Taking a deep breath, she pushed the bank doors open.
She made herself known at the information desk and waited a few moments before she saw the person she was waiting for.
“Emerson,” said Dawson Allen, the business banking manager and her former high school classmate. “Great to see you. I was so sorry to hear about your dad.”
“Thank you, Dawson. I’d be lying if I said things hadn’t been rough, but we’re muddling through it.”
Dawson led Emerson to his office, where he gestured toward the chair opposite his desk. Once they were both seated, he pulled out a notepad.
“So, how can I help, Emerson?”
She offered him a copy of the presentation she’d created to make sure she mentioned everything in the pitch. “We’re stuck in a catch-22. We have more orders than we can keep up with, but we don’t have the capacity to fill them. I estimate that we could sell at least a half million more units this year if we had the capacity. But without the wedding venue revenue and all the fallout that came with it, we don’t have the cash to do the kind of expansion we need to. Any renovation needs to be fast and simultaneous to reduce disruption to our supply chain. The venue and the distillery will need flipping at the same time.”
Dawson looked confused. “You want money to renovate?”
Emerson nodded. Why did it seem like such an odd question?
Dawson tapped something on the keyboard and looked carefully at whatever was on the screen.
“Is something wrong?” Emerson asked.
When Dawson looked at her, his features were as perplexed as she felt.
“Your dad was approved for and received a quarter-of-a-million-dollar loan thirteen weeks ago. It was a five-year loan. See the monthly payments here?”
He turned the screen towards her, and there was the deposit, just as Dawson explained. A deposit and a monthly automatic repayment of just under five thousand dollars a month.
Her stomach lurched as her eyes flitted over the screen. The distillery name was on the screen, and the account number matched, but there was no way her father was sitting on that kind of money. When she’d taken over immediately after he died, she hadn’t looked that far back in the business accounts. And in the muddle of grief and sudden shift in her responsibilities, she must have missed the loan repayment or mistaken it for a company credit card payment or something.
Shit. The piles of envelopes in Dad’s office. She’d ignored them, assuming they were simply bank statements, but perhaps they contained information about the loan. It suddenly felt too warm in Dawson’s office. She needed air.
“Can we look through the transactions to see where that money went?” Emerson asked, because it certainly wasn’t in the account right now.
Numbers began to blur together, but less than a week after the money had been deposited, cash began to leak from the account. Twenty-five thousand dollars here. Fifty thousand dollars there. Round amounts, no invoice numbers.
What the hell had her father done?
“Emerson,” Dawson said. “I hate to say this, but if this money hasn’t been used to upgrade the distillery, the bank would take issue with that.”
Her chest felt as though it were in a vise. A vise that was being tightened at an aggressive rate. She needed to think on her feet. To come up with something.
“I wonder if Dad had arranged for the repairs. Those look like contractor deposits, don’t they?” she asked breezily.
Dawson didn’t look convinced, and she realized he could just check who the money had been sent to.
“Look, Dawson,” she said, deciding to come clean. “I don’t know what Dad planned. But please, can you give me some time to sort this out? I need to go back to the office and figure out what happened. Are you able to tell me who the money went to? That would help me hugely.”
“We can, but not from this screen. Leave it to me.”
“Thank you, Dawson. Look, I’m not asking you for any favors, but if you’re unhappy with what we find out, I hope you give us some time to respond appropriately.”
Dawson nodded. “I’ll do the best I can. But Emerson, I couldn’t possibly approve another loan without clearing this issue up first.”
“I understand,” Emerson said, grabbing her purse. “Thank you, Dawson.”
She rose, her palms damp, and left the office.
The cool air was a welcome balm to her nervous sweating. What the hell had her father done? Where had all that money gone? She’d seen the amounts but still couldn’t believe her father hadn’t told them about such a large loan. Why had he kept it quiet? None of it made sense.
She needed to get back to the distillery, to start going through the office, her dad’s laptop, the invoices, through anything that might help her find the money. But if she went back right now, Jake would see straight through her, and she didn’t want to worry him yet.
She ran her fingers through her hair, then straightened the skirt of her dress. How was she going to explain this to Jake and Olivia? Especially Olivia. Emerson had hoped that by fixing up the venue and getting as many weddings as possible back on track, they could permanently erase some of the damage the hostility toward the distillery had caused. And if it died down, it would be safer for Olivia to be back at work.
An hour ago, she thought she had a plan. A plan to save the distillery with a loan. Now she had no loan. Worse, she had no possibility of a loan. And the distillery was a quarter of a million more in debt than she’d known about. The renovations now seemed even further away.
Her best intentions to understand what loan options were available had put the distillery at even more risk. Best case, they had to meet the monthly repayments, but worst case, the bank would foreclose on the loan, and they’d have to
