Death's Excellent Vacation - By Charlaine Harris & Toni L. P. Kelner Page 0,49

if dragging themselves reluctantly across the land, and speak in a slow, halting, decidedly non-quaint, nonfolksy way. They also looked alike. It was a small gene pool in this town, and it hadn’t really worked out that well for any of the citizens of Clam Bay.

Also, the clamming was lousy in Clam Bay.

Philip and Vance ate breakfast in near silence. There was no need to remark on their growing pile of bills and the lack of tourists. Without looking at the budget, Philip estimated they had another four months before the all-consuming debt . . . well . . . consumed them.

The bell attached to the front door jingled. Philip and Vance jumped up and ran to greet the visitor. Their hopes were dashed by the sight of the Clam Bay constable.

“Hello,” said Philip halfheartedly.

The constable nodded and tipped his gray hat. “Mornin’, 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