It had been a statement more than a question, and Florence hadn’t paused for a response.

“His plan is to reimburse the good people of the Wayne Building & Loan. With our money.”

His eyes had closed as he tried to enjoy the feeling of the dark liquid coating his throat and sliding a warm path down to his stomach.

“Daddy!”

J. Ellis had run a hand over his pomaded hair and walked back to the credenza to inspect the pineapple upside-down cake.

“This is a beauty. How long did it take Dolly to make this?”

“Daddy.” Betty’s voice had sounded a warning.

This was not going to become a family exercise, he’d decided. It had been a mistake to even mention it to Florence, but the atmosphere had been sheer insanity. With the telephone’s relentless ringing and the throngs of photographers outside the house. He’d started a verbal downward spiral about the whole thing, and at the end of the rant it had come out. He was going to use his own money to reimburse the Wayne Building & Loan customers. Or at least most of them. Of course the fellows from the club, that was just common sense. His son, John, had made a particular plea that he reimburse the Dalton family, which was easy enough. They hadn’t had much to reimburse. And then J. Ellis would, naturally, repay the people who could potentially make trouble for him. The loudest complainers. If somebody like Phil Stanley didn’t get his money back, J. Ellis would never hear the end of it.

He’d built up a majestic mountain of a reputation for himself over the years and he wasn’t going to allow the lingering bank robbery nonsense to topple it. When you were as big a man as J. Ellis Reed, you had a responsibility to maintain a certain standing in your community. And if that meant spending some of your own hard-earned money, then that was what it meant. (His father might have punctuated this with a “By gum!” but he had been more of an Eagle Scout than J. Ellis.) When you were J. Ellis Reed of Wooster, everyone knew who you were. Everyone cared what you did and how you did it.

Chapter 6

1931

“Oh, as if anyone cares what you do,” Vera’d mocked when Vivian had a near-fainting spell over Pawpy’s McGinty boardinghouse suggestion.

By April of 1931 the Brinkerhoffs next door had started letting two of their rooms to renters, a couple of men who’d lost their factory jobs in Cleveland and had moved to Wooster to find cheaper rent and, hopefully, work. Sixteen-year-old Vivian would watch in a curious panic, her breath fogging the panes of her bedroom window, as the strange men came and went from the Brinkerhoffs’, day in and day out over the next year. When Pawpy suggested the McGintys open their doors as well, to earn a little money (“We’ll call it McGintys’ Come-On Inn!”), she’d twisted her hands almost bloody around her handkerchief at the thought of strange men from Cleveland knowing any of the intimate details of her life.