The Bank, page 2
“Maybe so,” Durl said, walking back toward the corner. “Thanks.”
Kyle picked up the mortgage statement from the bank, found the toll-free customer service number below the bank’s corporate address in the upper left corner. “If you need any help, let me know!” he called out to Durl.
“Will do!”
Prepared for a long wait, he picked up his phone and called the bank.
3
Driving Nick home, Anita passed by not only the optometrist’s office where she worked, but also the nursery, where Steven was visible behind the chainlink fence, watering a table of perennials. She tried not to let her expression change, maintaining her focus on the road ahead, though her face felt hot and she could sense a sudden increase in her pulse rate. They were scheduled to meet today at lunch—not at the nursery this time, but at his place. She was not sure that was such a good idea. They’d been spending a lot of lunches together, and everything so far had been leading in one direction, but flirting was different than…what came after flirting, and maybe it would be smarter for her to use Nick’s suspension as an excuse to cancel. She could back away from the precipice, get things back on a friendship footing.
But was that what she really wanted?
She thought of the way it had felt last week when he had taken her hand in his, his thumb gently rubbing the knuckles on her—
“Mom! Pay attention!”
Anita slammed on her brakes, barely avoiding hitting the car in front of her, which, for some reason, had come to a stop in the middle of the street.
“Were you daydreaming? It’s like you didn’t even see that guy stop!”
“I’m all right,” she said. “I was just…distracted for a moment.”
A skinny, boyish woman threw open the passenger door of the car and bolted out, running toward the Shell station. The car swerved to the right, across the other lane, following her.
“What’s that about?” Nick wondered.
“None of our business.”
Nick looked out of his window behind them as they moved forward again. “You think she was kidnapped and trying to escape?”
“No, but maybe you should put that imagination to use and write about something like that next time instead of…what you did.”
They drove the rest of the way home in silence. When they arrived, Anita quickly unlocked and opened the front door before stepping aside. “I’m already late for work. Close and lock the door behind you. And stay here. I don’t want you leaving the house.”
“I thought it was a slap-on-the-wrist offense.”
“It is. But you’re still suspended, buddy. And if that little stunt showed anything, it showed poor judgment. Did you really think that was an acceptable thing to turn in as your writing assignment? To Mrs. Nelson? At Montgomery High?”
“No,” he admitted.
“All right, then.”
“But I can go on the internet, right? Or watch TV?”
“After you get your homework done.”
He grinned. “I only went to first period. So I only have one assignment.”
“Then you email your teachers and get your work for the next two days. This isn’t a vacation.” She glanced at her watch. “I need to go. But I’m checking up on you. I’m calling the house phone. Randomly. Throughout the day. And if you’re not there to answer it…”
“What if I’m in the bathroom?”
“You heard me.”
Nick laughed. “Don’t worry. I’m not going anywhere.”
Anita did the I’m-watching-you hand gesture, using two fingers to point at her eyes then one to point at Nick, before getting back into the car and making a U-turn in the street. He was a good kid and she trusted him, but as this incident showed, he was a bit of a smartass and a little too full of himself for his own good.
She was hoping that this would be one of those rare days when Dr. Wilson was late to the office, but no such luck. Immediately after pulling in, she saw the optometrist’s Mercedes parked in the small lot on the side of the building. Pulling next to it, she quickly got out, grabbed her purse and hurried through the side door, where Dr. Wilson, striding down the short hallway, turned to see her walking in.
“Sorry,” she apologized. “Family emergency.”
The optometrist was frowning, but as that was his natural expression, she wasn’t sure if he had any reaction at all to her excuse. She chose to believe he did not, and made her way to the front counter, stashing her purse beneath the desk. The office had only been open for a half-hour, and as yet there were no patients, but the optometrist was strict about employees showing up on time, and she mentally kicked herself for not calling in to explain that she was going to be late. It would have made her seem less…flaky.
Dr. Wilson hated flakes.
The optometrist had already gone back into his personal office and closed the door, and Anita waved hello to Jen, the other assistant, who was rearranging a display of designer frames.
“You’re late?” Jen said, walking over. “That’s a first.”
“Happens to the best of us.”
“What was it?”
“Nick got suspended.”
“Really?” The other assistant dropped her voice. “Was it drugs? My nephew Tommy got caught with marijuana a couple years ago. Never recovered. He’s still a screwup.”
Anita shook her head. “No. Nothing like that. The principal called us in because Nick wrote a play with the word ‘shit’ in it.”
“That’s all? Well…shit.”
They both laughed.
The buzzer rang as the front door opened and a patient walked in. After that, there was a mini-rush, and all three of them were suddenly busy as two new patients came in for eye exams and three older patients either ordered or picked up glasses.
Everyone was gone by eleven, and with the office empty and no appointments until one-fifteen, Dr. Wilson told Anita and Jen they could take an early lunch. The two of them paused outside the office. “Are you…going over to the nursery?” Jen asked carefully.
“Why?” Anita responded, suddenly defensive.
“No…I…Sorry. No reason.”
Was it that obvious?
The situation with Steven was clearly spiraling out of control. She needed to nip this in the bud, to use a gardening term, to stop things before they went any further and did some real damage. The best idea would be to stand Steven up, not show and not tell him and let him figure things out from there.
Standing him up would only make him more interested.
She knew that.
Was that why she was doing it?
She thought of his hands touching hers, the way it felt when he stood next to her.
“No. I have no plans,” Anita told Jen. “Want to grab some lunch?”
“I’ll get my purse.”
Anita walked outside and waited next to the door, staring numbly out at the three cars in the small parking lot. What was wrong with her? She had a good life, a nice family. Was she so self-destructive that she just had to sabotage things when they were going well? It’s what her parents had said when she’d dropped out of ASU her sophomore year, and she was beginning to think that maybe they were right.
Wasn’t Nick doing exactly the same thing with his Taking a Shit play?
Maybe it ran in the family.
Kyle was the stable one, the rock, and he didn’t deserve any of this. He was a good father, a good husband, and deep down she loved him. The last thing she wanted to do was hurt him.
So why was she allowing this to happen?
Jen opened the back door and emerged outside. “Ready to go?”
Taking Jen’s car, they drove over to Juan Wang’s, the new Asian fusion fast food joint that had opened up in what had previously been the Lottaburger. The tables were all outside, but it was a nice day and they had the place to themselves. After ordering, they waited until their names were called, and then carried their trays from the pickup window to their table.
Anita unwrapped a straw and stuck it through the hole in the top of her cup of iced green tea. “So what’s going on with your loan?” she asked. “Find out if you qualify yet?”
Jen sighed. “We actually don’t. But with my parents co-signing…maybe.” She took a bite of eggroll burrito. “Do you realize how humiliating it is to be thirty-five years old and still have to have your parents vouch for you? My twenty-year high school reunion’s coming up in three years. You’d think I’d be enough of an adult by now to be able to buy a house with my husband. But no…”
“What’s your credit score?”
“Pretty good. Both of us are responsible, always pay on time. It’s the income. We don’t make enough, even together, for the bank to think we can handle the payments on a house. Trailer, yes. House, no.”
“What are you going to do if they turn you down?”
Jen shook her head. “Lane thinks we should try one of those online lenders. But I don’t know. I’ve heard a lot of sketchy things about those places. I read the other day about one company that went under and sold all its debts to another lender who demanded immediate full payment from everyone who’d taken out loans.”
Anita nodded. “It’s the wild west out there on the internet. And I’m not sure how well-regulated some of those companies are. I think you’re much safer with a real bank.”
“Me, too. But it all depends on whether we’re accepted or not.” Jen held up her eggroll burrito. “This thing is really good. I didn’t think I was going to like it, but it’s amazing.”
Anita speared a fiesta wonton with her fork. “Mine’s good, too.”
“I should probably go back to bringing my own lunch to work, though. Try to save a few bucks.” Jen sighed. “Then maybe I wouldn’t have to keep relying on my parents.”
4
Seventeen years old, and he still didn’t like staying in the house by himself.
The minute his mom drove off, Nick turned on the TV in the living room and the light in the hallway, needing to hear some noise and wanting make sure there were no parts of the house that were dark—even though it was mid-morning on a particularly bright day. Such fears were childish, he knew, but he couldn’t help how he felt. He wondered if things would change once he became an adult, but the truth was, he didn’t really see that happening. He’d be eighteen in less than a year, and it was hard to imagine any radical changes in personality taking place in that time.
He wasn’t exactly sure why he still got scared being home alone. The house wasn’t that old. It wasn’t as if they lived in some historic mansion where a rich madman had murdered his wife in the 1800s. Theirs was just a regular home on a regular street with a bunch of others that looked just like it.
But he’d always had a vivid imagination, one that had inevitably turned toward darkness. As a little kid, he remembered seeing a movie on television about an escaped lunatic who lived between the walls of an ordinary family’s home, and for years afterward, every stray noise Nick heard in the house made him think that someone was hiding in the walls or the attic or the crawlspace.
His phone buzzed, and Nick picked it up to see a text from a number he did not recognize.
It was some bank, offering him his own credit card.
That was weird.
He automatically deleted the text. It was probably just some scam. How could he be eligible for a credit card? He didn’t even have a job. Someone was just fishing for personal information to use in order to create a fake account or…get a credit card.
Maybe he was eligible.
The idea appealed to him. Last summer, he’d wanted to upgrade his phone and had asked his dad for a loan, only to be told that the embarrassing antique he carted around was perfectly fine. If he’d had his own credit card, he could have charged it.
His phone buzzed again, but there was no text this time, no call. Apparently, the phone was ringing for no reason.
Was he being hacked?
Suddenly filled with panic, he flipped his phone over, pulled off the cover, slid open the back and yanked out the battery. He had no idea how sophisticated hacking operations were these days, but since phones could be tracked even when they were turned off, it made sense that they could be hacked that way, too.
The one thing in his favor was the fact that he almost never put correct personal information about himself online. His Google account was connected to a fake name with a fake address. For anything requiring a birthdate, he typed in random numbers.
Although…
The phone bill was paid by his dad, so it was probably linked to a credit card.
Should he call his father and let him know? If he did, his dad would just give him a lecture about allowing himself to be hacked. Besides, there was no guarantee that that was what was going on.
Maybe it would be better if he just waited to see what happened.
He decided to keep the battery out of the phone for the rest of the day and then put it back in before his parents came home.
Leaving everything where it was, Nick walked into the kitchen and got a water bottle out of the refrigerator. Twisting off the top, he took a long drink as he looked out at the back yard through the window over the sink. If it wasn’t a hack, what could have made his phone ring like that? he wondered. Was there something wrong with the device itself? Some sort of technical glitch?
Maybe it was a ghost.
The idea was absurd, and he knew it was absurd, but once in his mind, the notion was impossible to shake. He glanced back at the doorway. He was suddenly afraid to go into the living room and even look at his phone, certain for some reason that he would see something on the no-longer-dead screen, a picture, the face of a little boy, an overly serious little boy with obsidian-black hair and hard piercing eyes, looking out at him.
This, Nick understood, was one reason he continued to scare himself even though he was almost an adult: the specificity of his fears. He was never afraid he was going to see some generic ghost or amorphous blob. It was always an old lady with no teeth hiding in the closet, or a gibbering monkey-faced man crawling down the hallway.
Or an overly serious little boy peeking out at him through his phone.
He had no idea where these ideas came from or why they occurred to him, but from the second his brain conjured such an image, he was consumed with nothing else until he could prove to himself that it was not real.
Forcing himself to be brave, steeling himself for whatever he might see, Nick returned to the living room and picked up his phone.
Nothing.
A black screen.
Relief flooded through him, and he put the battery back in, turning on the phone, reassured that he saw nothing unusual on the screen as it came to life. He probably had a touch of OCD, since the stress and worry he’d felt disappeared as quickly as it had come, replaced by a sense of calm.
The phone rang, and he jumped, nearly dropping it.
Before he could yank out the battery again—his first reaction—he saw from the number that the call was from was his friend Victor. A glance at the time told him that at school they were on break.
“Hey,” he said, picking up.
“Where are you, man? What happened?”
“Suspended,” Nick said, and felt a little proud. That was not something that had ever happened to either of them.
Victor’s voice dropped conspiratorially. “What did you do?”
“Nothing. It was that play I wrote for Nelson’s class.”
“They suspended you for that?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s cuz it had the word ‘shit’ in it, right?”
“Which, right now, you are saying freely in the hallowed halls of Montgomery High,” Nick said drily.
“How long are you suspended for?”
“Two days.”
“What are me and Aaron supposed to do at lunch?”
“You’ll figure something out.”
The school bell rang in the background. “Gotta go,” Victor said.
“Later.”
Nick clicked off. After talking to his friend, the house suddenly seemed quiet—too quiet—and he started to feel a little creeped out again. He checked to see if there’d been any messages sent in the minutes his phone had been off. There hadn’t. And while he was glad there was no photo of a serious little boy, he was a little disappointed that there was no credit card offer.
Maybe he shouldn’t have deleted that first text.
It would be nice to have his own credit card.
TWO
1
“The bank called. Another foreclosure. They’re faxing over the forms now.”
“Goddamn it.” Sheriff Brad Neth picked up his coffee cup, took a sip, then spit the coffee back into the cup, grimacing. There was nothing he hated more than cold coffee.
Unless it was enforcing a foreclosure eviction.
“Who is it?” he asked his deputy. “Anyone we know?”
Hank Dillman shrugged in that bony-shouldered way that Brad always found irritating. “She didn’t say. Want me to check the fax?”
The sheriff waved him off.
Foreclosures were down from the peak of the recession, but this was still the second one in as many weeks, and Brad always got a queasy feeling in the pit of his stomach when he had to kick people out of their homes. Especially families. It didn’t sit well with him, and while it was legal, it didn’t feel right. He’d gone into law enforcement to catch bad guys, not to make life more difficult for good people who were down on their luck, and it seemed like a violation of his oath to conduct evictions on behalf of a private company. He was a public servant, damn it, and it was his job to uphold and enforce the law in order to protect the citizens of Montgomery.
