Naked Came The Phoenix (6 page)

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…"

"What you suspected?" Caroline's heart began to pound again. Was her own mother on the verge of solving a crime before the police detectives even got here?

Hilda sat back, looking triumphant. "Yes. She
has
had a facelift. I thought so."

Caroline found a chair and sat in it.

"Why doesn't anybody come?" her mother fretted, after they had waited what seemed an eternity alone with one another and the body of Claudia de Vries. Where only moments before she had seemed lost in her own thoughts, now Hilda turned and arched an eyebrow at her daughter. "You look like something the cat dragged in, Caroline. What if someone takes photographs? What if they print it in a newspaper? How would that look for Douglas to have his wife seen like this? Clean yourself up before somebody sees you."

Caroline looked down at her clothing and her arms, which were coated with thick, damp mud. She had hardly been aware of herself since she sat down, so stunned was she by the events of the past twenty minutes. But now, as much as she hated to obey Hilda, suddenly she couldn't bear to leave the mud on herself for an instant longer. Spotting a basin and faucet, Caroline hurried to rinse off as much as she could. She thought about taking off her clothes and putting on one of the terry cloth robes that hung on hooks but decided she didn't want to meet the police that way, wearing something so intimate as a bathrobe. In lieu of that, she scrubbed her face and neck and arms until they stung and the water ran clean into the basin and down the drain.

Her mother, she noted, didn't have a dirty drop on her.

Caroline had just sat down again in the leather chair when suddenly it seemed as if everybody was there all at once in a great loud chaos of discovery and dismay.

Claudia's husband, Raoul de Vries, came rushing in first, followed by several of the guests.

"Claudia!" he shrieked upon seeing his wife's body.

He didn't go to her, however, but drew back in a way that looked almost superstitious to Caroline. The man looked, she thought, as if he were afraid this death might be catching.

His next utterance sounded horrified. "How could this have happened?" He stared suspiciously at Caroline and then at Hilda.

"We don't know, Raoul," Caroline told him sympathetically. She stood up out of respect for the widower and the occasion. "When we came into this room, we found your wife's body submerged in that tub, and we pulled her out." She was going to break the news that it appeared that his wife had been murdered, but Caroline paused at that point, feeling unsure of herself and suddenly wary of saying it in front of so many people.

Behind Claudia's husband, Phyllis Talmadge was shaking her head in a deeply resigned and unhappy way, as if something she had feared had, indeed, come to pass. When she caught Caroline's eye, she mouthed, "I told you so!"

King David had come in with them, too. Now he leaned back against a door jamb, staring at Caroline, so that she found herself stammering for that reason as well. He looked older this morning, she judged from the quick glance she gave him before looking away. His sybaritic face looked more deeply lined, the bags under his eyes were heavier, as if he hadn't slept. But in spite of that, there was such a magnetism about him that it was all she could do not to keep glancing at him. She continued to be acutely aware of his gaze upon her face.

Beyond the door, she heard a man raise his voice and say, "No, Ondine, don't go in there!"

But the young model plunged through the open doorway, coming even farther into the room than anyone else had, so that when she did see the body, she gasped, and then screamed, and ran away from it like a little girl. The man she had pointed out to Caroline as her manager walked into the room, put his arm around her shoulders, and led her out again, saying, "Are you ever going to listen to me?"

Caroline risked a glance at King David.

He smiled ever so slightly and slowly winked at her.

It seemed wildly inappropriate, even lewd under the circumstances.

Caroline looked away again and this time firmly kept her own gaze turned away from the grown man who called himself King but who still seemed to want to be a bad boy.

Hilda, she noted, was hanging back, saying nothing.

Thanks a lot, Mom
, she thought, as she faced the widower alone.

Just then, Lauren Sullivan slipped into the room past King David and went to stand just behind Phyllis Talmadge. Her bruised eyes looked as wide and distressed as a wounded animal's, and her famous little chin looked quivery, as if she might cry at any moment. She was so quiet, so unobtrusive, she might have been a maid coming in to assist all the celebrities, Caroline thought. And yet she was probably the most famous one of them all. She was also, it seemed, the most loath to call attention to herself.

But she had King David's attention, whether she wanted it or not.

By accident, Caroline caught her eye and was amazed to see the wide, generous mouth curve up in a small, sweet smile. For just that moment, they seemed to Caroline to be caught in a circle of compassion that this beautiful, shy woman exuded by her very presence. And then the breathtaking smile was gone. Lauren Sullivan moved behind the others, so that she was out of sight of everyone, including Caroline.

Caroline stepped closer to Raoul, wanting to speak only to him. "
I
think you need to call the police," she suggested quietly.

His response was anything but quiet in return. "The police? Absolutely not. Why would I do that? Claudia would kill me.
The publicity
…" He turned slightly and clapped his hands
once
. "I want everyone to leave now. This is a private affair. I appreciate your concern, but this is a family matter. If you will all please step outside the room, I'll handle this…"

At that moment, Hilda finally did step forward to speak. "No, Raoul," she said. "I'll handle this."

He turned his handsome, aristocratic face toward her, looking surprised, condescending, even slightly amused. His distress seemed to have given way to brisk management, Caroline observed.

"You'll handle it?" he asked Hilda with insulting politeness. "Is that what you said? Well, thank you, Hilda, I'm sure that's very kind of you, but there's really no need for your assistance. I may be distraught"-he didn't look it, Caroline thought-"but Claudia was my wife, and I am now the owner of this spa, and-"

"No, Raoul, you're not," Hilda announced in the same strong, bossy tone. Behind him, his famous guests gaped at the little scene that was unfolding. Hilda cast a quick glance at her astonished daughter before saying, "You are not the owner of this spa, or at least you are not the majority owner. I am. I am sorry for your loss, Raoul, because I know what it's like to lose a spouse, but I must tell you that you have lost more than you realize. I am the new owner of this business, and I will take charge of everything from this moment on."

"Mother!" Caroline urgently pulled Hilda aside after a furious Raoul de Vries had been ushered out by the Adonis in the swim-suit who now, it appeared, worked for her very own mother. "Is this true, Mom?"