The Late Unpleasantness

The Late Unpleasantness is what Sandpoint calls the period five years before the present day when two separate catastrophes struck the town in sufficiently close succession to blur together in collective memory into a single sustained wound. The first was the fire that destroyed the original chapel of Desna, claiming the life of the beloved head priest Ezakien Tobyn and his adoptive daughter Nualia, a tragedy that the town mourned openly and has been quietly rebuilding from ever since in the form of the new cathedral whose consecration marks the opening of the Swallowtail Festival. The second was the series of murders carried out by the killer the town came to call Chopper, which cost Sandpoint its sheriff and several of its citizens before it ended, and which left a different kind of mark — not the clean grief of loss but the murkier discomfort of having been unsafe in a place that was supposed to be safe, and of having failed to see something that in retrospect seems like it should have been visible.
The two events are linked in town memory not because they were connected in fact but because they arrived together and departed together, leaving Sandpoint to rebuild its physical and psychological infrastructure simultaneously. The town has done that rebuilding with the quiet determination of a community that has decided it is not defined by its worst years, and by most measures it has succeeded — Sandpoint is a functional and largely contented place, and the Swallowtail Festival is in many ways a genuine expression of that recovery. But the Late Unpleasantness has not been forgotten so much as carefully set aside, and in a town this size, with memories this long, set aside and gone are very different things.