Chapter 6: Eleven in Aisle Seven

The grocery store was called Melvald's General Store, according to the sign above the entrance, though the 'l' in Melvald's had partially separated from its mount and now leaned at a discouraged angle. Holmes noted this without breaking stride. He had come for a telephone directory and, if one could be located, a street map of Hawkins with sufficient detail to overlay against the pushpin progression he had memorized from Hopper's bulletin board. He had not come for a case development. Case developments, in his experience, arrived with complete indifference to convenience.

The store's interior was the particular disorder of a place that sold everything and arranged nothing. Fluorescent tubes overhead — these ones functioning without interruption, he noted automatically — threw a flat white light across towers of canned goods, a rotating rack of paperback novels, a refrigerated case running the length of the far wall. The smell was industrial cold and something sweetish underneath it, the ghost of produce. A bell above the door had announced him to a teenager at the register who did not look up from the textbook spread open on the counter.

Holmes moved toward the rear of the store, where reference materials would logically be shelved if the establishment maintained them. He passed the breakfast goods aisle without looking down it.