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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