The rain over Spokane that afternoon was not the kind that announced itself. It came sideways off the river in a fine, needling mist, turning the sidewalks dark and the awnings heavy, and by one o'clock the light inside the Riverside branch of First Cascade Bank had gone the flat color of wet paper.
Floyd Briggs parked his truck two blocks away on purpose. Not out of humility, and not out of any wish to make a test of anybody, though later people would insist on calling it a test, as if he had arrived with a clipboard and a grudge. He parked two blocks away because the branch lot was small and always full at lunch, and because he liked to walk the last stretch to a meeting. A walk cleared the sawdust out of his thinking. He had come straight from the Riverside yard, where the crew was trying to keep a delivery of cedar from sitting in standing water, and his boots still carried the yard on them, a pale dust that the rain was turning to paste. His jacket was the brown canvas one he had worn for nine winters. The left cuff was frayed where Carol used to tug it when she wanted his attention in a crowded room. He kept meaning to have it mended and kept not doing it.
He was forty minutes early for a two o'clock appointment, and that, at least, was deliberate. In forty years of running Briggs Building Supply he had learned that a meeting room will tell you whatever the people in it have rehearsed, while a lobby, a loading dock, a checkout line, will tell you the truth for free if you sit still long enough to hear it. He had an appointment to discuss a fourteen-million-dollar expansion facility, money that would put a new yard on the north side and keep ninety people working through the next downturn. Before he signed anything that size, he wanted to watch his bank's front door work. He had banked here since 1984. He wanted to know what here meant now.
The branch had been remodeled since his last visit, which had been longer ago than he liked to admit. The old wood counter was gone. In its place stood a curved desk of pale stone, a row of low chairs upholstered in gray, a coffee machine with a small, apologetic sign, and a kiosk near the entrance with a screen that lit up, dimmed, and lit up again, patient as a lighthouse. The tellers worked behind glass that had not been there in the years when Dolly Ferreira counted his first deposit twice because his hands were shaking too hard to hold a pen steady.
Near the door, on a stand, was a young woman with a tablet held against her chest like a hymnal.
She was twenty-four and had been rehearsing welcome all morning. Dani Foss had ironed her blouse the night before and laid it over a chair, because her mother had raised her to believe that preparation was a form of respect. She had been at the branch three months. She knew the bankers' calendars, she knew which of them took their coffee black, she knew the speech about the bank's hundred and ten years in the Inland Northwest, and she knew, because she had been taught it in her second week by a man whose approval decided whether she stayed, how to read a person in the doorway.
Read them fast, Colby Strand had said, standing where she now stood, one hand resting lightly on the kiosk as if it were a lectern. You have four seconds. Shoes, hands, folder or no folder. A client with business has paper. A client with money has calm. Everybody else has a question that a screen can answer, and our job, your job, is to keep the bankers' hours for the people those hours are worth to. He had not said it cruelly. That was the thing Dani would turn over later, in the dark, like a stone in a pocket. He had said it the way you teach someone which fork to use, as a kindness, as the way things were done in a branch that intended to be named Premier.
Floyd pushed through the door with the rain at his back, took off his cap, and ran a hand over hair that had gone entirely gray without asking his permission. He did not head for the kiosk. He did not head for the curved desk either. He stood a moment, the way a man does in a building he used to know, getting his bearings among the new furniture, and his gaze traveled, unhurried, to the row of glass offices along the far wall, where his meeting would be.