Archer Mayor - The Skeleton's knee

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.

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.