Page 44 of Summers at the Saint
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?”
