Murder at the Spa (15 page)

“Ow!” Charlotte’s head reared up in protest against the pain that shot through the bunion of her right foot.

“Points on the foot correspond to parts of the body,” said Frannie. She was digging her thumbs into Charlotte’s bunion with the determined pressure of someone trying to push a thumb tack into a slab of solid mahogany. “The point near the bunion is usually associated with shoulder problems.”

Charlotte lay facedown on a massage table in the shiatsu treatment room, where she had reported after her daily parboiling in the bath. She had the feeling that the shiatsu, which had a reputation for being painful, was about to undo all that the bath had accomplished in the way of relaxation.

“I like to start with the feet. The feet give me an idea of where the problem areas are.” She kneaded the spot on Charlotte’s foot with her thumbs. “You have a lot of crystals,” she said. “Feel them?”

To her surprise, Charlotte could feel the grainy lumps rolling around in the skin under Frannie’s thumbs. “What kind of crystals?” she asked.

“Uric acid, calcium. They’re an indication of problem areas.”

Frannie moved up to Charlotte’s neck. Shiatsu, she explained, releases energy that is trapped at points along the body’s meridians, or energy pathways. The energy is released by applying pressure to specific energy points, the same points used in Chinese acupuncture.

“That hurts,” warned Charlotte as Frannie dug her fingers into a particularly sensitive spot in the middle of her shoulder blade.

“I knew I’d find trouble in your shoulders,” Frannie announced. “Feel that,” she said triumphantly.

Reaching back over her shoulder, Charlotte could just feel the spot. Under the skin was a knot of muscle the size of a plum.

“Right on your gall bladder meridian.”

“It’s very painful.”

“The pain is evidence of trapped energy. By the way,” she said, bending over to look Charlotte directly in the eye, “there would be less pain if you didn’t eat so much junk food.” Her dull blue eyes gazed at Charlotte reprovingly through her granny glasses.

“What junk food?” protested Charlotte.

Frannie gave Charlotte a look she might have given a dissembling four-year-old. “Liquor?” she asked.

“Well, yes.”

“Salt?” She continued to knead the knot. “I can tell. You’re so puffy. I bet you live on potato chips. Your body is a temple of the spirit …”

“I know,” interjected Charlotte. “But I treat it like a hotel room.”

Frannie smiled her lopsided smile and tucked a lock behind an ear that protruded from between strands of lank hair. She had ears that were cupped forward like a monkey’s. Charlotte found them quite charming. “It’s not all that bad,” Frannie said. “But it could be better.”

“I thought I was doing very well. I don’t eat sweets, I don’t eat much red meat. What about the people who binge on chocolate chip cookies?”

“You’re different. You should know better. You’re more evolved. You’re an old soul—very pure, very spiritual. That’s why your system is so sensitive. You were probably a high priestess in your last life, or a desert hermit who subsisted on nothing but grains and dates.”

Looking up, Charlotte raised an eyebrow in the you’ve-got-to-be-kidding-me look that was one of her screen trademarks. “How do you know?”

“That you’re an evolved entity?”

Charlotte nodded.

“Karma,” she answered matter-of-factly. “Beauty is a positive karmic consequence, as is success, as is wealth. Your beauty and your success are your rewards for your spiritual progress in past lives.”

Funny, Charlotte thought her good looks a gift of nature and her success a reward for a lifetime of hard work. But good genes and hard work apparently didn’t count for much among believers in the transmigration of souls. “Then ugliness and poverty are punishments for the sins of past lives?”

Frannie nodded. “Sort of. Educational opportunity would be a better term. You see, we plan our lifetimes before we incarnate in order to work out particular problems. An ugly person might have been obsessed with physical perfection in an earlier life. In that case, being ugly is their karmic consequence.”

“What if you’re not successful in working out your conflicts? What if you don’t
like
being ugly?”

“You won’t progress. If an entity fails to improve itself, it will keep on coming back to the school of life. I was a Roman matron in an earlier life. I’m crippled because I laughed at the cripples in the arena. Now I’m paying my karmic debt by helping others. If I didn’t, I might come back again as a cripple. Dana was a Roman soldier …”

“You were in Rome together?” interjected Charlotte.

“We’re soul mates. We’ve spent all of our past lives together.”

“I thought he was a samurai warrior.”

“That was in another life. Most of his karmic debt comes from his life in ancient Rome. He was a persecutor of the early Christians—one of the soldiers who fed the Christian martyrs to the lions. Now he’s working off his karmic debt by helping others learn about their past lives.”

It looked as if Frannie’s husband had a pretty heavy debt load. “How do you know all this? It hurts there, by the way.” Charlotte sucked in her breath as Frannie dug her thumbs into a point at the back of her skull. She was amazed that the hands of a woman could be so strong.

“Gall bladder twenty,” said Frannie, kneading the spot. “It’s what I call a yipe point.” She replied to Charlotte’s question: “The
akashic
records.”

“The a-what records?”

“
Akasha
. It’s a Sanskrit word for the fundamental substance of the universe. It’s like a giant photographic plate; it registers impressions of everything that transpires in the universe. We can learn about our past lives and our future lives through readings of the
akashic
records.”

“Readings?” It sounded like the giant ledger in the sky.

“If you’re trained, you can learn to pick up the vibrations of the
akasha
. You can find out what it says about your past, or someone else’s past. It’s not hard. It’s just a matter of learning to communicate on the right universal wavelength—kind of like tuning in a radio receiver.”

Charlotte had as little use for the determinism of Eastern religions as she had for that of Freud. She was a diehard believer in individual will. Deathbed visions of the godhead, past life regressions, clairvoyance—all these she wrote off to the imagination. She said as much to Frannie.

But Frannie had an answer for the imagination question as well. “But what
is
the imagination? The imagination is simply past-life recall. The
reason
you’re able to call a particular image to mind is that you’ve experienced it before. It’s already there, imprinted in your cells.”

There was no arguing with that. That was what was so annoying about Frannie’s brand of metaphysics—there was an answer for everything.

“How do you learn to read the
akashic
records?” asked Charlotte She was curious about the exact nature of this process. Did you travel in your astral body to some distant etheric library and look up your records in a cosmic card catalog? Or were they dictated to you over cosmic radio, or what?

“We start with guided meditations. To get our students accustomed to altered states of consciousness. Then we progress to trance work and OOB—that’s ‘out of the body’—experiences.”

“I see,” Charlotte said. But she really didn’t.

“Some people can tune right in; they use their bodies as a kind of receiver for the
akasha
. Others use an entity from the other side to help them tune in. But you have to be careful with entities. Just because someone’s lived and died doesn’t mean they’re more enlightened than you are. If you open yourself up, you don’t know what might come jumping in. But in any case it’s not difficult.” She was digging her fingers into the back of Charlotte’s leg. “We all retain memories of our past lives—it’s just a matter of finding a way to connect with that knowledge. For instance, I can tell a lot about a person’s past lives from a massage, from the aura. Some people can see it. I can feel it. If I hold my hands above the skin, like this”—she demonstrated, holding her hands over Charlotte’s back as if she was warming them over a campfire—“I can feel it. That’s how I know you were a spiritual entity in your last incarnation—that, and your positive karma. Your aura is very cool—a blue-green maybe, very energetic and clear.”

“It sounds pretty.”

Frannie smiled. “Dana and I also teach a course called You and Your Aura. The aura is a reflection of karmic energies. When a person understands his or her karma, the energies of the body flow freely and the aura is healthy and harmonious. When karma is unresolved, the energies are polluted by the karmic impurity and the body becomes sick. The more karmically free a person is, the more healthy he or she is.”

“Does that mean that you can diagnose disease from the aura?”

“Absolutely.”

Charlotte was intrigued. “What does the aura of someone who’s sick look like?” she asked.

“Dull. Cloudy,” replied Frannie, who was again working on Charlotte’s feet. “Often the energy patterns are fragmented. The auras of some of the people I work on are really a mess. Some start out bad—that’s their karma going down. But others create their own disharmony. Which they’ll have to pay for in the long run.” She ran her hands down the back of Charlotte’s legs. “Smoothing the meridians,” she explained. “Okay, you can turn over now.”

Charlotte turned over onto her back.

“Like that woman who died.” She was working the meridian on the inside of Charlotte’s arm. “You have to really work at it to be in such bad shape. I mean, you have really got to
concentrate
on neglect. She might as well have moved on to the next incarnation because she wasn’t making any progress in this one. Although it’s hard to imagine what condition she’ll come back in. Pretty bad, I’d imagine. She has a lot of karmic debt to work off.”

“Tender,” warned Charlotte. Frannie had moved down to her legs. The point she was now pressing was just above her knees.

“Liver-kidney-spleen meridian,” said Frannie. “Those toxins again. Don’t think you’re alone. Most of the people I work on have tender gall bladder and liver-kidney-spleen meridians. It’s the American diet—all that fat stresses the organs. Do you eat a lot of fried foods?”

“Only potato chips.”

Frannie nodded knowingly and returned to her description of Adele: “Her body was poisoned. I don’t like working on heavy people. I mean heavy emotionally. They’re like energy sponges. I had to lie down after I worked on her—that’s how much energy she sucked out of me. And then people like her think they can undo years of abuse with a few shots. Instant youth. If you ask me, that’s what killed her—those shots she was getting.”

Charlotte raised her head. “What shots?”

“Cells,” replied Frannie, moving around to work on Charlotte’s head. “From the embryos of sheep. Dr. Sperry gives them; they’re supposed to make you young. They’re illegal, but that doesn’t stop him. Nobody’s supposed to know about it, but I know because I see the marks. If Mrs. Langenberg found out, she’d fire him in a minute.” She moved down to Charlotte’s throat and jaw. “You have a lot of energy in your throat center,” she said. “All creative people do; it’s the locus of the creative energies.”

But Charlotte’s thoughts were on cell therapy: she knew several people who had undergone the expensive treatments, which were supposed to renew the sex life and restore youth. They might have been ineffective, but as far as she knew, they weren’t dangerous. “How would the shots have killed her?”

“Allergic reaction. Any time a foreign protein is injected into the body, there’s a risk of an adverse reaction. If you’re sensitive, you can die from it. Look at penicillin. A shot of penicillin can be life-threatening for the person who’s allergic to it. The same goes for a bee sting …”

Frannie had a point. It was also true that Adele had had an appointment with Dr. Sperry shortly before she died. But that still didn’t explain why her feet had been found hanging out over the end of the tub.

Frannie had grasped Charlotte’s wrists and was raising and lowering her arms, which, she explained, had something to do with the heart meridian. Then she announced that the massage was over.

Charlotte wasn’t prepared for the way she felt. She had been having Swedish massages every day after her bath, in which her body was pounded, kneaded, and stroked into letting go, but she had never had a massage that left her feeling as if every last drop of stress and anxiety had been wrung out of her body. “I feel like a fillet of sole,” she said, thinking of her lunch. But that wasn’t entirely true. She felt enervated, but at the same time curiously peaceful and mentally, if not physically, buoyant.

Frannie smiled. She stood over the table with her arms folded. “Tonight you’ll want to take a long soak in the tub. I worked your shoulders pretty hard; they’re going to be sore.”

Charlotte nodded.

“Are you going to come back?” asked Frannie.

“Definitely,” she said.

After her massage, Charlotte headed back to the hotel. Each step was an effort, as if she were walking through heavy sand. She wanted to visit Paulina before dinner. Jack had reported that she wasn’t doing well. Charlotte was worried about her: she was strong, but she was also eighty years old, at least. After stopping at the flower stand in the lobby to buy a bouquet of flowers—she chose freesias—she took the elevator up to the seventh floor.

Jack answered the door. He wore a tie and a jacket, again of white—a fashionable silk twill. He looked totally unruffled.

Charlotte handed him the bouquet. “How is she?” she asked.

He shook his head. “See for yourself,” he replied. “I’ll just get a vase for these.” Returning a moment later, he led her down the hall to the bedroom, where he opened the door on a scene that had changed little in two days. As before, the room lay in semidarkness. Paulina was curled up in the center of the bed, facing the wall. Her blue-black hair was spread out in a fan against the pillow. There was something eerie about seeing her so still. Charlotte studied her face: although the flesh sagged, her skin was smooth and shiny and free of lines. In repose, it looked almost childlike.