He signed it. The bank's counsel transmitted it the same afternoon, to Fairhaven and to the syndicate's agent and to Ivey Capital Partners, in the manner the term sheet prescribed, without a covering note of any kind. It arrived in Loretta's office at twenty past four on a Friday, in the middle of a thunderstorm moving across Atlanta from the west, and her deal team leader brought it in and set it on her desk and said, "The confirmation is here," and she opened it and read it standing up, with the rain beginning against the glass, and the number was what the missing letter had been declining, for three months and eleven quarters, to say.
She read it three times, which was her custom with documents that were going to change things, once for the content, once for the omissions, and once for the signature. The content was three pages and an exhibit. The trustee's officers had done the work as if they expected to be cross-examined on it, which showed a sound instinct. Assets of the Georgia pre-need trust, at market, as of the month-end: enumerated by class, each class footed to the bank's custody records. Contracts outstanding: enumerated by home, by year of sale, by guarantee class. Current fulfillment cost: priced from a survey of the actual charges at the homes in the portfolio, not from the company's planning assumptions, which the exhibit noted, in the flattest prose a bank can produce, differed materially from the survey. Then the two totals, and the ratio of the one to the other, and the dollar distance between the assets the trust held and the liabilities the contracts represented, stated once, without adjectives, in the trustee's own hand of account: a shortfall of approximately sixty-one million dollars.
Seventy-one cents, held, for every dollar of funeral that the people of Georgia had already paid Fairhaven to owe them.
She set the letter down. Her deal team leader was still in the doorway, and Fenn had come in behind him without being called, the way weather comes in, and the three of them stood in the office with the rain now fully arrived at the windows, and nobody said the word fraud, because nobody in that firm, in that office, ever said a word like that in advance of the documents that would carry it, and because the word was not, in any case, the one the moment required. The moment required a smaller and harder vocabulary. A condition had failed. A representation had been made, in a signed appendix, in a room where she had sat that week at the far end of a table while a chief financial officer assured a syndicate that the money was there and had always been there. The trustee's own computation now said the money was not there, and had not been accounted for as being there by anyone whose job was to count it, for longer than anyone in the room could yet say.
"The gap," Fenn said at last. "Sixty-one million. That's not drift. That's not a bad quarter in the bond book. Russell wants to know where sixty-one million dollars of other people's funerals went, and Russell would like the answer in writing."
"It went where money goes," Loretta said, "when it is treated as revenue before it is earned. But we will not write that sentence. We will write the sentences we can prove." She sat down at last, and pulled a pad toward her, and the office settled into the particular quiet of her firm beginning a piece of work it knew how to do. "The notice first. This weekend. The examiners will have their own calendar, and it is not ours, and we will not be coordinating with it, speculating about it, or performing for it. We have a term sheet, a failed condition, and a misrepresentation in an appendix. That is the whole of our business. Draft it."
The drafting occupied the weekend, in the firm's offices, with counsel on a screen from New York and the rain moving off and the city drying in the sun of a false October summer. Loretta was present for all of it, not because the drafting required her hand on every sentence but because the notice was going to be, in the life of this affair, the document of hers that everyone read, and she intended it to be read the way she intended everything of hers to be read: as paper that said what it said and nothing else.