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.”
