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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.
    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