With their meals finished, everyone pushed back their plates to listen to Darla’s explanation of what was going on in the strange town known as Fishs Eddy. Charles sat with pen hovering over pad, ready to write notes that would become his next lead expose on one of the strangest towns in the country.

“It is something I really need to show you to do it justice,” Darla said, clearly not satisfied with sitting in the diner when she could directly show them what she was going to tell them. Simon knew this was a much more effective way of moving things forward.

They left the diner with a wave at Sandy as they passed. Darla did not ask for a check or pay for the meal. It seemed natural for her not to, and Sandy did not attempt to stop them. “Have a good day,” Sandy said. This was clearly customary for people to walk in and pay for food they did not directly order. It was strange.

Before Darla left, she turned to Sandy. “You will deliver the food to the house?” she asked Sandy. Sandy nodded and waved at her, in a way telling her that, of course he would. There was no question that he would fulfill whatever responsibility he had.

“What was that all about?” Simon asked as they left the restaurant. The streets outside the restaurant were still empty. The day turned out to be bright, and a stiff wind walloped the trees, sending leaves in swirls around the sidewalk.

“There are people back in my house that need to be fed,” Darla said.

“More than just your son, I assume” Charles asked. He walked with his notepad held in front of him, his pen jotting notes. Simon resisted the urge to lean over and read those notes. He knew what they were, however: Charles was beginning to sketch out the description of the town, the downtown area. He was also probably recording the chase with George yesterday, reliving where they were and how he had driven and Simon had run down the blocks of the downtown to block of George’s escape.

Even though the street they walked through was deserted of people, most of the stores were open. Simon looked through the plate glass windows and past the displays in the windows and looked for the storekeepers. In the first few stores, he did not see anyone. The signs had been switched on to say open, or turned over to say open. But beyond that, there was no evidence of activity. Now that he thought of it, it was similar in the Three Star diner: the restaurant had been open, but there had been no activity except for when they went in. And even that was only minimal activity. The rest of the stores all were the same. It was as if the store owners were going through the motions, but were not expecting any patrons or customers.

“Yes,” Darla said to Charles’s question. “There are many people that need feeding in my house. I am sure you saw some of them laying about when you visited.”

“And why was that?” Penelope asked. She too had been studying the stores around her. Simon wondered what conclusions she might have already arrived at. She was always faster than him at coming to such conclusions even with limited information. He hated watching television shows with mystery elements to them. She always figured them out before he did. She was very good not to make a big deal out of it, or even to flaunt it and provide him with the answers. When Simon managed to figure it out—which was usually very late in the game, usually right before the big reveal—Penelope would be there nodding in agreement as if she knew it all along. When he tried to call her a few times on it, he realized that she did know it, much better than he did. She would correct him, and he did not remember a time when he was right and she was not.

Simon planned to ask Penelope once he received straight answers from his sister. He did not remember her being so coy before. She was one of the most straight forward people he knew. She told you what she thought and did not care whether it hurt your feelings or not. For her, the truth was more important than anything. It was strange to see her dance around the truth now.

“They stay in my house because they do not have any places left to stay,” Darla said. “The town is a bit topsy-turvy now. Things are not what they used to be, and, well, you can see it in this neighborhood. Look at the stores around you. Do you think these stores were always like this? There is nobody around and yet every store is open. I would be surprised if Tom’s Hardware had one customer today. And yet there is Tom, sitting behind the cash register, waiting for customers that he knows will not come. Do you know why he is doing that?”

“I can’t wait for you to tell us,” Charles said, still jotting down notes as he walked, not appearing to look up to know where he was walking. He was rapidly writing and turning pages faster than Simon thought he could read those pages. His pen zipped along the page with large flourishes as he hit important or interesting points. He was as extravagant in his writing as he was in his speaking. Even though nobody would ever see these notes, Charles could never escape from overdoing his descriptions and always performing. Simon did not mind as it was something that everyone always loved about Charles.

Simon looked into Tom’s Hardware. As Darla had said, the store was empty. He saw Tom sitting behind the cash register. He was not reading a newspaper or going over the store’s inventory. He was staring into space. He sat with his hands out of sight behind the counter. He was hunched on what looked like a round stool without a back. He did not look at them as they passed the store’s window.

“He has no choice but to go into work every day,” Darla said. “Like everyone else on this street, he has to go to work because that is what is expected of them. There are people who can fight it, but they are rare. The ones that have fought are either forced out of town, or are living in my house.”

“So you are the organizer,” Charles said, scribbling rapidly on his pad.

“She is more than the organizer,” Penelope added, looking meaningfully at Darla.

Simon was more than a little confused by what they were discussing. They were in a town where the shopkeepers were forced to work, and those who did not had to either escape town or live in his sister’s house. This was more than confusing.

“Does that mean that mother and our other sister were forced out of town because they did not want to work?” Simon asked, still trying to put the pieces together and finding that they were falling out of his hand even as he tried to match the edges together.

“It is more complicated than that,” Darla said. “But I still have not shown you what I wanted to show you. All this talking is not explaining it as good as a picture describing it. It is over here.”

Darla led them down the street to where the City Hall stood. It was a rather squat building with three white columns. The middle column seemed to get in the way of the door, which did not swing open all the way because of the column. Simon remembered the hoopla around when it was built. There were huge mistakes made. For the door, for example, they did not realize that the fire code made it illegal to have the doors swing inward. Because the column blocked a full swing of the door outward, they were left with a strange half situation where the door sort of opens, and creates more of a fire hazard because of the way it only sort of opens.

They broke into the sides and back of the building, adding two unplanned doors to ensure it would meet fire code. They had planned to make the front doors open inward after creating the doors, but after a huge public outcry, they decided to leave the doors alone. It became a symbol of what happened when people from outside Fishs Eddy were asked to do anything. The architect and general contractor were friends of the mayor and they lived outside of Fishs Eddy. Even though they lived in one county next door, they were not of Fishs Eddy. The quality of their work was not the same as Fishs Eddy quality. There were many articles about it in the local paper, and Simon remembered his family sitting around the dinner table talking about this issue. Simon did not understand most of what they were talking about, but he did remember a sense of pride in his town, a pride that, as he grew older, he thought bordered on the side of prejudice against people who were not of the town. This became more apparent as he grew older and had moved away from Fishs Eddy. The people his older sisters (and, yes, he was the youngest of the three) had tried to keep in touch with were not eager to maintain contact. They felt that his sisters had somehow lost something. (Although, if he had a younger sister, it would make more sense that she, who was not born in Fishs Eddy, would bring another aspect to the story. That aspect can be presented by Simon’s mother, however.)

Darla led them up the stairs and into the City Hall. Penelope, Charles, and Simon followed her. They walked through the strangely ajar door that did not open all the way because of the ill-placed middle column. Studying the column for the first time close in, Simon realized that the column was not a load-bearing column. He saw that it did not add much to the support of the building. Instead, the column was for show, and because it was aesthetic, they could have torn it down. For whatever reason, they chose not to, however. Simon realized that that had been a choice. They could have removed the column instead of creating the new doors. That they did not showed a lot about what the town thought about such things.

They entered a large front lobby, which was much bigger than it looked from the outside. The lobby had shiny wooden floors and a vaulted ceiling, where an oversized chandelier hung. The lobby was empty. There was a security desk with a tall chair that stood empty. The lights were on, but there was nobody home.

“This is the center of it all,” Darla said. “I sometimes come in here and wander around, trying to understand how it became as bad as it did.”

“Governments usually do that,” Charles said. “The smaller the government, the more problems they can create. Give me an oversized world government any day over the small town politics that most of the small town in these parts and the rest of the nation.” Like most of his readers, Charles was a staunch libertarian. He believed the less government the better. Unlike most other libertarians, Charles believed that it was not the federal government that caused all the problems, but the local political scene, where inexperienced politicians did not understand the best way to manage a city.

“In this case,” Darla said. “It is not the government that caused the problems. It is what governments are supposed to be made of: it was the people that created this vacuum in space.” Darla started walking toward a large double wide set of stairs. “It is up here that you will see what I mean.”

Word count: 2,013

Word total: 41,451

Words remaining 8,549

I hit the single digits—that is, the single thousand digits. This is a good day. I have only about four or five days left in this contest. Today moved a bit slower than the last two days, but I hit target and threw down more exposition and perhaps set up a bit of action for tomorrow. We’ll see if I ever hit that action. Ziggy is upstairs locked behind his new and improved gate. I’ll post about it when I download the photographs. He’s whining and clearly not impressed by my handiwork.

We leave for NYC tomorrow. When I return to Seattle, the Marathon (and two oversized turkeys) will be a thing of the past. I will have more to say about pasts and futures then. For now, I am going to bask in my last hour alone in the Castle. Doolies is at her Jazz group practice, and the men (or at least man and dog) are left along to rule the nest. I’ll spend my freedom watching television. Nothing says freedom like doing nothing. Nothing.