He trudged past them, down the hall, into the living room. Clare heard the clunk of the gun case opening. She looked up at the housekeeper. “Do you think I should…” What? Report the incident? Ask if Eugene needed help? Get herself and Lisa out of the house?

Eugene returned. He stopped in front of them. “Reverend Fergusson, have you finished with your phone call?”

She nodded, speechless.

“Good. I’m going to retire to my den. Lisa, you’ll find your envelope on the kitchen desk in the usual spot. Please don’t disturb me.”

He continued on toward the room Clare had recently vacated. She looked at Lisa, who shrugged. “Mr. van der Hoeven? Eugene?” He paused in the doorway. Half-turned toward her. “Do you need any… can I help you?”

“I believe, Reverend Fergusson, that the Lord helps those who help themselves.” The den door clicked behind him, closing the world out.

Shaun Reid ran his thumb and index finger over the crease in his navy serge pants, then glanced up quickly to see if Terry McKellan had noticed. He hadn’t. Eyes on the proposal Shaun had brought to the meeting, reading glasses slipping down his nose, Terry was abstracted, rolling his cigar-brown mustache between his fingers, occasionally tapping out the beat of some song only he could hear against the spreadsheets scattered across his messy conference table.

Shaun congratulated himself on choosing just the right look for this meeting-country club casual. He had bought the pants and shirt in the Bahamas during his honeymoon with Courtney, from an exclusive shop with a PATRONIZED BY THE PRINCE OF WALES sign by the door. They had cost more than he usually spent on a suit, tie, and shoes combined, but Courtney had said they made him look young and fit and successful.

Terry, on the other hand, with his round moon face and vanishing hair, looked like what he was, a guy rapidly headed north of middle age, who had given up the fight to stay fit and any hopes of rising past senior vice president long ago. With his shapeless sweater stretched over his belly and his shiny-kneed corduroys, he resembled an untenured academic more than a commercial loan officer.

Looking the part wouldn’t win Shaun his loan, but it couldn’t hurt. In truth, he was feeling more relaxed than he had all week. He had good numbers on the past three years’ profit-and-loss statements. He had a great proposal, laying out all the ways in which Reid-Gruyn could expand and grow with the future. He had highly favorable estimates of the value of his personal property. And he had a relationship with the man across the table from him. For God’s sake, he and Courtney had had the McKellans to their house for dinner.

Terry propped his chin in his hand and removed his reading glasses. Shaun knew speaking first would betray his weakness, his eagerness, but he couldn’t help himself.

“What do you think?”

Terry rolled one end of his mustache thoughtfully. “I gotta ask you, Shaun… why?”

“Why what?”

“Why are you twisting yourself into financial knots like this? You know that as a creditor, AllBanc has already seen the preliminary proposal from GWP. You stand to make a bundle if the mill sells. Certainly more than you’d realize in ten years if you went on as you have been, taking the same level of salary out of the business.”

He could feel sweat starting in his armpits, damp and sour. McKellan didn’t get it. He didn’t see it. “That’s one of the points of my proposal,” he said, forcing strength and confidence into his voice. “That we don’t go on as we have been. That we make a concerted effort to grow and develop the specialty paper market.”

“But the capital costs of retooling the mill-”

“Are accounted for in the third section of my proposal.”

“Shaun, I won’t argue that those figures show a sufficient amount to upgrade the plant and still maintain operations. But you haven’t taken into account any market variables. If the economy takes a downturn, if the state raises the workers’ comp rates, if you can’t get the union to fall into line with you, you’ll be screwed. There just isn’t enough of a safety net.”

The sweat was creeping down the middle of Shaun’s back now. His expensive Bahamian shirt clung to his spine.

“You’ll be putting yourself personally in debt-deep in debt,” McKellan went on. “And if it doesn’t work out a few years down the road, GWP has moved on to bigger and better things. You’ll have a business weighed down with excess obligations and no white knight on the horizon to bail you out. So I ask you, why?”

Shaun leaned forward, hands curling around the table’s edge. “Terry, my great-grandfather founded that mill. I’m the fourth-generation Reid to run the business. I’ve got a son who’ll be stepping into my shoes someday, just like I did with my dad and he did with his dad before him.” That was not, strictly speaking, the truth. Jeremy had shown no signs of interest in his family’s generations-old trade. As far as he was concerned, the money to be made in the Adirondacks was in tourism, not in timber. But the kid was young yet, still in love with his first job. Shaun would bring him around. If there was a Reid-Gruyn Pulp and Paper to bring him around to.

“If GWP buys the plant, they’ll still need your expertise to run it. They’ll be able to make the upgrades you’d like.” Terry tapped the proposal. His cheery, pep-up tone scraped Shaun’s nerves like nails on chalkboard. “Reid-Gruyn could become a name in specialty papers. There’s a legacy to hand on to Jeremy.”

“But I’d be working for someone else! It wouldn’t be mine!” Shaun clamped his mouth shut. God almighty, he sounded like a whiny three-year-old.

Terry raised his eyebrows. They looked like two woolly caterpillars climbing Mount Baldy. “You’re already working for someone else,” he said. He used the mild and reasonable tone appropriate to a fussy preschooler. Shaun’s face grew hot. “The Reid family owns forty-nine percent of the company. The rest of the shares are held by individual and corporate investors.”

Some of which, he didn’t have to say, were AllBanc’s own trust accounts.

“Right. I misspoke.” Shaun leaned back, propping his arm over the back of his chair in what he desperately hoped was a casual gesture. “What I meant to say was, we’ll lose our local control. Decisions about the mill, the employees, the dividend payouts-everything will be coming from Malaysia. You and I have seen too many Washington County businesses get bought out and then abandoned. With me at the helm, you know the needs of our community will be at the forefront. Money is not the most important thing to me, you know that.”

“I do.” Terry gazed at him with his big brown eyes. Brown, brown, brown-Shaun had never realized how much like a seal the loan officer looked. A mournful seal. “And I respect that. Unfortunately, as an officer of the bank, I have to put money first. I’m afraid I won’t authorize additional capital loans to Reid-Gruyn.”

“Then give me the personal loan. You and I both know I have enough collateral. I can buy back enough stock to tip the family holdings to fifty-one percent. With that, I can stave off takeover attempts till doomsday.”

Terry recoiled. “That’s insider trading, Shaun. When GWP announces their bid publicly, there’s no way the share value isn’t going to shoot up. For you to buy in advance, knowing the offer will be made within days-”

“So give me a loan for home improvements, then. I don’t care what it says on the paperwork. I just need the money, and I need it by Monday.”

Terry’s seal-like eyes looked harder now. “No. The SEC would be all over your buy. They’d look at the loan, and the first thing they’d see would be the bank’s notice of inquiry from GWP. You may be fine with doing three-to-five in the federal pen, but I’m sure as hell not.”