In reply to my grinding contempt, she said, "Come on, sourpuss! It's an adventure! Show a little spirit!"

It wasn't hard to find off-season rentals in summer resorts. Owners of such properties were usually so happy to have winter tenants that they made no bones about leases, first and last, background, or credit histories. Add to that the discount rates, few nosy neighbors, and attractive, out-of-the-way locations that tended to discourage process servers, and you understand why such accommodations were a staple of ours. Poor old Mr. Fred Cowper had no idea that by retreating to the seaside, he'd all but put out the welcome mat.

Mum soon had us in a treeless village of white clapboard cottages strewn like apple crates across a grassy common. Bare clotheslines and backyard LPG tanks made up the view. It looked like a mining camp during the Gold Rush, or at least the abandoned remains of one. The sea wasn't exactly at our doorstep, but you could smell rotten eggs when the tide went out, and to me that meant clams, oysters, and other littoral delights, of which I was an avid hunter ever since reading Stalking the Blue-Eyed Scallop, by Euell Gibbons. (Over the years, I had practically memorized the book, and still felt a guilty twinge every time I read the words PROPERTY OF OLIVER LAFARGE PUBLIC LIBRARY.) Aside from a few seldom-seen retirees like Cowper, and a house down the road occupied by hard-partying biker types, the place was a ghost town.

We didn't have a TV or a radio, not even in our car, because my mother couldn't bear commercials of any kind, and most popular music disturbed her chi. Instead, we relied on an old Capehart record player and her collection of movie-soundtrack albums, so that my childhood memories are all scored by Henry Mancini. Mum painted watercolor still lifes, and I wrote poetry in the style of Emily Dickinson, whom I identified with to a nearly pathological degree. Consequently, by the time we heard what was going on, it was already old news. Here is what happened: