The Skeleton's Knee Read Online Free PDF

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