Page 57 of Filthy Rich Daddies
Cynthia Howard stands framed by yellow lamplight. She’s tall and spare, sun-bleached rosy hair pinned at the nape of herneck. She wears a button-down shirt three shades lighter than her driftwood tan and a pair of hiking pants patched at the knee. Her eyes are hazel, exactly like her daughter’s, and they study me without blinking.
“Mr. Copeland,” she says.
“Atticus, please. It’s nice to meet you, Mrs. Howard.”
“Call me Cindy.” She smiles and steps back so I can enter. The place is half living room, half laboratory. Two tables sag under plastic tubs labeledreef rubbleandclam spat.A freezer, chest-high, solar-powered, throbs in the corner. James Howard is bent over a microscope in the kitchenette, peering at a petri dish. He rises and offers his right hand. His left arm is a thing of beauty—a prosthetist’s wet dream of titanium and creativity.
He gives me the firm handshake of a man who works primarily with bone and shell. “Thank you for coming,” he says. His voice hints at New England buried under years of Caribbean wind.
I set my duffel by the door. Inside are grant papers, a laptop, and two bottles of water I packed out of habit. We sit on mismatched wooden chairs in what used to be a dining room. The Howards pour room-temperature water into tin cups. I can feel the house exhaling evening heat. Somewhere behind the cottage, a generator coughs to life.
James speaks first. He explains the current state of their research—less than two hundred live clams in the refuge lagoon, only thirty of breeding size. A bacterial blight that scrapes calcium from the shells faster than they can lay it down has been ravaging the population.
Cindy explains, “The hurricane stripped the lagoon’s seagrass and dumped silt so deep the juvenile clams suffocated.” Shesighs deeply. “We restocked by hand, one specimen at a time. It’s slow going, obviously, but we’ve done all we can do at this point. We need funding for a floating nursery cage, a bank of solar panels, and a cold-storage van to hold tissue samples before they reach the university lab across the island. The foundation we originally worked for had to reallocate funds after Hurricane Becker.”
He chimes in, “They believe our work, though valuable, is too risky to fund in perpetuity. But that’s the whole point, isn’t it? Places like this, species like this, they’re always going to be risky to support. High risk, high reward.”
Cindy sketches a diagram on the back of a shipping manifest. “The nursery would consist of three cages, each the size of a child’s wading pool, anchored at different depths so the clams can be moved as the seasons change.”
“How have you been funding the continued mission until now?”
They share a wan smile. He says, “Partially through donors like you, partially our own savings.”
Ouch.
I notice a row of photographs tacked to the wall above her shoulder. One shows Thalassa at maybe ten, hair in a bun, crouched on a sandbar and grinning. Another shows her at seventeen, lifting a basket of shells onto a dinghy. That one stops me. Her face is open, fearless, unaware that in four months, a category-four storm will steal her map of the world.
I grip my tin cup tighter. The metal warms in my hand.
When they finish, silence swells, but the cicadas outside fill it. I reach into my messenger bag and extract a sealed envelope. Thewax is still unbroken; the imprint is a stylized nautilus. I slide it across the table.
“I’d like to fund your next phase.”
James glances at Cynthia. She opens the envelope carefully, like it might hiss. The letter inside lays out an eighteen-month grant—eight hundred thousand dollars, renewable, no strings beyond quarterly reports and open access to the data. She reads it twice.
“This is a lot of money for such a small project.” When she looks up, her eyes glimmer but do not water. “Why us?”
I take a breath. The ceiling fan clicks overhead, beating warm air against my scalp. “Because your work is important,” I say. It is the truth. It’s not the whole truth. The whole truth is a girl with hazel eyes and a voice that cracked when she asked if we would still be there even if she ended the pregnancy. But I can’t mention that yet.
I need to know who they are.
James folds the letter. The carbon-fiber fingers do not slip. “This changes everything,” he says. The words fall flat, not dramatic, more like an engineer noting a variable.
She adds, “We need to speak with our collaborators. Equipment orders can take months.”
I can’t tell if they’re happy or trepidatious. “Understood.”
She swallows, eyeing me carefully. “There are no stipulations about control on your end of the grant. What are your intentions with the island?”
“To preserve what’s there. Fragile ecosystems need protection. Your clam is a keystone species, providing food for seabirds andkeeping the water clean. If we don’t protect those elements of every island, every shore, then the world will collapse.”
As I speak, James nods along, but Cindy appears unmoved. We sit in the whir of the fan for another minute. Then she rises. “Dinner?”
Dinner consists of rice, steamed plantains, and a pot of what they call bean soup but looks and tastes like survival distilled. Beans, garlic, some shredded leaf I can’t name. The salt clings to the wooden spoon. I eat two bowls, and I don’t even try to stop myself from asking for a third.
James laughs softly when I wipe the third empty bowl with a piece of plantain. “Works, doesn’t it?”
“It works,” I agree.
