The Hickory Staff

IDAHO SPRINGS, COLORADO

Last Fall

Steven Taylor walked slowly across Miner Street to the entrance of the First National Bank of Idaho Springs. Steven had few physical characteristics that would make a passer-by take more than a cursory glance in his direction. Slightly shorter than average, he was green-eyed, with a shock of unruly brown hair. He was pale, more from genetics than any aversion to sunlight; rather than tanning he slid gradually from the cold ivory he sported in winter to the alternating blotchy pinks and deep sunburned reds of summer.

His face was a battlefield between worry wrinkles creasing his forehead and laugh lines tugging at the corners of his close-set eyes and surprisingly delicate mouth. He was attractive to the few women who knew him well, more for his wit than his physique, though, as an avid weekend sportsman, he was in good physical condition – and this despite his poor eating habits. Steven’s clothes appeared to have been borrowed from two people: one a thickset man with low, slat-sided hips and the other a lean athlete with a penchant for overworking his arms, shoulders and upper body.

It was 7.45 a.m. as Steven fished in his coat pocket for keys to the front door. He’d been holding a pile of files in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other and was forced to put the paper cup in his mouth, gripping the edge firmly with his teeth as he dug through the pockets of his wool blazer. Looking up towards the mountains above Clear Creek Canyon he could see the yellow leaves of the intermittent aspens, now fully changed from their spring green. They dotted the hillsides among the hegemonic green expanse of the Ponderosa pines. Autumn came early to the canyon. The coming winter would be another long one. I’ve got to get out of here, he thought, then laughed at himself: I think that every morning.

‘Hello, Steven,’ Mrs Winter called. She was sweeping the sidewalk in front of her pastry shop next door and stopped to offer a quick wave.

‘Good morning,’ he answered, his voice muffled by the cup, and burned his upper lip in the attempt. ‘Ouch, damnit.’ Steven dropped the coffee cup onto the sidewalk, splashing his shoes.

‘How’s Mark this morning?’ Mrs Winter asked, ignoring the coffee accident.

‘He’s fine, Mrs W,’ Steven answered. ‘He’s teaching the Stamp Act today… was up late last night working on some way to make it a bit more palatable for the kids.’ Mark Jenkins was Steven’s roommate; he taught US and world history at Idaho Springs High School.

‘Oh, that’s exciting: one of the causes of the Revolutionary War. Tell him I said keep up the good work.’ Mrs Winter had known Steven since he was a boy, when his family moved to Idaho Springs. Her pastry shop was one of many local businesses kept afloat by tourists stopping for gas off the interstate. Not many people visited Idaho Springs for more than a few hours; the local LATGO and Sidney mines did not draw many from the masses who rushed by on their way to the ski resorts of Breckenridge, Vail or Aspen.

Steven had started working in the bank after completing his MBA at the University of Denver. He was a bright, successful graduate student, and he’d been headhunted by a number of investment firms from San Francisco, New York and Chicago – but he had procrastinated too long and lost out on several lucrative positions. He put it down to fate and bad luck and climbed back up Clear Creek Canyon to take the assistant bank manager’s job for a year; he planned to accept the next decent offer that came his way. That was three years ago. Now he couldn’t remember why he had hesitated to accept the jobs when they had been offered. He didn’t love the bank business or investment fields, certainly not the way Mark loved teaching. He studied business because he knew it would pay well, but it didn’t inspire him to study further, or to explore the nuances of financial theory in action. Actually, he could remember very little that inspired him that much – so he wasn’t really surprised when he found himself still here, still home, after three years. Steven never actively sought inspiration; he expected it to come one day, in a great metaphysical epiphany. He would wake one morning and find his calling waiting for him with the morning paper. It hadn’t shown up yet, and here he was, as usual, opening the bank at 8.00 a.m., although this time with no coffee and stained shoes.

To make matters worse, today was going to be especially dismal. His boss, the estimable Howard Griffin, had directed him to oversee a complete audit of all open account files – some going back as far as the bank’s original customers in the 1860s. Steven had started the job the previous day; he anticipated a great deal of tedious secretarial work with little reward.

‘You’ve got leadership potential, Steven. I want to see you taking on more projects like this in the future,’ the bank manager had told him with enthusiasm.

But Steven was finding the assignment was disillusioning him even further, increasing his distaste for a career in finance.

‘Who could be inspired by this?’ he said to himself as he switched on the lights and crossed the lobby floor to the aged pine window and counter top.

Pushing the stack of files through his window, he re-crossed the lobby and switched on the illumination for the display case hanging on the opposite wall. It held grainy photographs showing mine workers, and some hand tools found in the LATGO mines on the northern wall of Clear Creek Canyon, as well as the original ownership papers for the bank, a photo of Lawrence Chapman, the founder, and several pages of accounting ledgers from the original books. Steven rarely considered the items, but he was glad customers had something to look at while they waited in line.

The condition of his shoes this morning made him pause and consider one photo, of Lawrence Chapman and a bank employee. The man wore a uniform with awkward-looking boots, a frilly white shirt, suspenders and a large belt buckle with the letters BIS clearly visible on the front.

‘Well, my shoes may be wet and smell of cappuccino, but at least I’m not wearing that get-up,’ Steven said, wandering towards his office.

Checking his e-mail, Steven found a message from Jeffrey Simmons, the doctoral student in Denver who shared Steven’s only real passion, abstract mathematics concepts.

‘You work in a bank, dress like a philosophy professor from the ’50s, and you love abstract maths. I’m surprised you don’t have to beat the women away with a slide rule,’ Mark would tease him.

Even though his roommate couldn’t appreciate the beauty of calculus or the genius of a good algorithm, Steven liked Mark immensely; the two had shared an apartment ever since Steven had returned to Idaho Springs. To Steven, Mark Jenkins was the perfect history teacher: he possessed an enormous body of knowledge and had a razor-sharp wit. He thought Mark was the most knowledgeable and quick-thinking person he knew – not that he would ever admit that to Mark.

Jeff Simmons, on the other hand, fully understood the joy of a complex equation: the mathematician often sent Steven problems to consider and solve in an infuriatingly uncomfortable deductive paradigm. This morning’s message was no exception. It read: ‘You use them both every day but probably have never considered why the numbers on your cellular telephone and your calculator are organised differently.’ Steven was about to pull a calculator from his desk drawer when he heard the bell above the lobby door chime as someone entered the bank.

‘Stevie?’ Howard Griffin, at only 8.10 a.m.? He was early this morning, which meant he hadn’t taken time to exercise on his Stairmaster before leaving for work. Steven smiled at the irony of anyone owning a stair machine while living in Idaho Springs: the entire city was constructed on an incline at 7,500 feet above sea level, with mountains on either side of Clear Creek Canyon rising to over 12,000 feet. He liked to think Griffin had lost some sort of bet with the Devil and had to climb his eternal stairway, a corpulent, baby-boom Sisyphus, rather than just go outside for a walk each morning, but he knew better. Griffin had moved to Boulder from New Jersey in the 1960s. When he discovered the decade would not last for ever, he enrolled in the University of Colorado, completed his degree and moved to Idaho Springs to become manager of the small town’s bank.

Now, at fifty-five, Griffin was bald and had a burgeoning paunch that he battled every morning as he climbed Colorado’s highest peak, the Mount Griffin Stairmaster. His commitment to exercise was admirable, but he had a weakness that regularly bested his determination to regain the thinness of his youth: Howard Griffin loved beer, and most afternoons would find him propping up the bar at Owen’s Pub on Miner Street. Steven sometimes accompanied him, and Mark would join them for a few beers or the occasional dinner.

‘Stevie?’ the bank manager called again, and Steven moved into the lobby to greet his boss.

‘Good morning, Howard. How are you?’

‘Never mind that. I’m fine, thanks, but never mind that,’ Griffin often thought faster than he could speak. ‘Myrna called last night and can’t be in today. She’s sick or something. So I’ve had to come and cover. How’s the audit coming?’

‘It’s fine. I have all the active accounts pulled. There are thousands of them, by the way. I’ll get through many of the oldest today, because most of those haven’t had much in the way of transactions since they were opened. They’ve made enough interest to cover the monthly fees, so the cash just sits there.’

‘Great. Stay on it. I’ll work the window and we can check in over lunch later. How’s Owen’s for you?’

‘That’ll be fine, Howard. I’ll appreciate the break.’ Steven returned to his office, retrieved the keys to the basement and braced himself for a long, tedious morning.

‘Take a look at these.’ Steven had brought several pages of notes to lunch. ‘We have twenty-nine accounts that haven’t had a single transaction in the past twenty-five years. Most of them are forgotten accounts, people who have died. Thankfully, I have information on next of kin from the original applications. But eight of them appear to be accounts for single men killed in the Second World War, and, get this, five accounts date back to the late 1800s – one of which had one deposit and no additional transactions.’

‘I’m not surprised,’ Griffin said between long draws on an enormous draught beer. ‘It was probably some miner who went back to work and got himself killed, got his claim jumped or something. It was a rough time back then. But those assets are among the reasons this bank survived the depression – those and the molybdenum mines.’

‘That’s not the worst of it, Howard,’ Steven interrupted. ‘This account had only one deposit, but it was a deposit of more than $17,000. That was nine hundred pounds of refined silver. The bank made a bundle on the silver sale alone, because they screwed the guy for over ten cents an ounce off the market price.’ Steven paused to take a bite of a thick Reuben sandwich. Continuing with his mouth full, he added, ‘This is the part that doesn’t make sense. What mining company sends a guy in with nine hundred pounds of silver, lets him take a loss of ten cents an ounce, and then never comes back for the cash? To top it off, he wasn’t even from the Springs. This guy was from Oro City. I don’t even know where that is.’

‘Was, Stevie, was. Oro City was Leadville, but they changed the name in 1877. You’re right, though, something’s crooked. There were banks in Oro City then, so what was this guy doing over here?’ Griffin finished his beer and motioned for Gerry, the bartender, to draw him another. ‘You want one more?’

‘Jeez, no, Howard. It’s only 12.20; I have to go back to work.’

‘Well, I often question my own behaviour, but I’m still having one more before we go. Anyway, this account, what’s the big deal? Some miner hits it big – huge – drops off most of his haul at the bank, takes a handful of silver with him to the pub, flashes it around, drinks too much hooch and gets himself killed. It happened all the time, I would guess.’ Griffin rubbed a French fry around his plate, sopping up hamburger grease.

‘The big deal, Howard, is that a $17,000 deposit made in our bank in October of 1870 is now worth more than 6.3 million dollars. It’s just sitting there, and the guy didn’t list any family or next of kin. So I can’t call anyone to say their ship has just come in and docked here in the Rocky Mountain foothills.’ He was about to continue when he was distracted for a moment by an attractive young woman who entered the pub and joined a group of friends in a booth near the back. He shook his head wryly and turned back to his boss. ‘Anyway, the thing I have to ask you is that this guy, this William Higgins, well, he-’

As Steven lost track of his question, Griffin interrupted, ‘Go say something to her. You don’t get out enough. She’s a pretty girl and you aren’t getting any younger. How old are you now, twenty-seven? Twenty-eight? Soon you’ll be old and ugly like me, and I’ll be fried and eaten before I see you get old and ugly like me.’

‘No, maybe another time.’ Steven paused. He hadn’t been seriously involved with a woman since university. He dated from time to time, but had never found anyone he felt was the right match for him. He grinned at his boss. ‘Well, anyway, this guy had a safe deposit box, number 17C, in the old safe. I was thinking, if we looked in his drawer, we might find some clue as to who his family is or was and we could let them know this account exists.’

‘No way.’

‘Why not? It may be the only way to get this resolved.’

‘No. It’s bank policy. They put it in there. They pay the rent on the drawer. We leave it alone until they get back.’

‘Yeah, I understand, but think about this for a minute. What do you put into a safe deposit box?’ Steven asked rhetorically. ‘Something you expect to retrieve in your lifetime. You certainly don’t put anything in there that you don’t plan on your grandchildren or even your great-grandchildren ever having. This guy meant to come back for this stuff, whatever it is. Anything we don’t plan on retrieving for a hundred and thirty-five years, we throw in the trash. We don’t ensure its safety in a bank.’

‘No way. They put it in there in good faith. We take the $12.95 a month from his account. The drawer stays locked in good faith. It’s good business practice, Stevie. Our customers have to trust us.’

‘Trust us? This guy is deader than disco, and if he has any family they might want to know that they’re worth a fortune in accumulated interest.’

‘Sorry.’ Griffin finished the last of his beer, a light foam moustache outlining his upper lip. ‘I don’t write the policies,’ he said wryly, ‘but I will buy lunch.’

Dusk came early to Idaho Springs as the sun disappeared behind the mountain peaks lining the west end of Clear Creek Canyon. It was 5.15 p.m., and already Steven could see its last rays shining in tapered rectangles across the floor. He switched on his desk lamp and took one last look through William Higgins’s account ledger. Monthly deductions for rent of the safe deposit box were the only noted transactions since the day Higgins opened the account in October, 1870. Although fees for the deposit box had increased over time, the compounded interest was more than enough to cover the cost. It was a forgotten account, the fees deducted as a matter of course without anyone checking to see if Higgins or his heirs had ever done business with the bank again. Steven looked up from his desk. A doorway led through to Griffin’s office and beyond that to the bank lobby. On the far wall, a collection of safe deposit keys, more museum artefacts than tools, hung on a small rack. There were three rows of twenty drawers in the old safe, though only forty-seven keys remained. Thirteen had been lost in the years since Lawrence Chapman brought the Bowles and Michaelson safe from Washington, D.C. in the 1860s, and twelve of those drawers now sat empty.

The safe had come from an English steamship that had piled up on a muddy shoal several miles downriver from Chapman’s Alexandria home. Chapman, ever the entrepreneur, had bought salvage rights, stripped the ship to the beam supports and sold much of her rigging to a local shipwright. He hadn’t been able to part with the old safe, however, so he arranged to bring it along as he worked his way west to open the first Bank of Idaho Springs.

As Steven stood examining the remaining keys he wondered about William Higgins. Had he met Lawrence Chapman that day in 1870? Had Chapman been the one to convince the miner to deposit his silver rather than taking it to the assay office? And what was in that safe deposit box? Steven, angry at Griffin’s intransigence, was certain it held information that would lead to Higgins’s family; he was determined to see it opened.

An empty hook hung from the rack under 17C. Steven thought for a moment about picking the lock – it surely couldn’t be that difficult – but he would have to do it quickly, because Griffin would see him disappear into the safe on the security screens in his office. He could claim to be cleaning the inside of the safe, dusting or sweeping it out. Yes, that was it; that was his ticket in. He would just have to find time to study the locking device first. He could stay late one night, slip in, open the drawer and be out before Griffin was any wiser. It would work. He just needed a bit of time to Steven caught himself. ‘My God, Steven, what are you thinking?’ He ran a hand across his brow and felt beads of perspiration emerging from above his hairline. ‘Let this go. You’re going to be the only overqualified, maths-loving MBA ever to get fired from an assistant manager’s position at a small town bank.’

He pursed his lips, reached out and turned the hook marked 17C one hundred and eighty degrees and said, ‘There, now nothing would hang from it, anyway.’ Steven donned his jacket, grabbed his briefcase and left the bank thinking about telephones and calculators. William Higgins’s account was safe, and his deposit box would remain locked in good faith.