Suddenly someone was standing next to Coy, although how that had happened without his noticing was a mystery. “I’m Mr. Pickering. You must be Mr. Stinson.”

Coy nodded cautiously. Pickering seemed familiar to him, although he had never met the man before. He was like a perfect amalgam of every banker Coy had seen in movies or on television.

Only…

There was something slightly off-putting about him, something unnatural and fundamentally aberrant in his otherwise bland and benign deportment that Coy recognized but could not pin down.

“Let us step into my office.”

Coy followed him between desks until they walked through an open doorway in the side wall. The room in which he found himself was large, functional yet designed to impress and possibly intimidate visitors. How could there even be an office here? Coy wondered. With stores to either side of the bank, there was no space in the building for any other rooms, let alone one of this size.

Nevertheless here it was: wood-paneled walls on which hung framed prints of famous landscape paintings, a bookcase filled with leatherbound volumes, a massive oak desk. Its contents itemized in such a manner, the office would seem to be perfectly normal. Yet there was something hideous about it. Just as with its occupant’s appearance, no single element was particularly unusual or out of place, but the overall effect remained one of profound unpleasantness. And there was something both strange and terrible about the shadows that lurked in the corners, shadows not tied to any specific object but seemingly manifested out of nothing.

Pickering walked around to the other side of the desk and sat down. Coy was invited to sit as well, and he did so in a comfortable ergonomically designed office chair opposite the bank…manager?...president? He realized for the first time that he did not know Pickering’s position. Shanley had not told him.

There was a standing eight-by-ten frame on the desk between a computer monitor and a stack of folders, facing Pickering, and the man turned it around so Coy could see the photo within. It was a full color photograph of a naked woman, a very familiar woman, her legs spread wide to display her completely bald and extremely pink genitalia.

Coy’s heart sank.

Florine.

“That’s my wife,” the banker said. He grinned. “Some beaver, eh?”