Then she put the three letters back in their order, closed the file, turned off the lamp, and went down in the elevator of her own building alone, carrying her binder, past the sleeping lobby, into the Atlanta night, where the towers were lit in their grids and the traffic on Peachtree had thinned to taxis and buses, and she drove home through streets she had known for fifty-four years, a woman whose hand had been refused that morning by a man who believed he had thereby said something, and who was about to discover that what he had actually done was far less interesting than that, and far more consequential: he had caused Loretta Ivey to read his file herself, from the first page, in the evening, without assistance.
The demand went out in the morning, jointly, in writing, over the names of every member of the syndicate, which surprised Fairhaven's counsel sufficiently that he telephoned Fenn before ten o'clock to ask whether some misunderstanding had arisen. Fenn, who had drafted the demand's final paragraph himself, told him there had not: the syndicate required the confirmation described in the executed term sheet, computed as described in the executed term sheet, and required it by Friday, and the facility's closing was suspended until it was received. He said this in the tone of a man reading a train schedule. The counsel said the trustee's diligence was a hallmark of the relationship. Fenn said he had read that phrase somewhere, and rang off, and noted the call in the file with the time.
To understand what happened next it is necessary to understand the Boyce Trust Company, which is to say it is necessary to understand that the word trustee, in the Fairhaven arrangements, described a legal duty and a social fact, and that for fifteen years the social fact had done the legal duty's work in the legal duty's clothing.
The Boyce Trust Company was a state-chartered bank of respectable age and modest ambition, headquartered in a granite building in downtown Atlanta that it had occupied since 1962. It held trust accounts for estates, for churches, for two small colleges, and, since the year Fairhaven began acquiring in earnest, for the pre-need trusts of the Fairhaven Memorial Group, a book of business that had grown, acquisition by acquisition, into the largest single relationship on the bank's trust floor. Its chairman, Leland Boyce, was fifty-eight, a man of courtly habits and unhurried speech, who had roomed with Wesley Dunmore at the state university in the last years of the seventies and had stood as a groomsman at his wedding and been named, in the fullness of friendship, the trustee of nearly everything Dunmore touched thereafter. When Fairhaven acquired a funeral home, the home's pre-need trust moved to Boyce Trust as a matter of course, the way water finds a channel already dug. The trust officers who administered the accounts were diligent people. The bank's examinations were satisfactory. Nothing about the arrangement was hidden. Everything about it was customary. That was the trouble, though no one at the bank would have put it that way, because custom, in a trust department, is not supposed to be a method of verification.
For the confirmation letters the syndicate and the regulators had received over the years — quarterly, in format, without incident — had been produced by a process that the bank's own procedures manual described one way and that the trust floor practiced another. The manual said the bank would confirm the trusts' position from its records. The practice, grown up gradually like ivy over a wall, was that Fairhaven's accounting department prepared a schedule of the trusts' position, transmitted it to the bank, and the bank's officers compared it against the account statements the bank itself generated — statements of what the accounts held — and signed a letter in the form the company proposed, attesting the position as management had stated it. The comparison was real, as far as it went. It compared the company's numbers against the bank's balances. What it did not do, because no one had ever made it do it, was price the obligation side of the ratio: the current cost, at each home, in each year, of fulfilling every guaranteed contract outstanding. The bank held one side of the fraction in its vaults and its systems. The other side it had always taken, on trust, from the trustee's customer's own mouth. The ninety-eight percent had been, for eleven consecutive quarters, a number the company computed about itself, which the bank restated in the bank's voice, which the company then quoted back to the world in the phrase per the trustee — a circle of attribution so complete that no one inside it had ever stood outside it long enough to see its shape.