The Skeleton's Knee (4 page)

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.