My dad felt there was at least one lesson to be learned. “When you grow up, Zack, you remember to join the triple A. It’s like insurance. If that man had belonged to the auto club, someone else would have come and got his keys for him and he’d be alive today. Don’t you forget.” This may have been when I started developing my lifelong obsession with safety, but more about that later.

The reason this whole thing with Jeff was such a big deal, of course, is that finding a dead body’s not the sort of thing that happens to you every day. Other than Jeff, I can’t think of a single friend or acquaintance who’s ever stumbled upon a corpse. Not that I’ve asked them all. It’s hardly necessary. If one of your friends finds a body, chances are good that the next time you see them, they’re going to mention it. Right away. It’s a great conversation starter. As in: “Oh my God, you won’t believe what happened on Friday. I was taking a shortcut, that alley behind the deli? And there’s these legs sticking out from behind a garbage can.”

There are some body-finding circumstances I don’t count. Like if you go to check on your ninety-nine-year-old Aunt Hilda, who lives alone and hasn’t answered the phone for three days, and find her rigid in her favorite chair, the TV on, the remote on the floor by her feet, the cat climbing the curtains in hunger. That kind of thing happens. That’s natural.

And there are certain lines of work where discovering a dead body’s no big thing. Police officers come to mind. A lot of times, they’re looking for a body before they actually find it, so you lose the element of surprise. Finding a body when you’re already looking for a dead body isn’t quite the same as when you’re just out for a stroll. “Finally, there it is. Now we can get some lunch.”

I’m an unlikely candidate to find a body. First of all, I’m not, unlike a police detective, in a line of work where finding a victim of foul play is a common occurrence, unless you know something about science fiction authors that I don’t. And second, when I found a body, I wasn’t living in some big city, where, if you believe what you see on TV, people come across dead people about as often as they go out for bagels.

I found my body in the suburbs, where, although I do not have actual statistics to back this up, people are more likely to die of boredom than run into someone nasty. I came across a corpse in as tranquil and beautiful a spot as you could hope to find.