What the hell? The photo was old. He was wearing his uniform, but he was at least ten to fifteen pounds lighter. It was impossible to tell where the shot had been taken, because his head and upper torso had been cut out of the original picture and placed against a black background. Above his photo, in yellow against the black: BRAD NETH!
Frowning, he turned over the postcard.
“We know who you are! Can your current bank say that? Our guess is no. But we make it a point to know your needs, and pride ourselves on providing unparalleled service to all of our customers. Including BRAD NETH!
We’re looking forward to banking with YOU!”
He read the words again, then turned the postcard over. It was clearly an ad for a bank, but there was no mention of the bank’s name and no return address. Strange. He didn’t like the fact that the company behind this not only knew his name and address but had access to an old picture of him. Ordinarily, he would have dumped the postcard, along with the other junk mail, into the trash, but it occurred to him that this might be part of some scam, and he set it aside. He’d take it into work tomorrow and ask around, see if anybody else got one of these.
“It’s kind of quiet!” Patty called from the kitchen. “Can you check on the girls, make sure they’re okay?”
That brought a round of giggling from the girls’ bedroom, and Brad smiled, standing up. “I’ll see what’s going on!” he said, loud enough for all of them to hear.
There were squeals, then silence, and he stomped loudly as he headed down the hallway. “Ready or not, here I come!”
THREE
1
It was a customer who told him.
As always, Kyle had parked this morning next to the metal trash bins in back of the store and had not gone outside since opening up. But when Rollie Brown came to trade in a bunch of Michael Connolly books for store credit, he happened to mention that the vacant space next to Brave New World was going to be home to a new bank.
Kyle frowned. “A bank? Are you sure? Seems kind of small for a bank.”
Rollie shrugged. “That’s what it says.”
Sure enough, when he went outside with Rollie to look, leaving Gary in the store, the adjacent space was no longer for lease. Not only was the Century 21 sign gone, but a new sign had gone up in its place, a square notice on the inside sill, leaning against the window, stating that this was to be “The Future Home of The First People’s Bank.”
“See?” Rollie said.
The First People’s Bank.
An interesting name, Kyle thought. Was it really the first people’s bank? Because he would be willing to bet there’d been others, if not in Arizona then in other states. And what exactly constituted a “people’s bank?” Or was it actually the first people’s bank? Which brought up the question: who were the “first people?” Native Americans? Was it owned by some tribe? Or were the first people some lost race that had been on Earth long before the rise of man?
This was why he never got anything done, he realized. He wasted his time on things like speculating about the etymology of names that had no meaning beyond commercial viability.
Kyle peered through the dusty glass. The single room inside was long and narrow, more suited to an ice cream parlor than a bank. Against the side wall opposite his own store, a built-in wooden counter ran most of the length of the space, and in the center of the floor lay a jumble of chairs and broken tables, along with a couple of empty cardboard boxes. It was the counter that had given him the idea of turning the place into a coffee bar, and he noted with regret that if the space was to become a bank, the counter would have to be demolished.
“You’re right,” Rollie said. “It is kind of small for a bank.”
Kyle nodded. “Yeah.”
Unfortunately, there went his hopes for expansion.
It had been a pipe dream, of course, particularly with the way things were going financially, but the death of any dream was hard to accept, and he walked back next door feeling oddly bereft.
Gary looked up from the counter, where he’d been tabulating the trade-in price for Rollie’s books. “Is it really going to be a bank?”
“Looks that way.”
“Where are they going to keep the money? There’s not even enough room for a safe.” He shook his head. “It doesn’t make sense.”
Kyle shrugged. “I guess we’ll find out.”
“Oh, and the books?” Gary told Rollie. “Two dollars cash, six dollars in-store credit.”
“I’ll take the credit,” Rollie said.
“You want us to write you a credit slip,” Kyle asked, “or do you—?”
“I’ll pick out something right now.”
Nodding, Kyle left him to it, while Gary wrote the price of each book inside the front cover in pencil before shelving all of them in the Mystery/Suspense section.
Kyle put on a CD of Celtic music he’d bought at the Renaissance Faire in Phoenix back when he and Anita were dating, and the gentle sound of pipes and mandolin filled the store. He loved this music. Half of the songs were traditional, the other half originals, and the musicians were uniformly wonderful. He probably put on this CD at least once a month. Listening to it now, he wondered if the group had ever recorded another. Or if they even still performed together. The line between musicians who became successful, he thought, and those who didn’t was completely arbitrary. It had nothing to do with talent or technical ability and everything to do with luck. For his money, these guys were every bit as good as Mumford and Sons, but they’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time, and for all he knew they now spent their weekends watching football or shopping at Home Depot rather than playing music.
The thought depressed him.
It was much the same with literature. Some of his favorite books were by one-hit wonders, authors who’d had a single novel published and then dropped from sight. What happened to artistic drive when the talent behind it was not nurtured? he wondered. What were those authors doing now? Were they still writing, still trying to get published, or had they given up entirely?
The loss of the empty space next door had put him in a weird mood, and he was grateful when Rollie brought his purchases to the counter. In his usual meticulous way, Rollie had calculated the price of the two books he had chosen down to the last cent, even adding the tax, and when all was said and done, they owed him a nickel, which Kyle gave him rather than writing out a store credit slip.
The store was dead for the rest of the morning, until Walter Peters, the Baptist minister, stopped by shortly before lunch. He was the only clergyman in town who was a regular reader—or at least who bought his books locally rather than online—but the minister’s taste ran to nonfiction books on sports and Las Vegas, and the store hadn’t gotten anything new in either of those areas for some time. The minister browsed the stacks for ten minutes or so, although he still left without making a purchase.