Chapter 30
Wordlessly, Traci handed her phone to her brother-in-law.
Ric’s face was impassive as he listened and nodded, his Adam’s apple working as he swallowed the emotions he seemed unable to speak. Finally: “Yeah. I understand. You’re sure it’s her? Yeah. I’ll tell her.”
Ric disconnected the phone, threw it onto the desktop, and doubled over, burying his face in his hands, his shoulders heaving with each muffled sob.
Traci waited, her heart pounding in her chest, for the news she’d been dreading all day. Parrish was gone. She hadn’t known how or why, but the same black cloud that had descended after Hoke’s plane went down was back.
After his sobs seemed to have subsided, she spoke. “Ric?”
He raised his tearstained face and took a deep breath. “Ray says… he found her. My beautiful, my baby girl, is gone. Oh my God. Parrish is dead.”
“Where?” Traci whispered.
“She was behind the Shack all this time. Ray says…” He gulped and started over. “He said he spotted a woman’s shoe in the overgrown bushes behind the Shack, so he kept searching and it looks like she must have fallen down into a kind of ravine.”
He stood abruptly. “I’ve gotta go. I’ve gotta get to my little girl.”
“Ric, wait,” she called, but he was already out the door.
By the time Traci reached the Shack, the woods were alive with lights: blue lights from the Bonaventure sheriff’s department, the red lights of an ambulance, and the swirling white lights from the Saint’s security patrol cars. Her heart pounded and she felt the blood rushing to her head. This was real.
Yellow crime scene tape had been stretched in a wide perimeter around the Shack. Inside the tape, Ric stood stiffly at the edge of a knot of law enforcement types.
A uniformed sheriff’s deputy stepped forward as soon as Traci alighted from her golf cart, and motioned for her to stop.
Traci tried to brush past the woman. “I’m Traci Eddings, the president of the resort, and that’s my niece, Parrish, the girl who—”
“Sorry for your loss, ma’am, but this is an active crime scene investigation. You need to stay right here.”
“Can you… tell me anything? Like, what happened?”
Just then, Ray Bierbower walked up and ducked under the tape. “I’m so sorry, Mrs. E.”
He removed his aviator sunglasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. “This was the last thing I wanted to find.”
“Who called the sheriff?” she asked.
“I called it in, as soon as I found her, but I don’t think your brother-in-law is too happy with me for doing that.”
“Don’t worry about it. You did the right thing. Do they know what happened?”
“They’re not telling me nothing official. But I can tell you, when I found her, she wasn’t shot or stabbed or anything like that, at least as far as I could tell. She just kinda looked like she’d fallen asleep.”
Traci felt bile rising in her throat. She ran to a thicket of palmetto and vomited; dry heaves that brought her to her knees as she retched and sobbed. When she tried to stand, she felt faint. Somehow, she managed to stagger to her feet. She was leaning against a slash pine tree when Bierbower found her, her eyes closed, a cold sweat forming on her flushed face.
He handed her a neatly folded handkerchief and looked tactfully away as she dabbed at the snot and sweat dripping down her face.
“Your niece seemed like a real nice girl, every time I had dealings with her,” he said.
“She was… amazing. I don’t know what I’m going to do without her. Parrish was like a daughter to me.”
“Traci? This is Sheriff Coyle. He needs to talk to you.” Ric turned and walked away without another word.
The sheriff could not have missed the hostility in her brother-in- law’s attitude.
“Very sorry for your family’s loss,” Coyle said. “As I understand it from Mr. Eddings, there was some kind of party here last night? What can you tell me about that?”
“Not very much. I only found out about it this morning, from some of my staff who share a dorm with Parrish.”
She dabbed at her face and neck with the handkerchief and fanned at the halo of swarming gnats.
Coyle whipped a notebook from his pocket. “I’m gonna need to talk to all those folks.”
“Our general manager, Charlie Burroughs, can provide you with everyone’s…”
Traci was aware that her voice was trailing off, and she was beginning to do a kind of slow-motion sway. Coyle touched her arm. “Are you okay?”
“No,” she whispered. It sounded like her voice was coming from far, far away.
“Lean on me,” Coyle said. The next thing she knew, she was stretched across the bench seat of her golf cart with a cool towel pressed to her neck and a cold bottle of water being rubbed across her forehead.
She opened her eyes to see Ray Bierbower, Charlie Burroughs, and the sheriff staring down at her.
“You passed out,” Bierbower said.
“Dehydrated, probably,” Coyle said, handing her the water bottle. “Drink.”
“Have you eaten anything today?” Charlie asked.
She shook her head.
“Let’s get you out of this heat,” Coyle said. “Is there someplace we can go to talk?”
“My office. It’s at the hotel,” Traci said.
“I’ll join you,” Charlie offered. “In case the sheriff here needs any questions answered about staff.”
“That’s okay,” Coyle said pleasantly. “For now, I’ll just need Mrs. Eddings.”
Traci sipped a glass of iced tea that someone had sent in from the restaurant, and nibbled at a saltine cracker while Coyle questioned her.
“I just can’t wrap my mind around this,” she said, crumbling the cracker between her fingertips. “You’re seriously thinking it was foul play?”
“We can’t really know until the medical examiner weighs in, but your niece was a healthy young woman. Only twenty-one, right? So it seems like a stretch that her death could be from natural causes.”
“But who? Who would want to hurt her?”
“That’s what we need to find out. Was there a boyfriend, or an ex, someone like that she might have gotten crossways with?”
“Not really. She dated a boy at the beginning of her senior year of college, but by Christmas they were broken up. She hadn’t seen him in months.”
Coyle jotted something on a pad of paper. “What kind of work did she do here?”
“Guest relations, which covers a lot of ground. In a nutshell, Parrish was responsible for seeing that our members and guests have nothing less than a stellar experience here.”
“What’s the difference between a member and a guest?”
Traci blinked. “Sheriff, how long have you been in office here in Bonaventure?”
“This is my first term,” he said. “I guess you can tell I’ve never spent any time on your property. Not much call for us, what with you people having your own security.”
“A guest is someone who’s paying to stay at the resort, which means they have access to most of our on-site amenities, like the pools, golf course, and tennis courts. For members, we offer two kinds of memberships; residential and nonresidential.”
“Would she have had any problems with your guests?”
“I mean, some guests can be difficult and demanding. A lot of them have been coddled and catered to their entire lives.”
“Entitled assholes,” Coyle said.
“You said it, not me.”
“Tell me about her coworkers. You said she was living in a sort of dorm, here on the grounds of the resort? Did she get along with those folks?”
“Yes, as far as I knew. They’d only been living there a couple weeks.”
Coyle shifted gears without warning. “What’s Parrish’s dad’s role here?”
“Ric is CEO of Saint Holdings. It’s the real estate arm of the family company. My late husband, Hoke, was CEO of the Saint Cecelia resort, and I assumed that role after his death.”
“Why was Ric Eddings’s daughter living here, in a dorm? I saw his house earlier. It’s a mansion.”
“I think that’s something you should address with Ric, not me. I had the old cart barn remodeled into staff housing earlier this spring so that we could offer free housing to some employees. With rents in this area as high as they are, it was a way we could recruit summer help.”
“Including your niece Parrish? Her father seems to think you bullied her into coming to work for you.”
Traci turned her eyes on the detective. “Ric told you that?”
“He seems pretty angry at you.”
“He’s been angry with me for a while. I’m sure he already blames me for her death.” She took a deep breath. “Maybe Ric’s right. Maybe it is all my fault.”
Coyle leaned forward in his chair, his voice calm. “Mrs. Eddings, take my advice. It’s early days yet. Don’t go there with the guilt. It’ll eat you alive, if you let it.”
She managed a wan smile.
“Tell me about that Shack,” he said.
“It used to house the landscape maintenance equipment. My father-in-law built a modern barn a few years ago, and the Shack was left to deteriorate. At some point, we realized people were using it as a sort of illicit party destination, so we had it boarded and padlocked.”
“When was the last time you were out there?”
“Years, probably. You saw how overgrown the woods around it were.”
“Would a lot of your staff have known about the place?”
“I suppose so.”
Coyle doodled something on his notepad. “Tell me about this Beach Bash that was held Saturday night. Who all was there?”
“It’s an annual celebration to kick off the summer season. I think we had over four hundred paid reservations. Guests of the hotel, of course. And members.”
“All those people would have had to pass through the security gates, right?”
“Yes. Although members have QR code decals on their vehicles, so they don’t even have to slow down at the gates. Resort guests are given parking passes that allow them to come and go at will.”
“You said people had to make reservations for this party? Who would have that list?”
Traci’s eyes began to well up again. “Parrish would have had the list. On her work computer, I suppose.” She pulled a tissue from a nearby box and dabbed at her eyes.
Charlie Burroughs knocked lightly on the office door and stepped inside. “Traci, how are you feeling? You still look kinda peaked.”
“I’m… overwhelmed,” she admitted. “Sheriff Coyle was asking about a list of folks who were at the Beach Bash last night.”
“I can help with that,” Charlie said.
Traci turned back to the sheriff. “I’m sorry, but do you think we could continue this later?” She handed him one of her business cards. “I just need some time to process this. Charlie here can help you with whatever else you need.”
“Fine,” Coyle said. “I’ll be in touch.”