There were people in the park—a couple of teenagers horsing around on the swings, a man with a toddler on the baby slide, two guys shooting baskets—but Tupper paid no attention to them. Whistling, he rolled a pale white calf with foot attached in the mulchy dirt beneath a hedgerow and left the foot displayed, as if the rest of the body might be hidden somewhere beneath the branches. Next, he knelt down in a pile of dried leaves adjacent to the tennis court and removed the canvas pack from his back. Inside was the torso from one of his oldest fabrications: “Friend.” It was supposed to sit in your house and keep you company in an unthreatening, undemanding way. It wasn’t supposed to be cute like a stuffed animal, or needy like a live pet; it was supposed to be human-ish. The skin was a sort of brownish gray, like the color of a mouse, and had dimpled with age. With its featureless, hairless head and rigid limbs hacked off, Friend looked like a target for shooting practice.

Tupper stood it up in the leaves, and then knocked it down again. He dragged it around and kicked soil and leaves and sticks over it. The torso was almost completely camouflaged, but perhaps that was best. Ironically, Friend was the most artificial-looking body part in his collection.

Was there a connection between Elizabeth’s staging of her death and rebirth and this trail of body parts? Tupper wondered. What was her intention? Maybe that was part of the process—part of the hunt—to wonder, to feel confused.

The man was strapping the toddler into its stroller now. They were leaving, which was good, because Tupper wanted to dangle a leg from the top of the big winding slide, let go, and see where it landed. The monkey bars would be perfect for an arm.

“Don’t go overboard,” Elizabeth had warned. “Just a light touch. This isn’t a carnival show. Be provocative, not obvious. Best-case scenario, no one even notices them for days and it rains and green stuff starts to grow on them. The more integrated into the environment the better.”

Weedy vines grew up the fence behind the big-kid swings. If only the teenagers would leave. The sun had set. Soon it would be very dark. If he creeped them out enough, they might take off.

He dragged the trash bag full of limbs across the rubber mats of the playground. The teenagers, a boy and a girl, both long-limbed and skinny, were lying beneath the swings, batting at each other like kittens and laughing their heads off.

Tupper sat down on a bench and tried to look threatening. The teenagers took no notice of him. He cleared the mucous from his throat and spat into the dead leaves. Nothing. He reached down, pulled a foot from the bag, and cradled it in his lap.