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Liberty Park

So then, following a late lunch at Adorno’s Ristorante and the mutual recovery of the lost memory involving Wayne Louis Hornfly and Halloween night, Bobby suggested they engage in some brainstorming and that Liberty Park should be the place to do it. When Rebecca and Spencer at once agreed, Bobby felt warmed by a sense of friendship almost as intense as the camaraderie that he had enjoyed so much back in the day.

In the Genesis, on the way to the park, when the three amigos spoke of the Night the Tourist Was Eaten, you could hear that they capitalized those words. This doesn’t mean the consumption of the chubby-cheeked individual had been designated as an official holiday in picturesque Maple Grove. It certainly had not. But now that the amigos had been made to remember that long-forgotten episode, the incident possessed such terrible power that Bobby couldn’t speak of it entirely in lowercase, and his friends also adopted the subtle vocalization of capital letters. Indeed, standard capitalization did not seem adequate to convey the horror of that murder and devouring. However, while capital letters can be conveyed by the human voice, italics and bold typeface cannot; if we stop to consider the issue for a moment, which is what’s being proposed here, we must agree we can hear the capital letters in “Memorial Day” or “New Year’s Day,” but we are unable even to imagine how italics or bold typeface would sound.

During the drive, they arrived at the inescapable conclusion that memories of forgotten events were not returning spontaneously. Someone was intentionally unlocking their memory vaults, setting free the experiences of which all recollection had been previously denied. The unknown master of memory must be supernatural or in possession of a technology far more advanced than anything human beings had yet developed.

In the latter case, the amigos didn’t feel qualified to reach a conclusion about who the technological wizard might prove to be. If they failed to find clues that led them to the responsible party, they would perhaps consult a scientist—or better yet, a science-fiction writer, if one could be found who was sober.

That thought was not a slam at science-fiction writers. Bobby did not believe they were more likely to be inebriated than authors working in other genres. He’d met a lot of writers of all kinds, and it seemed to him that the stress of their work led them to strong drink more often than occurred with people in other professions. The pressing need to decide whether to use a comma or semicolon; whether to employ a dialogue tag, what that tag should be, and whether it should come before or after the speaker’s name; the extent to which the use of adverbs must be limited; whether the best choice for a lead character was a perky brain surgeon or maybe a moody homicide detective or perhaps a perky homicide detective studying to fulfill his or her dream of becoming a moody brain surgeon—several such decisions needed to be made every minute of a workday, without surcease. Any wrong choice could lead to a finished novel that, for the life of copyright, resulted in semiannual royalty payments that never exceeded nine cents.

This might seem to have nothing to do with visiting the scene of the beheading in Liberty Park and brainstorming about what steps to take next. But it’s important to understand that, as a writer perpetually seeking material and considering how it might best be developed, Bobby had mundane concerns that crowded into his mind along with all his worries about Hornfly. He was distracted . This is important because distraction could cause him to make a mistake and become the only amigo to die horribly. We should prepare for that eventuality.

And so, well fed but with much on their minds, the three amigos stepped onto the dance floor of the pavilion, though not to dance.

The late-summer day was pleasantly warm, with a light breeze out of the west. The leaves of the surrounding maples fluttered prettily, as if the trees were demure Japanese maidens concealing their lovely faces behind geisha fans.

On benches throughout Liberty Park, people were reading books, feeding squirrels, and mesmerized by their smartphones. A few walked dogs, and fewer pushed strollers carrying small children who were in various states of uneasy consideration of the world into which they had recently been thrust.

In the pavilion, Bobby’s attention—and that of his friends—was initially focused on the approximate center of the floor, where Wayne Louis Hornfly had stood over a mutilated corpse, holding a severed head by its hair. They half expected to find telltale stains that had been dulled but not worn away by thousands of feet engaged in waltzes, foxtrots, jitterbugs, cha-chas, sambas, and contemporary terpsichorean performances that had no names, prescribed steps, or obvious connections to the word dance. But of course, more than once over these twenty-one years, the concrete had been sanded, resealed, and polished to facilitate graceful movement.

Suddenly Rebecca’s eyes widened, and she covered her mouth with one hand. This could have meant she had eaten too much garlic, or it could have been an expression signifying that she’d had a surprise realization of such potential importance that she was reluctant to speak without being sure that she remembered correctly. The latter was the case, but she nonetheless at once revealed what had occurred to her.

“Bjorn Skollborg,” she said.

The name electrified Spencer. “Bjorn Skollborg! That was him. His severed head. His headless corpse. He was the one.”

“He and his wife, Karamia, both disappeared,” Bobby recalled.

“Their photos were in the newspaper, all over TV. I remember their faces clearly,” Spencer said, excited by the montage of images cascading through his mind. Indeed, his excitement was so keen that some might have found it unseemly under the circumstances. “Yeah, yeah, I remember exactly how the newspaper looked as it lay there on the table, in the booth at Adorno’s, with a piece of pepperoni that fell off Ernie’s slice and landed right on the face of Karamia, so it looked like Bjorn was married to a sausage. The polished-chrome napkin dispenser. The ceramic salt and pepper shakers, one a figure of a chef, the other a waitress with—”

“They were from upstate,” Rebecca interrupted. “They were staying at the Spreading Oaks.”

“It was just a motel then,” Bobby said.

“It’s just a motel now,” Rebecca said. “Bjorn owned a bakery up in the state capital. Karamia was a cupcake specialist.”

“The cops never did find their bodies.”

“Because they were eaten.”

“Never found their car, either.”

“At the time, we wondered if Hornfly could have eaten that, too.”

“We couldn’t go to the police.”

“Who would have believed us? A monster who eats people in two minutes, maybe three? Ten half-formed naked men lying in the church basement? Pastor Larry hates humanity and is part of some conspiracy to destroy us all? They would’ve locked us up in an asylum.”

“Enough of this,” Bobby said. “We’re just telling one another things that all of us already know, the way characters do in lazy books and movies to get information to the audience. We’ve got to decide what to do next.”

They were silent, lost in their thoughts, staring out at the maples and the velvety lawns that surrounded the pavilion, which was when Bobby noticed the person with binoculars. A figure in dark clothes. Standing in tree shadows. Toward the north end of the park. He would not have noticed that someone was conducting surveillance if the watcher hadn’t shifted position to get a better view, briefly stepping into a shaft of sunlight that flared off the lenses of the binoculars. Then the snoop took several steps forward, and Bobby saw something dreadful. Fear gripped him not merely because of the spy’s identity but also because he expected an encounter to ensue. As he watched, the dreadful thing happened again. The flare of a black cape. Britta.