I.O.U

by Nancy Pickard

  “We were.”

  “Compared to you, Jack, were any of the other lenders of any significance?”

  “Not really; most of the money was coming from us.”

  “How was it secured?”

  For the first time, he hesitated. “Well, it wasn’t a loan so much as it was an extension of your father’s line of credit.”

  I stared at him for a moment, before I said, “For how much?”

  He sniffed, looked me in the eyes and said, “There wasn’t any actual limit on it, although I suppose we tacitly assumed we’d go to two or three million before we cut him off.”

  “No limit?” I fought to keep my voice low and neutral, but some of the astonishment I was feeling crept into it. “And your loan committee just assumed…”

  Jack sniffed again. His lower jaw was getting a bit stiff as he admitted these loose, to say the least, banking practices to me. “We had been doing business with Cain for a very long time, Jennifer. My father lent money to your grandfather, and my grandfather to your grandfather’s father. It was a relationship built on three generations of trust, my dear.”

  “My father is not my grandfather,” I pointed out, dryly. “And even less is he my great-grandfather.”

  “I know that,” Jack retorted sharply, “but he had never defaulted. We never had so much as a narrow miss on a loan with your dad. Cain Clams wasn’t what you would call thriving under his stewardship, but it was maintaining a certain position well enough, in our view.”

  I was beginning to feel as outraged as I was astonished, and so I let him have it in a volley of distinctly rude interrogatories:

  “I don’t suppose my father or anybody else at Cain ever filled out any actual, official credit applications for the money, Jack?”

  “We usually waive those for old customers—”

  “How about credit and loan evaluations? Anybody at The First actually work on one of those? Or did you just take my father’s word that he needed this new addition and sure, there’d be no problem paying for it?”

  “We had no reason to doubt his word, Jennifer.”

  “So you’re saying, no credit or loan evaluation?”

  “I suppose not, not really.”

  “How about collateral?”

  “All right. I am embarrassed to admit to you that part of the loan was secured, but part of it was not. We would have lost our shirt on that, but Port Frederick Fisheries assumed all liabilities as well as all assets when they took over, and Pete Falwell was meticulous about repaying all past debts.”

  “Were you on his board of directors then, too?”

  Jack flushed. He opened his mouth, closed it, then opened it long enough to say, “Yes, I was, but—”

  “So even after paying all of my dad’s debts, Pete still made out like a bandit.”

  Jack smiled, grimly, his face still looking flushed. “I believe it is more commonly called doing good business, Jenny. Your father gambled and lost, Pete stepped in and won. It’s done every day, and there’s nothing invidious about it.”

  “Oh, no? What about the role of your bank in all of this? What about the fact that The First violated every tenet of good—and legal—banking practices by making unsecured loans, without proper application or evaluation? That’s not invidious? I do believe it might be illegal—”

  “Jenny, you know it’s done every day all over the world—”

  “And what about the fact that The First, by making the loans, in effect actually encouraged my father to overextend himself? What do you think is a bank’s responsibility in all of this, Jack? You make the loan and one way or another you get your money back, plus who knows how much interest. You’re free and clear. But my dad and my family go down the tubes, along with a lot of other families who worked for us. How’s that for invidious?”

  “You’re being naive,” he snapped.

  “That’s what Sam Hayes called me the other day,” I said, with equal heat. “But I’ll tell you something, Jack. Naive, I’m not. What I am is angry. You were naive. Or at least I hope that’s what it was. Naive to trust my father. Naive to make loans that a simple evaluation should have shown to be in trouble from the start. And you were greedy, weren’t you, my dear friend, because you must have suspected, all along, what the result could be. And there you sat, all along, on the board of the company that would buy our company when the inevitable happened. Your bank risked, at the very least, censure. And that brings up a point, Jack; why wasn’t there any federal banking investigation of these loan practices?”

  “There was,” he said. “It was quiet; we were fined; that’s all there was to it.”

  “And you still made money on the deal?”

  “Yes.” This time he merely sighed, and said, wryly, “Yes, we made money on the deal, as you put it.”

  “Why wasn’t any of this in The Times?”

  “Any of what?”

  “Your bank’s role as major lender to the project. The banking investigation, the judgment and fines?”

  “Why should there be? Sam Hayes—senior, that is—determined that it was a matter of rather arcane banking procedure that would not interest the average local newspaper reader.”

  “My lord.” I stared at him in disbelief. “And the next thing you’re going to tell me is that he was also on the board of directors of this bank.”

  “Well, yes, although now it’s Sam, Jr.”

  “Jack,” I said, then I spread my hands pleadingly. “Jack!”

  I followed his glance, which settled on his hands. They were trembling slightly on top of his cane. I said, with a sort of hopeless-sounding laugh, to his bent head, “Jack, Jack, and you call yourself a Democrat?”

  His head came up, his neck remained stiff. I was not going to reach him on this, he was too far entrenched in custom and pride and the old-boy network. “It is standard operating procedure, Jenny. We did nothing that any other bank might not have done in similar circumstances. I accept no responsibility for your father’s bankruptcy, because that responsibility is not mine. It is his, totally his. You do him and yourself no favor by trying to push it off onto innocent parties—”

  “Innocent!”

  “Yes, innocent parties.”

  “I thought your bank got fined.”

  He blinked and, for a moment, seemed to falter in his stout defense of his morally indefensible position. But then he rallied. “A slap on the hand.”

  “Meaning, I gather, that the practice of encouraging people to assume debt loads that are greater than they can possibly afford is a mere minor flaw in the system?”

  “A system that has worked well for generations.”

  “Generations, yes. But well? Perhaps yes for the bank owners. Perhaps no for the overextended debtor who got that way because the banks made too much money too easy to get? Hmm?”

  We glared at one another. Then, using his cane, Jack suddenly pushed himself back into the sofa, and gave a dry, quavery hoot of laughter. “I’d say you are feeling fine, Jennifer. To think I worried for a minute about you. Suicide! You! Impossible. How could I ever have thought it? Besides, they’d never let you into heaven—you’d try to argue St. Peter out of his ‘discriminatory admission policies’!”

  I found myself laughing, too. Here was a man who had sprinkled money in my father’s path, dancing him down the road to ruin, if you will. Here was a situation that probably represented, in microcosm, many of the ills of the world’s banking system. Here was a man, decent, likable, and well-respected, who probably represented the best and the worst of traditional bankers, and who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, acknowledge his quite direct role in the debacle. Jack Fenton had, with open eyes and open palms, willingly cooperated in the events that led to the bankruptcy of Cain Clams. He was close to eighty years old now. Was I going to change him? I wasn’t. It was too late for Cain Clams anyway …but what about the others who came later, unwisely looking for money they’d never be able to repay—

  “Jack, do you evaluate all loan a
pplications now?”

  He nodded, smiling a little. “Yes, yes, it will please you to know that as a direct result of your father’s bankruptcy, we had to tighten our loan policies, even for longtime customers.”

  “Well,” I said, “at least there’s that.”

  But he gave me the old cynical eye. “Won’t last.”

  I sighed, tacitly acknowledging the truth of what he was saying. What could I do? I hated the system, I hated what it had done to my family, but I had loved this old man for too many years to suddenly start hating him now. It was time to let him off the hook, emotionally, even if he didn’t deserve it: “You’re right, Jack. I didn’t try to kill myself. It was an accident.”

  I rejoined Geof in the lobby, only to find him still on the phone, a pay phone. “I’m listening to our messages on the machine at home,” he explained. “A lot of people have called, asking about you, including your sister. She sounds pissed.”

  “How can you tell?” I asked.

  He smiled, and held up one finger as a polite way of telling me to shut up. After a minute, during what must have been a long, boring, inconsequential message from somebody, he said, “I had a friend of mine run Cecil Greenstreet through the computer, but we came up empty on any sort of police record. I suspected we would, but I had to ask. I also called Chart’s Flowers, but they didn’t send over the carnation. So I started calling every other florist in town, but so far no luck—” He broke off, to listen more closely. “Your sister, again.” He started to grin, and then broke out laughing. “Oh shit, those little devils—”

  “What?” I demanded. “Who?”

  He held up that infuriating finger again, so that he could hear the remaining messages, and then he hung up. He was still grinning, as he grabbed my elbow and started walking me rapidly out the door of the First City Bank. “Come on!”

  “Where are we going? I’m tired, Geof. I really do want to go home this time.”

  “We will,” he said, and started chuckling again. “But on the way we have to stop by the Harbor Lights Funeral Home. It seems that the reason Sherry is so mad at you—and me—is that our niece and nephew have developed this strange little habit of collecting obituaries from the newspaper.”

  “What?”

  “And today she found out from a friend of Ian’s that he and Heather plan to attend a funeral this afternoon at Harbor Lights. And of course, Sherry says you and I are to blame for this macabre little habit of theirs, and she’s ready to kill us and to haul them off to a psychiatrist. And she wants us to go get them and straighten them out, because she’s too mortified to do it herself.” He looked down at my astonished face and chided me. “Oh, come on, Jenny. You can figure it out. One guess.”

  The light dawned as I looked at his grin—and recalled two other impish little grins in the doorway of the kitchen at Sherry’s house.

  They’d been eavesdropping, those two little twits, and now—

  “They’re playing detective, Geof!”

  “Bingo,” he said.

  17

  THERE WERE TWO FUNERALS BEING CONDUCTED IN DIFFERENT “chapels” at the same time that afternoon at Harbor Lights, and we couldn’t be sure which one Ian and Heather would pick. We figured they’d probably try to cover both. First we looked in the chapels themselves, to make sure the children hadn’t already arrived and taken a seat. They hadn’t. So then we arranged ourselves as inconspicuously as possible behind a ficus tree in the front lobby, Geof commenting that he was spending a lot of time in Port Frederick lobbies on this day. And then we waited. Luckily, the funerals weren’t for anybody we knew, but that didn’t mean that we wouldn’t know some of the people attending. I stood behind Geof, so my blond hair wouldn’t attract attention, and he attempted to disguise himself as a leafy branch.

  Mourners trickled in.

  “Oh, God,” I muttered, upon glimpsing an architect we both knew, “there’s Webster Helms. Quick, turn to me and pretend you’re talking.” Geof turned his face toward me and began moving his mouth, with no sound coming out. I put my hand over my own mouth to stifle a fit of giggles.

  The little, red-haired architect kept on moving down the corridor. We watched him sign the guest book that lay on a pedestal in front of the first chapel, and then he walked on in.

  The children came in a few minutes later.

  “Ohhh,” I whispered. “Don’t they look sweet?”

  “Little shits,” Geof whispered in reply, but he was smiling, too. Our niece and nephew did look adorably nervous. They’d dressed in their finest Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes, just as their mother would have required them to do if she knew they were attending a funeral—which they didn’t know she knew—and just as they’d dressed for their grandmother’s service. Under her winter coat, Heather wore the same navy blue wool pinafore dress with big white polka dots, and her best navy blue flats with real, grown-up stockings, and a white bow tying back her blond hair. She even carried a little navy purse. Clutched it, actually. Ian had on his too-short suit, and his best shoes and socks; the only thing awry about his appearance was that his mother hadn’t been around to comb his hair, which stuck out in cowlicks front and back. They walked close together, their eyes downcast, looking appropriately mournful for a funeral.

  “Good little actors,” I murmured.

  “Little shits,” Geof repeated, and I snorted with laughter, and prayed they wouldn’t hear me and look over our way. They were distracted, however, by a funeral home employee who bent over to say something to them. They must have replied in some sort of acceptable manner, because he smiled in a sad, pleasant way, and allowed them to pass on by him. We watched, amused and fascinated, as the children scuttled over to a far wall and then stood there, huddled together, as if waiting for their parents to arrive. They watched everybody else file through. We watched them.

  “Are they going to do anything?” I whispered.

  Geof shrugged. I pressed myself against his back, enjoying the excuse to get physical. He pressed backward against me, also appearing to enjoy it.

  And we waited.

  And across the hall, Heather and Ian waited.

  And the last of the visitors filed in through the front door, and the funeral home employee walked toward the first chapel and quietly closed its double doors so that the service could begin. Then he walked to the doors of the second chapel, and closed those. And then he disappeared into another door marked, “Employees Only.”

  Heather and Ian glanced at each other and then they broke and ran. Ian to the first chapel! Heather to the second chapel! Ian grabbed the guest book off the first pedestal! Heather swept the guest book off the second pedestal! Ian raced back for the front door! Heather ran after him, catching up to him, blond hair flying out behind her! They were neck and neck as they drew abreast of the ficus plant, when Geof stepped out in front of it, and said quietly:

  “Stop in the name of the law!”

  “Uncle Geof!” cried Heather, and stopped in her tracks.

  “Oh shit!” said little Ian, and broke for the front door.

  Geof caught up with Ian at the bottom of the front walk, and hauled him back to where Heather and I stood shivering on the porch of the funeral home. I took the guest books out of their cold hands and quickly returned them to their pedestals before anybody noticed they were missing. And then I rejoined the cop and the culprits outside on the porch.

  Now it was Heather who looked defiant, and Ian who looked terrified at the possible implications (five years of being grounded?) of what they had done.

  “We were only trying to help,” Heather protested. Her lips were blue, and she stomped her feet up and down to keep warm. “We were only going to look at them, and then we were going to return them!”

  “I’m sorry, Uncle Geof,” Ian said, in a pitifully small voice. He stuffed his hands in his pockets and danced up and down beside his sister. “I’m sorry, Aunt Jenny. I’m really sorry. Aren’t you really sorry, Heather? We’re really sorry. We didn’t do it.
I mean, we didn’t mean to do it. It was an accident. Can we go now? It’s really cold!”

  Geof and I looked at each other and laughed.

  The children saw it, glanced at each other, and then looked hopefully back up at us. Maybe we wouldn’t kill them, they were thinking. Maybe Uncle Geof wouldn’t toss them in jail and throw away the key. Maybe Aunt Jenny wouldn’t tell their mother and father and maybe they wouldn’t really be confined to their rooms until they were dead. Maybe they were going to live!

  “Were you going to… examine… the signatures?” I asked them.

  Heather stopped stamping her feet long enough to nod her head. “We were gonna see if anybody signed anything weird like they did at Grandma’s funeral.”

  Geof said, “Have you done this before?”

  “No!” they cried in unison.

  “Honest,” Ian added, and crossed his heart as he danced around us, creating little drafts of even colder air.

  “How’d you get here?” I asked. They were far too young to drive and it was several miles from their home. “Hold still for a minute!”

  “Taxi,” Heather admitted. “We used our allowances and we walked to a friend of Ian’s house and called a taxi from there. It was easy.”

  Ian broke into a grin. “It was fun!”

  Geof shook his head, trying to hold on to a grave expression. “Listen up, junior detectives. It’s nice of you to want to help, but I think the grown-ups can handle it from here on out. Are we agreed on that?”

  They looked solemn, and even stood still for a moment as they nodded their heads.

  “Promise?” I said. “Swear it on a stack of Bibles?”

  They nodded again, but I wasn’t convinced.

  “Swear it on a stack of Star Trek comic books?”

  They giggled, but they nodded vigorously that time.

  I bit my lip, to maintain the seriousness of their pledge, and it was then that I became aware that Heather wasn’t quite holding my gaze. Geof’s, yes, but not mine. She’d look at me, and then her blue eyes would seem to cloud over and her glance would shift away from me. And suddenly I realized what was going on. If she’d been younger, littler, I’d have crouched down on my haunches and taken hold of her arms and looked up into her blue eyes. As tall as she was now, I could only put my right hand behind her head and turn her face to me.