I was on Fourth Street, the one-way thoroughfare running south through the heart of Stagger Bay, turning into Highway 101 above and below town limits. This was the neighborhood folks called Old Town.
Back when Stagger Bay was first founded, the second thing they did after massacring the local Indians was build Old Town, a rickety warren of wall-to-wall whore houses and bars conveniently adjacent the waterfront. By the time we’d moved up here from Oakland in the ‘90s, the original shacks and hovels of that frontier red-light district had mutated into it’s present day architecture, mainly brick multi-stories heavily retro-fitted to earthquake resistance.
We’d come up here because the cost of living was cheap, and I thought I could finagle a job in one of the lumber mills or on a boat. Unfortunately the logging and fishing industries were already withering on the vine by that point, and Stagger Bay was pretty depressed – I’d been lucky to get the job at the soda distributor.
Then, a few years before the Beardsleys were murdered, some bright boy decided to build the Mall on the south edge of town – half the local mom & pop businesses folded, unable to compete with those big box chain stores. That was a real stake through the heart for Stagger Bay.
Driving through Old Town in back then was like sightseeing in a ghost town, what with all the darkened storefronts and whitewashed windows. There’d been trash in the gutters and newspapers spinning in updrafts; it was pretty run down.
Old Town’s empty squats had been crowded with homeless transients, pan-handlers, drug addicts and other low-end would-be outlaws – up from the Bay Area chasing welfare checks. The Stagger Bay Police Department had a beat cop annex there but closed it down because there was ‘too much crime’ – that one had been laughed at on all the late night network talk shows.
Our hookers were an especially sorry bunch, mainly speed freaks missing a few teeth and dressed in thrift-store chic. Angela always felt sorry for those working girls; she wanted to stop and do an emergency makeover whenever we passed one by.
But Old Town had changed a lot since last time I’d seen it. Now it looked like someone had come through with a broom and swept all the wild life away. Walking down the street, all I saw was decent citizens, not a wannabe-an-outlaw in sight.
It was also booming with new construction and renovation: Toward the waterfront the Andersen Mansion loomed above the smaller interposing buildings, sporting a new paint job. A work crew was power washing the side of a building across the street from me. On the next block a guy telescoped up in the bucket of a cherry picker was doing some kind of work on a bronze art deco façade spanning the second story of the Emporium, our sole vintage department store. A designer coffee shop and a chain bookstore were doing brisk business on the block I currently walked down, and lots of quaint little boutiques and art galleries dotted the cross streets to either side; I didn’t recognize any of them from before.
Even though all this had nothing to do with me, it still didn’t feel too bad to see the old neighborhood on its feet again. After all, it wasn’t Stagger Bay per se that expelled me from my family so rudely; it was the featherless bipeds infesting her that did the dirty deed.
It was a little confusing, though. Like I said before, the fishing and logging jobs had pretty much dried up years ago, small business was still limping, and we had no industry – someone was doing some real fast talking to convince this much investment in a dead-end podunk town like Stagger Bay.
No one on the streets seemed to recognize me, which was fine. But I saw more than one person shopping or driving by that had been pretty bloodthirsty when I was on trial.
No complaints, I was lucky to be alive and free. A backwoods place like Stagger Bay, I reckon they would’ve saved the state a lot of money in the old days; maybe just strung me up from a tree, photographed themselves smiling around my stretch-necked corpse and sold copies of the snapshot as souvenir postcards.