“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’ttry 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?”
