The two groups jockeyed for dominance in inspecting the body. They wanted to know who I was and what I was doing there. Through my

chattering teeth I told them my name, but said I couldn’t talk until I was some place warm.

The two forces bickered for another long minute while I shivered uncontrollably, then compromised by letting the New Solway police ride along while the sheriff’s deputies took me to Wheaton.

“My God, you stink,” the sheriff’s deputy said when I climbed into his squad car.

“That’s just the rotting vegetation,” I muttered. “I’m clean inside.”

He wanted to open the windows to air out the smell, but I told him if I ended up with pneumonia I’d see he footed the medical bills. “You have a blanket or an old jacket or something in the trunk?” I added. “I’m wet and freezing and your pals waiting for the shift change so they wouldn’t have to take the call didn’t help any: it’s been over forty minutes since I phoned.”

“Yeah, bastards,” he said, then cut off the rest of the sentence, annoyed with me for voicing his grievance. He stomped around to the trunk and fished out an old towel. It couldn’t be any dirtier than I was: I draped it around my head and was asleep before the car left the yard.

When we got to the sheriff’s headquarters in Wheaton, I was so far gone I didn’t wake up until some strong young deputy yanked me out of the backseat and braced me on my feet. I stumbled into the building, joints stiff in my clammy clothes.

“Wake up, Sleeping Beauty,” the deputy snapped. “You need to tell us what you were doing on private property out here.”

“Not until I’m clean and dry,” I mumbled through cracked and swollen lips. “You must have some clothes out here I can borrow”

The deputy who’d brought me in said that was highly irregular, they didn’t treat housebreakers like hotel guests in DuPage County. I sat on a bench and began undoing the zipper on my windbreaker. A chunk of some dead plant had worked its way around the pull. My fingers were thick with cold, and I worked slowly while the deputy stood over me wanting to know what in hell I thought I was doing. The zipper took all my attention. When I finally had the jacket undone, I pulled off the wet sweater underneath. I was starting to take off my bottom layer, a T-shirt, when he grabbed my shoulder and yanked me back to my feet.

“What are you doing?”

“What it looks like. Taking off my wet clothes.”

“You can’t do that out here. You produce some ID and some reason for being on private property in the middle of the night.”

By now, a number of other officers, including a couple of women, had joined him. I looked past him and said to them, “Darraugh Graham asked me to check on Larchmont Hall. You know, the old Drummond estate where his mother lived until the year before last. It’s been standing empty and she thought she was seeing housebreakers. I found a dead man in the pool behind the house and got thoroughly soaked pulling him out. And that’s all I can say until I get clean and dry.”