Naked Came the Phoenix

by Marcia Talley

  “I’m telling you, that’s Lauren Sullivan. Why wouldn’t she come here? It’s one of the top spas in the country and probably more private than any in California. Sometimes a person wants to be three thousand miles away from where she lives. Look at that profile. That’s her.”

  There was no mistaking it, not when the woman turned her head. The mass of flame-colored hair under the gauzy scarf, the trademark chin coming to that foxy little point below a full, wide mouth. “You’re right again, Mother. But it’s just so odd seeing her here instead of on the movie screen.”

  “She looks so romantic,” Hilda said with a sigh.

  “Lonely,” Caroline disagreed. “She looks lonely to me, and sad. Mom, there are bruises on her face. You can see them, just under the sunglasses.”

  “Face-lift.” Hilda whispered it and couldn’t prevent the zing of excitement from jumping out. “She’s had a face-lift. That must be why she’s here. Recovering. Hiding out. And why we didn’t see her at dinner last night. She wouldn’t want to let it get out she’s had plastic surgery.”

  “But she’s young and beautiful. Why would she want—″

  “Let’s go talk to her. We’ll just stroll down to the lake.”

  “No.” Caroline gripped her mother’s arm. “We will not.”

  “But, sweetheart …”

  “She’s entitled to her privacy.” And, Caroline thought as she dragged her mother down the path, she would get it. That lone and lonely figure on the beach had struck a chord with her.

  “It’s not as if I was going to ask her for an autograph,” Hilda complained. “Right this minute.”

  “Making a good impression means being much too cool to accost a movie star at dawn. You’ll see her later and smile breezily and ask her how she’s enjoying her stay.”

  “That’s good. Very good.” Impressed, Hilda studied her daughter. “How did you think of that?”

  “You learn a lot being a politician’s wife. The bathhouse is unlocked,” she announced. The door to it, triple-bolted the night before, now stood partially open. “Let’s go in.”

  “Now?”

  “I’m dying to see it. And I’d much rather have a swim than stand and stretch with a bunch of other yawning guests. It’ll be fun. Just you and me splashing around in the pool.”

  It was so unusual for Caroline to suggest doing something on impulse, or for fun, that Hilda let herself be pulled inside.

  The fountain was on, spewing up its crystal water. The room echoed with the music of it. The early sunlight sprinkled through the jewel tones of the skylights and sparkled on the polished tiles.

  Fresh flowers stood on the low tables near the deepcushioned sofas and lounge chairs of the waiting area. Pillows were plumped and glossy magazines artistically fanned.

  Luxury, waiting.

  A wide glass display across the room held the many products, all in the spa’s trademark silver packaging, that were available for sale. Scattered among the boxes were spears of dried herbs and flower petals and bits of polished stone.

  A cathedral to that luxury, Caroline thought as she crossed the tiles and opened one of the doors. Inside was a changing area, complete with lounge, generous closet, and thick white towels. A small counter held a mirror and a supply of spa products.

  “I found the pool,” Hilda announced.

  Caroline wandered back out and joined her mother in front of wide glass doors. Through them was a beautiful stretch of blue water under high white ceilings. The walls were covered with colorful mosaics depicting mythical scenes. Gods and goddesses frolicked in naked abandon.

  And a man, very much flesh and blood, walked around the skirt of the pool laying fresh silver cushions on the lounge chairs. He wore nothing but a minuscule electric blue triangle, low on his hips.

  “Oh my,” Hilda managed. “Oh my goodness.”

  He was tall, muscled, and tan with a mane of black hair that spilled nearly to his shoulders. Caroline’s mouth fell open when he turned his back to them and she saw that the triangle was a very thin thong.

  “I guess we skip the swim.”

  Hilda purred. “And I was just thinking what a terrific idea you’d had.”

  “We can’t go in there now. He’s practically … he’s really built well, isn’t he?”

  As if he’d heard her, the man turned. He had a face that belonged carved on a coin and eyes both bold and black. He skimmed them over her, smiled lazily.

  “We’re going,” Caroline announced and, mortified, turned the wrong way. She shoved through another door. And into the mud baths.

  It was everything it had been hyped to be. And standing there, studying the stone troughs and black mud, gave her the time to regain her composure. The smell was … thick, she decided. Thick and rich and secret.

  There were four of them, each mounted on its own individual platform and tucked into a corner where seeded glass doors could be closed for privacy. The curved stone was long enough for a grown man to sink into.

  High padded tables stood beside them. Sparkling chrome-and-glass shelves held still more products she imagined were used during the treatment.

  Music was playing softly, something with lots of strings and pipes. The lights were turned low and carried a faint amber hue. It was a quiet, relaxing glow she imagined was part of the sensuous experience offered here. In the center of the room another fountain bubbled, a charming counterpoint to the music. Warm, slippery mud, perfumed air, music, soft light, and the relaxing notes of water striking water.

  Yes, she’d very much like to try it.

  She stepped to a trough, dipped a finger in. “You’d feel like Cleopatra, wouldn’t you?” she mused. “But once you get in, how do you get out? Much less get the mud off.”

  She walked around the tub, saw the stone steps built into the far side of the trough. “Well, that solves the in and out part, I suppose. They must have showers or scrub rooms or something.”

  “We’ll make sure we get in on this right away,” Hilda began. “I want a full paraffin, too. And the deep-pore facial. No, the collagen facial. Hell, I want everything.″

  “Someone forgot to clean this one up,” Caroline said absently as she wandered toward another trough. Ribbons of mud ran down its sides and into untidy pools on the floor.

  “Claudia’ll have someone’s head for that. We’d better get going if we want to make that class. Unless you change your mind and we go for that swim with that Adonis. You know, Caroline, it’s all right to look at gorgeous male specimens, even after marriage.”

  All Caroline heard was a buzz in her head. Her mother’s words had turned into a messy tumble of sound. She stared down at the trough. And at the mud-streaked hand that dangled from its lip.

  The hand wore a ring. A square diamond caked with drying mud.

  She screamed. In her head, she screamed—one long, loud shriek. But her mother’s voice continued, cheerful nonsense, babbling nothing. Caroline stumbled forward, plunged her arms into the trough. And met cold flesh.

  “Help me. Oh, God, Mom, help me!” The flesh slithered through her hands. Panting, she fought for purchase even as Hilda ran over.

  “Honey, what in the world are you …”

  Out of the sucking mud came a head, a face. Grotesque as a gargoyle with its coating of black.

  Now it was Hilda who screamed. Her screams cannoned off the walls, careened from floor to ceiling while Caroline struggled to hold on.

  “Get help!” she ordered, fighting to clear her own vision as it threatened to gray. “Hurry. Get help now!”

  “It’s … It’s …”

  “I know.” Caroline’s arms were trembling, with both effort and fear. “Hurry, Mom. Please.”

  While Hilda fled, screaming still, Caroline braced herself and stared down in horror at Claudia de Vries’s mud-bathed and very dead face.

  3

  HELP CAME HALF NAKED.

  “Oh!” exclaimed Caroline, when her mother returned with the man in the turquoise thong.
Directly faced, as it were, with the skimpy patch of electric blue, she nearly slipped her oozing grip on Claudia’s body. Blushing as if he had arrived to ask her to dance instead of to assist her in a grisly task, she bleated, “Help! I can’t hold her up any longer.”

  He bent down quickly and slid his forearms under Caroline’s. For a terrible, intimate moment, they were locked together in a slippery embrace with the corpse.

  “Do you know CPR?” Caroline squeaked.

  Adonis shifted slightly, cradling Claudia’s upper body with his arm and supporting it from below with his knee. He bent his magnificent head over the victim’s muddy face, and for a long minute Caroline held her breath while he listened, as if waiting for Claudia to say something. Then he laid two fingers against the spa owner’s neck. He shook his head gravely. “Let go,” he whispered, and she thought she heard an accent.

  Caroline slid her arms out from under his, and backed far enough away to be able to lean against a wall. Even a lifetime of holding a cello propped between her legs had not prepared her for bearing the weight of a dead body. Her arms quivered with exhaustion. Her knees began to tremble, so much that she thought she was going to slip ingloriously to the floor and have to put her head between them to keep herself from fainting. Calm down! she directed herself. If she could play Beethoven in front of a thousand symphony lovers, if she could sit on a political platform smiling up at her candidate husband while three hundred people cheered, if she could steal food from a deserted kitchen, surely she could keep her composure for this.

  Douglas!

  The thought of her husband made her heart race, partly out of longing for his sweet presence in this moment of emergency but also out of fear of the headlines in tomorrow’s tabloid newspapers: Congressman’s Wife Drags Corpse Through Mud!

  Caroline chided herself for her self-absorption. Her stunned gaze fastened on the spectacle of the body being pulled out of the clinging embrace of the mud bath.

  On his knees now, with his feet braced against the wall, the Adonis was tugging, dragging the body out of the muck. He freed her with a grunt and one great clean-and-jerk, as if Claudia were a barbell and he were a weight-lifting contestant. Now only her high-heeled shoes still dangled in the muck. He took one step backward, so that her body was completely clear, but the shoes were left behind. Caroline hurried forward to grab them before they could sink again. For an awful moment, the strength in her legs gave way, and she was terrified that she was going to tumble facefirst into the “grave.”

  “Got’em?” her mother crowed, as Caroline saved the shoes.

  She peered over at Hilda, marveling at her mother’s ability to wrest the trivial from the profound in virtually any circumstance. Where was the hint of new sensitivity she thought she had detected in her mother this morning? She should have known better than to get her hopes up. One good cry did not a better woman make. It was said that a person’s true character emerged in crises, and this was a crisis if ever there was one. And here was the old familiar Hilda, bobbing to the surface like a rotten egg in a pan of boiling water.

  I knew it was too good to last, Caroline thought.

  She put the shoes down by the edge of the bath.

  “Those could be saved,” her mother said, with a fastidious frown. “Although they might have to be re-covered in a new fabric.”

  When Caroline turned and looked up, she saw that the young man was still clasping the body to his chest, and looking as if he didn’t quite know what to do with it. He and Claudia were locked in a stiff embrace that looked to Caroline as if they were caught in a moment of dancing a macabre tango. For one wild moment, she thought he might whirl the body in his arms, press his tanned cheek to its muddy one, and step smartly out into a Latin rhythm.

  “Put her down on the floor,” Hilda commanded him.

  Gently, he followed her directions.

  “Caroline, turn up the lights in here,” her mother ordered, and when the dimmed lights came up to their full brilliance, painfully illuminating the scene as if it were an operating room or a morgue, she exclaimed,”Good grief, she’s still in that same dress.”

  Caroline heard an acidic note to her mother’s comment, as if this were a judgment on Claudia’s fashion sense instead of on the timing of her demise. For surely this meant the spa owner had never gone to bed last night. With a shiver, Caroline remembered the voices she had overheard on her own adventure—the raised voices—and wished she knew who had been taunted by Claudia only a few hours ago on the moonlit path among the trees.

  “Why would she take a mud bath in her dress?” Hilda asked in the peevish, superior tone of someone who might have said, “Why would she wear a cocktail dress to a morning wedding?”

  Caroline stared at her mother and then looked up at the Adonis. He was shaking mud off his arms, flinging it off onto the tile floor. A glob of it landed on Claudia’s still breast. Another bit struck Caroline’s own cheek, just missing her eye, and she flinched when it stung her skin.

  Didn’t they see what she saw?

  Couldn’t they see the obvious, terrible truth?

  With a chill that increased her shivers, Caroline realized she might have overheard the final argument between Claudia de Vries and the one who killed her. For there was no doubt in Caroline’s mind that this was no “natural” death. Claudia’s peach chiffon dress was plastered to her body. But it was her lovely shawl of a thousand scraps of fabric that told the murderous tale: It was wound around and around her neck, pulled tight as a cello string tuned almost to breaking, and tied with a strangling knot.

  “Go get Raoul,” Hilda imperiously told the muddy Adonis.

  He cast her an unreadable look but then turned to do as he was bid. As he brushed past Caroline, he muttered, “Your mother acts as if she owns the place.” She cast him an apologetic glance that her mother couldn’t see. Caroline had to agree that even for Hilda, her mother was being uncommonly bossy. His accent, she was startled to hear, was English, and not just any old Cockney, either, but decidedly upper-class. What in the world was that accent doing with those black eyes, that wild hair, and that swimsuit?

  “What was that?” Hilda demanded when they both jumped at the shock of a loud splash in the adjoining room. “What’s he doing?”

  Caroline walked on shaky legs to the connecting door and opened it.

  Adonis had plunged into the swimming pool to wash off.

  She watched him swim the length of it, fast as a shark, graceful as a dolphin, as smooth in the water as if that were his natural habitat instead of land. I’ve never felt that sure of myself, she found herself admitting with a shock of piercing regret, not even as a musician, certainly not as a daughter, a wife … a woman.

  “Caroline?” her mother called out behind her.

  Without turning, she answered, “He’s washing off the mud.”

  By the time he climbed out—with a single muscular lunge, his entire weight supported on one hand—his body was gleaming and clean again though a dark trail lingered behind him in the turquoise water. He shook himself, casual and efficient as a dog, but this time it was only water that flew off him. She watched him stride toward the front door, open it, and go off into the morning light without closing the door behind him. He didn’t amble, but neither did he race. There was no visible urgency to his mission, nor did he appear to be the least bit self-conscious about walking around half naked. Rather, he moved across the ground with measured, graceful strides, as if he were merely moving to the side of a pool to scoop out a bit of litter that happened to be floating there.

  Well, Caroline thought, forgivingly, it isn’t as if hurrying is going to bring Claudia back to life. Her heart suddenly contracted painfully with sympathy for what Claudia’s husband was about to hear and to endure. If it were Douglas who was dead, God forbid, she would want the Adonis to take his time, take forever, if possible, to walk from here to there, so that for all of those remaining moments she would still believe her husband was alive.

 
“Caroline!”

  “Just a minute, Mother,” she pleaded, still without turning.

  Go slowly, she whispered silently to the handsome young man whose name she did not know. Don’t hurry to tell Raoul this awful news. Give him a little more time before he learns his world has shifted on its axis.

  Only at that moment did it occur to her that Adonis had not said a word about his employer or her death. Nor had he asked a single question, not even, “What happened?” He hadn’t asked, “Is she dead?” although perhaps that was all too easy to see at a glance. He had simply followed directions; he had silently and efficiently moved to do what needed doing. Perhaps that was not a bad example to follow, Caroline decided, after a moment’s thought about it.

  She took another moment to compose herself.

  Then she turned back to the mud bath room, her mother, and the body of Claudia de Vries.

  “Mother! What are you doing?”

  Her mother looked up from her crouched position beside the body of her old college roommate. “Nothing. I just wanted a closer look. I think somebody killed her, don’t you?”

  So her mother did realize the truth.

  “You amaze me, Mom. You’re so cool about this.”

  “Hysterics won’t help, will they?”

  “No, but …″ Caroline couldn’t say what she was thinking, that hysterics hadn’t helped when her father died, either, but that hadn’t kept Hilda from having them.”What are you doing, Mother?”

  “Just checking something.”

  Caroline felt a sense of unreality. The piped-in music was now playing a Celtic tune. The fountain still burbled in the center of the room. This couldn’t be real. This wasn’t a spa with a dead body in it. That wasn’t really her mother down there, bent over a corpse, turning its head this way and that as if it were a turkey she was inspecting for the holidays.

  “Mother! Don’t touch anything. The police …″

  “Well, why not?” her mother retorted. “You and that Hercules have already pawed all over her. I just wanted to see if what I suspected was true … .”