Death's Excellent Vacation - By Charlaine Harris & Toni L. P. Kelner Page 0,128

of herself. She sure as hell shouldn’t be running up and down the beach playing Mrs. Robinson, seducing high school boys!”

I remember the cop nodding. “They’re going through a rough stretch.”

“Who?” my dad asked.

“Her family. The girl’s grandfather died a couple weeks ago. Now she disappears. They’re not thinking straight, you know? Keep pushing us to dig something up. I figure she’s just another runaway, like in that new Springsteen song. Guess she was ‘Born to Run.’ ”

The grown-ups all nodded.

I didn’t. In fact, I froze.

Because, in my mind, at that moment, I knew exactly what had happened to Brenda Narramore.

It was just like that old man who had come back from the dead to help the rescue squads find his granddaughter.

The demon in the dunes was Brenda Narramore’s recently deceased grandfather!

When I wouldn’t stop pawing her, groping at her on the beach and in the Boardwalk spook house, when I wouldn’t listen to his ghostly demands to leave his granddaughter alone, he had found a way to stop her!

That’s when I would’ve totally freaked out if I hadn’t started seriously smoking, full-time.

Dorals at first, to honor Brenda’s memory, I guess. But Dorals were low in tar and nicotine. Not enough juice to wash away the guilt that came with the weight of knowing that my actions had caused a beautiful girl to be “disappeared” by a demented dead relative.

I moved on to Marlboros.

Unfiltered Camels.

Cigarettes can numb you out. Erase a lot of mental anguish. Help you stuff down all sorts of feelings of guilt and shame and remorse. I think this is why, when I was a kid, all the priests and nuns smoked. We Catholics needed all the help we could get.

By Halloween 1975, I had forgotten all about Brenda Narramore. Callous of me, maybe, but I just assumed that the police officer was right. She was a runaway. Yes, that first month back home I would sneak down to the corner drugstore on my bicycle to check out the newspapers from Philadelphia and down the shore. I kept searching for a gruesome story like “Missing Girl’s Body Found, Flesh Ripped off Her Beautiful Body by Deranged Beast” or “Monster Stalks Jersey Girl.” But I never found anything about Brenda Narramore at all. Not even in the tabloids with the stories about Elvis and aliens.

The demon in the dunes was, most likely, what I first supposed it to be: a figment of my overactive imagination. Face it, seeing evil creatures lurking in blank white spaces is what a comic book artist does.

I just started seeing my mythical tormentors earlier than most.

However, after that ride down the tunnel of love with Brenda Narramore, I never saw that particular apparition again. I blocked him out of my waking thoughts. Only let his image seep into my subconscious when it needed an especially hideous creature to haunt the shadows of my graphic novels, like my first New York Times bestseller, an early Belinda Nightingale tale called The Withered Wraith of Westmorland.

The only thing I can’t comprehend: Why am I thinking about all of this again? Why now?

Why today?

Why am I drifting back to Seaside Heights, August 1975? Surely there are more important places and dates in my life for me to review. Especially now.

I hear a knock on a door.

Remember where I am.

My wife crawls out of the hospital bed.

I creak open an eye. Expect to see a doctor. Maybe a nurse.

It’s a middle-aged woman with short-cropped, wiry gray hair.

“May I help you?” my wife asks weakly.

“I’m sorry,” says the visitor. “I’m an old friend of David’s. When I read in that papers that he . . .”

The visitor holds up a faded paperback book. Burgundy cover.

The Catcher in the Rye.

She opens the front flap. Shows my wife the doodle of the baseball catcher with the bottle of rye in his mitt. My wife nods. Recognizes my signature.

The demon in the dunes didn’t kill Brenda Narramore. She grew old and frumpy.

I try to speak. Groan out her name. Can’t. Too weak.

Dammit! Why am I thinking about that night we first met?

Saturday. August sixteenth. 1975.

I close my eyes. Race back. Replay it.

The young, topless Brenda Narramore hovers over my trousers.

“Shhh. You’re just nervous.”

I nod. I am.

“Here.” She digs into her beach bag. Finds the crumpled Doral pack. “Have another smoke. It’ll calm you down.”

“I thought we were supposed to, you know, smoke afterward.”

She lights two fresh cigarettes.

It appears. Ten feet behind her, lurching out of the shadows. The gaunt walking skeleton of