Chapter 25
Shannon’s supervisor, a sour-faced older woman named Ruth, stopped her as she was leaving her patient’s room. “You have a visitor downstairs.”
“Me? What kind of visitor? It’s not about Olivia, right?” She grabbed her phone from the pocket of her scrubs, but there were no recent texts or calls from her daughter.
“I’m not your receptionist, Shannon,” Ruth snapped. “All I know is there’s someone here to see you. I suggest you take your break and deal with it.”
“Understood,” Shannon said.
Scott Whelan recognized Shannon Grayson from the old photos he’d seen online, as soon as she stepped off the elevator. She wore pale green scrubs with black Crocs, and her reddish hair was in a tightly pulled-back ponytail. She was pretty in a fresh-faced way, with freckles and high cheekbones.
“Miss Grayson,” he said, approaching her with a smile and an outstretched Starbucks venti.
“Do I know you?” She didn’t take the coffee, just crossed her arms over her chest in a defensive posture that told Whelan she wasn’t going to make his life easy. Not today.
“You don’t. Yet. My name is Whelan, and I was hoping you could maybe give me ten minutes of your time?”
“Why would I do that? I don’t need life insurance or an extended warranty on my car. So, who are you and what do you want from me?”
He gestured toward a seating area near the lobby window that looked out onto the hospital’s meditation garden. “Could we sit over there so I could explain?”
Shannon took a seat and Whelan sat beside her. He set the coffee on the table between them, along with some sugar packets, creamers, and wooden stir sticks. “That’s for you, by the way.”
She removed the lid of the cup, dumped in a creamer and a sugar, and took a sip. “Ten minutes.”
“I’d like to talk to you about something that happened in 2002, the summer you were working as a lifeguard at the Saint Cecelia.”
Her expression darkened, so he rushed ahead, wanting to get it out before she changed her mind and went scurrying back upstairs to her patients.
“I’m interested in what happened to a little boy named Hudson back then. He drowned. At the pool where you were a lifeguard.”
Shannon gasped. Her hands were shaking so badly she had to clasp them in her lap to keep them still. “It was an accident. A horrible, horrible accident.”
Whelan’s pale blue eyes were unblinking. “I want to understand what happened that day. I’ve looked at the police reports—as far as I can tell there was a strictly perfunctory investigation. The local newspapers had only the briefest mention of it. I think the story was hushed up by the owners of the resort. And I want to know why.”
“Did you know they fired me? I was just nineteen. I gave him mouth-to-mouth, did chest compressions. Everything I’d been trained to do. And I didn’t stop, even after it was clear he was gone.”
“According to the police reports, there were two lifeguards on duty that day.”
“Yeah. But only one of us got blamed.”
“Why was that?”
“That part’s not a mystery. The other girl happened to be engaged to the boss’s son.”
“Can you tell me what happened that day?” he asked.
“It was a long time ago. And you still haven’t explained why you’re interested in digging up this ancient history,” she said.
“Hudson was my little brother. Well, half brother. And I know he knew how to swim, because I’m the one who taught him.”
He pulled out a folded sheet of paper. A photocopy of an old, faded color snapshot he’d found in his mother’s papers. It showed a younger version of Whelan, standing in chest-high water with a skinny, sunburnt Hudson perched on his shoulders, grinning into the camera.
“This was taken at his father’s house, in their pool in Atlanta. Hudson had been around pools all his life. There’s no reason he should have drowned.”
“And yet he did,” Shannon said. “I was there.”
“Did you ever meet Hudson’s mom? My mom?”
“Sometimes she’d come down to the pool with him that summer, but mostly not. When she was there—wow! She was an eyeful. She could really rock a string bikini. The dads couldn’t take their eyes off her, and let me tell you, the other moms didn’t like that. At all.”
Whelan smiled at the memory of his mother, who, even in her forties, loved nothing better than shocking the prim and proper mothers in her Buckhead neighborhood. He pulled another sheet of paper from his pocket, this one a photocopy of the last picture he had of his mother.
“This was my mom. Her name was Kasey, by the way. I think it was taken a few months before she died.”
The photo was blurry but showed an emaciated woman with thinning white hair worn in a badly executed bowl cut. Her eyebrows were drawn on crookedly, her cheeks sunken, lips barely parted over toothless gums. It was a shocking photo. And that was the point.
“Oh my God,” Shannon exclaimed. “That doesn’t look anything like the same woman. How old was she when this was taken?”
“Just barely sixty-six,” Whelan said.
“Wow. She looks like about a hundred years old. What happened to her?”
“Her little boy died. Her husband blamed her and she blamed herself and this is how she ended up. Alone, haunted by that loss,” Whelan said. “So. Anything you can remember about that day would really be a help to me.”
She looked out at the garden, where butterflies fluttered above bright pink blooms.
“I hate to tell you, but that kid was a big pest that summer. Always getting into trouble. And it didn’t seem like he had a whole lot of adult supervision.”
Whelan nodded. “Hudson’s father, Brad—my mother’s second husband—wasn’t around much back then. I think my mom was basically a single mom that summer.”
“Yeah. I don’t know if I ever even saw the dad,” Shannon agreed. “And when I did see your mom, she usually had a cocktail in her hand.”
“Sounds right,” Whelan agreed.
Shannon closed her eyes as she thought back to that day. “Seemed like he was in some kind of feud with his little buddy who he usually hung around with. Mike something.”
“Michael Sullivan?” Whelan had found the name, scrawled in childish handwriting, on a sympathy card among his mother’s belongings.
She nodded. “That sounds right. Mike and another boy were down at the deep end, having a cannonball contest to see who could make the biggest splash. You could tell Hudson was mad about not being included. At some point, he was sitting on the side of the pool. And all of a sudden, he starts screaming and making these gagging noises, yelling that one of the kids had pooped in the pool.”
Shannon rolled her eyes. “It was textbook Hudson. Of course, then Traci—that was the other lifeguard—and I had to get everybody out of the pool. Code brown, we called it. I went and got the skimmer, to scoop up the poop, only it wasn’t really poop. It was a Tootsie Roll.”
“Hudson’s idea of a practical joke,” Whelan said. “He was always a little trickster.”
“It wasn’t funny to us,” Shannon retorted. “Traci started yelling at him to get out of the pool, but then he was flailing around, splashing and pretending that he was drowning, which really pissed us off. And then, he kinda stopped moving. And his head rolled back…”
She wasn’t looking at the butterflies anymore, Whelan noticed. She was looking up at the ceiling, dredging up that very bad day, and her eyes were damp.
“I was down at the shallow end, yelling at kids to get out. Traci jumped in, still thinking maybe he was faking us out again. But his lips were already turning blue…
“Traci and I, we took turns working on him. All these people were gathered around us, yelling for someone to call nine-one-one. And then, I heard this woman, screaming. Just, the most piercing, awful howl I ever heard. And she was screaming… ‘My baby. Save my baby.’”
Shannon looked over at Whelan. She was still clenching and unclenching the hands that had been resting on the knees of her scrub pants. “But it was too late.”
When he’d set out on this mission, Whelan had convinced himself that he could approach it, all of it—including hearing a firsthand account of his little brother’s death—with the kind of clinical objectivity he’d possessed during his previous career in the military.
But he hadn’t reckoned for this—his instant recall of his mother’s high-pitched wail, the utter despair in her voice when she’d called to tell him about what had happened.
That summer, he was sharing an apartment in Charlotte with two other guys, sweating his balls off working on a construction site, bored and considering joining the military.
Kasey had been hysterical, crying so hard he could barely make out what she was saying. Just… “Hudson” and “my baby” and… “drowned.”
It hadn’t made sense then and it still didn’t make sense all these years later.
That July day had been the beginning of the end for Kasey. For years, he’d been too selfish, too wrapped up in his own drama to recognize the fact of her rapid demise. Now, though, he owed it to her, and to himself, to find out the truth.
He reached across the end table and lightly touched Shannon’s hand. She flinched.
“I’m sorry to bring this back up again. It’s painful for me, and I wasn’t even there. I just have a couple more questions.”
“Okay, but make it quick. I’m on the clock and my supervisor hates me.”
“You said you ran and got the pool skimmer, after Hudson hollered about the fake poop. Was there anyone else in the pool?”
“Not in the deep end. Traci and I blew our whistles and yelled at everybody to get out of the pool.”
“What about the kids who’d been on the diving board? Where did they go? Could one of them have pushed Hudson underwater when you weren’t looking?”
“No. Traci was watching. She would have yelled at them.”
“You’re sure? I mean, you said you went to get the skimmer. Maybe, while your back was turned, and while Traci was clearing the pool, one of those boys, just horsing around, pushed Hudson in and held him underwater?”
“I’m telling you, my back wasn’t turned but a few seconds. And when I got back to the deep end, Hudson was the only kid in the pool.”
She stood abruptly. “I gotta get back. Ruth is probably writing me up right this minute.”
Whelan couldn’t let her leave. “Did you and the other lifeguard, that girl Traci, did the two of you talk about it, afterward? I mean, maybe she saw something you missed?”
She headed for the elevator bank and stabbed the Up button. He’d lost her. She was stony-faced, shut down. “Me and Traci didn’t talk at all after that day. About anything.”
Whelan followed her to the bank of elevators. “Really? You’d just witnessed what had to be the most traumatic event in your lives, and you never talked about it? At all?”
“At all,” she said, pressing her lips together. The doors opened, she stepped inside, and a moment later the doors closed and she was gone.