Murder at the Spa (4 page)

Anne-Marie nodded. She urged Charlotte to switch to white wine spritzers and to limit herself to one or two.

In fact, Charlotte thought her biological age would probably be higher were it not for her nightly manhattan. She was a firm believer in the psycho-therapeutic virtues of alcohol, and said as much. For soothing the spirit, Lord Byron had said, apply rum and true religion.

But Anne-Marie, invoking the specter of shriveled gray cells to add to those of bat wings and liver spots, wasn’t convinced. She returned her attention to the printout, a disapproving frown slipping across her viking brow. “I see another area. What about the cigarettes?”

Charlotte damned the computer. She could hardly argue that cigarettes were therapeutic, but she had managed for most of her adult life to keep her habit to ten or less a day, an achievement that she, at any rate, considered an outstanding example of self-control.

“You realize, don’t you, that there’s no threshold for lung cancer?” Anne-Marie leaned forward, her arms folded on the desk. “In other words, there’s no point below which you are not subjecting yourself to a risk.” She raised a forefinger. “Even one cigarette is a risk.”

In her mind’s eye, Charlotte saw the celestial hand making an entry in the debit column of the giant ledger in the sky. Meekly, she pledged to refrain, or at least to cut back.

Anne-Marie set the printout aside.

Charlotte leaned back in relief.

“You’ll be in C-group—for those whose biological ages are forty-five and above. All our guests take the same classes, but the workouts are tailored to individual fitness levels. Here’s your exercise prescription.” She handed Charlotte a booklet with an engraving of the Indian maiden on the cover. Inside there was a page for each day of Charlotte’s stay. The pages were marked off in half-hour intervals: six
A.M.
, wake-up; six-thirty
A.M.
, mineral water prescription; seven
A.M.
, Awake and Aware; seven-thirty
A.M.
, breakfast; eight
A.M.
, Terrain Cure; and so on.

“Six o’clock?” said Charlotte.

“We like you to get up early to take the waters. The spa physician, Dr. Sperry, will be giving you your mineral water prescription and your bath prescription this afternoon. We generally reserve the afternoons for treatments at the Bath Pavilion or at L’Institut de Beauté.”

“I’m glad to hear that,” Charlotte said. She had been looking forward to her spa stay in terms of a long, luxurious soak in the tub, but it was beginning to sound more like boot camp—without the food.

“Don’t worry. It’s not as strenuous as it looks,” said Anne-Marie with a smile that was intended to be reassuring. “I’m sure you’ll enjoy it.” With that, she rose, signaling the end of the interview. “Frannie will take you down to the locker room now; your first class is in twenty minutes.”

Charlotte thanked her and shook her hand. She had the grip of a heavyweight champion.

Frannie was waiting for her outside Anne-Marie’s office. She smiled her crooked smile. Next to the robust Anne-Marie, she looked like a case study in bad health. Her posture was poor, her complexion pasty, her hair thin and lank. Even her eyes, which were magnified by her glasses, were dull and pale. She reminded Charlotte of the baby mice—blind, pink, and helpless—that she had once found nesting in an old orange crate as a child.

“How did you do?” she asked as they headed toward the stairs.

“Group C,” confessed Charlotte. She felt as if she was admitting to being relegated to the slow track in ninth grade.

“I mean, your biological age,” said Frannie. She descended the stairs with much less difficulty than she had climbed them.

“Forty-nine.”

“I guessed forty-eight.”

“How did you know?”

“By your appearance. Generally speaking, if people look younger than they are, their biological age is younger than their real age.”

“So much for the wisdom of the computer.”

Frannie smiled. They had reached the foot of the stairs. Frannie headed across the lobby to a door on the far wall.

“This is the treatment area,” she said as she entered. She reeled off a list of treatments, which ranged from biofeedback to herbal wraps to tanning beds. “A typical treatment cubicle,” she added, opening a door on a small room with a cot. “It also happens to be the one where I work.”

“What do you do?” asked Charlotte.

“Shiatsu,” she replied. She briefly explained the Japanese system of finger massage. “You asked how I estimate biological age. One way is by appearance. Another is by touch. If I’ve done a massage on a person, I can usually estimate their biological age pretty accurately.”

“Why’s that?” asked Charlotte.

“Oh, it’s not hard. Skin quality, muscle tone …” she replied. “If someone’s poisoning their body, it will show up in a massage. The body is supposed to be the temple of the spirit, but some people treat it like a hotel room.” With that, she opened a door leading to the weight area.

A hotel room? Charlotte pondered the metaphor for a while and decided that it didn’t hold up. It wouldn’t be right to treat your body like a flophouse, but as a temporary abode in which you were privileged to reside—a first-class hotel, so to speak? That hardly struck her as so reprehensible.

“Sometimes I can even tell about past lives from a massage,” Frannie added as they entered a room filled with gleaming chrome exercise machines.

“Past lives?”

“Sure. The body is imprinted with every incarnational event the soul has ever experienced—not only from the present lifetime, but from every lifetime. Every cell is a storehouse of the energy of experience. Have you ever had the feeling that you’ve been somewhere before?”

“Yes,” replied Charlotte, wondering what she was opening herself up to.

“That’s because you
have
been there before, in another life. Ordinarily, you don’t remember because it would interfere with your functioning. You’re prohibited from remembering by a veil of forgetfulness. But once in a while, the veil lifts. That’s when you have the feeling of déjà vu.”

Here we go again, thought Charlotte. Mozart, who was composing at four because he’d been a musician in a past life. Patton, who was strategically familiar with the battlefields of Europe because he’d been over them before as a Roman commander. She raised a skeptical eyebrow.

Frannie paused next to a machine into which a young woman was strapped on her back, ready for takeoff. Her ankles were tucked under padded cylinders, which she raised by extending her legs.

“This is our compound leg machine; it exercises the quadriceps muscles. We have twenty-three machines,” she said. “Each machine exercises a different muscle or muscle group. I’ll be showing you Row to use the machines later in the week. But first we have to get you conditioned. What were we talking about?”

“The veil of forgetfulness.”

“Oh, yes. The veil lifting. It happened to me with my husband. The first time we met—it was in a metaphysical bookstore in the Village—I had this feeling of closeness, as if I’d known him before. I wasn’t into reincarnation then, but he was. He felt it too; he knew right away what it was.”

As she spoke, a young man entered the room. He had black hair, a black beard, and a black belt that identified him as a martial arts instructor.

Frannie’s face lit up. “I was just talking about you.”

“Oh?” He grinned. “Anything nice?” He spoke with a soft southern accent that Charlotte pegged as North Carolina or Tennessee.

“I was just telling Miss Graham how we met. Miss Graham, this is my husband, Dana LaBeau.”

He extended his hand. “Pleased to meet you.”

“It wasn’t until Dana regressed me that I realized we were soul mates,” Frannie continued. “Not twin souls. Twin souls are quite common—people who’ve had a relationship of some sort in another life. Soul mates are very rare; our souls vibrate at the same electromagnetic frequency.”

“They were created together at the time of the Big Bang,” added Dana.

“How romantic,” said Charlotte with a twinge of sarcasm that went unnoticed. She studied Dana more closely: he was good-looking enough, with strong white teeth, a pleasant smile, and deep green eyes with long, silky lashes, but Charlotte thought him disappointingly unprepossessing for someone whose soul dated back to the Big Bang.

“I mean, it all makes sense if you think about it,” said Frannie.

Charlotte withheld comment.

“If you’re interested in finding out more about your past lives, you can take our course,” said Dana. “It’s called Other Lives/Other Selves. It’s on Wednesday nights. It’s a prerequisite for Past Life Regression. If you want to sign on, just tell Frannie.” He extended his hand with a warm smile. “It was a pleasure meeting you. I hope we’ll be seeing you again on Wednesday.”

“Maybe,” said Charlotte, returning his handshake.

“Dana teaches karate in the morning and works as a bath attendant in the afternoon,” Frannie explained after he left. “He was a samurai warrior in a previous life; that’s why he’s so interested in the martial arts. We often remember our past lives through our interests and predilections.”

“Does that mean that I was an actress in a previous life?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised. If you take our course, you’ll find out. It often helps you advance spiritually if you’re familiar with your past lives. It’s easier to work off your karmic debts when you have a clear idea of what they are. You know—coming to terms with your cosmic responsibilities.”

“I think I’d prefer not to know.”

Frannie shrugged. “Some people just prefer to live in a state of cosmic ignorance,” she said with a good-natured smile.

The tour ended at the women’s lounge, where Frannie issued Charlotte a white terry-cloth kimono, a pair of red rubber thongs, and a white sweat suit with racing stripes of Langenberg red. Then she directed Charlotte to her locker, wished her good luck, and bade her good-bye.

Charlotte wasn’t sure which was worse: Anne-Marie’s overbearing enthusiasm or Frannie’s metaphysical malarkey.

She found herself sharing a corner of the locker room with a woman who was struggling to stuff a large leather tote bag into a narrow floor-to-ceiling locker. She was of the type who used to be called voluptuous, but was now just called fat.

“For four grand a week, you’d think they’d give you a bigger locker,” she complained as she slammed the door.

She was a short woman with frizzy brown hair cut in a twenties-style bob and a piquant mouth that turned up at the corners. But underneath its expression of wry amusement, her face was careworn: the forehead was deeply creased and the skin hung in yellowish folds under distant gray eyes.

“Are you a new inmate?” She enunciated her words carefully, as if she wasn’t sure they’d come out right if she didn’t.

“I guess you could say that.” Charlotte did have the feeling that she was being treated like a mental defective confined to some sort of institution—the childlike days plotted out for her in half-hour segments, no decisions to make, not even what to wear.

“It’s a nice place,” the woman said. Taking a seat on a bench, she removed a pack of cigarettes from her pocket. She pulled out one for herself and then offered the pack to Charlotte. “Want a smoke?”

“Do they allow it?”

The woman lifted her shoulders in a shrug.

Charlotte smiled and sat down next to her, taking her up on her offer. She liked her immediately.

“I see you’re in the backward group too,” the woman said as she offered Charlotte a light. Charlotte noticed that her hand shook.

“You’re in C-group.” She nodded at Charlotte’s sweat suit. “We’re color-coded—dark gray, light gray, and white. White is for the backward group, those of us whose biological age is forty-five and over.” She gestured at the booklet in Charlotte’s hand. “Do you have Swing and Sway now?”

Charlotte checked her booklet. “Yes.”

“Good. So do I. There are only four from the backward group in that class and two are men. It’ll be nice to have some more female company.”

“How is it?” asked Charlotte.

“Swing and Sway isn’t bad. It’s Backs and Bellies and Absolutely Abdominals that are the killers. In case you haven’t noticed, they’re big on alliteration here,” she added with a little smile. “The real killer is Awake and Aware—that’s the one at seven.”

“At that hour, I’m more like semiconscious and stupefied.”

The woman laughed. “I know what you mean. What age did you clock in at?”

“Forty-nine.”

“Hey!” Drawing away, the woman gazed at Charlotte in wide-eyed admiration.

It was true that Charlotte didn’t look her age. Outside of her hair style and a few crow’s-feet, she still looked much as she had in her twenties. The years had dealt lightly with the fine structure of her face. As for her body, she had gained a few pounds, but she still had a good figure and she carried herself with the lightness and grace of a woman half her age.

“Congratulations. I clocked in at forty-eight, but that’s not much of an achievement. I’m really only thirty-eight. My name’s Adele Singer, by the way,” she added, extending her hand.

“Charlotte Graham.”

“I know. I recognized you right away. I always imagined you would be tall. But so often movie stars turn out to be a lot shorter than you think—you know what I mean?” She continued: “I’m a fan. But don’t worry. I’m not going to hound you for an autograph.”

“Thanks,” replied Charlotte. She hoped the same would be true of the other guests. She was counting on the guests at a posh spa like this one to be considerate enough not to harass their celebrity fellows.

As Charlotte changed, Adele filled her in on the other C’s. The two men were Art, a middle-aged chemist who had been ordered to the spa by his cardiologist, and Nicky, an obese young man who worked as a counter boy at his father’s Greek deli in Astoria, and who had been eating more than he sold. He had sold the Buick he’d saved three years to buy to pay for his stay. The third C was Corinne, a model who’d come to the spa to promote a new line of Langenberg products, the chief ingredient of which was mineral water. Corinne had technically been assigned to A-group—she’d clocked in with a biological age in the teens—but she’d voluntarily relegated herself to the ignominy of C-dom. Her attitude was that she’d come to the spa to do a promotion, not to torture herself, which Adele thought a sensible attitude indeed.