Deaths Excellent Vacation

fellas. I’m afraid we have us a slight little problem here.”
    Philip tried to place the accent. It wasn’t New Englandish. Not quite. Clam Bay had its own special dialect. It really was a world of itself. Too bad it wasn’t in the charming Old World way, but the creepy, skin-crawling fashion. But for all their creepiness, the folks of Clam Bay hadn’t done anything to Philip or Vance.
    And now there was a problem.
    The constable led them outside and pointed to a hanging sign posted by the road. “Want to tell me about this?”
    Vance said, “I found it in the attic. Thought it looked Old World. Kind of cool.”
    The icy wind made the sign swing. The constable steadied it. “We’d like you to take it down, if you could.”
    “Why?”
    The constable made a snorting noise and spat up a wad of green phlegm. “We just would rather if you did.”
    “Excuse me,” said Vance, “but this isn’t a police state, is it? We can have anything we want on our house, can’t we?”
    The constable frowned. It wasn’t easy to detect, because the citizens of Clam Bay had mouths bent downward naturally. “Ehyah. It’s just, well, we don’t like to think about it. About the old town name, huh.” He worked his jaw as if testing to see if it still functioned properly.
    “You can barely read it,” said Vance.
    “It’s a memory,” said the Constable. “A bad memory that we would rather forget.”
    He gazed out toward the ocean with a strange combination of yearning and dread. Nobody swam in Clam Bay’s waters. They were too cold. But sometimes, Philip would catch a citizen or two standing on the beach. Always with that same unsettling expression.
    “We’ll take it down,” said Philip. “No problem.”
    The constable nodded. “Ehyah.” He rubbed his face. “Ehyah.” He shuffled away, never taking his eyes off the sea.
    “Why’d you agree to that?” asked Vance. “It’s a free country.”
    “Oh, stop it,” said Philip. “Who really cares? We gotta live here, right? At least for another few months.”
    “It’s censorship. It’s bullshit.”
    “Yeah, yeah. You can fight the good fight when we go back to New York.”
    Grumbling, Vance wrestled with the sign, stubbornly trying to uproot it with his bare hands.
     
     
    CLAM Bay’s general store was large on the outside. But on the inside, it was half empty. The weird thing was that instead of splitting the store down the middle with empty aisles on one side and filled aisles on the other, the arrangement was seemingly random. There was the canned goods aisle, an empty aisle, the cereal aisle, produce, another two empty aisles, frozen foods, one more empty aisle, ethnic foods (which amounted to tortillas and taco shells), several more empty aisles, and at the very end, farthest from the entrance, the meat aisle. Even weirder, the lighting of the store was a murky twilight that refused to venture into the empty aisles, leaving them shadowy regions of darkness. Sometimes, Philip thought he saw something lurking in the aisle between frozen and ethnic. Not exactly saw, but sensed.
    There was nobody ever in the store. He was sure that people shopped here. They had to. It was the only place to get groceries. But he never saw anyone other than the raggedy guy by the cash register. So Philip wasn’t really paying attention when he nearly plowed into the woman as he turned into the aisle.
    They jumped simultaneously.
    “Oh, jeez. I’m sorry,” he said.
    She smiled. It’d been a while since he’d seen a smile like that. And she wasn’t wearing standard Clam Bay gray or black. No, she had on a blue sweater and some tan slacks, and Philip realized how cheery tan could be in these circumstances.
    “Don’t worry about it. I should’ve been looking. It’s just . . . well, I’m just not used to seeing anyone else here.” She extended her hand. “I’m Angela.”
    “Hi, I’m—”
    “Philip,” she interrupted.
    “Have we met?”
    “Oh, no. I just arrived in town yesterday. But the village is buzzing with gossip about the two”—she made air quotes—“ ‘big-city fellows’ who moved into the Bay.”
    He had a hard time imagining Clam Bay buzzing. The cashier was sitting slouched by the front of the store, motionless, staring out the window.
    Angela moved past him and headed toward the register. He hadn’t finished his shopping, but he followed her. “So what brings you to Clam Bay?” he asked.
    “Just visiting my mother.”
    That