The Skeleton's knee

3

My office is located on the first floor of one of the Victorian era’s least successful architectural leftovers. The Municipal Building-all red brick, carved stone, and bristling with rooftop spires-is perched threateningly on a steep bank overlooking upper Main Street. It is also as functional as a survivor from a train wreck. Years of remodeling and renovation have introduced elements of modern heating and cooling into its labyrinthine soul, but, like Frankenstein’s monster, it seems cursed with a defective mind all its own.

The police department occupies the rear of the first floor and is cut in two by a broad central corridor running the length of the building. After parking my car in the rear lot, I was buzzed through the main entrance by Dispatch-Maxine Paroddy-who waved to me through the teller-like glass window. The chief ’s office was located in the far corner of the main reception area.

A visit to Tony Brandt’s office was like a trip back in time to when London heated itself with soft coal exclusively and force-fed black lung into all its inhabitants. Tony smoked a pipe. It was a habit he said he took up to cure his addiction to cigarettes, but he smoked so much, and in such airtight circumstances, I never could grasp the advantage of his conversion.

He looked up as I paused on the threshold, letting as much of the fog bank roll by as possible before plunging in. As always, I left the door open, and as always, he motioned me to shut it. “Rumor has it we have a dead body on our hands.”

I settled into one of the guest chairs as he leaned back and locked his hands behind his neck, ignoring the periodic beeps that softly emanated from his glowing computer screen. “So far, that’s about all we’ve got, that and the decades-old bullet wound that killed him. How’d you hear about it?”

“Harriet told me. I was trying to hunt you down for some paperwork. Give me the details.”

I told him what I had so far, which took ten minutes at most.

Brandt formed a steeple with his fingers and tapped his lips a couple of times before speaking. “None of this rings any bells concerning unexplained shootings or losses of money in recent years?”

I shook my head. “My immediate guess is that Mr. Fuller brought his problem with him from somewhere else. In fact, the money and the bullet may have nothing in common, and neither one is necessarily a sign of criminal activity. He could have been a wounded Vietnam vet with a mistrust of banks. I wouldn’t be surprised if we ended up handing it over to some other jurisdiction pretty quick, probably right after the FBI spits out something on his fingerprints.”

Brandt was silent a while before asking me, “What do you intend to do now?”

“I’d like to check his residence out. It seems to me that if we’re going to get a handle on this guy, that’s where we’ll find it. Maybe we can pin down a prior address and wash our hands of it even before the FBI stirs itself into action.”

In fact, I had my doubts things would be that easy, doubts I was pretty sure Brandt shared. But neither one of us was willing to turn up the political heat just yet, still smarting as we were from the fallout that had followed a recent grisly case involving a fellow officer, an investigation tainted by insider leaks and a lingering distrust among the various agencies involved.

Brandt gently tapped his pipe against his ashtray. “All right. That seems fine to me. You’re planning to secure a warrant?”

“Of course,” I answered.

“But check it out alone, okay?” Brandt added quickly. “No forensics team. If you find anything, you can call them in later. And I’ll let the State’s Attorney know.”

I shrugged. It was a little unconventional, not to mention impractical, but I sympathized with his wishful thinking. “You got it. One tiptoe at a time.”

Neither one of us smiled.

Two hours later, a signed search warrant in my pocket, I drove along Route 9 into West Bratt, in the local jargon-a barely separate entity from Brattleboro, segregated by I-91’s gray slab of a no-man’s-land, which only three streets manage to breach. The fire department has a substation out there, as does the post office, among a small cluster of commercial buildings at the intersection of Greenleaf Street and Route 9, but the sense of it being a community apart is lacking. Despite occasional yearnings to be otherwise, West Bratt remains a commercial tentacle on the map, dangling from downtown.

There is an irony to this, since the village of West Brattleboro cropped up in the late eighteenth century, around the same time Brattleboro, or the “east village,” was being settled. In fact, the west village was an independent entity until 1927, catering to the rural trade that found its bustling, more industrialized neighbor largely unapproachable. By then, however, the battle had already been lost, and West Brattleboro fell victim to urban Darwinism.

Seen on a map, it appears like a finger pointing west, the only intrusion on an otherwise-green expanse of forests, meadows, and farm fields. Indeed, once I’d turned off Route 9 onto Sunset Lake Road, I didn’t go more than a third of a mile before I was embraced by almost pristine countryside, making it hard to believe I was only minutes from the fourth-largest town in Vermont.

Sunset Lake Road climbs to the body of water after which it’s named-a large, beautiful hilltop pond ringed by rustic cabins and dense woods, but the lake is actually in Marlboro township, which raised a concern in my mind that Coyner’s property might be just outside the Brattleboro town line, and therefore outside my jurisdiction.

Along its least civilized stretches, the road has blind corners, intermittent axle-killing ditches, and spots where a storm’s runoff reduces it to little more than a stream crossing. But, as I approached the Hescock Road turnoff, the reward proved worth the effort: a view of operatic scale, extending south-southeast into Massachusetts and seemingly forever beyond. Blue-gray hills, spiky with evergreens, mountain passes, and the occasional glimmering pond, all lay before me with the same hopelessly romantic artificiality of a mural-sized landscape painting.

I followed Hescock’s semicircle less than halfway around until I came to an overgrown driveway marked by a mailbox and the rutted ‘passage of years’ worth of four-wheel traffic. The driveway-more of a grass-tufted lane-meandered a few hundred yards through the woods to a clearing as spectacular as the one I’d just left, where I found a rambling two-hundred-year-old Greek Revival farmhouse, weatherbeaten and in need of paint, but as seemingly solid as the boulders poking through the lawn at its feet. By my calculations, I was still within township lines.

I killed the engine and swung out of the car, automatically slinging the department’s 35-mm camera over my shoulder, my eyes irresistibly drawn to the hundred-mile view at my feet. I noticed then that a few leaves had already begun to fall from some of the trees, in reaction to the cool mountain air. In the valleys, early September meant a slight chill at night. Up here, that chill stayed put until mid-afternoon.

“Who are you?”

I turned at the voice, at once challenging but unthreatening. A tall, stooped, white-haired man had rounded the corner of the house, wearing a red-and-black-checked wool overshirt and holding a rake in his hand.

“Joe Gunther. I’m from the Brattleboro Police Department.”

The white-haired man stopped about ten feet from me, his pale eyes still and watchful, glistening like polished stones in a narrow, much-seamed, expressionless face. “What do you want?” He quickly glanced at the camera.

“Are you Fred Coyner?”

“Maybe.”

I couldn’t suppress a smile. The answer was a parody of how “real” Vermonters speak. “I wanted to ask you about Abraham Fuller. I gather you called the ambulance several days ago that took him to the hospital?”

Coyner remained silent, seemingly uninterested in confirming the obvious.

“Did anyone give you an update on his condition?”

“Nope.”

“He died, Mr. Coyner. Of a very old bullet wound.”

There was a prolonged silence, offset only by distant birdcalls and the occasional rustle of a few crown-top leaves. Coyner’s expression, what there was of it, didn’t change, but after a pause, he shifted his gaze from me to the vague and distant horizon.

“Did you know he’d once suffered a gunshot wound?” I asked.

He still refused to answer. After several moments of contemplation, he finally muttered, “What do you want here?”

“I’d like to see where he lived, for starters.”

“Follow me.” He turned abruptly and began marching off at a surprisingly fast and steady pace, given his age. Having studied him up close, I guessed him to be somewhere in his seventies, lean, leathery, and hard, shaped by the weather and the personal isolation he wore like a mantle.

We walked for about fifteen minutes along a barely discernible path cut through the woods. I noticed to my surprise that running from tree to tree, fastened by bent-over nails or just looped over branches, was a heavy-gauge electrical wire.

“How long did you know Mr. Fuller?” I asked at one point, but the response was much as I’d expected: total silence. We trudged along quietly after that. I began to wonder if I would get any more from Coyner than I might from the surrounding trees.

We eventually came to a large opening in the woods, completely hemmed in by an impenetrable circle of trees and brush, as if a giant’s heel had crushed the woods flat in this one spot, leaving the rest of the forest untouched. At the edge of the clearing, across from where we entered, was a small dirt-colored dwelling, a story-and-a-half high, mostly made of logs, with a rusty metal roof, a rough lean-to on one side, and a sturdy homemade greenhouse on the other. A metal chimney poked out of the building’s center. It was no thing of beauty, but it looked trim and tight and well tended. It was a shelter rather than an architectural expression, and as such it displayed a certain comforting appeal, like the huts and cottages in an illustrated children’s book.

The storybook feeling was heightened by the landscaping before us, in front of the house. Every inch of open space from the front door to the very edge of the woods was under cultivation. Rows of vegetables, banks of berry bushes, arbors, trellises, stepped-up flower beds, and a sinuous, graceful latticework of pathways all combined to form an intricate, soothing display of virtually every form of plant life supportable in this area. The weather had begun to turn cold up here, the first hard frosts were just a few weeks away, and the summer’s colorful cloak had begun to fade and unravel. Nevertheless, it was easy to see that this insulated, private spot, jealously tended and walled off from the rest of the world, was a paradise for six months of the year.

“Was Fuller the one with the green thumb, or is all this yours?” I asked my taciturn guide, who had entered the clearing with barely a glance around.

“His.”

We marched in single file up to the door of the cabin, where Coyner stepped aside like the bellboy to some hotel room, his job done, eager to be gone. He nodded his head toward the building, lifted the latch to the door, and pushed it open a few inches. “There. All yours.”

I called after him as he retreated back down the narrow central path. “You going to be around for a couple of hours? I’d like to ask you a few questions later.”

He didn’t answer.

I pushed the door wide open and stood there for a few moments, adjusting to the darkness within, taking account of what I could see, smell, and sense. I then took the camera out of its case and checked its settings.

It is a given at the start of a homicide investigation that everything and everybody should be approached fresh and without prejudice, so that no telltale signal, no matter how subtle, can be eclipsed by the investigator’s preconceptions. It is a fact, however, that such perfect neutrality is impossible.

Except here.

In my subconscious, ever since I’d first heard of him, I’d been trying to nail Abraham Fuller down. Images had stirred of a rough, back-to-nature man, a product of the sixties, with a secret, violent past. Dr. Brook and the hospital comptroller had introduced the notion of a loony hermit. But now, standing on the threshold to his house, confronted by the pristine, picture-perfect world he’d made for himself, I no longer knew what to think.

The cabin reminded me of the period set pieces found in popular folk museums, where the chairs, tables, rugs, and wall hangings of a specific era are arranged to evoke days long past. The effect usually flops, of course. The human energy is always missing, leaving behind only silence and an overwhelming sense of sterility. In Fuller’s place, the theme was contemporary, middle-class, woodsy-rural-and just as hollow.

Something else was missing, too. In every home, no matter how compulsive the owner, there are at least a few signs of life ongoing-bills piled on desks, tables covered with unread magazines, sinks filled with dirty dishes.

This place had none of that. It was as if the entire house had been plucked from a showroom and airlifted into the wilderness.

I stepped inside and closed the door behind me, acutely conscious of my intrusiveness. Shafts of sunlight angled in through the clear windows, reflecting off the pale, scrubbed wood floors and muted oval rag rugs. I took the first shot of a fresh roll of film.

The furniture was spare, old but not antique, solid and comfortable in appearance, obviously belonging to a determinedly single person: one armchair by the wood stove, one chair at the table, one set of eating utensils by the sink. More than the home of a man who lived alone, this was a monument to someone wishing absolute solitude.

As John Breen had described, the cabin consisted of one large room, where the kitchen occupied one end of a combination dining-living area. An overhead platform loft jutted out from one far wall, hovering between the floor where I stood and an overall cathedral ceiling of massive wooden roof beams. A ladder to the loft was attached to the wall and disappeared through a hole above.

The only jarring note to the sparse tidiness rested on the floor near the long harvest-style table. Again, giving substance to Breen’s testimony, I could see where Fuller had lain in his own filth for days, surrounded by a half-spilled bag of trail mix, some partially rotted fruit, and the wadded-up table runner that he had used to drag these items over to him. I could also see by the way it was disturbed that the soiled rug had been used as a blanket during the cold nights. Given the oddly impersonal feeling of this otherwise clean and comfortable home, the remains of Abraham Fuller’s agonizing ordeal packed the same emotional punch as a blood-soaked sheet in an aseptic, empty operating room.

I turned away from the spot. I wanted to find out about the man who had ended up on that rug, but to do so, I felt the need to conclude my examination of his house there, rather than begin it. I therefore started with the kitchen area, taking more pictures as I went.

Both Hillstrom and Brook had commented on Fuller’s diet. What I found, both in the cabinets and the electric refrigerator-an odd contrast to the hand pump by the sink-was an almost total absence of store-bought food. There were paper bags, glass containers, and tin boxes all carefully stored away by the dozen. None of them was labeled-another sure sign of single living-and all contained an assortment of mostly-to me-unrecognizable beans, flours, herbs, and liquids. For someone whose idea of heaven was boxed, neon-colored macaroni and cheese, I found Fuller’s cupboard about as appetizing as a bowlful of grass cuttings.

Nevertheless, I was impressed by the energy and specialized education it must have taken to fill all these shelves. It was, to my professional eye, a rarity, and any rarity in an investigation is also more easily traceable-or so I hoped.

My next stop was the loft, which turned out to be the bedroom. Again, I was struck by the monastic sparseness: a neat twin bed, a small chest of drawers half-filled with nondescript, sturdy clothes, and a simple night table with an electric lamp. The only window was mounted in the end wall, and the only place I could stand fully erect under the sloping roof beams was at the foot of the narrow bed, in the center of the platform. Looking over the balcony to the room below, the shafts of yellow sun highlighting the wool of the rugs and the grain of the wooden floor and furniture, I was briefly caught up by what must have made this place special to its occupant. There was a serenity to it, a hard-won peacefulness. This was a retreat more than a home, a shrine to what life could be away from the hubbub beyond the encircling trees.

I suddenly thought of another reason why such effort had been expended to keep this house so severely neat. It was a tribute to self discipline-a guide rule by which Fuller could measure his success at maintaining a straight and narrow line. In this light, the aesthetic serenity was not an end in itself, but a reward for personal sacrifice. Not for the first time, I wondered if Fuller might have isolated himself more for practical reasons and less for whimsical ones. Living here, he had only to look around every day to be reminded that being apart from the world was also being safe from the threats it might hold.

Not that I ruled out any whimsical motivations. To live in Brattleboro was to reside in one of the East’s more notable respites for aging hippies. I was very familiar with alternate lifestyles, and didn’t bat an eye at the usual naturalist trimmings, a good many of which were in evidence in this house. The difference in this case was the cash Fuller had on him, and the fact that it had appeared, bank-banded and moldy, out of a bag. That-and the bullet wound-introduced two distinctly foreign elements, and a suspicion that Fuller’s mania for neatness and isolation might be triggered by a self-preserving paranoia.

Downstairs, I’d noticed a wall full of books, but I hadn’t seen any photographs, address books, note pads, filing cabinets, or even a desk. There was nothing of a personal nature in the whole house, as far as I’d seen. It made me think of a recovering alcoholic not having booze in the house-because of the temptation it represented.

The one inconsistency with that observation hung over both the bed and the window behind it. It was a chart of some kind, framed and under glass. The chart was circular, its outer band divided into wedges like an old-time carnival money wheel, and parked within some of the wedges were odd symbols, like letters from an ancient foreign alphabet. The blank inner circle was crisscrossed by differently colored lines that connected the mysterious symbols in an overlapping series of triangles. To one side, apart from the circle, was another, much smaller chart, linear in form, with more enigmatic symbols and numbers.

I moved alongside the bed and leaned over to take a closer look. The entire document had been carefully handwritten, and it was not whole. One slightly fuzzy edge indicated that the paper, after much creasing, had been neatly torn across the top.

I hadn’t the slightest idea what this was, but I knew in my gut it was something personal to Abraham Fuller, which, in this barren context, made it-along with the obsessive vegetarianism-another rarity. Despite his obvious efforts to leave no trace of himself, I felt I was gaining, just a bit, on my quarry. I adjusted the camera to compensate for the light coming in through the window, then took several shots.

I returned downstairs to investigate the building’s two wings. The lean-to shed was accessible only from the outside, and it was filled with the expected accessories of a major-league organic gardener. In predictably neat rows and piles, I found a specialist’s paradise in tools, seeds, and natural fertilizers. Hanging in tidy bundles from the low rafters were mysterious bunches of bulbs, twigs, and dried leaves, all of which might have made sense to my long-dead father, who’d been a farmer, but not to me.

The other wing, the greenhouse, was connected by an inner door to the kitchen area. It was much larger than I’d thought from the outside, wider than the house, and half-buried in the ground, so that I had to climb down a short flight of steps to reach the wood-slatted floor.

The greenhouse was as extreme a contrast to the central part of the house as a flamingo is to a mud hen. Where the first had been almost sterile, this room was tropically wild, pungent with the strong odor of damp earth and sun-warmed vegetation, and blazing with the exotic colors that had already been muted outside by the coming winter’s cold.

Rows of slate-walled wooden tables lined the edges of the room, each filled with dark earth and a riot of plants and vegetables, some of which grew in vines up the translucent walls. Nestled in their midst, not far from the foot of the steps, was a large redwood hot tub hooked to a bizarre wood-fueled heating stove that was vented through the glass ceiling. From what I could tell, the stove warmed both the greenhouse and the tub’s water, presumably allowing Fuller to soak in near-Mediterranean splendor all through the winter months. I was relieved to find the tub. It not only partially addressed a question I had concerning the lack of a bathroom but it also offset the image I’d been forming of a blighted, driven, paranoid man. Here I could envision both a yearning and an outlet for leisure and comfort, as well as a relief valve for some of the compulsive behavior revealed by the rest of the house.

The other sanitation question I had was answered in a far corner of the greenhouse. Lurking among the overhanging plants, I discovered what functioned as a toilet-an earth-colored, seat-shaped contraption that I guessed was half old-fashioned outhouse and half highly engineered recycling device. Whatever it was, its function was obvious and its setting quite soothing.

I left the greenhouse to go to the bookshelves inside. Having seen how Fuller had pampered himself physically, I was all the more curious to find out how he’d entertained his mind.

Books, unlike health food, were something I could gauge with a certain confidence. Gail Zigman, my friend and lover of the past twelve years, proclaimed my appetite for reading to be as voracious and eclectic as my taste for bad food was predictable and self-destructive. It struck me as ironic, therefore, that the reverse held true for Fuller. His collection of books was surprisingly mundane.

Not that his library consisted of trashy beach novels. In addition to the Mark Twain I’d dug out of the red knapsack earlier, I found several of Twain’s other works, along with samplings of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Wharton, Poe, Hardy, Dostoyevsky, and a dozen others, all of whose last names alone were sufficient to identify the authors. But the actual titles were not always representative of the author’s best work. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was missing, for example, and What Is Man? and The Mysterious Stranger were parked side by side.

Still, the quality and diversity of the books was only part of the collection’s oddness. My own books were a jumble of mysteries, histories, novels of dubious merit, a couple of volumes on carpentry, old texts from college, police manuals, and even an abysmally written but stimulating work of pornography I’d once confiscated from a ten-year old. I suspected my library was like most people’s, built over decades, reflecting varying interests.

Abraham Fuller’s, by contrast, looked like the offerings of a low-rent book club specializing in high-profile modern novelists, and while some of the volumes were paperbacks, a few bound in leather, and some looked on the verge of collapse, others had never been opened. And all of them were shelved in alphabetical order by author.

Had Fuller been genuinely interested in his reading? Or was this home-built “collection of the masters” another task he’d set himself to keep on the straight and narrow, another form of self-discipline?

I shook my head at the track my own mind was taking. I needed more than an odd assortment of books, a fetish for neatness, and an obsession for gardening and home cooking to draw any accurate conclusions about the man who’d lived here. And that, in fact, was about all I had so far. Aside from the strange chart, I still hadn’t discovered a single personal document.

Which brought me back to the last place Fuller had occupied in the house.

I’d thought about his days-long ordeal on the floor quite a bit since I’d first heard Breen describe it. Indeed, my initial curiosity had focused on Fuller’s mobility: Could he have crawled somewhere in order to fetch his red bag during the five minutes the Rescue crew was outside? Breen had doubted it-such mobility would have allowed Fuller to avoid lying in his own waste. On the other hand, if a trip to the toilet, far off in another room and down a flight of stairs, might have been impossible, a short slide across the smooth floor-given the proper incentive-might not.

It was a reasonable enough assumption, I thought, and it implied a hiding place in the immediate vicinity. I pulled the rug away, hoping in vain that a trapdoor would theatrically appear. The boards were tightly joined, and the small cracks between them were packed with the microscopic dirt that even the most dedicated housekeeper can’t remove.

I sat back on my heels and looked around. Presumably, Fuller had stayed on the rug, expecting either to die or to recover on his own. The arrival of the ambulance, however, had prompted him to bear the increase in pain, move to where he kept his pack, and then return to the rug in order to cover his tracks.

I didn’t want to sell Breen short. He’d been a paramedic for years and had developed a pretty keen eye for other people’s pain tolerances. If Fuller had pulled the wool over his eyes, it had been only because the red pack’s hiding place was nearby.

My eyes traveled across the floor to the first likely spot: a freestanding counter opposite the kitchen sink, topped by an oversized chopping block that hid a large, now rank-smelling garbage pail. I walked over to it and tried to shift the counter, to no avail. I then moved the pail and examined the floor, checking the interior recesses of the counter. I found no signs of either a hiding place or a secret latch that might reveal one.

Disappointed, I continued on my miniature voyage from where the rug lay in a heap, imagining Fuller pulling himself across the floor, grimacing in pain, intent on his goal. Like a navigator on the sea, I sought out the next available landfall, turning to the kitchen counters lining the wall.

I worked methodically, figuring that Fuller’s obvious meticulousness would extend to how well he hid his most private belongings. I pulled out drawers, checked for cavities under the counters, and knocked against the back walls, listening for hollowness, and finally, under the sink counter, I came up with something.

Under normal circumstances, I would have missed it. The bottom of the cabinet under the sink had been lined with tile, presumably to combat the mildew and rot that normally accumulate there. Where most people put down linoleum for the same purpose, Fuller-typically, I now thought-had gone the extra distance. What caught my eye, however, wasn’t the craftsmanship but the fact that the sponges, brushes, bottles of biodegradable soap, and whatnot had all been shoved messily to one side, leaving half of the tiled surface clear.

It took me a while to find the catch, back behind the front brace into which the cabinet hinges had been screwed. In fact, I had to crawl half into the narrow space before I could even see it. But once discovered, I found it smooth and easy to operate. With a click, the uncluttered part of the tile flooring swung down like a trapdoor, revealing a damp-smelling black hole.

I pulled out a small penlight from my pocket and shined it into the hiding spot. It was fairly large, about the size of a steamer trunk, extending to the right and left of the opening, and it was lined with what appeared to be cedar, whose odor mixed unpleasantly with the dampness.

This, as far as I knew, was the sanctum sanctorum of Abraham Fuller-the one place on earth a very secretive man had chosen to hide his most personal possessions.

It was also not the cornucopia I’d been hoping for. There were no passports, photo albums, tape recordings, or reams of revealing letters. Instead, I found one mildew-dusted duffel bag and one old and brittle holster, packed not with a gun but with a partially filled box of.32-caliber ammunition, now green with age. The duffel bag, however, was filled with a small fortune in neatly bundled hundred-dollar bills.

Disturbing the cache as little as possible, in the hope that a forensic exam might later find what I could not, I gently poked around, taking more photographs. I found nothing more… Nor did I find the missing gun.

Everyone holds on to symbols of their past, some more ostentatiously than others. That’s what makes locating missing persons a little easier. They maintain contact with their former lives, either through pictures, or mementos, or even a single Mother’s Day card sent during a moment’s nostalgia.

Abraham Fuller had been more successful than most. He had kept only his money, an indecipherable chart on his wall, a box of bullets, and an empty holster. Eccentric as it all seemed, I could only hope it would eventually speak to me in a voice I could understand.