The Blackstone Chronicles (4 page)

Meaningless platitudes that had triggered even louder alarms in Bill’s mind. How on earth could he
not
worry? Blackstone Center was the biggest project he’d ever taken on. He’d turned down two other jobs—one in Port Arbello, the other in Eastbury—in order to concentrate on the conversion of the old Asylum into the sort of commercial center that could revive what had been a slowly dying town. The Center, in fact, had been in large part his own idea. He had thought about it for more than a year before even suggesting it to the directors of the Blackstone Trust. The one person he’d talked to almost from the start was Oliver Metcalf, because he’d known that without Oliver’s support, the plan would never have gotten off the ground. A couple of tepid editorials in the
Chronicle
, and that would have been that. But Oliver was
enthusiastic about the Blackstone Center from the very beginning, with a single major reservation.

“What about me?” he’d wanted to know. “Am I suddenly going to be living on the busiest street in town?”

Bill had already thought of that. Grabbing a pencil from Oliver’s cluttered desk, he’d quickly sketched a rough map to show that the most logical approach to the site was not through the front gates, but from the back, where the old service entrance had once been. Appeased, Oliver immediately backed the project, pushing for it not only in the paper, but with his uncle as well. Once Harvey Connally had been won over—albeit reluctantly—the rest was easy. By the day before yesterday, when the wrecker’s ball had made its ceremonial swing, puncturing the Asylum’s west wall in preparation for the expansion of the building, most of the opposition to the project had evaporated.

Bill McGuire, and his entire crew, had been all set to go to work the next day.

Yesterday.

But only hours after the ceremony, Jules Hartwick made his ominous call. “Hold off for a day or two,” indeed! “Not to worry”—fat chance of that. Bill McGuire was worried, all right. Worried nearly out of his mind.

Now, as he walked the three blocks down Amherst Street to the corner of Main, where the redbrick, Federal-style building that housed the First National Bank of Blackstone stood, he felt an anticipatory rush of fear. His nerves gave an additional jump when he spotted Oliver Metcalf at the bank’s door.

“You know what this is all about?” Oliver asked.

“He called you too?” Bill replied, trying to betray nothing of his ballooning sense that something very serious had gone wrong.

“Yesterday. But he wouldn’t say what it was about, which tells me that whatever it is, it’s not good news.”

“Did he tell you not to worry?”

The editor nodded. His eyes searched McGuire’s face. “You don’t have any idea at all what this is about?”

McGuire glanced in both directions, but they seemed to be alone on the sidewalk. “All he told me was to hold off on the Center project. You can guess how that made me feel.”

“Yes,” Oliver said with an ironic smile, “I certainly can.”

Together the two men entered the bank, nodded to the tellers who stood behind old-fashioned frosted-glass windows, and made their way to Jules Hartwick’s office at the back.

“Mr. Hartwick and Mr. Becker are waiting for you,” Ellen Golding told them. “You can go on in.”

Bill and Oliver exchanged another glance. What was Hartwick planning to tell them that required the presence of his lawyer?

Jules Hartwick was on his feet as they entered the walnut-paneled office, and he came around from behind his desk to greet both men with no less warmth than ever. The gesture did nothing to ease Bill McGuire’s sense of foreboding. He’d learned long ago that a warm handshake and a friendly smile meant absolutely nothing in the world of banking. Sure enough, as Hartwick retreated around his desk and lowered himself into his deeply tufted red-leather swivel chair, his smile faded. “I don’t suppose there’s any easy way to tell you this,” he began, looking from Bill McGuire to Oliver Metcalf, then back again.

“I assume it has to do with the financing for the Blackstone Center project, right?” the contractor asked, his worst fears congealing into a hard knot in his belly.

The banker took a deep breath, then slowly let it out. “I wish it were that simple,” he said. “If it were only the Center project, I suspect I could arrange a bridge loan for a few—”

“Bridge loan?” McGuire interrupted. “For Christ’s sake, Jules, why would I need a bridge loan?” He rose from his
chair, his hands unconsciously clenching into fists. “The financing’s supposed to be all set!” But even as he spoke the words, McGuire knew that no matter how true they might have been only a few days ago, they no longer were. Nor would getting angry help the situation. “Sorry,” he said, slumping back into his chair. “So what is it? What’s happened?”

“We don’t really think it’s very serious,” Ed Becker said, but there was something in his tone that told both McGuire and Oliver Metcalf that whatever was coming was going to be very bad indeed. “The Federal Reserve has put a temporary hold on loans by the bank, and—”

“Excuse me?” Oliver Metcalf cut in. “Did you say the Federal Reserve?” His eyes shifted from the lawyer to the banker. “What exactly is going on, Jules?”

Jules Hartwick shifted uncomfortably in his chair. For twenty years, ever since he’d taken over the bank after his father suddenly died, the worst part of the job had been having to tell a customer—usually someone he’d known most of his life—that he couldn’t give him a loan. But this was worse.

Far worse.

The construction account had already been set up; the first funds had been transferred into it. And Bill McGuire had already begun hiring a crew; two of the men who would be working on the project, Tom Cleary and Jim Nicholson, had come into the bank only yesterday to make small payments on debts the bank had been carrying for months. Just as he—and his father before him—always had, Jules told both men to wait until after Christmas. What, after all, could be the harm? The bank had already been carrying Tommy for a year and a half, and Jim for nine months.

What would another month matter?

Let the men and their families enjoy the holiday.

Except that now there would be no more paychecks for those men, for the simple reason that the routine audit the
Federal Reserve was working on had turned up what it considered a “disproportionately large percentage” of inactive loans.

So many, in fact, that the Fed had put a hold on all new lending by the Blackstone bank until the bank could demonstrate how it was going to handle the loans.

But to Jules Hartwick, they weren’t simply “inactive loans.” They were loans to people he’d known all his life, people who had worked hard and always done their best to meet their responsibilities. Not one of them had purposely quit a job, or been lax in looking for a new one. They had simply been caught in an economy that was “downsizing”—a word Jules Hartwick had come to hate—and would make good on their debts the moment things got better for them.

Now, thanks to his own decision to carry all those loans, the bank wasn’t going to be able to fund the Center project. Ironically, the Fed had seen to it that at least some of the men whose loans were a source of concern to the auditors would no longer have the jobs that would allow them to make their loans current.

“It seems the auditors are worried about the way we do business,” he said, forcing himself to meet Bill McGuire’s gaze straight on. “For the moment, we’re going to be unable to continue funding the construction account.” He turned to Oliver Metcalf. “The reason I wanted you here is so that Ed can explain exactly what’s happening. The bank isn’t insolvent, and I’m sure we’ll be able to straighten all this out in a couple of weeks. But if word gets out that the Fed is nervous about us—well, I’m sure you can imagine what would happen.”

“A run,” Oliver said. “Could you stand one?”

Jules Hartwick shrugged. “Probably. If it got bad, we might lose our independence. In the end, none of our depositors would lose a cent, but we’d be folded into one of the big regional banks and become just one more small branch with no flexibility to do things our way.”

“Your way seems to have gotten us all into a fine mess, if you ask me,” Bill McGuire said. “What am I supposed to tell my people, Jules? That the jobs they’ve been counting on have simply evaporated? Not to mention my own job.” Though this time he managed to stay in his chair, his voice began to rise. “Do you have any idea how much work I turned down to make this project happen? Any idea at all? I’m already stretched tight, Jules. The new baby’s due in a month, and I—” Abruptly, he cut short the tirade he’d been working up to, recognizing the genuine pain the banker was feeling. What, after all, was the point of yelling at Jules? Once again he forced himself to calm down. “Do you have any idea how long it might be?” he asked in a more reasonable voice. “Is this just a temporary funding freeze, or is the project done for?”

Hartwick was silent for a long time, but finally spread his hands helplessly. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’m hoping it’s only for a week or so, but I can’t promise you anything.” He hesitated, then forced himself to finish. “There’s a possibility it could be months.”

The banker kept talking in an effort to explain, but Bill McGuire was no longer listening. Instead his mind was already working, trying to figure out what to do next.

This afternoon he’d drive up to Port Arbello and see if there was any chance of bidding on the condominium project he’d turned down three weeks ago. Although that project wasn’t supposed to start until spring, if he could secure the job, its financing would tide them over for a while. And while he was up there, maybe he’d talk to the developers behind the condo project about finding new financing for the Blackstone project.

“Well, what do you think?” he asked Oliver Metcalf twenty minutes later as they left the bank. “Is it all over even before it starts?”

Metcalf shook his head. “Not if I have anything to do with it. All I’m going to run is a small article to the effect that the project is being held up, maybe imply that there
are some permits not in place yet. Then we’ll see what happens.”

Nodding, McGuire turned away and started up Amherst Street. He hadn’t taken more than a couple of steps when Metcalf called out to him.

“Bill? Give my love to Elizabeth and Megan. And try not to worry. Things will work out.”

McGuire forced a smile, wishing he could share Oliver Metcalf’s optimism.

O
liver Metcalf was already starting to compose his editorial as he left the bank building, but instead of going directly back to his office, he turned in the opposite direction, walking a block farther down Main Street to the corner of Princeton, where the old Carnegie Library still stood in the center of the half acre of land that Harvey Connally’s father had donated nearly a century ago. Though most of the old Carnegie libraries that had sprung up in small towns all over the country had been replaced decades ago by far more modern “media centers,” the one in Blackstone remained as unchanged as the rest of the town. Part of the reason for its preservation was Blackstone’s sense of historic pride; part was lack of funds for modernization. Though there were a few new buildings—“new” being defined as less than fifty years old—most of the town still looked as it had a hundred years ago, some peeling paint and other signs of wear and tear notwithstanding; and some of it had gone unchanged for more than two centuries.

In Oliver Metcalf’s own memory, nothing about the library had changed at all. Perhaps the trees were a little bigger than they’d been when he was a boy, but even then the maples on the front lawn had been fairly mature, spreading their limbs wide, providing plenty of shade for the Story Lady, who had read to the children of the town every Thursday afternoon of the summer months. Now, forty years later, there was still a Story Lady, and she still
entranced the children of Blackstone on warm summer Thursdays. Oliver suspected there would always be a Story Lady. Anyway, he hoped so.

Today, though, there was no storyteller or cluster of children in evidence as Oliver mounted the steep flight of concrete steps, deeply worn by generations of feet moving up and down, and pushed through the outer set of double doors that provided a buffer between the chill of the December day outside and the comforting heat from the old-fashioned radiators whose occasional clanging was the loudest sound ever heard within the walls of the building. The radiators provided too much heat, really, but nobody objected because Germaine Wagner, who had been the head librarian for nearly twenty years now, always insisted, “A warm room leads to the appreciation of good books.” Oliver had never been able to figure out what the connection between temperature and literature might be, but Germaine was willing to work for a salary that was no more modern than the building itself; if she wanted the heat turned up, so be it.

Now, as Oliver pushed through the second set of doors, Germaine looked up from the stack of books she was checking back into the library—still with old-fashioned cards bearing the due date and the signatures of the people who had borrowed them tucked into envelopes glued to the inside covers. Peering at Oliver over the tops of her half-glasses, Germaine stuck her pencil into the thick bun of hair that was neatly pinned to the top of her head and beckoned him over to the desk.