Was this my teenager’s boyfriend? Despite her smart remark about the sex police, were they meeting in the abandoned house-somehow bypassing the security system? Maybe he hadn’t made tonight’s rendezvous because he’d tripped over the same brick I’d stumbled on, fallen into the pond and hadn’t been able to fight free of the weeds. He hadn’t tried to take off his shoes or his clothes: I’d undone his tie and unbuttoned his shirt to give him CPR, but he had on a suit; belt, fly button and zipper were all tidily done up. The suit looked as though it had been a good one, a brown wool basket weave. He’d been wearing wing tips, not an outfit for the woods at night.

I moved my flashlight along the length of his body. He was about six feet tall, lean, not particularly athletic looking. His skin was a nut-brown, his hair African, which might explain the need for secret meetings in an abandoned house. Or maybe it was his age-he looked to be in his thirties. I could picture the girl attracted to an affair with an African-American:

the need to do something dramatic, something daring, was clearly strong in her.

Who was he? Who would meet his end in such a remote and dreadful way? I dug gingerly into the pockets. Like my own, they had clammed shut from the weight of the water. I had a hard job of it, as cold as I was, and I wasn’t rewarded with much when I finished. There was nothing in his jacket or his front trouser pockets but a handful of change. I gritted my teeth and stuck my hand under his buttocks. The back pockets were empty, too, except for a pencil and a matchbook.

No one in the modern age goes out in a suit and tie without a wallet, or at least a driver’s license. But where was his car? Had he done like me? Parked two miles away and come on foot for a secret rendezvous?

My head was aching so with cold I couldn’t think clearly, but I’d have been bewildered even if I were warm and dry. I know people drown in their baths in panic, and I myself had had a moment’s terror when I couldn’t get my head through those weeds, but why had he left all his papers at home? Had he come here on purpose to die? Was this some dramatic event planned for my teenager? Come out in the open about me or I’ll kill myself? He looked in repose like a steady man, not the person for such dramatic actions. It was hard to picture him as Romeo to my young heroine’s Juliet.

When the emergency crew arrived, I was still holding his matchbook and pencil. I stuck them into my own jacket pocket so I wouldn’t be caught in the act of stripping the body.

Besides a fire department ambulance, the dispatcher had sent both the New Solway cops and the DuPage County sheriff’s police. The body had turned up in unincorporated New Solway. That technically meant it belonged to the DuPage County sheriff, but the dispatcher had also notified the New Solway police. Even in my frozen state, I could understand why. The houses along Coverdale Lane were a who’s who of greater Chicago Big Money: New Solway cops would want an inside track on who to blame if the local barons-or baronesses-got testy.