“Why did it blow, after all this time?”

  He shrugged, much as I’d guessed Hillstrom had earlier to the same question. “That kind of aneurysm acts like a stretched-out water balloon. If either the pressure inside increases too much or the outer envelope weakens, it goes pow.” He retrieved the file from my lap and flipped it open. “His blood pressure was on the high side, probably due to the pain and anxiety. That alone might have been enough to do the trick.”

  I let my eyes wander across the walls before me, registering but not reading the various diplomas and citations. A secretive man, admitting to no past, is forced by medical necessity to come out of his hole and then dies. I shook my head. This was turning out darker than I’d feared… and more intriguing.

  “How did the Accounting Office deal with him? I notice he didn’t list any insurance.”

  Brook chuckled. “Normally, I wouldn’t know, since it ain’t my department, as they say, but this guy really made history on that one. The whole hospital heard about it—unofficially, of course. He paid cash, and I mean real cash: greenbacks. At some point, after I’d started talking surgery, someone in Accounting got nervous—Fuller didn’t even have a Medicaid number, after all—and they went up to talk to him. He asked them how much they needed, told them to leave the room for a minute, and then handed them five thousand bucks. He told them to regard it either as a down payment or an amount to draw on, depending on the final amount due. They didn’t argue, and from what I heard, they didn’t ask for explanations.”

  “Where was he keeping it? Did he have a bag or something?”

  “Yeah, one of those small backpacks. I think the hospital still has it, along with his clothing and whatever else he left behind, unless somebody’s claimed them by now.”

  My mind was humming with possibilities, most of them far from innocent, but I wanted to play out at least one straightforward angle before assuming the worst. “Maybe he was a hermit. Did you see him clothed, or did the ER staff have him stripped already?”

  Michael paused before answering, thinking back. “He was still partly dressed. They were work clothes—standard JCPenney-type stuff. His hands were rough; he had the typical workingman’s suntan—forearms as black as walnut, the rest of him lilywhite. I don’t know… I guess initially I took him for what he looked like. Not a backwoods type, though. His speech didn’t fit that at all. He was pretty well educated, beyond high school. When I described what I’d found out about his back, he had no trouble following it, even asked some fairly sophisticated questions…”

  “As if he’d had medical training?”

  “No, nothing that fancy, but definitely a college background. He was also a health nut. A lot of construction workers and whatnot are tough as nails, but their eating habits are lousy. It usually shows up in their waistlines. This guy was as thin and hard as cable wire. Described himself as a lacto-vegetarian: no eggs, no meat, no fish, and no poultry. He gave strict instructions to the dietitian.”

  “You think he took care of himself because he knew he had a touchy back?”

  Brook shook his head. “I don’t know. He denied it to me—said he’d never had any trouble with it except when he’d fallen on the tree branch years ago, but who’s to know? The guy was obviously not too intimate with the truth.”

  I thanked him and moments later passed through the umbilical-like corridor between the hospital and the office building, in search of the head of Accounting. I found her beyond a moderately crowded waiting room in a small, windowless, but cheery cubbyhole decorated with framed Georgia O’Keeffe posters and unusually healthy green plants.

  She was an angular, white-haired woman with a flame-red dress and an animated face. The nameplate on her tidy desk read KATHY PARKER. She half rose from her chair as I entered and shook hands. “The receptionist said you’re from the police?”

  I smiled and placed my credentials before her. “Yes. Lieutenant Joe Gunther.” She looked at me carefully then. “Oh, I’ve heard of you. My goodness, weren’t you almost killed a couple of months ago?” I smiled at the reference to a recent headline-grabbing case. “A dubious claim to fame. Yes, that was me.”

  She returned my badge and gestured to me to sit. “Well, it’s an honor.” Her face acquired a carefully neutral cast. “I take it you’re here in a professional capacity?”

  “Yes. I want to know about a small backpack belonging to a patient who died here a couple of days ago, an Abraham Fuller.” Kathy Parker’s eyebrows shot up. “Oh yes. I inventoried that myself. Would you like it?”

  “I’d like to take a look at it.”

  She turned toward a small floor safe behind her, opened its door, and retrieved an old red canvas bag, laying it on her desk. “I’m not surprised you’re here, actually. I mean, we’re obviously delighted when a patient pays for his treatment on the barrel, but using a bagful of cash did stir up a few comments.”

  I picked up the knapsack and rested it in my lap for the moment. “Did anyone know him, or about him?”

  “Mr. Fuller? Not that I heard. That’s what made it even more mysterious; paying cash is the kind of thing you see drug-runners do on TV.” She smiled at the soiled, much-used bag between my hands. “Of course, on TV they usually carry it around in a fancy briefcase. I guess that’s the Vermont touch.”

  I smiled and fingered the material. “I know you didn’t mean it literally, but was there anything indicating he was into drugs?”

  She shook her head emphatically. “No, no, this was all just gossip; you know how it is, especially in a small place like this. People were also asking if Fuller was a pseudonym for an Italian name, as in Mafia. I never even saw the man.” She nodded toward the pack. “I didn’t get that until after he’d been shipped off to Burlington for autopsy. It was just… Well, open it and see for yourself. It is a little weird.”

  I undid the knot at the throat of the bag and drew it open, taking a look before I reached in. There were some odds and ends: a toothbrush and paste, a comb, a paperback edition of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, a balled-up pair of socks, some underwear, and a single change of clothes. But the attention grabbers were the banded bundles of hundred-dollar bills.

  I gingerly pulled one out, holding it by the edges. “Did you count it all?”

  “Yes. There’re five of them, a thousand dollars each.”

  “And he’d already paid five thousand for his treatment, is that right?”

  She nodded. “We deposited part of what he gave us, for services rendered. The difference is still in escrow, pending retrieval by next of kin.”

  I looked at the bundle in my hand. The inner bills were new and crisp; the outer ones were unwrinkled but grimy, and the edges of all of them were faintly soiled. They also had an odd feel to them—almost slippery. I held it up to my nose and smelled.

  “Mildew,” Kathy Parker suggested.

  “Yeah. I think you’re right.” I lifted the knapsack to my nose and detected the same pungent odor. I looked at the face side of one of the cover bills and let out a small grunt, flipping through the others for confirmation.

  “What?” Parker asked, presumably keen for more gossip.

  I hesitated, then dropped the money back into the bag. “Nothing; I was just wondering about the mildew. If you could draw up a receipt, I think I’ll take this down to the Municipal Building and lock it in our evidence room.”

  She did as I requested, half-curious and half-relieved to be rid of a potential headache. By proxy, I was allowing her to jerk her thumb down the line at us, should anyone later ask about the cash.

  Not that I was paying much attention to her quandaries, in any case. As I thanked her, took a copy of the receipt and the bag, and worked my way back to my car, I was mulling over what I’d discovered in glancing at those bills. Not all the bundles were of mint notes—in fact, only two of them were—but those two were utterly pristine, with their serial numbers in perfect chronological sequence. The kicker was, new or old, none of them had been printed more recently than 1969, nearly twenty-five years ago.

  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.

  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.