The Search for Artemis - By P. D. Griffith Page 0,7
went, he always became aware of the person paying for a pretzel at the cart or the cash lying in a musician’s guitar case as they played to the passersby at the edge of the park. Since he’d run away from home, he’d burned through all of the money that was in his Treasure Island book.
After a week in the park, Landon thought he knew the place like it were his own room, but soon he began to notice men in black suits strolling around. They weren’t regulars; he would have known. The only people he ever saw in suits at the park came with a few other people and they’d sit on a bench and eat a sandwich for a quick lunch—in and out in thirty minutes tops. These other guys would wander around the footpaths for a while and just disappear. The first time Landon noticed them, he thought he needed to keep an eye out, and if they tried anything, to run as fast as his legs could carry him to one of his hideouts.
As the days passed, they seemed to multiply. What started out as two of them soon became five and then seven, and Landon got more nervous with each new addition. They still hadn’t tried anything, but they quickly moved from strolling the footpaths to loitering about thirty or so yards from Landon’s position, wherever that might be. That night, he decided to leave the park and relocate somewhere else under the cover of darkness. They were closing in and he still hadn’t gotten any closer in his attempts to remember that night.
His notebook contained the same information scribbled one page after the other with a bunch of random doodles and drawings covering the margins, but after the first few days, he began to believe he remembered other things from that night. First, he thought he possibly saw his father’s hand move from under the couch. It was nothing more than a flick of his finger, but Landon could see it. Later he could have sworn that he remembered seeing his mother’s chest moving up and down after he removed all the books from on top of her. After a week, Landon was convinced that his parents still lived, but he feared going back home until he could remember what happened during his blackout. He still didn’t know if he was responsible.
Since he couldn’t remember, Landon started to concoct all sorts of theories as to what potentially happened that night. In one scenario, the thud that woke him up in his room was the sound of a mobster breaking into the apartment and searching for something that he believed they were hiding. That explained the state of the apartment, as the thug would have torn through the place searching for whatever it was he wanted, and it explained why Landon couldn’t remember it. He thought that after he opened his bedroom door, the mobster whacked him on the head and knocked him out before he saw anything. It seemed like a plausible explanation, but what would his parents be hiding and why would Landon’s room be left untouched?
Another scenario involved his father not being a mechanic but instead a special weapons developer for a secret branch of the government. He’d brought his most recent project home, a fireless explosive device that only destroys the contents of a single confined space. It was developed with the intention to be used in special situations where the government wanted to eliminate a target while minimizing civilian casualties. That explained why Landon’s bedroom seemed untouched, but that didn’t explain why he survived. There were always holes in his theories.
One afternoon, Landon remembered something he read in one of his textbooks; the concept was called Occam’s Razor. Supposedly, when trying to solve a problem, the simplest explanation is generally the correct one, but Landon didn’t want to believe that. If that was true, Landon did it. It was the simplest explanation, but Landon couldn’t think of any possible way he could have caused all of that destruction. One day, Landon brought himself to write, “I did it,” into his notebook, but since then he’d scratched through it so many times that he’d torn three pages.
For the next week and a half, Landon never stayed in the same place for more than two nights. By then, the suited men started popping up in crowds and around corners. This constant worry of getting caught began to take its toll. Landon became