"So what happened? How'd the guy die?"
"I don't know. He had this big gash in the back of his head, and he was face down in the water, so I don't know, I get the idea the cops think somebody killed him, but it could have been an accident, easily. It's very slippery down there, he could have slipped on a rock or something, then fallen in the water and drowned. Did I ever tell you about, when I was a kid, this guy I almost found dead, but instead my friend found him? It was almost like this. Guy falls down, then drowns."
"Yeah, you told me."
"Anyway, I'm gonna walk home now, start writing something for you. What did you say, about six hundred words or something?"
"Listen," Sarah said, softly. "About that. They don't want it."
"Whaddya mean? I thought it was a great angle. Former reporter, goes on to write science fiction, finds a body. It's a perfect first-person thing. It would be what I believe you call an exclusive."
"I know, and I thought it was a great idea. But we've already heard back from Scott and Folks." The reporter and photog I saw. "And they've phoned in, say it's just some guy, might be murder, might not."
"Yeah, so?"
"Well, it happened in Oakwood. The main desk doesn't care about the suburbs. Nothing ever happens there."
"But something did just happen here."
"Yeah, but the way they see it is, even when something does happen in the suburbs, it's not worth running, because nothing ever happens there."
I stood there at the edge of the woods, where there were seven police cars lined up along the shoulder of the road, and said nothing.
"You there?" Sarah asked.
"Yeah. I'll talk to you when you get home."
o o o
While I would have been up for writing an account of my early afternoon adventure, I wasn't much in the mood for getting back to work on my book. But I sat down at the computer anyway, and there was an e-mail from my editor, Tom Darling. It was, for Tom, a fairly long message. It read, "Whr is it?" Tom was the kind of guy who could edit Moby Dick down to a news brief.
I wasn't overdue with the manuscript. My contract gave me nearly another month, but Tom was used to me handing things in ahead of schedule, so for me to be taking the time I was allowed was probably throwing him into a panic. The sequel to Missionary was already in the fall catalogue, so not to deliver it on time would be something of an embarrassment to Tom and those to whom he answered. I clicked on "Reply" and wrote, "Had computer virus, lost manuscript with only one chapter to go. Will have to start again. Hope this isn't a problem." And then I clicked on "Send."
Tom must have been sitting on his computer when my note arrived, because less than two minutes later I was notified of a new message. It read, "Dnt fck wth me." How a guy with these kinds of typing and people skills ended up as an editor with a name like Darling was beyond me.
I called up a chapter I'd been working on, but couldn't concentrate. I brought up a Star Wars computer game and tried to destroy the Death Star, but even the images of intergalactic explosions couldn't erase Samuel Spender, as I'd last seen him, from my mind.
So I turned away from the computer, looked at a shoebox full of receipts and tax statements, and tried to occupy my mind with financial matters. Soon I'd have to gather all my tax stuff together and try to figure out my annual return. Rather than hire an accountant to figure out all the possible deductions, I usually tried to do it myself, relying on bits and pieces of information gleaned from talking to others who worked from home, like Trixie.
She was a better person to talk to than most. She'd sat at the kitchen table and told me about her business as an accountant. She suggested that maybe it was time to stop getting free advice, much of it unreliable, and go to an expert. I could turn everything in the shoebox over to her, and she would find more deductions than I ever could. I decided right then and there to bring my shoebox over to Trixie. The truth was, I wanted to tell someone about what had happened, about finding my first body. I was, to put it mildly, a bit wired.
I decided to call her first.
I got out the phone book, then couldn't remember her last name. I wasn't sure I'd ever known her last name. For that matter, what was Earl's last name? I'm not good with names, first or last. You send me into a party, introduce me to a dozen people, and I won't retain so much as an initial.
I thought maybe if I looked up accountants in the yellow pages, when I came across Trixie's last name it would jump out at me. There were three full pages of them, and I ran my finger down one column after another, scanning, looking for a name that would make me go "Yes!"
Nothing.
I repeated the exercise, this time looking for an accountant whose office was on our street. No luck there, either.