It was Ben.

“I need you to do something for me,” the manager said without preamble. “Go into my office and see if you can find a…” There was a muffled exchange, as though he’d put his hand over the phone and was talking to someone else. “…See if there’s a book, a ledger, anywhere on my desk. It’ll be old looking, maybe beat up, I don’t know. But see if it’s there or not and call me back.” He gave Coy a number then immediately hung up.

That was weird.

Exiting the screen he was on, Coy stood and walked past Cal and Maggie’s desks, past the lone customer at the middle teller window, and into Ben’s office. He had not been inside here since the day the agreement with First People’s had been announced.

“We had to give something up.”

There’d been a change in the office that day. It had seemed newer, cleaner, brighter. But there’d been another change since. The room Coy entered now was not the freshly refurbished space he’d seen last but a dark, oppressive chamber more appropriate to a deteriorating mansion than a bank. The lights, tied to a motion detector, had turned on automatically when he entered, but the recessed bars gave off a sickly yellowish glow rather than the clean white fluorescence found in the rest of the building.

He walked toward the manager’s desk, which had seemed sleekly modern the last time he’d been in the room but now looked heavy, old and far too bulky. On top of the desk, facing outward, was a framed photo of a naked Florine, her legs spread wide. It was a different picture than the one in Pickering’s office, and it complemented the rest of the room, because the Florine depicted was not the one he had dated but the woman he’d last seen: sickly, pale, blotchy. She was smiling, showing several missing teeth.

The sight of her depressed him.

And frightened him.

Coy didn’t want to be in here any longer than necessary, and he quickly walked around to the other side of Ben’s desk. He expected to have to search for the book the manager had asked him to locate, maybe dig through some drawers or look under papers, but there it was in the center of the desk, a dusty leatherbound ledger that resembled a register of accounts that might have been found in Ebenezer Scrooge’s office. Opening it, he saw on the first page, in faded calligraphic script: The First People’s Bank. Flipping to a page at random, he saw “1936” underlined at the top. Columns below that were headlined “Men,” “Women,” and “Children,” with numbers in each column that varied by months noted on the left side of the sheet. He turned to another page, and another, and saw exactly the same thing.

1941…1945…1953…