She wriggled out of my slackened grasp and rolled over. I grabbed at her arm, but only got her backpack. A furry wad came loose in my hands as she wrenched herself free. She sprinted through the opening to the gardens. I jumped up after her, stuffing the furry thing into my jeans as I ran.
As I crashed through the garden, she disappeared around the pond, heading for the woods behind the outbuildings. I charged up the path and tripped again on the loose brick. I was going too fast to catch my balance. I flapped my arms desperately, trying to keep upright, but tumbled sideways into the water.
Weeds and leaves clogged the surface. The water was only five feet deep, but I panicked, terrified that I wouldn’t be able to push my head through the tangled roots. When I finally broke through the rotting mass, I was several yards from the edge. I was freezing, my clothes so heavy with the brackish water that they pinned me like an iron shroud. My feet slipped on the clay bottom and I grabbed at the plants to stay upright. Instead my numb fingers closed around clammy flesh. One of the dead carp. I backed away in disgust so fast I fell over again. As I righted myself, I realized it wasn’t a fish I’d seized but a human hand.
CHAPTER 4
Once More Unto the Pokey, Dear Friends
I worked my way around to the head. It was a man, weighted down by his clothes, kept on the surface only by the tangle of weeds underneath him. I thrust my arm under his armpits and started dragging him, holding his head out of the water in case he wasn’t really dead. My feet kept slipping on the clay bottom. Pulling his waterlogged weight through that muck made my heart hammer. After some enormity of time, I managed to haul him to the pool’s edge. The water was half a foot below the pool’s perimeter. I took a deep breath, squatted in the rank plants, and did a dead lift to get him out.
My arm and leg muscles burned with fatigue. My own legs weighed about a ton each now. I lay my torso across the marble tiles surrounding the pool and managed to swing my legs over the side. My teeth were chattering so violently that my whole body shook. I lay on the sharp stone for a minute, but I couldn’t afford to stay here. I was remote from help; I’d die of cold if I didn’t move.
I got to my hands and knees and crawled to the man. I rolled him onto his back and cleaned the weeds out of his mouth and undid his tie and pushed on his chest and blew cold trembly gusts into his mouth, and, after five minutes, he was still as dead as he’d been when I’d clutched his hand in the water.
By now I was so cold I felt as though someone was slicing my skull with
knives. I pried the zipper of my windbreaker open and dug my cell phone out of one of the pockets. I couldn’t believe my luck: the little screen blinked its green lights at me and I was able to connect to the emergency network.
The dispatcher had trouble understanding me, my teeth were chattering so loudly. Larchmont Hall, could I identify that? The first house you came to off the Dirksen Road entrance to Coverdale Lane? Could I turn on my car lights or the house lights so the emergency crew could find me? I’d come on foot? Just what was I doing there?
“Just tell the New Solway cops to come to Larchmont Hall,” I croaked. “They’ll find it.”
I severed the connection and looked wistfully at the house behind me. Maybe the dot-com millionaires had forgotten a bathrobe, or even a kitchen towel, when they left. I was halfway to the house when I realized that this would be my one chance alone with the dead man. Larchmont Hall was sealed like Fortress America. Without tools, with my hands frozen, I’d be lucky to have a door open before the cops arrived, but I’d have enough time to look for some ID on the body.
I found my flashlight near the French doors where I’d wrestled with the girl. I took it back with me to the dead man.
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: