OCEAN CITY-- --On a rainy day, a beach town deflates. The whole myth of escape, of ceaseless fun and respite from reality, turns as sodden as day-old cotton candy.
Yesterday, the rain drew the tourists inland, and the talk was all about the dead babies. Some vacationers headed to Ocean City's latest and most unlikely attraction - the 200 block of Sunset Drive, where yellow crime tape circled the home and yard of Christy Freeman, arrested in connection with the death of an infant, one of four whose remains have been found in and around her house.
She lived just a couple of blocks from the boardwalk, on a street that is home both to locals and the vacationers who flock to seasonal rentals here every summer. Of course, the vacationers didn't know Freeman, any more than they know the waitresses who serve their meals or the DJs who entertain them at happy hour or the maids who clean up all that sand that they track inside.
No, it is the locals who know Christy Freeman, or thought they knew her. And what they say is that she seemed the same as always last time they saw her - except maybe a little more tired than usual. But even that wouldn't be out of the ordinary.
"Everyone is tired this time of year," said James Gray, who works at the pawn shop around the corner from Freeman's house.
By "everyone," Gray doesn't mean the tourists - the ones who arrive here with boogie boards and winter pale skin, to splash in the crowded surf during the day, start working on a tan, and get in line for the hotel buffets or the restaurants with names like Bellybusters.
No, by "everyone," Gray means the local workers. By this time of year, more than midway through the summer and with the end of the season in sight, the workers are tired. Since Memorial Day, they've catered to the visitors, the pleasure-seeking, sunburned, sometimes cranky and always demanding tourists, and by now the locals are the ones who need a vacation.
"I wave to her every day in the winter," said Todd Paulus, who lives down the street from Freeman.
In the summer, he doesn't see her much - either she's working, or he is. A painter and illustrator - and, when he needs extra money, one of those guys who approach you on the beach offering to do a caricature - Paulus said the surest way to tell if someone is local is by their pallor.
"We don't have time to go to the beach," he said.
Freeman kept particularly busy, neighbors said, running her Classic Taxi business and managing rental properties that she owned.
Gray, who moved here 22 years ago when the steel mill he worked for in Ohio shut down, rented an apartment from Freeman, and said she couldn't have been a nicer landlady.
Down the street, FBI personnel swarmed the yard around the home Freeman shared with her boyfriend and their four children. Bulldozers were overturning dirt, crews were clearing brush.
Such a crime scene would be gruesome anywhere, but it's especially so here, just a short stroll from the eternal amusements of the old Ocean City, of 1950s-era motels named after exotic locales, a miniature golf course that features a volcano and souvenir stores that for some reason all offer free hermit crabs.
That Freeman seemed a part of the winking fantasy world of this beach town - her company ferried tourists in restored '60s-era cars - makes the reality of the crime she is accused of all the more horrifying.
Even now, in the midst of an unfolding crisis, the town can't seem to completely switch gears, from vacationers' sandbox to scene of an unspeakable crime.
"This alleged crime has nothing to do with the tourist industry," Joel Todd, the state's attorney for Worcester County, says suddenly as he is briefing reporters on fine points of Maryland's fetal homicide law. "This is a terrific place to vacation. I don't know why everyone doesn't come here."
Even as out-of-town reporters are jotting his comments down, behind us, I hear someone making another typically downy ocean pitch. "I have a hotel on the boardwalk, if anyone needs a room," a woman is telling some of us nontypical tourists, armed as we are with cameras and notepads. "If you come to my bar, I'll give you free food."
Nikki Amos is part of a group that has come here from Mercer, Pa., every summer, renting in Freeman's neighborhood because it's quiet - "usually," she qualifies - and affordable.
"My mom and dad have been coming here since they were kids," is how her brother, Charlie Burk, quantifies how long they've been summering in Ocean City.
For some, the annual summer visits weren't enough, and they moved here permanently.
"My dad used to take me down here. Living in Maryland, you always came to Ocean City," said a Sunset Drive neighbor, Richard Kennon, who moved here from Frederick two years ago after a job-related disability sent him into retirement.
After years of watching one of several Ocean City Webcams on his computer, he still can't believe he lives here year-round. Soon, Labor Day will be here, and the crowds of outsiders will be gone, and the city will revert to the locals again.
"It's the best time," he said, "to be here."
jean.marbella@baltsun.com
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