Who are you? What do you do for a living? Why do you want this hotel? What could it possibly mean to you? And, most crucially, what right do you have telling me what my own daughter wants or doesn’t want? What do you know about me, really? You know only what I’ve told you in letters and what you might observe from the street. Isn’t that right? Or are you someone on the inside? Are you a Beach Club member, a hotel guest, someone who walks the property every day? Answer me! Bill Elliott Mack spent the days following the Fourth of July questioning his future. His sweat equity had turned out to be nothing but sweat—salty water—and at the Beach Club, there was more than enough of that to go around. He’d been threatened with a gun by one of his employees, his girlfriend had kicked him out, and the woman he loved didn’t love him back. Running the farm in Iowa was looking better and better. It might not be so bad—climbing up into a combine again and knowing that as far as his eyes could see, the land belonged to him.
