“He married Hannah Wilcox in 1940, when he was twenty- three. They had two children over the next few years, both of which died as infants.”
“Anything suspicious in the kids’ deaths?”
“None that I could see. The death records indicate birth defects in both children. The Coyners lived on Hescock Road with no fanfare and no troubles until January 1967, when Fred sold off his first piece of land.”
The mention of 1967, right after my conversation with J.P., added a sudden extra weight to her biography.
“Why did he sell the land?” I asked.
“It took me a while to nail that down. Fred’s wife died of cancer in 1970, but I found out she’d been diagnosed about four years earlier, just before he began selling off property.”
“So he was paying for her medical treatments,” I muttered.
“As far as I can tell, yes. Of the two hundred original acres, he unloaded all but ten, and finally took out a mortgage on the house. In late 1969, we busted him for being drunk and disorderly, but he was driven to his residence instead of spending the night in the tank when we found out he had an invalid wife at home with no one to take care of her. By the time Hannah died in 1970, Coyner’s delinquent tax bill totaled almost twenty thousand dollars and papers had been filed to sell his property as a result.”
I remembered my own wife’s battle with cancer just a few years later. We, too, had been childless, and despite my own job security, finances had played no small part in adding to the stress. It had been a lonely, desperate time. Alcohol had helped me through a couple of the toughest stretches, until I’d given it up for good, fearful of its appeal.
“Later that same year,” Sammie continued, “out of the blue and almost fresh from the funeral, Fred settled all his bills. A note at the tax assessor’s says the payment was made in cash. And from that time on, he’s listed his profession as produce farmer, although the only part of his land that’s agricultural is located around Fuller’s place.”
She put her crib notes back down but she wasn’t finished. “I asked Ron if he’d discovered anything about Coyner’s banking habits, but all he’s been able to get so far is that the bank is First Vermont and that the guy is living comfortably.”
Willy Kunkle appeared from around the panel separating Sammie’s desk from his. “There’s your rat, if you ask me.”
I turned to him. “What’d you find out?”
“That there’s no way Coyner could make a comfortable living from what he was dealing in produce. He could only grow stuff for three or four months out of the year at most, and he didn’t bust his ass even then. According to your fruity friend Sunshine Jackson, Coyner was more of a recreational grower. I asked Jackson if maybe the old guy was growing dope. He just wiggled his eyebrows at me. Weird son of a bitch.”
“How long has Coyner been doing business with him?”
“Years, apparently, but they aren’t buddy-buddy. Sunshine said I reminded him of Coyner, and I don’t think he was making a run up my leg. Thought Coyner was a crook of some kind, ’cause he usually paid in hundred-dollar bills.”
“Jackson only sells seeds and fertilizer and whatever, right? Where did Coyner unload the produce?”
“Farmer’s Market, Food Co-op, various fairs around the area. Pretty low-key. I talked to other people who do the same thing. None of them knows Coyner real well, no more than to say hello and get nothing in return.”
“Did you talk to any neighbors?” I asked.
“Yeah. Seems pretty clear that Coyner only likes his own company. I got more gossip about the time his wife was sick, though. According to the Sunset Lake Road crowd-the year-round people, that is, which come to about twelve-the time we nailed Fred for D amp; D wasn’t the only time he flew off the handle. He’d get lit on a regular basis toward the end-1970, I guess-and tear around the neighborhood raising hell.”
“Nobody complained?”
“They knew what was up, and he didn’t do any harm-scared the dogs, shot up a few road signs. Most of the time, someone would either steer him back home or he’d head that way himself eventually. There was one time when he went down to Hippie Hollow and started blowing out the bus windows with a shotgun. A few people got pissed then.”
“Hippie Hollow?” Sammie asked.
“About halfway between Coyner’s place and Route 9,” I answered. “There’s a road heading west. Twenty years ago, there was a sort of commune up there-they all lived out of five or six old yellow school buses.” I paused and thought back a moment. “You know, our own State’s Attorney defended them in a couple of cases before he switched hats. I’ll have to give him a call and ask him about that.”
I turned back to Willy. “No one pressed charges after the incident with the shotgun?”
“Nope. Once his situation was explained to them, they decided to let it slide. And after his wife died, he went back to being the invisible man of the neighborhood.”
“By the way,” Kunkle added, “I told Dennis to hold up on faxing Fuller’s photograph to everyone. I figured if we had the Boston PD’s forensic guys take twenty years off Fuller’s face by running the picture through their imaging computer, we could fax before-and-after pictures and maybe improve our chances.”
I moved to the center of the room to address them all, since Ron Klesczewski had just entered the office and I could now hold an impromptu staff meeting. “Apparently, we’ve stirred up somebody who’s hell-bent on erasing the past, and since the skeleton may give us an explanation, I’ll be heading up to Burlington tomorrow to see what Hillstrom has found out.
“In the meantime, we should circulate the recent and early portraits of Fuller as soon as we get them back. Maybe someone will remember him and give us a fresh lead. Also, since we know the shooter used an M-16, we need to find out what we can about the local availability of Vietnam-vintage weapons. Check with bartenders, club owners, gun shop and sports store operators, and your snitches to find out if there’s been any unusual activity concerning M-16s or.223 ammo, either preceding or following tonight’s pyrotechnics.
“Finally, although there’s no sign I hit this guy when I fired at him, let’s check the hospitals, both here and in Keene, Greenfield, and Townshend, as well as the local doctors’ offices and pharmacies for anyone buying either painkillers or trauma dressing. Ron, you coordinate with everyone.”
Ron nodded without comment.
“Okay. Let’s meet officially tomorrow at 1600 hours to compare notes. By then, I should know something about that skeleton.”
13
The trip to Burlington took a shade over three hours. I left Gail’s house just before dawn and had settled into the soothing monotony of long-distance travel by the time the sun spread its pallor across the eastern hills of New Hampshire. In that short period between total darkness and when the burgeoning monochromatic daylight reveals a world beyond the headlamps, my mind floated away from the troublesome details surrounding Fred Coyner and Abraham Fuller, focusing instead on the beauty around me.
Interstate 91 is one of only two such roads in Vermont. It shoots straight north toward Canada, paralleling the Connecticut River border with New Hampshire until just below St. Johnsbury, where the border veers off to the northeast. At White River Junction, some sixty miles south, 91 intersects I-89, which takes a diagonal path to Burlington, in the northwest corner of the state.
Combined, the two roads offer one of the best time-compressed tours of Vermont I know of, taking one from the “banana belt” of Brattleboro, through the low hills and river views of the southern valley, along the dramatic forested gaps of the Green Mountains, and finally out onto the rich, flat plains of the Lake Champlain valley. It amounts to a seamless succession of picture-perfect postcards.