Chapter 45
Crunch. Crackle. Crunch.
Whelan lay very still. It was still dark outside. Where was that noise coming from? It might have been a mouse, but what self- respecting mouse would move into a hovel as small as this?
He rolled onto his side and looked up.
Traci Eddings was seated on his sofa, casually eating Tostitos out of the bag. Her hair was combed, her pale pink blouse looked crisp and neat. She looked remarkably fresh.
“Good morning,” he said, struggling upright and stifling a groan from the pain in his lower back.
“Hi.” She held out the bag of chips. “These are stale, by the way.”
“Sorry. I didn’t plan on having company last night. Or this morning. How do you feel?”
She ducked her head. “Embarrassed. I’m not used to waking up in a strange man’s apartment.”
“Don’t be. Nothing happened. It was all completely innocent.”
“Yesterday was a lot. First the press conference, and then my brother-in-law called and went off on me and basically threatened to strangle me, then my oldest friend, who now hates me, showed up in my office to remind me how much she hates me. I never got a chance to grab lunch, which is probably why I had such a fierce headache… which led me to overdose on this stuff.”
She held out the smashed bottle of Tylenol PM and shook it.
“You figured that out, huh?”
“I’ve been awake for a while. You’re out of coffee, by the way, because I drank the last pod.”
“I tried to get you to drink some last night, but you were too far gone,” Whelan said.
“Can’t believe I slept for twelve hours straight,” Traci said. “Sorry you had to sleep on the floor. You should have dumped me there.”
Whelan stood up and headed for the bathroom. “I better get ready for work.”
“What about breakfast? Honestly, if I don’t get some real food…”
“Sorry, but as I mentioned, I wasn’t expecting company.”
“The least I can do to repay you for all the trouble I caused you is to buy your breakfast.”
He started to protest.
“It’ll be okay. I’ll call your supervisor and explain I co-opted you this morning for an hour or so for some landscaping consulting work.” She looked around the apartment. “I don’t suppose you have a spare toothbrush I could use?”
He pointed to a stack of plastic bins near the door. “There should be one in there.”
When Whelan emerged from the bathroom she was leaning over his tiny kitchen sink, brushing her teeth. “Much better,” she pronounced, popping the collar on her shirt. “I have no business going out in public looking like this, but right now I’m so hungry I don’t give a damn.”
She grabbed her purse. “Have you been to Kory’s Kitchen?”
Kory’s was a greasy-spoon diner he’d seen in a nondescript strip shopping center about a mile from the downtown tourist district. “Uh, no.”
“You’ll love it. Best homemade biscuits in town, but don’t tell our chef at the Verandah that I said so.”
“We’ll need to take your car,” Whelan advised. “You’re parked in a tow-away zone.”
The interior of Kory’s featured dark pine paneling, corny signs like BLESS THIS MESS and SLAP YO MAMA, numerous taxidermy fish, and an eclectic crowd that looked like a mix of casually dressed locals, suit-and-tie businessmen, and blue-collar laborers, many of whom seemed to know Traci Eddings on a first-name basis.
“Hey, Traci,” a white-haired man in denim overalls said, stooping to bestow a kiss on her cheek. “Good to see you out. Real sorry about Parrish.”
“Thanks, George. Give Bess my love.”
Their server was in her twenties. “Mrs. E! Y’all want some coffee?”
“Hi, Chrissy. Yes, coffee for two, please.”
She filled their mugs and left the thermos on the table after handing them menus.
“Chrissy worked as a counselor at Little Minnows, while she was in high school,” Traci explained, sliding the menu to the side of the table. “You know what you want?”
“Whatever you’re having,” he said.
To his amazement, she ordered biscuits with sausage gravy, scrambled eggs, hash browns, and grits, and when the food arrived at their table shortly afterward, she tucked in like a… man. Which Whelan found refreshing.
She was slathering a packet of grape jelly on a biscuit but paused, the knife hovering above her plate.
“Whelan? What’s your story?”
“Me? No story. Just a guy trying to make an honest living.”
“C’mon. There’s more to you than that. I just spent the night at your apartment. While you were asleep this morning, I looked around. Lots of books, some original artwork. No nudie magazines or neon beer signs…”
“Really, I’m not that interesting.”
She took a bite of biscuit and chewed.
“I disagree. But also, what’s with all the bins of random stuff? Like, there must have been thirty or forty toothbrushes and tubes of toothpaste and hotel-sized bottles of shampoo and hand cream in there.”
Whelan debated trying to deflect her questions, but then decided to tell her the truth. What did he have to lose?
“I didn’t just come here for a job,” he admitted. “I came because I need some real answers.”
“Existential questions?”
“You asked about the bins. They belonged to my mom. She died last year, and I found all that stuff when I went to clean out her condo. She’d turned into kind of a hoarder.”
“I’m sorry,” Traci said.
“Me too. We hadn’t been close in a long time. My folks split up when I was a teenager, and I was sent to live with my dad’s family. She remarried and then she and Brad, the new husband, had a baby together. Funny little kid. I wasn’t around him that much, because by then I was an adult, and also because of Brad, but when we were together, he was like my shadow. And then, Hudson drowned, and my mom’s life went to shit.”
Traci’s eyes widened. “Did you say your little brother’s name was Hudson? And he drowned?”
Whelan nodded. “Summer of ’02. At the Saint.”
“Is this some kind of a stunt? I was one of the lifeguards on duty that day.”
Whelan calmly poured more coffee in both their mugs. “I know.”
“So what? You’re here to try and pin the blame on someone?” Traci balled up her paper napkin and tossed it onto the table.
“I am sorry for your loss. I am. It was heartbreaking, for all of us. But we did everything we could that day to save Hudson. It was an accident. One minute he was goofing around, trying to prank us, the next minute he was drowning.”
She pushed her chair away from the table, grabbing for her purse.
Whelan reached across the table and grabbed her wrist. “Don’t go. Please. Hear me out.”
She crossed her arms. “So talk.”
“I’m not blaming you, or your friend, the other lifeguard. But I need answers.”
“Why now? It was more than twenty years ago. Answers won’t bring back that little boy and they won’t bring back your mother.”
“But maybe it’ll give me some peace,” Whelan said. “My mother’s life went completely off the rails after Hudson. Brad blamed her. He left, and she basically came out of the marriage with nothing, because he made her look like a neglectful parent. She was never the same after that. She’d been this vibrant, outgoing woman…”
Traci’s attitude visibly softened. “I remember her. Sort of. Her name was Kasey, right?”
He nodded.
“She was gorgeous. A knockout.”
“She changed completely after Hudson. A shut-in. No friends. I’m ashamed to say I didn’t bother to find out what had happened to her, until it was too late. And that’s on me.”
“You said you want answers. What are your questions?”
“First off, I want to know why did Hudson drown? He was a good swimmer. There was a pool at their house in Atlanta.”
“I wondered about that too,” Traci admitted. “He basically lived at the pool that summer. Like, all day, every day. He and this little buddy of his.”
“Mike. Yeah, I talked to him last weekend.”
Traci stared. “How did you find him?”
“It wasn’t that hard. I had the original police report from that day, and his name was included on the list of witnesses. Luckily for me, he lives down near Jacksonville.”
“Did he remember anything? He was like, what, eight or nine?”
“I was surprised by how much he remembered about that day. He and Hudson had a fight that morning, in the game room. Mike said he rode off on his bike, but then he circled back because he’d thought up another nasty name to call Hudson. Which is when he saw Hudson talking to a guy in a ‘fancy’ red car. He saw the guy hand Hudson something in a paper bag, and then he drove off.”
Traci looked puzzled. “What’s this got to do with what happened in the pool?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“Did Mike know what kind of a ‘fancy’ car this guy was driving?”
“No. But he said he remembered seeing it around the resort a lot. When Mike wasn’t goofing off with Hudson, he said he hung out with this gaggle of teenaged girls who were intensely interested in that car and its owner. You don’t happen to remember those girls, do you? Or a red car?”
“You’re kidding, right? There was a constantly changing cast of bored rich girls hanging out at the pool or the beach that summer, but no way I could dredge up any of their names.”
She toyed with a used packet of sugar, folding it in thirds.
“I’d tell you to ask Shannon, but that’s a lost cause.”
“She was one of the first ones I talked to when I came to town,” Whelan said. “Not very friendly, and she definitely doesn’t have anything nice to say about the Saint, but her account of what happened that day lines up exactly with the police report and what Mike told me.”
“And I’m afraid I can’t add much more to the story either.”
Whelan again considered leaving it be. If he pressed Traci Eddings too hard, she might shut down totally. Might even have him fired. Which would be a shame, because he liked the work, and more important, he liked her.
But then again, he hadn’t come to Saint Cecelia to make new friends.
“Maybe there is more you can tell me,” he said finally.
“Oh?”
“Your in-laws managed to shut down the investigation into Hudson’s death. And then they hushed it up. Fired the lifeguard who tried to save Hudson. You don’t find that odd?”
Her face flushed. “They weren’t my in-laws at the time. But of course they didn’t want any publicity. It would have made the Saint look bad. Unsafe, even.”
“Maybe. But last week when your niece was murdered on the property, that would have been even worse publicity. Yet you didn’t try to hush it up. You called a press conference to announce what had happened, and you offered a reward. See the difference? It’s like maybe they had something to hide back then.”
Traci let out an exasperated sigh. “Hoke didn’t agree with how his father handled the drowning. He wanted to let the cops do a real investigation, but Fred wanted it shut down. The sheriff and his family got a free, all-expenses-paid weeklong stay at one of the cottages every summer. He was beholden to Fred. And the Saint was the newspaper’s biggest advertiser, back when we still had a newspaper here in town. My father-in-law probably didn’t have to say a word to the sheriff or the newspaper publisher. They knew what was expected of them.”
“But you’re a different person,” Whelan observed.
She lifted her chin. “I try to be.”
“So? If I wanted to find answers to how Hudson drowned? You’d try to help?”
“I don’t see how I can. It was so long ago. And don’t forget, I’ve got a very real, very painful mystery of my own to get to right now. I won’t rest until we find out who killed Parrish.”
“That’s fair,” Whelan said. “Maybe we can help each other.”
“You’re going to play detective? In your spare time, between working full-time on a landscape crew, your side hustle driving for a rideshare, and trying to find out what happened to your little brother more than two decades ago?”
Whelan finished his coffee and reached for the check, which the server had tucked under the coffeepot.
“I’m actually pretty good at this stuff, you know. People open up to me. I guess they don’t see me as threatening. Let me take a shot. Please?”
Traci snatched the check away from him. “I’ve got this. What else do you need from me?”
He took a five-dollar bill from his pocket and placed it under his coffee mug. “I’ll get the tip. And what I could use from you are the names of those teenaged girls who saw that red car in the summer of ’02.”
“I told you, I don’t remember.”
“Tonight when I get off work, I’ll look up my notes for the names of the girls Mike Sullivan mentioned. And then maybe you could check the hotel registry from that time.”
She rolled her eyes. “That won’t be any help now. Their parents would have been the ones the rooms were registered to.”
“I’ll call Mike Sullivan. Maybe he can come up with some last names for me. In the meantime, do you think Shannon might remember the girls, or that red car?”
“I’m the last person she’d talk to about that summer,” Traci reminded him.
“I’ll get back to her myself.”
“Good luck with that.”
Whelan checked his phone. “It’s almost eight. I better get going. Can you drop me at my car?”
She turned onto Beachview and slowed when she came to the block where the surf shop was located.
Whelan pointed to the Tahoe. “That’s me.”
“I remember.”
“See if you can get me copies of the sheriff’s report on Parrish’s death. That would be a huge help. I want to see what the witnesses who talked to him said.”
“Doubtful he’d give that to me,” Traci said.
“Try this. Pretend, just for a day, that you’re Ric, or Fred Senior, when you ask him. Use your power for good, instead of evil.”