the door. Oakley managed to catch her, but even he stumbled back in surprise at the sight, his easy contentedness gone. When they moved, Ivy finally got a clear view of the dead man, not something she particularly wanted, but not something she could look away from either.

  “Oh, no, oh, no,” Safiya was saying, stuck in a loop, her voice echoing down the hall as Ivy’s feet took her forward against everything else her body wanted in that moment. She would have liked to run, to scream, to throw up, but the chaos of Safiya’s voice, the blood rushing past her own ears, and the way Oakley had turned away with horror on his face like she had seen only one other time, told her she had to keep it together. Like she always did.

  It wasn’t possible, she knew—his pallid skin, his distant stare, his tight but open jaw all told her there wasn’t anything left inside—but she still found herself taking another step over the threshold into the bathroom. He had been dressed to meet them that morning, dark grey pants bunched up over black Oxfords and a wine-red button down with paisley embroidery along the shoulder. Then the poor guy took a detour into the bathroom for the shit that would be his last.

  She hesitated when both of her feet were on the bathroom tile, glancing back to the others. Safiya was hyperventilating against the wall, Oakley hovering over her, but he gave Ivy a solid nod. She swallowed, moving to close the space between herself and the toilet when she heard a crunching underfoot. Jumping back, there was a patch on the tile that caught the light differently, a few tiny shards of broken glass. She placed her foot more carefully to the side and finally leaned in.

  Rufus’s neck was cold. And stiff. And still.

  Ivy removed shaking fingers from where his pulse should have been and looked back out into the hall. She confirmed without a word what they already knew, and Safiya, who had finally gone quiet, turned away and dissolved into a puddle of tears.

  Once more Ivy looked back at Rufus, just to be sure, searching for anything that looked like life. Even with his skin greying and blotchy and his body twisted stiffly, it was clear he had been a handsome, athletic man—had been, she thought bleakly—with dark hair peeking out from three undone buttons, wide shoulders straining against his shirt, and eyes that were a pretty shade of blue under the haziness of death forming in them. If it weren’t for the crow’s feet and grey flecks at the crown of his head, she would have thought him much younger. At least he’d smiled a lot.

  Ivy tore her gaze back to the floor so she could maneuver out safely. It was glass there but so little of it and just next to the toilet, an incredibly dangerous place. She raised her gaze up to Rufus’s arm hanging languidly between himself and the chipped marble-topped vanity, the face of the watch around his wrist shattered.

  “I’ll call the police,” Ivy offered quietly.

  “Don’t!” Safiya spun around, suddenly loosed of her grief, her eyes wild. Then she took a deep breath. “I’ll get Greg to handle it.”

  “The guard?” Ivy slipped out of the bathroom and pulled the door shut behind her.

  Safiya was nodding and sniffling, but already dialing her phone, nearly dropping it in shaky hands. She held it to her face, crossing her arms tightly over her chest, crumpling in as she took a few slow steps down the hall and began to speak in a low tone.

  Ivy glared at Oakley. “Is that guard actually a police officer?”

  Her brother shrugged, his eyes unfocused looking after Safiya but not really seeing her. Rufus had been the man who introduced Oakley to Avalon Estates. They’d been friends, as Oakley had described it in her brief chat with him the day before, though he hadn’t used that word—he really never used that word. She squeezed his arm, and he just looked down at his feet.

  “Oh, shit!” Safiya suddenly stood very straight at the hall’s end, and then she dashed off through the kitchen. Safiya was running, thundering up the stairs until her footsteps faded away. The place fell silent and then her voice exploded through the house, “Damn it!”

  Ivy and Oakley made their way to the foyer as Safiya hurried back down the stairs, nearly tripping. Her hair wild now, her eyes were red and freakishly wide behind her glasses. “It’s gone! What am I going to do?” Then she fell onto the last step, dropping her head into her hands.

  Her exclamation knocked some of the sadness out of Ivy. Oakley too seemed to be overtaken by some confusion. Then Safiya let out another sob, hard and loud. Ivy sat next to her, carefully putting a hand on her back. Oakley’s eyes had fallen on the floor again, his form hunched, and they stayed like that, stuck to their spots for what felt like an eternity until there was a thump on the door.

  This wasn’t Greg’s first body, or so he wanted it to seem, his fingers looped in his belt as he stepped over the threshold into Rufus’s house. He didn’t take off his sunglasses even as he looked around inside the darkened foyer. Safiya was now crying silently into her hands, and Oakley was pacing the foyer with short, nervous steps. “Thanks for coming,” Ivy said, closing the door behind him. “I’ll take you there.”

  The guard turned, sticking a finger in her face. “No. You’ll stay right here.”

  She opened and closed her mouth, but he had already gone up to Safiya. “You said he’s in the bathroom?”

  Between fingers and strands of hair, she looked up and nodded, and Greg disappeared down the hall.

  Ivy looked after him, chilled at his reaction, but thought better than to say anything. People were weird about death, and really she was no exception. Even now, she was standing there, looking down at Safiya who was finally coming back into herself, and all she could think about was how rude the guard had just been. She could still feel Rufus’s neck on her finger’s for fuck’s sake, a little respect, or even kindness, would have been nice.

  Safiya took a deep breath and stood, wiping at her face. “Ivy, I’m so sorry.” She was pinching her nose. “You too, Oakley. If I would have known I never would have brought you here, and—” Her body shook again as her voice caught in her throat.

  “No, it’s…it’s fine,” Ivy managed. “You just talked to him, how could you know?”

  Safiya nodded with a far off look and started chewing on her thumb nail. “This is really, really bad.”

  Greg returned from the back of the house, his footsteps heavy. He took a long, low breath, hands on his hips as he rocked back onto his heels, surveying the three. “Well, he’s dead all right. Poor fella’s heart finally gave out, looks like.”

  Safiya whipped her head toward the guard. “Heart?”

  He nodded knowingly. “I’m no doctor, but I’ve seen more than my share of this kinda aftermath. And you know Rufus: smoked like a chimney.”

  “He gave it up,” Safiya mumbled. “For his health.”

  “I called Ogden Bluff’s finest.” Greg tapped his temple in an odd way as he ushered them onto the front porch. “Gotta meet ‘em at the gatehouse. Stick around, I’m sure they’ll have questions even if it is pointless.” He put a heavy hand on Safiya’s shoulder. “Sorry, Saf.”

  Her face had changed again, gnawing on her nail as she watched Greg pull away with a deep squint. She stood there for a long time, her eyes fixed on where his car had been as he headed back to the gates of Avalon Estates. Oakley wandered down the steps and into the front yard, his arms hanging loosely at his sides as he stared up at the sun.

  Ivy wanted to break the silence, but no words seemed appropriate. Remarks on the weather, even condolences, they a
ll seemed so distasteful, but then Safiya did it for her. “It wasn’t a heart attack.”

  This was probably typical, Ivy thought, after the first rush of shock swept over someone and then flowed away. There was no denying Rufus was gone, but the way it had happened? That could be up for debate. But Safiya’s voice had gone steady for the first time since she’d seen him, cutting through the moment with what felt like infallible truth.

  “Rufus ran five miles a day, he switched to vapor cigars years ago, he was healthy. You saw him.”

  Ivy had, indeed, seen him, and he did look pretty good, except for the whole being dead thing, but Ivy wanted to at least humor the poor woman. “It could be anything,” she admitted. “Sometimes people have, like, a blood clot, or—”

  “No,” Safiya said with aplomb. “He was murdered.”

  Chapter 5

  Even with as matter-of-factly as she had said it, Safiya’s statement didn’t completely sink in. Murdered? No, she’d misspoken. Ivy wanted to be careful with her next words, and she thought long and hard about them, finally speaking: “You’re kidding.” They didn’t come out exactly how she planned.

  “Absolutely not.” Safiya turned to her and met her eye. “Someone did this to him. Someone killed Rufus Vlcek.”

  Ivy swallowed and looked to Oakley for help, but he was still dreamily gazing out at the lawn, too far off to even hear Safiya’s sudden and insane claim.

  “Did…did someone want him dead?” It was ludicrous, of course, there hadn’t been anything about the body that suggested foul play—Rufus went in a pretty common way, even Elvis kicked it on the toilet—but she found herself asking the question anyway.

  “Who didn’t?” Safiya threw her hands up as if she should have known. “That man’s had a target on his back since he became the president of the association. Oh, gods,”—she looked like she might be sick—“and now I’m the fucking president.”

  Ivy cocked an eyebrow. She remembered her parents’ HOA’s strict policies about everything down to mailbox replacement and lawn ornament approval and briefly understood Safiya’s sentiment, then shook her head. Safiya was turning in circles now, trying to pace on the edge of the stoop. “Maybe we should take a step back here. We don’t know anything for sure right now, so we should just—”

  “We do know he was murdered.” The woman’s voice dropped down to a whisper. “I know he was murdered. They took the orb, and they would have had to kill him to get it.”

  As Safiya ran a hand through her hair and started biting the nails of her other hand, Ivy turned the words over in her mind. They took the orb. It meant nothing to her, but it had been said with such gravity she thought it really should. The orb—whatever that was—was gone, stolen, and a man had been killed for it on his toilet no less. These were suddenly facts, as wild as they seemed, and Ivy had no idea what to do with them.

  “What orb?”

  “From the society?” She threw a hand out. “The one that protects us.”

  Oh no, thought Ivy, she’s cracked. “Protects you from what?”

  “The outside,” she said, spitting a bit of nail off the porch. “The others. The ones who aren’t like us. Gods, and the cops are coming…without that orb we might—” Safiya stopped herself suddenly, her eyes snapping up to meet Ivy’s. For a long moment they lingered on her, no longer bulbous and wondering, but sharp and slight even behind those thick lenses. “You are,”—she hesitated—“Sylvan, right?”

  Ivy cocked her head, but the sound of cars pulling down the road stole their attention.

  When officers from Ogden Bluffs’ Police Department came, the three were taken to distant corners of the front yard. They were separated purposefully, but with little real effort. Ivy could hear Oakley’s low drone as he recanted what had happened that morning to an officer who took notes and nodded. She could also hear Safiya, and even though the words themselves were muffled and far off, they had none of the urgency with which she previously spoke of on the front porch.

  When a third officer, a small woman with her blonde hair tied in an efficient knot at the nape of her neck, walked up to Ivy, she barely glanced at her before asking what happened, focusing instead on her pen hovering over the pad. Ivy took a breath and looked over to Safiya, the woman’s dark hair composed again, pulled tightly in her hand over her shoulder, knuckles white. She was eyeing Ivy now with an intense gaze, her lips pursed. Darkness had fallen over her face, the bright morning sun flooding in behind her and down the still sleepy street. Looking back at the officer, Ivy began to tell her how she had only just shown up that morning, she didn’t really know any of these people save for her brother, and really this whole thing was kind of nuts.

  “Just stick to the facts,” the officer said. Behind her, the stretcher, the white sheet, and the tell-tale bulge beneath were being wheeled out down the stepping stone path to an ambulance, its sirens and lights off, no need for urgency. Her eyes followed Rufus Vlcek’s body as it bumped along, and her voice told the officer, almost without her consciousness, how they’d gone to his home and how they’d found him, exactly as she’d remembered. Just the facts.

  She was thanked for her time, and the officer flipped closed her notepad, finally looking up at her. “I’m sorry for your loss.” She thought to correct her—she’d never even met him—but instead she just said a thank you to the officer’s back as she walked away.

  A little crowd had gathered on the street, unable to come up the drive as the whole front had been taped off like a movie scene. Behind the group was the massive truck that had nearly run Ivy over that morning, and in the driver’s seat was Tharman Beryleaxe, the short man with the ruddy beard from the board meeting. He was leaning out the window and talking animatedly with Sunglasses Greg.

  Safiya wound up next to her again, though she hadn’t seen her cross the yard. She leaned in, her long hair tickling Ivy’s arm. “We need to talk tonight. I’ll be over at six. Tell no one else what I said.” Then she drove them back to 210 Ironwood Place in silence.

  Ivy stared up at her brother’s house for the second time that day, but all the awe she had previously experienced was now gone, replaced with exhaustion and a longing for the house’s innards. Oakley’s eyes were saying the same when he glanced over at her from their spot on the front lawn. “Weird first day, huh?”

  Ivy sighed, relieved he’d returned somewhat to normal. “Real weird.”

  He led her to the front door, then paused before going in. “So, remember today’s been weird, okay?”

  “Okay?” She narrowed her eyes.

  “So that weirdness is, like, untoppable, right?”

  Of course. “Just open the door.”

  Oakley’s front hall was littered with boxes. Full boxes. Certainly not an entire house’s worth, but a lot of boxes. “You haven’t unpacked yet?”

  “I’ve been busy.” He maneuvered ahead of her through the hall. There were stairs leading upward off to the left, and a small room on the right, empty and flooded with morning light from the bay window in it. The hall spilled out into the main part of the house beyond.

  “Doing what?” Again, she couldn’t help herself. Oakley was rarely busy.

  “Working.”

  She stopped at the end of the hall, looking out into the open living space. The room was already filled with furniture fit for someone sixty years Oakley’s senior save for a single, leather recliner in the center. It was sat across from a large TV propped up on an upturned box dangerously close to caving in. And of course his video game console was beside it. “Working?”

  “Yeah.”

  Ivy followed where his voice came from, turning to see him standing in the middle of the kitchen surrounded—absolutely surrounded—by greenery. Foliage fell from every surface, sprouting up from pots lining the floor, crawling across counters, and dangling from above the cupboards. There was plenty of black dirt too, haphazardly spilled over edges and mounding here and there, pointless efforts made to scoop it up leaving trails in the g
rout. A stack of empty terracotta pots threatened to topple over in the corner, an open bag of fertilizer balanced against the wall, and the whole room was doused in a familiar fuchsia light emanating from bulbs dangerously rigged between the cabinets and pot rack.

  “What in the world?” She strode over to the mess, blowing strands of hair from her face.

  “Impressive, huh?” Oakley was really pleased with himself, just chuffed. Grinning from ear to ear, Rufus was all but forgotten. He held his hands out, waiting for her praise.

  “Is this all marijuana?”

  “What? No!” Oakley chuckled, then pointed to one of the plants. “I mean, that is, and there’s some over there too, but the rest of it, the rest of it, is something else entirely.”

  Ivy rolled her eyes and turned away, crossing back to the recliner. “Of course, because now that pot’s getting legalized all over you’d need to move onto something else illicit.” She picked up a frozen dinner tray, a plastic fork hardened in the remnants of some sad mashed potatoes. Then she turned back to him suddenly. “Is that how you can afford this place?”

  “Ivy,” he said, dragging her name out like he were begging to be taken along to the mall. “It’s not like that. These other things, they’re like tea and shit. Herbs and flowers and vegetables. Not drugs. Well, enough of that one might be, but I haven’t tried it yet.”

  She scoured the room and found the bag he’d been using for garbage, tossing the tray and looking about for more trash. “Uh huh, so your little druggie friends are getting turnt on tomatoes now, I suppose?” She remembered them, punks every one, and how she’d gotten him out of a number of scuffles, usually with cash when she had it.