The notice, as it finally issued on Monday morning over the signature of Ivey Capital Partners as anchor and administrative agent for the syndicate, ran to four pages. It recited the term sheet and the date of its execution. It recited the closing condition, verbatim. It recited the three written deferrals of the condition's satisfaction, by date, without characterizing them. It recited the trustee's confirmation, received the preceding Friday, computed as the condition required, and stated the funding ratio the confirmation reported, and the ratio the borrower's appendix had represented, and the dollar shortfall the trustee's exhibit computed, and it placed those three figures in a single paragraph, in that order, with no sentence between them longer than the figures required. It declared, in the term sheet's own language, a failure of the condition and a misrepresentation of a material fact, and it withdrew Ivey Capital's commitment, effective immediately, and it advised that the commitments of the remaining syndicate members were, by the express terms of their own commitment letters, conditioned upon the anchor's participation, so that the facility as constituted could not close. It closed with a reservation of rights in one sentence and a direction that all further communication be made through counsel in another.
What it did not contain was any reference to the meeting at which the facility had been presented. It did not mention a handshake refused, a seat assigned, a name mispronounced or unpronounced, a director's laugh, a chairman's silence. It did not use the words respect, courtesy, or conduct. It contained no adjective that a hostile reader could have quoted back as evidence of motive, and Fenn, reading the final proof at midnight on Sunday with his jacket off and his cuffs turned back, observed that the document was so cleansed of the room in which its author had been insulted that a reader would conclude she had not been in it. Loretta corrected him, precisely, the way she corrected drafts. "A reader will conclude what the paper supports," she said. "The paper supports this." She initialed the proof. "Send it at eight."
At eight o'clock on Monday morning the notice went out by the channels the term sheet prescribed, to Fairhaven, to the syndicate members, to the trustee, and to the file. At eight-forty, Fairhaven's stock, which traded on the national exchange under a symbol chosen to suggest permanence, opened down nine percent on no news the wire services could yet name, and by ten o'clock the first of the county's funeral directors, in a town whose name the analysts in New York had never pronounced, was telephoning the Georgia insurance department — which in that state, as in several others, held the regulation of pre-need funerals in its hands — to ask a question that the man had been composing, in one form or another, for the better part of two years, and that Denise Booker, in Perry, had already asked twice in writing and kept the answers to. The question was short, and it was the question the whole structure had been built, with letters and delays and restatements, to prevent anyone from asking in a place where it had to be answered: if we are funded at ninety-eight percent, why was Mrs. Salter's family asked for nineteen hundred dollars on the morning of her funeral, when her contract, paid in full since 2009, guaranteed the price in writing?
The cascade had begun, though cascades, in regulated industries, do not look like water. They look like calendars. Within a fortnight, the examination that the Georgia department had scheduled and postponed three times at Fairhaven's written request — postponed for the platform conversion, postponed for the personnel changes, postponed, in the third letter, in language about the burden of examination during a period of systems transition — was rescheduled by the department on its own motion, on a date the department chose, with a scope the department set, and this time the letter went from the regulator to the company, and it did not use the word indulgence at all.
Wesley Dunmore's response arrived in the two tenses his company had always used for trouble, the immediate and the arranged. The immediate response was a statement, issued before noon on Monday through the company's investor relations firm, which said that Fairhaven was disappointed by the syndicate's withdrawal, that the withdrawal rested on a technical closing condition and a trustee computation the company was reviewing and expected to resolve, that the trustee's letter reflected, in the company's view, a timing difference in the recognition of acquisition accounting and the effect of market movement in the trust's bond portfolio during a volatile quarter, and that Fairhaven's pre-need trusts remained, in the statement's chosen words, sound and fully administered in accordance with law. The statement did not give a funding ratio. It gave three explanations, none of them a number, and it closed by announcing that the company had secured fully committed replacement financing on terms it described as attractive, which would be detailed in a subsequent release.