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Beach is a tourist town for part of the year, some of the businesses on Archer Avenue cater entirely to that trade. They open a week before the Season officially gets under way, and close the week after Labor Day.
    When I was a kid, the Archers Beach tourist trade had a couple T-shirt and beach wear shops to choose from, an ice cream stand, couple of pizza stands, a sundry shop, Dynamite, a candy factory, a biker bar, a hobby and game store. The storefronts started out thick at the back side of Fun Country, at the bottom of the hill, but by the time you reached mid-hill, there were gaps in the line; maybe two, three empty stores sandwiched between those open for business.
    Growing up, I heard a lot of grumbling among my grandmother’s friends about the Old Days, when the Beach had three Seasons full of tourists, and Archer Avenue fairly glittered with lighted shops.
    Fashions change; fortunes fall. The dance bands and the off-Broadway shows stopped coming up to Archers Beach a long time ago. The Fire burned down a big swath of the posh hotels, gutted the fancy eateries. Owners chose not to rebuild—no insurance, or no heart, investors heard there was more return to be had someplace else.
    The Beach had a small renaissance as a blue-collar party-place in the 1970s; rock bands instead of Big Bands came up to headline on the World Famous Pier at Archers Beach, and things in general took an uptick.
    Then, a nor’easter chewed up the World Famous Archers Beach Pier and spat it out like so many toothpicks. The town rebuilt, though slowly, with the help of a couple of angel investors with old ties to the Beach, but it was a humble thing, compared even to its immediate predecessor, and the tourist trade . . . fell away.
    By the time I came onto the Beach, the Seasons had long been The Season, and had shrunk from twenty weeks to twelve.
    A twelve-week Season might interest investors in the glamorous resorts where children of wealth go to play, but the chilly and frankly old-fashioned coast of Maine just didn’t attract money from Away, anymore.
    That had all been bad enough: a town gone a little to seed, but still able to show a brave front, and to keep on with its own business during the three-quarters of the year when the townies had only themselves for company.
    By the time I’d returned from my self-appointed exile, though—matters had gone from bad to worse.
    There was still business on the hill—a computer repair shop, a styling salon, the hobby shop and the candy store still holding firm, a tattoo parlor that was new since my time, a store selling country craftworks imported from China, and St. Margaret’s Catholic Church, sitting at the intersection of Route 5 and Archer like a crown atop a bald head.
    The biker bar was gone, along with the antique store and the camera shop. Hell, even St. Margaret’s was on reduced hours—only two Masses on Sunday, and confessions heard by appointment.
    The state of Archer Avenue worried me, to tell the truth. Not that there was anything I could do about attracting viable business to town—that was what the Chamber of Commerce was for, and they were—reasonably enough—trying to hold their base at the bottom of the hill together. They’d managed to tempt a high-end deli into taking a chance on West Grand, along with a luxury day spa and a boutique wine store, but there they’d been helped out by the fact of some of the older motels reinventing themselves as beach condos for the pleasure of folks from Away.
    It’s an article of faith among most Mainers that people from Away always have money. Unfortunately, the high side of the hill was going to be a tough sell to money from Away, and if there wasn’t a certain ratio of shops to empty storefronts, even the businesses that’d been hanging on would starve for lack of foot traffic.
    I crossed Route 5, heading down the hill, St. Margaret’s on my right. Directly ahead of me, taking up most of the sidewalk, was a pair of