The owner of the bookstore—Coy had already forgotten his name—was the first to break the ice, describing how First People’s had poached and indoctrinated his sole employee, how from the beginning there had been odd sounds from behind their shared wall, and how the bank, among other things, had financed the nursery owner’s foray into home security, which had resulted in their home being unlawfully surveyed. The man put his arm around his son, standing next to him, and, nodding at the sheriff, said that the boy’s friend had slaughtered his family and had been hired by the bank, which had tried to cover for him.

That broke the dam, and, one by one, the gathered men and women shared horror stories of their encounters with the bank. For the first time, everyone seemed to understand the scope of what they were facing. It was daunting, that was for sure, and well nigh unbelievable, but once they’d gotten over those mental hurdles, they all seemed to come to the same realization he had, that there was strength in numbers, and when the sheriff signed on, too, telling them about his wife, Coy began to believe that they really did have an opportunity to reverse whatever it was that The First People’s Bank had set in motion.

It was the bookstore owner’s wife who contributed the most intriguing and possibly most significant information to the discussion. She had a friend who had received a home loan from First People’s, and in order to obtain the loan, the bank had stipulated that she and her husband had to keep one room of the house free. But free for what? The bank’s purposes, certainly, although that turned out to be a locked room which seemed to contain some sort of prisoner and from which mysterious sounds emanated. They’d left the house, but the kicker was that she’d continued to dream about the room, and her dreams appeared to have some vaguely premonitory power.

Coy had always been a rational man, but logic and rationality had flown out the window long ago, and neither he nor anyone else had any trouble believing that that restricted room held some sort of secret that First People’s did not want revealed.