Margo Ackerman paid $2.19 for a large coffee at the Speedway out by the bypass and drank it in the gravel yard on Miller Pike, northeast of the Corley square, while the six trucks came awake around her in the dark.
"Cold enough for you," Gil Ostrowski said, and answered himself before she could, the way he had for twenty-two years.
Frost had gone onto the windshields hard and white, and Truck Four's block heater cord still hung down the grille where Gil had plugged it in at four that morning, because he did not trust anybody else to do it.
"It's a dry cold," he said, into a wind proving otherwise.
"Twenty-nine on the porch. They're saying thirty-one by nine."
"They're saying a lot of things."
Nick came out of the parts room with a box against his hip and set it in Truck Two.
"Sandusky called back," he said, standing there while the engine caught. "Wants to know why the furnace only heats the room when the dog's in it."
"And?"
"The dog sleeps on the register."
"Did you tell her that?"
"I told her the dog had found the warmest square foot in Ohio. She gave me a bag of apples."
One after another the trucks went out the gravel and turned up Miller Pike, and the yard went back to being a yard. Six of them, and six certificates of title in the fire safe ten feet from her desk. Her name was on every one of them. So was Roy's.
She had opened her Menards barn coat twice before seven, which was the whole story of her fifties and nothing she meant to explain to Gil Ostrowski. The folding fan in her coat pocket was good for two things: the heat, and a reason to walk out of a room.
Four days earlier an old man at the Bluebird had told her the sign at the road used to read Ackerman & Sczepanski, and she had not decided what to do with that.
At five past nine she was parked around on Third, where nobody counts cars, and sitting in the one room two doors up from the courthouse steps, with the butterscotch dish on the client side of the desk.
"I walked the letter over Friday afternoon," Diane Halloran said. "Two hundred yards around the square. Certified mail would have bought us three days and a trip to the post office."
"Is that all right to do?"
"You're a guarantor on the note and half owner of the company that holds the ground under the mortgage. When collateral walks out of a file you're standing behind, you're allowed to say so, in writing." She turned her legal pad around. "Read the second page."
The bank's answer had come over that morning, hand-carried by a teller. Miami Valley Savings acknowledged the notice from Margaret Ackerman, reserved every right under the note, the mortgage and both guarantees, and did not consent to any transfer of collateral or any change in ownership of the borrowing entity. No release and no consent to a refinance would issue while the review was open, and nothing would issue at all without the signature of every guarantor.
"They said no," Margo said.
"They said review." Diane capped her pen. "A bank will hold its breath and mail you a letter about it."
"He'll call them this afternoon."
"He will. They'll tell him the file is under review, which is true, and nothing else. Bankers don't volunteer names."
Margo turned the page over and read the last line twice. "I signed that note."
"You signed it a long time ago, and you have been keeping that file current ever since. When the collateral goes down, the guarantor's exposure goes up, and you are the guarantor who said something. Nothing in that letter is a favor."
"Is he going to know it was me?"
"No. He'll know somebody told them something. Nobody at that bank is going to hand him a name."
Margo put her glasses back on their chain. "Well."
Monday was payroll, and payroll belonged to her. She sat in the front office after five with Tuesday's deposits dated and the phones still going in the back, because it had dropped to twenty-nine at dark and every furnace in Calder County was deciding something.
Nick dropped his tickets on the corner of her desk.
"He was at the bank at two," he said, working at a splinter with a paperclip.
"On the deposit?"
"There wasn't one. I ran that through at noon." He shrugged. "He came out walking like he does when an estimate goes sideways. Sat in his office with the door shut till four, then came out and snapped at Gil about the filters."
"What did he say about it?"
"Bank stuff." Nick flicked the paperclip into the trash. "That's about all he said."
"Which bank stuff."
"The kind he doesn't tell me." He reached for his jacket. "He's got a lot on him. He says after all this goes through we're looking at two new trucks, and I get to spec them."
"Does he."
"He promised." Nick stopped in the doorway. "Six tomorrow. Gil moved it."
"Six."
She listened to his truck start and sat with her hand flat on the register. Her son had a spring in his head with two new trucks in it, and she was the one standing in the road, and there was no way to tell him that would not put him in the middle of his parents.
Roy came in through the garage at twenty past nine with his coat still on.
"Anybody call the house today?"
"St. Boniface, about the food drive. Deb at noon."
"Nobody from the bank."
"Why would the bank call the house?" she said.
He stood at the counter with his keys going in his hand and looked at the stove instead of at her.
"First thing in the morning I want the loan binder out of the safe. The whole thing. The note, both guarantees, the mortgage, the survey, the lot split, every page."
"All right."
"Somebody put a bug in that bank's ear."
"What kind of bug."
"The kind that costs a man three weeks he doesn't have." He opened the refrigerator, looked in it, shut it. "A man I have banked with since I was thirty handed me a word this afternoon."
"What word."
"Review." Roy said it the way a man says a word in a language he doesn't speak. "There is a signature holding that whole deal together somewhere, and before this week is out I want to know which one it is."
"Which one do you think it is?"
He looked at her a half beat past what the question needed and did not answer. He picked up his keys and went out through the garage, and the truck backed out of the drive and turned east — toward the square, toward the office, toward the safe.
Margo stood at the sink with the water running over a plate she had already washed. She had put a wall across his road, and he could feel it without seeing it. He would back up and hit it again, and then he would start looking for whoever built it. A man who had never been able to sit still in front of a thing he could not sell would not slow down now. He would speed up. She ran the numbers on her own husband three ways, and every way came out the same.
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