The Skeleton's knee

2

Since the Rescue, INC. ambulance service had delivered Fuller to the hospital, I made them my next stop after depositing the money at police headquarters.

Located off Interstate 91’s Exit 1, Rescue, Inc.’s broad, squat building sat on a small knoll overlooking where Canal Street petered out as a low-rent, commercialized, somewhat seedy urban drag, to be renamed Chicken Coop Hill on the far side of the underpass-a narrow, rural ribbon of tarmac heading toward Guilford and the southern Vermont hinterlands. The abrupt contrast was typical Brattleboro: an aging, turn-of-the-century industrial town, in spots old enough, worn enough, and frail enough to appear threatened by the encroaching countryside. It wasn’t true, of course. Brattleboro was expanding, if timidly. It just had the New England sensibility to be subtle about it.

I didn’t see anyone around when I got out of my car. All three ambulances and the crash truck were parked on the apron before the two huge, open garage doors, the early-fall air still balmy enough to be welcome inside and out. I stood in the cavernous central truck bay for a moment and listened for voices, hearing a murmur emanating from behind a door far to the back.

I crossed the bay, knocked once, and opened the door to what looked like a classroom, complete with blackboard. Seven people, five of them in uniform, sat side by side at a pair of long tables, stuffing, stamping, licking, and cataloguing thousands of envelopes.

Alphonse Duchene, the burly, white-haired president of the company, raised his head and grinned. “Caught us in the act.”

“Fundraising time?”

He rose, stretching his back, and walked over to shake my hand.“Forever and always. Want to join in?”

I looked at the dulled expressions of his colleagues. “Not even maybe. I wanted to ask you about a call you had a few days ago.”

His expression, while still genial, became slightly guarded. “We might be able to tell you a little, assuming it doesn’t trespass into patient confidentiality.”

“The patient’s dead.”

Now he looked downright nervous. Ambulance personnel, like police officers and firefighters, have come to fear lawsuits more than personal injury. I quickly took him off the hook. “Name was Abraham Fuller. You picked him up for back pain and leg paralysis. He died in the hospital two days later of unrelated causes, more or less.”

Duchene’s face cleared somewhat, but I noticed all activity had stopped at the long table. One of the men in uniform, a paramedic I knew slightly, named John Breen, spoke up. “I was on that one. What killed him?”

“Aneurysm. There’s no question of impropriety. You guys did it by the numbers, as did the hospital staff. It was just a long-standing thing that finally let go.” I had no interest in revealing too much. We had our own confidentialities to protect.

My answer apparently did the trick, however. Duchene, the happy host once more, escorted me back out the door, calling over his shoulder as he went, “John, why don’t you join us in my office?”

The three of us cut across the truck bay to a small glass-walled room in the far corner. Duchene held the door open, made sure we were both settled comfortably, and then planted his considerable hulk behind a cluttered metal desk, locking his hands behind his neck. “So, what’s on your mind?”

“Where did you pick him up?”

Breen made a face. “The far side of the moon. About three miles up Sunset Lake Road, out of West Bratt, there’s a horseshoe-shaped road.”

“Hescock Road,” I put in.

“Right; Hescock or Goodall, depending on who you talk to. Well, it leads to an old farmhouse owned by…” Breen hesitated a moment, thinking back. “Ed? No, Fred Coyner. He was the one who called us.”

“So Fuller lived with Coyner?”

Breen laughed and shook his head. “No, no, it gets worse; it took us over forty minutes to get to this place from the time we got called. Coyner owns the property, but Fuller lived in a small building a half mile behind the main house, deep in the woods. We couldn’t drive the rig to it-there was barely a track, much less a road-so we had to hoof it with the cot. Another fifteen minutes…”

“What did you find?”

“The patient lying on the floor of a central room-living room, kitchen, and everything else combined. He was in a lot of pain, had probably been there for several days. He was fully oriented; he’d managed to drag some food off a table nearby to sustain himself, but he was slightly dehydrated.”

“He wasn’t happy to see us. Coyner had warned us that he’d made the call over Fuller’s objections-that happens a lot, and we often end up not transporting-but this was an extreme case. The guy was really furious, accused Coyner of a ‘breach of faith,’ whatever that meant.”

“But still you transported. You can’t do that if the patient doesn’t want it, can you?”

“Not unless he’s deemed incompetent,” Duchene put in.

“He wasn’t that,” Breen resumed. “This was a highly intelligent man. He was just angry, outraged that we’d invaded his privacy. It took a long time just to get him to talk about why we were there; he kept asking why he couldn’t die in peace. I got the impression he’d been living as a hermit, totally cut off from the world around him.”

“He really thought he was dying?”

Breen shrugged. “I don’t think he meant that literally-hard to say. Of course, seeing how things turned out, maybe he knew something we didn’t. At the time, he was in agony, and I just wrote it off to that.

“Also, we finally did talk him into going with us, which reinforced my feeling he was being a little overdramatic.”

I didn’t fault Breen his seeming callousness. As with cops, lots of people in the rescue business grow numb to some of the subtleties of human anguish; it was less a hardness-although it could be that, too-and more a sense that they’d seen it all before. “Did you notice a dirty red knapsack?”

Breen shook his head. “Not at first. After we’d finally convinced him to come along with us, he made us all go outside for a few minutes. When we came back in, he was holding the pack. Never let go of it all the way to the hospital.”

“He show you what was inside?”

“Nope. And it could have held anything-two hundred toothbrushes, for all I know. Nothing else had been normal about the call.”

“How many minutes were you outside?”

Breen paused, thinking back. “Couldn’t have been more than five.”

“And you didn’t see the knapsack before going back in?”

“I didn’t, no. I generally look around quickly when I enter a scene, to check for any danger, or clues to the patient’s condition, like pill bottles or needles or whatever. I don’t remember seeing the pack, but then it probably wouldn’t have registered anyway, since it wouldn’t have told me anything.”

“But if it had been hanging from a hook on the wall or in a closet, could he have reached it? How helpless was he?”

“He could barely move. Like I said, he’d been there for days, and the only food he’d been able to reach was on a nearby table-a bag of trail mix and a bowl of fruit. He’d only gotten that because he’d pulled on the tablecloth and dragged it to within reach. He was lying in his own waste, if that gives you any idea.”

It did. Fuller had been a desperate man, torn between a passion for solitude and the need for help. I closed my small notebook and stood up. “Well, I guess that’s it for the moment. I’ll let you get back to your paper cuts.”

I put my hand on the doorknob and then hesitated, looking back at Breen. “How did you convince him to go with you?”

“I think he finally convinced himself. At first, when he was trying to send us away, he kept saying it would pass, as it had before, but I don’t think he really believed it. No one wants to live with that much pain if there’re people around who can help.”

“He said the pain had passed before? Did he explain that?”

“Nope. When I asked him later if this had ever happened before, he denied it. By that point, of course, he didn’t have much credibility with us, since he’d also denied having a date of birth, a Social Security number, or even a mailing address.”

I thanked them both and headed back to my car. A hermit, Fuller may have been, but not just that. I remembered the contents of the red bag: Aside from the money, there’d been a change of socks and underwear, a few toilet articles, and a book by Mark Twain, all of which, now that I thought back, had been both musty-smelling and brand-new, with the wrappers still on and the back of the book unbroken.

During the Korean War, one of the things I’d learned the hard way was always to have a pack ready at hand, something light and compact, containing the essentials of survival, that could be grabbed at a moment’s notice, along with my rifle. Life then had been an uncertain thing, with the Chinese threatening to overrun us at any time. We never knew if our tenuous connection to the rear might not vanish altogether. I couldn’t help wondering if Abraham Fuller hadn’t acquired the same habit of always having the bare essentials packed and ready by the door, including ten thousand dollars in antique bank notes.

I could blame the Chinese army, but what had been Fuller’s dread? One obvious suggestion was the police. But despite his initial resistance, Fuller had finally agreed to go to the hospital, possibly to have his old bullet wound discovered, and therefore be interviewed by us. That risk couldn’t have escaped him.

So either the police were not the stimulus that kept him packed and ready to run-which implied that somebody else was-or he was a demented and paranoid reclusive with a fondness for classic American literature.