If it had been up to him, he would have gone back to the bank each time he found a penny on the ground or a dime in the coin return of a vending machine, handing his passbook to the teller so she could stamp the date and write in the amount he had deposited. But his parents had frowned on that idea and made him wait until his piggy bank was full.
The bank, to him, had seemed a wonderful place. Calm, quiet, warm in the winter and cool in the summer, the people nice and polite, adults addressing him as “sir.”
The view from the inside was not as rosy.
He had worked at the Montgomery Community Bank since graduating from high school. Supplementing his work experience with classes taken at the community college, Coy had risen to the rank of loan officer and then senior loan officer. He liked being able to help people realize their dreams and improve their lives: get that new car, buy that new house, build that addition, purchase that adjacent lot. What he didn’t like was turning people down, shattering their dreams, condemning them to the hardscrabble lives they were already living.
Foreclosures were the worst.
But that, luckily, was not his department. He issued loans. What happened after that was the responsibility of Cal and Maggie, who processed the payments. Theoretically, he had the hopeful, positive end of the transaction, the most optimistic part of the process, particularly since the bank had such a generous lending policy. But Montgomery Community was small, and when his clients went under, he knew about it, even though he wasn’t directly involved, and a lot of times it broke his heart. Coy remembered a newlywed couple whom he’d helped to buy a condo in that new development on the east end of town. The husband had just been hired as a salesman by Apache Toyota-Chevrolet, and the wife worked part-time as a pharmacist’s assistant at Walgreen’s. Every time he’d see them at the grocery store, he’d always ask how they were doing, and they’d always gush about how they loved living in Montgomery and how they loved their home. Unfortunately, the recession hit, the man lost his job and, unable to keep up with the payments using just the wife’s part-time salary, they walked away from the condo, leaving town without telling anyone where they were going.
Now there was Carl Yates.
How had that gone so terribly wrong?
Coy sighed. The financial world was like those stores in old western movies: a nice impressively respectable false front hiding the small squalid building behind it. He glanced over at Maggie, on the phone with a client who was obviously underwater and obviously pleading for leniency in making some sort of payment. Maggie, as usual, was bending over backwards to be accommodating, but rules were rules and there was only so much she could do. Just from hearing her side of the conversation, he could tell that this story would not end well.
Rumor had it that the bank was in trouble. Too many bad investments. He wasn’t privy to the details—none of them were—but they’d all been exposed to a little piece of the puzzle, and when they got together at break or lunch to compare notes, all of the arrows seemed to point in one direction.
For the past year, Coy had been dating Florine Jacobs from Evergreen Title, and it was Florine who’d first hinted to him that everything at the bank might not be hunky dory. She told him that word had come down from the corporate office that an auditor was looking into Escrow accounts associated with Montgomery Community. The expression on his face must have given away the shock he felt because she immediately said, “Don’t tell anyone I told you!” Her voice was panicked. “You can’t say a word about this to anyone!”
“I won’t,” he promised. And he hadn’t. But he had kept his ears and eyes open, had expressed his doubts about the future to coworkers who expressed their own doubts, and he worried that the day might come when he was forced to look for a new job.
The very thought of changing employers depressed him. He’d spent his entire working life at Montgomery Community. He liked it here. He liked the work, liked most of the people. He even liked the building. The only other bank in town, aside from the small Federal Employees’ Credit Union next to Wal-Mart, was a Bank of America, and the B of A was not only fully staffed, but the last time a position opened up, they transferred someone from the Prescott branch instead of hiring locally. It was going to be next to impossible for him to find a banking job here in town. He’d either have to apply somewhere besides a bank or move to another, bigger city.
It was a slow afternoon, not only for the loan officers but for the tellers as well. Between one and three, a few calls came in, a couple of old ladies stopped by to make withdrawals, but that was it, and Coy saw Maggie and Cal exchange worried looks. It was not unusual for there to be slow periods in banking, but those slow periods were not only becoming more frequent, they were lasting much longer. It was part of a pattern, a pattern that did not bode well for the future.
As low man on the totem pole, Jimmy Collins, the newest teller, took his lunch break last, and when he returned to the bank shortly after two, he was so excited he was nearly out of breath. “Have you heard the news?” he asked, addressing them all. “The Bank of America! It’s closed!”
“There is a God,” Cal said, grinning.
“B of A’s closing? Why?” Coy wondered aloud.
“Not closing. Closed. And why? I have no idea. Not enough foot traffic would be my guess.”
Maggie nodded. “Most of their customers just use ATMs.”
“Or bank online,” Jimmy offered.
Cal grinned. “Which means we’re the only game in town.”
Thank God, Coy thought. Maybe the worst of it was over. Maybe things would start picking up now that their competition had called it quits. He glanced around the familiar room, his gaze settling finally on his desktop, on his engraved wood nameplate, on the little Pirates of the Caribbean coffee cup Florine had brought back for him from a trip to Disneyland. He smiled, feeling happy, feeling, for the first time in a long time, safe.
3
Burning butterflies gave off a smell that was completely unique.
He didn’t exactly like the smell. But he didn’t hate it, either. He found it…interesting.
V.J. touched the flame of the lighter to the wings of the final butterfly. Like the other two he’d caught, it had been immobilized by a pin to its midsection, although, unlike the others, its wings were still fluttering.
That ended quickly, though, and once fire had consumed the bug’s body, V.J. pressed his right index finger into the ashes. They were warm but not too hot—pleasant—and he held the finger in front of his face, looking at it, seeing some of the glitter from the colorful wings in the gray ash that coated his skin. Placing his finger on the blank three-by-five card next to the burnt butterflies, he rolled it from left to right until a clear fingerprint was visible. Carefully cutting off a length of scotch tape—one inch long; it had to be one inch long—he placed the tape over the fingerprint to protect it, then opened a small metal filing box and added the card to the others he’d made.