Christopher Nicole - Her Name Will Be Faith

“Look,” Lawson said. “All it needs is a hundred thousand as a deposit. That’ll tie it up, Big Mike.”

“Which we lose if it doesn’t work out,” Michael commented.

“It has to work out,” Lawson insisted. “Look, did Big Mike give you the figures?”

“He talked about maybe a couple of million profit.”

“That was off the top of my head,” Lawson told him. “Since then I’ve been getting down to facts and quotes. Listen! I can lay electricity to that whole property for a hundred grand. There’s no water, but hell, no property in North Eleuthera has mains water. But I can build a cistern big enough to serve the whole area for another hundred, and a catchment area to serve the cistern for fifty — hell, just a big sheet of sloping concrete.”

“So we’re up to 250 grand on top of the million,” Big Mike pointed out.

“Sure we are. But then we split those 42 acres into quarter-acre lots. 168 of them. And you know what I reckon we’ll get for them, with water and electricity? Forty thousand dollars each. Work that one out.”

Big Mike pulled his calculator towards him, jabbed the figures. And whistled. “Six million, seven hundred and twenty thousand dollars.”

“That’s right. Five million profit. Half for me, half for you.”

Big Mike and his son exchanged glances. “We were thinking of a three-way split.”

Lawson hesitated, then grinned, and shrugged. “Okay, if I get my normal two per cent for every lot I sell.”

“Done,” Big Mike said. “I’ll have that $100,000 in your account tomorrow.”

Michael poured them each a glass of port. “Seems a bit unnecessary for me to come down at all,” he remarked.

They all drank coffee in the kitchen. “Now then,” Babs said. “Let’s talk about this summer. You going to honeymoon on Eleuthera, Marcia?”

“Well…” Marcia looked at Benny. “Would you be terribly upset if we didn’t, Babs? Actually, we don’t mean to marry until the winter. Right now we want to fix the house up first. Our house,” she added proudly.

“Of course I’ll be upset,” Babs said. “But I reckon you’re probably doing the right thing.”

“You can count us in,” Belle said, smiling at Lawson. She was dying to tell her mother and sister about the McKinley deal, but he had sworn her to secrecy until her father gave her the nod.

“I’ll be there,” Dale agreed.

“And Jo and Michael and the grandchildren,” Babs said. “Oh, it’s going to be such fun. How long is it since you were on Eleuthera, Michael?”

“Not since he started racing, seriously,” Dale observed.

“Seven years,” Michael said, thoughtfully.

“You’ll find it’s changed,” Big Mike said. “Boy, have I got some things to show you.”

“I’m looking forward to it,” Michael agreed.

He wasn’t entirely convincing, Jo thought. But he wouldn’t go back on his word. And she knew he would enjoy it, when he got there. She’d been feeling rather guilty about him, ever since Sunday night. But she knew she had made him do the right thing.

She smiled at them all. She hadn’t been so happy since her wedding day. And she felt the happiness was shared.

“Here’s to the summer,” she toasted. “It’s going to be just great.”

Two days later, Ed told her that Kiley had agreed to give Richard an extra five minutes on Friday evenings following the early newscast, to chat about the weather, and about hurricanes in particular; he had been encouraged by Anthony down in the Caribbean, even if Anthony, after briefly reaching Category One in the Gulf of Yucatan, was now fading fast. “So,” Ed said. “If you’re serious about doing those interviews with the ‘man in the street’, you’d better get with it.” He had raised no objection when she told him she wanted to cut down her office hours, and do more work at home, but a project was a project. Jo was momentarily taken aback. She had not actually planned out how she would go about it; interviewing the man in the street was not her forte. Normally her meetings were with people used and eager to be interviewed, set up by the magazine. So how did one buttonhole some perfect stranger and get his opinion on something as remote as a hurricane? Then she realized that she had at least one natural starter, Washington, the giant black man who had worked as porter in the apartment block ever since she had first lived there, and who had once told her how he had been frightened as a child in Florida by tales of the 1926 storm.

“Couldn’t hardly happen, nowadays,” he said, when she asked him about it again. “They have all that sophisticated gear to tell everybody days in advance what’s going to happen.”

“So living in South Florida wouldn’t bother you, now,” Jo persisted. “Even if you know that by the law of averages Miami has to get hit again by a big one some day?”

“Depends on whereabouts I’d be living, Mrs Donnelly. Think maybe I’d get worried if I was one of those rich folks out on Miami Beach. My son and his wife took his mother and me down to Miami on a holiday two years ago…”

“Yes, I remember you telling me about it.”

“Didn’t think too much about hurricanes at the time, but now you mention it, I don’t see how they’re going to get all those people off that sandbank, over the causeways, in time — even with plenty warning. And that’s if everyone moves kind of quick. You know what folks are, Mrs Donnelly. They won’t make up their minds to go until the last minute, and then there’ll be one big traffic jam and panic and everything you can think of.”

“Washington, have you ever thought that a hurricane might hit New York, one day?” Jo watched his face as he considered the question.

“Nope,” he said at last. “Never came into my head. Hurricanes don’t get this far north.”

“Only because the water’s too cool. But suppose one year warm water spread up here, as it must have done the year Gloria came so close?”

“Heck, I remember her,” Washington said. “Jees, that was something, eh? But she was a kind of freak, wasn’t she? I guess anything in the world can happen.”

“And if it happened once, it could happen again, couldn’t it?”

“I guess it could, ma’am. But you don’t get freaks very often. I wouldn’t expect to see another Gloria in my lifetime. And she didn’t even hit us, Mrs Donnelly.”

“She only just missed us,” Jo reminded him. “Well, I hope you’re right that it can’t happen again for a while, because I’ve been told it’s quite possible. If a hurricane were heading this way, what would you do?”

The automatic glass doors swung open and a man crossed the foyer. Washington got up to speak with him, returned to call one of the apartments, and directed him to an elevator. When he sat down again, he shrugged. “Hard to say.”

“Suppose warnings were out on TV, that one was coming straight for the Battery, would you leave town?”

He nodded, slowly. “Yes, ma’am, I reckon I would. If there was going to be a big one coming straight at us, I reckon I’d do just that. Get the wife and my daughter and little one, and call my son to do the same. Yes, reckon we’d all drive off to stay with my brother until it was over.”

Again the automatic doors opened to admit several people, and Washington stood up.

Jo got up too. “Looks like you’re going to be busy for a while, so I’ll leave you now. NABS will be doing a short feature on hurricanes after the Friday forecasts at six o’clock. I’d be interested to hear what you think of them, some time. And thanks very much for the interview, Washington. I’ll let you have a copy of the magazine when this article is printed.”