How to Say Our Final Goodbye novel · Chapter 7 of 24
Chapter 7: Finals Week
I'd never seen Wyeth Wainscott look afraid of anything.
He didn't look afraid now, exactly.
His face tightened, watchful and guarded.
"Hotel bars," I said. "People drink and talk. I hear things."
"Not that. That isn't something people talk about."
"Then I'm right."
He glanced around the lobby.
The man with the newspaper had gone up.
The couple from Ohio were gone.
The doorman was outside, out of earshot.
Wyeth leaned his forearms on his knees and kept his voice low.
"Three years ago my department lent your father three hundred and forty million dollars. Before I ran it. The collateral is this building and the Fairbairn Hotels shares in your mother's trust."
"My shares."
"Your trust's shares. He's the trustee. He's allowed to pledge them, in theory, if the beneficiary consents."
"The beneficiary being me."
"Yes."
"And did I consent?"
He didn't answer right away.
"The file says you did," he said. "There's a consent form. And a personal guarantee."
"I've never signed anything for Wainscott Trust in my life."
He looked at me for a long moment.
"Clem, there are two hundred pages in that file. Your signature is on twelve of them."
"Then somebody else wrote it twelve times."
He sat back in the chair.
I could see him turning it over, the way he'd turned the lantern collar in his hands.
"He's behind on the payments," he said finally. "Has been for a year. The merger money was going to clear it. Nobody on my board wanted to call the loan on a family we were about to marry into."
"So the wedding pays off the loans."
"The wedding pays off the loans."
"And then nobody ever looks at those twelve pages again."
He was quiet.
"There are things in that file I signed off on myself," he said. "I'm not proud of all of them."
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