Summers at the Saint by Mary Kay Andrews

Author:Mary Kay Andrews
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

CHAPTER 41

Whelan was on his hands and knees, ripping out a bed of faded annuals near the resort gatehouse, when he saw the news vans arriving.

Within an hour, they’d erected a small village, with pop-up tents, folding chairs, generators, and coolers.

Traci Eddings and an older man—her lawyer, he surmised—showed up at the scene within an hour, where they were met by two police cruisers from the sheriff’s office.

His curiosity got the better of him, so he went to the landscaping truck, pulled on a clean T-shirt, and casually joined the knot of reporters gathering around for what looked like an impromptu press conference.

Whelan marveled at Traci’s composure—even while she was discussing the loss of her niece, her voice stayed calm and steady. She was an impressive woman. He’d seen that already.

The night before, after he’d returned to his apartment, he’d gone online and done a deep dive on the background of the Saint’s president—and his new boss.

It seemed she’d met her future husband, Hoke, at nineteen, working as a lifeguard at the resort, the same summer, ironically, Hudson had drowned in the Saint’s pool.

He’d fetched the old police incident reports and been startled to realize that the teenaged Traci Davis who’d unsuccessfully attempted to save Hudson’s life back then was now the CEO of the Saint.

Hoke Eddings was ten years older, the scion of one of the wealthiest families on the Georgia coast, and Traci was a townie, from a working-class family. Unlike her husband, who had an Ivy League education and a newly minted MBA, she’d graduated from the local community college and married Hoke Eddings before the ink was dry on her diploma.

The Savannah and Jacksonville papers he found online were full of breathless accounts of the whirl of parties and soirees hosted on behalf of the happy couple’s nuptials, and a dozen years later, the headlines were about the multi-year, multi-million-dollar expansion of the Saint, rebuilding much of the hundred-year-old hotel complex originally built by Hoke’s grandfather, and turning it into an up-to-date five-star luxury resort.

Then, just as the project was nearing completion, came the plane crash that had left Traci Eddings a widow and the CEO of the resort. Whelan could find no mention of children in Hoke’s obituary. Maybe that explained why she was so close to her niece.

He watched now as she fielded questions, deferring to the sheriff, her expression neutral, until the shithead from Jacksonville asked if the dead girl had been raped.

Traci had recoiled as though she’d been slapped, leading the sheriff to step in and definitively quash the rumors.

When the press conference was over and the reporters had begun to pack up to leave, she’d spotted him at the back of the crowd and acknowledged him with a nod. Then, she said something to the older man and walked over to greet him, stopping to fetch a bottle of water from a tub near the makeshift stage.

She gave him the bottle and a weary smile. “I was hoping to catch you today, to thank you for bringing my car back this morning.

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