Linwood Barclay - Bad Move

For years, I envied my friend Jeff Conklin, who, at the age of eleven, found a dead guy.

We were in Grade 6, in Mr. Findley’s class, and most days we walked home together, Jeff and I, but this particular day my mom picked me up after school not only because it was raining pretty hard, but also because I had a checkup booked with Dr. Murphy, our family dentist. Jeff didn’t have the kind of mom who cared about picking him up at school when it was raining, so he struck out for home, no umbrella, no raincoat, stomping through all the puddles in his sneakers.

At one point, the heavens opened up and the rain came down so hard the streets flooded. I remember as we were pulling into the dentist’s parking lot you couldn’t see past the windshield, even with the wipers going full blast, thwacking back and forth on our 1965 Dodge Polara. It was like we weren’t in a car, but in the Maid of the Mist , right under Niagara Falls.

Meanwhile, the worst of the rain had let up a bit as Jeff, now as wet as if he’d done ten laps at the community pool, rounded the corner onto Gilmour Street. Up ahead there was a blue Ford Galaxie pulled up close to the curb, and stretched out on the pavement next to it, on his stomach, was a man.

At first Jeff thought it was a kid, but kids didn’t wear nice raincoats or dress pants or fancy shoes. It was a very small man. Jeff approached slowly, then stopped. The man’s short legs were stretched out into the street, shoes angled awkwardly, and from where Jeff stood, it looked like his head was cut off at the curb, which really creeped Jeff out.

He took a few more steps, the world engulfed in the sound of rain, and shouted, “Mister?”

The little man said nothing, and didn’t move.

“Mister? You okay?”

Now Jeff was standing right over him, and he could see that the man’s chest was positioned over a storm drain where water was coursing around him and disappearing. His right arm and head were wedged into the drain. Now Jeff could see why it appeared that the man’s head had been cut off.

“Mister?” he shouted one last time. Jeff confided to me that he wet his pants then, but it was okay, because he was already soaked and no one would be able to tell the difference. He ran to the closest house, banged on the door, and told the elderly man who answered that there was a dead man’s head in the storm sewer. The old man had a look at the weather and decided to call the police rather than conduct his own investigation.

As best as the police could tell, this was what happened: The man-his name was Archie Roget, and he was an accountant-had left work early and was planning to run a few errands on the way home. He could tell by the approaching clouds that the light rain was about to turn into a deluge, so he pulled over to the curb to get his raincoat out of the trunk. (His wife told police he never went anywhere without a raincoat in the trunk, or a cushion on the front seat to help him see over the steering wheel.) He opened the trunk with his keys from the ignition-this was in the days before remote trunk releases-slipped on the coat, and slammed the trunk shut. Then, somehow or other, he lost his grip on the car keys, which slipped between the iron bars of the storm sewer grate. It was the kind that hugged the curb, where there was a broader vertical opening wide enough to slip an arm in, at least.

Roget got down on his hands and knees, must have been able to see his keys, and reached in. But his arm, like the rest of him, was a few inches too short, so to get a bit more length, he wedged in his head, which was, like the rest of him, tiny.

And his head got stuck.

And then the downpour struck.

Just as the wipers on my mom’s car couldn’t stay ahead of the rain, the storm drains couldn’t empty the streets fast enough. They backed up, and Archie Roget’s lungs filled with rainwater.

The circumstances of the man’s death were so bizarre that the story made the papers, even hitting the wires. Jeff was interviewed not only by local reporters, but by newspapers from as far away as Spokane and Miami. He was, at least at Wendell Hills Public School, a celebrity. And if it hadn’t been for my dental appointment, I might have been there to share the spotlight. This was my introduction to the cruelties of fate.

I moped around the house for nearly a week. How come I never got to find a dead guy? Why did Jeff get all the breaks? Everyone wanted to be his friend, and I tried to bask in his reflected glory. I’d tell my friends at Scouts, a different group of boys from my school friends, “You know that story, about the guy who drowned with his head in the storm drain? Well, that was my best friend who found him, and I woulda been with him, but I had to go to the dentist.” No cavities, by the way. A perfect checkup. I could have skipped the appointment and it wouldn’t have mattered. The ironies were enough to make an eleven-year-old’s head spin.

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.

Willow Creek, to be exact. Where my wanderings often take me. Listening to shallow water cascading over small rocks can clear the mind and help one work out plot problems. But when you’re engaged in thoughts of interplanetary exploration and whether God can spread himself thin enough to oversee worlds other than our own, there’s nothing like finding a guy with his skull bashed in to bring you back to reality.