Last Will (The Lockes)

by Ron Schwab

  “What is it, Princess?” I scooted my rocker around to face her.

  “Are you a dreamer?”

  “A dreamer? I suppose you could say that. Anyway, I spend a lot of time in my own head. I have a lot of good conversations with myself up there. Am I making any sense?” She grinned, and I must say she absolutely owns me when she smiles and crinkles her pixie nose the way she does.

  “Mother always says I’m a dreamer just like my father.” She grinned again. “I don’t think she always meant it as a good thing, though.”

  “Well, I suppose it’s not always a good thing. Sometimes I’m at a meeting, and I get tired of listening to people yammer, so I just slip into my own world for a spell. But then I don’t hear what’s going on . . . and I guess it’s rude besides.”

  “Yeah, I do that all the time. Lots of times I’d rather just be by myself and think about things. I love Rosemary. She’s my best friend anywhere, but sometimes I even have to get away from her for a while. If I don’t get my dreaming time, I get crabby.”

  “Me, too.”

  “There’s a lot of time to dream here . . . like sitting on the porch at night, or during the day when I’m riding Dancer.”

  “Dancer?”

  “I named my horse today. I’ve thought hard about it. She’s so graceful and careful on her feet, like a dancer, I decided the name fit.”

  “It’s a good name. Something to live up to.”

  “Maybe Hemlock’s living down to his name. Maybe you should have named him something else.”

  “Too late now. He is what he is.”

  “Could I ride him some time?

  The thought startled me, and I did not like the picture that flashed in my mind. “I don’t know. I can barely handle him myself. We’ll see. No promises.”

  “I like it here, Dad. I thought I’d hate it, but I was wrong. I miss Mother, but I’m okay.”

  “I’m glad, because whatever happens when your Mother returns, I don’t want us to ever be separated like we were again.”

  “Me, either. If I go back to Omaha, I’ll come here and visit as much as I can. Spend summers here with you, maybe.”

  “That would be wonderful.”

  “I just wish Mother could come and live here.”

  “I don’t think she’d like living in Borderview.”

  “Not just Borderview. Here. On the Lazy Key.”

  Our conversation was taking an unexpected turn. “That can’t be, Princess. That time is past.”

  There was a compelling sadness in her face now and a huskiness in her voice. “I’ve been thinking about that all week. About you and Mother and me all being together.”

  “Your mother has a husband, Mandy.”

  “She could divorce him. Just like she did you. Then she could marry you again.”

  “It doesn’t work that way, honey.”

  Her eyes clouded with sudden anger. “I hate Victor,” she hissed. “He hits Mother and he—”

  “He what?”

  “Nothing.” She brushed a tear from her eye and her teeth dug in her lower lip before she turned away and picked up her book. Conversation ended. Don’t push. Give her room. And time. Patience.

  After a respectable silence, I said, “Tomorrow’s Sunday, and I’m not going anywhere near the office. What would you like to do?”

  “Go to church.”

  “Church?”

  “Yes, don’t you ever go to church?”

  “Not much.” Not a huge fib, if funerals counted.

  “Do you belong to a church?”

  I evaded the question. “I was baptized a Methodist. My mother was a Quaker, and my father didn’t belong to a church. There wasn’t a meeting place for Friends where we lived at the time, so my mother took the children to the Methodist Church. My brother, Franklin, is a Methodist preacher.” I added the last comment, thinking that might count for something.

  “I’m a Presbyterian.”

  “I know. I was there when you were baptized. We don’t have a Presbyterian Church in Borderview, but Methodists aren’t too far from Presbyterians in the way they look at things.” That was a guess on my part, for a student of theology I am not.

  “Then we can go to the Methodist Church.”

  “Well, okay.” What else could I say? I supposed a father had some responsibility to expose his child to religious influence, and I guessed it wouldn’t hurt me all that much. I hoped this wouldn’t become a habit, though.

  “Grandma Sarah was a Quaker? What do Quakers do?”

  “I truthfully don’t know all that much about them. They call their worship services ‘meetings,’ and I don’t think they have a preacher as such. Different members speak at the meetings. They emphasize doing good works over religious rituals. They’ve established schools for Indians, and many Quakers worked to help slaves escape to the North. Most oppose war, and many will not take up arms. They’re generally a quiet people who try to live their lives according to the way they interpret the bible.”

  “I never knew Grandma Sarah, but Mother says my middle name, Kate, came from her middle name.”

  “Yes. Your mother got to choose your first name, and I got to pick the middle name. I didn’t like the ring of ‘Amanda Sarah,’ but ‘Amanda Kate’ had a nice sound. And I wanted to give you something of your grandmother. She was a remarkable woman.”

  “And Cammie was named after your twin brother.”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t remember him . . . or Grandpa Locke or Aunt Hannah or Uncle Franklin. And there’s Uncle Thad, too, isn’t there?”

  “Yes, your Uncle Thad’s a veterinary surgeon. You weren’t more than three years old the last time you saw them. They all came to Omaha when I still lived there.”

  “Does Uncle Cam look like you?”

  “Most strangers can’t tell us apart, but Cam always claims he’s the handsome one. I say I’m the smart one, because I’m older . . . by about five minutes.”

  Mandy rolled her eyes, and traces of a grin returned to her lips. “I’d like to meet Uncle Cam.”

  “You will. I’ve already written Cam and told him we’ll be making a visit to the Circle L in September when it’s cooler and, hopefully, I’m not so swamped with legal work. You’ll meet your Aunt Pilar, Cam’s wife, and their three kids . . . your cousins. And, of course, your Grandpa Locke. I haven’t seen them since last Christmas, although Cam and I write back and forth all the time.”

  We were interrupted by a long, high-pitched yowl from the direction of the barn. I got up and stepped off the veranda. Momentarily, the horses began whinnying, and then I saw TJ limping up from the barn. Mandy jumped up and ran out into the ranch yard to meet him and scooped him into her arms.

  “Dad,” she said, “TJ’s hurt.”

  The commotion continued in the barn. “Take him to the house, Mandy. I’ll look at him in a minute.” I whirled and ran into the house, plucked my Winchester from the gun rack, pumped a cartridge into the chamber and headed toward the barn.

  As I approached the barn, I saw movement behind the side corral, something racing toward the arroyo that angled into a wooded area some distance from the farmstead. My instinct was to give chase, but dusk was settling in, and Mandy was alone at the house. The horses had quieted now, and Hemlock stuck his head out of the barn door and ventured out into the corral, followed momentarily by Dancer and the team. No harm there. I checked out the barn, and as I expected, I found nothing. As I made my way back to the house, I faced the truth. The figure I had seen running from behind the corral had not been something. It had been the shadowy form of someone.

  Mandy was cradling TJ like a baby in her arms when I entered the house, and he was not resisting the attention, purring loudly, as she gently rubbed behind his ears. He had clearly shifted loyalties to the new member of the household. I took a look at him and could not detect any broken bones but found his left hip painful to the touch.

  “Will he be okay, Dad?”

  “I think so
. If he’s crippled up in the morning, I’ll ask George to take a look at him . . . after church, of course. We don’t have a vet in town, but George is pretty good at doctoring sick or injured animals.” I didn’t add that I wanted George to come over and take a look at things—see what he thought about the visitor. I also wanted to talk to him about a dog. I’d never felt a need to have one around and always thought a dog would be more trouble than help with me often splitting my time between town and country. When I left TJ at the ranch, he lived off the land and did serious mousing in the barn. Besides he frequently absented himself from home several days at a time. I always thought “domesticated’ was an oxymoron when describing a cat anyway. A dog, on the other hand, required companionship and regular care.

  “Can TJ sleep with me tonight? So I can look after him?”

  “As long as he wants to.” TJ didn’t look like he would raise an objection.

  17

  Ian

  I SAT IN the president’s office at the Wainwright Savings Bank, shuffling through a stack of customer notes that were causing me some worry. The notes were unsecured, good as the individual signor’s word, which in some cases was not much. The accountant was to meet me here in a half hour. He had spent a week digging through the bank’s records and was prepared to render his verdict. I had seen nothing thus far to make me particularly optimistic about the outcome.

  It was a lazy Friday afternoon, welcome after a chaotic week. Sunday after church, Mandy and I had enjoyed chicken and gravy and biscuits in the dining room at the Fremont Hotel and afterward had stopped by George Washington’s Mount Vernon farm. Mandy stayed at George’s to talk with Rosemary while George and I rode over to my place. George had taken a look at TJ who was moving slowly, but didn’t seem to mind the attention his injury had brought him. George confirmed that the tabby cat would recover, but was unable to tell whether the blow had been inflicted by man or horse. An examination of the dusty earth behind the corral verified that a human visitor had been the cause of the ruckus at the barn. George had concluded that the party was male and relatively small and had tracked him to the end of the arroyo where a horse had been tethered. We now had a dog at the Lazy Key—a huge gray mongrel that looked like some wolf blood ran in his veins, which might account for the fact that George had named the animal “Wolf.” He was an ugly creature, as were most of George’s dogs, and he was trained to voice commands, on which George had instructed Mandy, evidently not trusting my memory or my attentiveness to the task.

  I had met with the bank’s board of directors, and after quickly accomplishing my election as president, explained my concerns about the bank’s financial position. I suggested that anyone who was not prepared to weather some tough times should consider resigning. This promptly elicited resignations from the owner of the general store and a livery proprietor, who also served as the town’s mayor, neither of whom wanted to risk the public’s ire if things went sour. That left Harm Junker, a well-to-do German farmer who was deservedly respected in the farm community and too stubborn to quit anything under pressure, and Amos Thornton, a grizzled grain merchant, who said he was too old to give a damn if trouble came his way. I had correctly anticipated the resignations and immediately elected George Washington and Dr. Theodore Mason, one of the town’s two physicians, to fill the slots. Folks seem to love doctors as much as they hate lawyers. Dr. Mason would lend credibility, in addition to his good sense, to the board, and George would bring financial judgment unequalled in Cottonwood County.

  Monday would bring Emily Stanton and Casey McGlaun to Borderview. The trial would follow a week or two later. The Wainwright case was drawing regional attention the likes of which Borderview had never seen.

  I continued to review the ‘bad note’ pile and stopped when I came to one I had not given much thought to before. Isaac Bell. Two thousand dollars. Why in the hell would Ralph loan Ike Bell that kind of money on his signature? There was no way Ike could repay a note that size. As far as I knew he owned nothing but his horse. He lived in a boarding house and the county sheriff’s wages were subsistence at best. The note was dated in January six months earlier and payable on demand.

  “May I come in, Mr. Locke?” I looked up and saw a cherubic man in a gray wool suit standing in the open doorway, with a bulging briefcase in each hand. I stood and waved him in.

  “Be seated, Mr. Tilson. Take off your coat.”

  Arnold Tilson was a short, bald man closing in on sixty. An accountant who specialized in bank audits, I had used him on several occasions when I needed an independent financial analysis of a banking problem for a client of my former law firm. He worked alone, demanded healthy fees and got them. His voice had an annoying nasal quality, but you got past that quickly when he began to tell the story he had created from his numbers. I considered the man a genius.

  Tilson placed his satchels on the floor and removed his coat and put it on the rack in the room’s corner. He sat down and methodically began to sort through the papers from one of the bags. I sat back in my own chair and waited patiently, knowing that Tilson preferred to do things in his own way, in his own time.

  After some moments, Tilson pushed a sheaf of papers in front of me. “These are the numbers I come up with, Mr. Locke. Not a very pretty picture. Whether the numbers turn downright ugly depends upon the quality of the bank’s assets.”

  I perused the figures Tilson had entered on the lined paper. The real balance sheet was even worse than the numbers set out in the report. “You’re referring to the quality of our notes, I assume.”

  “Yes. As you can see, the bank has approximately $210,000 in liabilities represented by depositor accounts . . . an impressive amount of deposits, by the way for a community this size, even considering the bank has no competition. On the asset side of the ledger, you have less than $50,000 cash and about $146,000 in borrowers’ notes. That gives us a total of some $196,000. Liabilities exceed assets by $14,000 or so . . . if the notes are all good. There is no capital account. It’s been sucked dry. The bank’s insolvent.” He paused and fixed his eyes on mine, blinking like a barn owl. “How good is your note case? I found a goodly number of non-performing loans and way too many unsecured notes, but Mr. Wainwright didn’t leave much of an accounting trail. Very few borrower financial statements and little documentation to back up the notes. My past experience tells me, unfortunately, that this is not a hopeful sign. It usually means, Mr. Locke, that much of the paper held by the bank can be relegated to outhouse functions.”

  I pointed to the stacks of paper on my desk. “A country lawyer knows most of the people in the county. With a few exceptions, I know pretty well who’s good for the money and who isn’t and who’s somewhere in between.” I placed my hand on the largest stack. “These are solid loans, not only with assets to back them, but, more importantly, the notes are signed by men who have a high sense of honor. In a few cases, for the protection of the bank and its depositors, we need to request some mortgages to secure the loans, but these are clean. These add up to $112,000 plus. I have another batch here I consider marginal. Mostly small farmers. They’re probably okay if it rains in the next week. If it doesn’t, I’m afraid half of them go into default. The borrowers are good people, but they’re hanging by a thread. We have about $25,000 of these notes.” I picked up the remaining stack. “I have $9,000 in notes that can go to the outhouse.”

  “So,” Tilson said, “optimistically, we have a shortfall of about $23,000. I’d add, say, $12,000 of the marginal notes, and you’re short $35,000.”

  “The bad notes and the marginal ones we can charge off to poor judgment or a kind heart, likely some of each.”

  “Either can be fatal to a banker,” Tillson interjected.

  I continued. “But according to corporate records the bank has $50,000 in capital stock outstanding. That means that once the bank had at least that much in the capital account even if there weren’t any retained profits. Most banks try to build the capital account every year by only pa
ying out a fraction of the profits to shareholders. As near as I can tell, the Wainwright Savings Bank had over $80,000 in the capital account a little more than three years ago. What happened?”

  “As you requested, I also audited Mr. Wainwright’s personal accounts in the bank. Obviously, I can only ascertain where certain checks were written or when deposits and withdrawals were made, but it isn’t all that complicated. Approximately three years ago Mr. Wainwright commenced making large withdrawals from the bank’s funds and depositing the money in his personal account. This first wiped out the retained profits, then depleted the equity account and finally wormed its way into the depositors’ funds.”

  “Where was the money going?”

  “That wasn’t all of it, by the way. He evidently was liquidating personal assets during this time, because there were large deposits from other sources . . . one for some $30,000 a few years back.”

  I checked my memory for a moment. “Land sale. He sold a section of farmland and another section or more of pasture in Coyote Canyon about that time, all of it in one clean sweep to George Washington. Got clean out of the land business . . . said he was tired of the management headaches.”

  “Anyway, to answer your question, some of the money is easily tracked. In excess of $75,000 in checks went to one Karl Wainwright during this time. The ledger declared these payments as investments. A relative?”

  “Son. Allegedly a real estate investment broker in Kansas City.”

  Tilson nodded. “Risky business. There were checks to another relative . . . the wife I presume, Celeste Wainwright . . . of something like $20,000. ‘Household expenses’ these payments were called. A generous household allowance I should say. Fifteen thousand of this was disbursed within the last two months.”

  “I see.” But I didn’t.

  “Finally, another gentleman enriched himself at Mr. Wainwright’s expense: Mr. Isaac Bell, for ‘services,’ $13,000, more or less. Initially, payments were $250 monthly, but Mr. Bell received $4,000 in April of this year.”