The Skeleton's Knee (5 page)

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.

THE CABIN HAD NO PHONE
, so I retraced my steps through the garden, along the overgrown path, and back to my car, where I’d earlier tossed the department’s new cellular phone as an afterthought.

Tony Brandt had wanted me to investigate Fuller’s place alone to cut as low a profile as possible. It hadn’t been an unreasonable request, given the supposition that Fuller had brought his festering wound, and his bagful of money, from far beyond our jurisdiction. Chances were I would find a normal, empty house and nothing more. But I’d been nagged from the start by the thought that this case would not slip from our grasp quite as smoothly as we all seemed to be hoping.

Harriet Fritter answered the detective squad’s private line on the first ring.

“Hi, it’s Joe. You better send Tyler and the crime kit up here for a search. Who’s within easy reach to help him out?”

“Ron and Willy.”

I grimaced. As a team, Ron Klesczewski and Willy Kunkle made cats and dogs look mutually compatible.

She caught my hesitation. “Want someone else?”

“No. I don’t want to lose time.”

“All right. Consider them on the way.”

As I stood by the car, I felt rather than heard Fred Coyner behind me. He was standing out in the open, his back to the panoramic view, watching me, his hands empty, hanging loosely by his sides. I had the uncomfortable feeling he’d been there for quite a while.

I was well used to the famous Vermont reticence. My own father considered anything beyond a few sentences a day to be idle chitchat. But that was while he was working, when talking usually meant taking time off to lean on a shovel. During off-hours, with his family or friends, he opened up some and the dormant humor I often saw in his eyes crept out, if only a little.

I saw no such glint in Fred Coyner’s eyes. They were as cool and expressionless as water.

“Mind if I ask some questions?” I inquired.

“Wouldn’t make much difference if I did.” He turned his back to me to face the valleys and hills below us. I moved beside him, shoulder-to-shoulder.

“You know Abraham Fuller well?”

He shrugged. “Nope.”

“Was that his real name?” The question was purely spontaneous, which I thought was a better approach than some textbook psychological angle he’d spot a mile off.

There was a pause. His expression didn’t change, from what I could see of it, but I sensed he was surprised. “I suppose.”

“So you had no personal connection to him.”

He shook his head. “Not likely. He rented the place.”

“For how long?”

“Twenty years, about.”

I resisted doing a double take, but just barely. Instead, I kept my voice as flat as his. “That’s quite a while. Looks like he led an exotic life—hot tub, the greenhouse, the garden. Unusual guy. What was he like?”

“Wouldn’t know. He was a granola-head; kept to himself, which suited me fine.”

“He pay the rent in cash?”

Again, there was a pause, calculating this time. Coyner chewed his lower lip a while before answering. “Wasn’t that kind of rent. I didn’t use the place. It was being wasted, buried back there.”

I guessed at a possible explanation for this incongruous generosity. “If you’re worried about the IRS, don’t be. I just want to know why Fuller died.”

“Don’t give a damn about the IRS.”

“They might give a damn if you haven’t declared his rent as income.”

“He bartered—food for the house.”

“And the electricity.” I remembered the wire looped through the trees between the houses.

“That was my idea. I didn’t want him burning the place down with the old oil lamps that were there.”

“Did you give him the refrigerator?” I asked, trying to widen the view he’d allowed me of their relationship.

Coyner nodded. “I was getting rid of it.”

I couldn’t shake the impression that Coyner was not the renting type, unless there’d been some irresistible angle. “How often did you see him?”

“Barely saw him at all.”

“Monthly?”

“Not even. He never moved from the place.”

“Didn’t he ask you what you needed from his garden?”

“He knew, after a while; I’m a man of regular habits. If something special came up, we left notes. Said he wanted to be left alone—no ifs, ands, or buts. So that’s what I did. I wasn’t interested anyhow. If he wanted to be a hermit, it was fine with me.”

“But you called the ambulance,” I insisted.

“He was supposed to drop some stuff off. I got to wondering. He had regular habits, too.”

“Lucky for him.”

“Guess not.”

I smiled inwardly. Sentimental he was not, but I suspected that after twenty years, at least an element of predictability had been disrupted by Fuller’s death, which had resulted in the closest thing Fred Coyner would ever come to mourning.

“Mr. Coyner, I noticed Fuller had a lot of supplies and equipment to keep his garden going. How did he pay for it?”