Murder at the Spa (32 page)

“That’s a comforting thought.”

Jerry grinned.

Charlotte knew it would be Frannie who would conduct her follow-up, but she nevertheless felt a lump rise in her throat as she saw Frannie waiting for her in the lobby of the Health Pavilion, her ears sticking out from between strands of lank blond hair and her game leg tilted out at a peculiar angle. Seeing Charlotte, she smiled crookedly. She seemed naked, defenseless, too frail to take the blow. Her marriage, her future, her beliefs, would all be shattered, maybe even ridiculed. Again Charlotte thought of the baby mice: blind, pink, unprepared for exposure to the harsh world outside their nest. What would she draw on to see her through? But perhaps she had unexpected reservoirs of strength. People often did. At least she had the day-to-day routine of a job she loved to depend on. It was a strange and monstrous feeling, being able to see Frannie’s future being played out like this. Sitting there, in the heart of the dusky, columned lobby, her slight figure seemed unreal, a murky image floating deep within a crystal ball.

Frannie rose to greet her. “Are you ready for the verdict?”

“As ready as I’ll ever be.”

Again they climbed the staircase to the diagnostic room. Again they went through the twelve stations. To Charlotte’s surprise, several of her fitness parameters had improved. Her lung capacity was better, as was her resting pulse—a result, said Frannie, of the “training effect.” She had also lost eight inches, most of them from her hips.

“See, it pays off,” said Frannie, recording the inches lost.

“I guess so,” Charlotte concurred, rather weakly.

“You’re auric field is brighter than it was too—more energetic, more shimmery. That means you’re more balanced. The aura reflects the changes in your spirit. When you don’t take care of your body, your spirit suffers, and when you do, your spirit is more radiant.”

“Frannie?” interjected Charlotte. “Remember when you said that Mrs. Singer would be better off starting over in another life?”

“Yes.” Stepping back, Frannie raised a pensive knuckle to her chin and gazed intently at Charlotte. Her attention was elsewhere. “But we still have a problem,” she said. “A big problem.”

“What?”

Moving around to Charlotte’s back, Frannie placed her hands on Charlotte’s shoulders. “Your spine is like a steel cable,” she said, digging in her fingers. She spun Charlotte around. “Look at your shoulders.”

Charlotte looked in the mirror. Her shoulders were hunched up around her neck. The tension was obvious.

“We can’t have you going home like that,” said Frannie. She instructed Charlotte to sit on the lifecycle and lean over the handlebars.

“There’s something I don’t understand,” continued Charlotte as Frannie worked the back of her head and her neck. “Does that mean that the person who killed Mrs. Singer did her a favor?”

“Oh, no. I probably shouldn’t have put it that way. She wasn’t making any progress, it’s true; but that’s not to say she wouldn’t have. The only route to enlightenment is through the karmic experience on the earth plane.”

“So if you take someone’s life, you’re robbing them of their opportunity of reaching enlightenment.”

“Exactly. If you take someone’s life, you’re robbing them of the vehicle of experience, the body. A favor—never. To interfere with someone’s karmic destiny is the worst kind of cosmic crime.”

“I see,” said Charlotte. Even within the context of Frannie’s strange beliefs, there was no way of justifying what Dana had done.

Frannie finished by raising and lowering Charlotte’s arms a few times. “Now look in the mirror.”

Charlotte obeyed. It was remarkable: her shoulders now sloped naturally and felt much more relaxed, all as a result of applying pressure to a few small points. “Thanks,” she said. “I needed that.”

Frannie went on to demonstrate several exercises to relieve shoulder tension. She suggested doing them daily and wrote them down in a fresh copy of the exercise prescription booklet. Then came the second part of the Fitness Appraisal: the computer interview. But this time Frannie instructed Charlotte to answer the questions according to how she’d behaved during her spa stay. If she hadn’t drunk any alcohol, she should say she didn’t drink. If she hadn’t smoked, she should say she didn’t smoke. If she had exercised daily, she should say that too. The computer would then calculate her biological age based on the good health habits she’d established at the spa.

Charlotte’s health habits during her spa stay hadn’t exactly been simon pure, but she played along anyway. To the alcohol question, she answered no (she’d only had two manhattahs and a couple of beers), as she did to the smoking question. When she finished, she rejoined Frannie, who had been inputing the results of her physical evaluation.

“I want a pledge,” said Frannie as they waited for the printer to spew out the computer’s verdict.

“Let me guess. No cigarettes?”

Frannie nodded.

“Cut back on the cocktails?”

Frannie nodded again. “One per day—that’s it.”

“Okay. What else?”

“Salt. No more potato chips. Your face is already less puffy than it was. Just because your good health and good looks are a positive karmic consequence doesn’t mean you should abuse them,” she scolded. “Your body is a temple …”

“I know, but I treat it like a hotel room.”

Frannie grinned.

The printer stopped and Frannie tore off the printout. “On to Anne-Marie,” she said, heading toward the exit. Outside of Anne-Marie’s office, she paused to rummage through the bag in which she carried her paraphernalia. She withdrew a small package neatly wrapped in red tissue paper. “For you,” she said, holding it out shyly. “I’ve enjoyed working with you.”

“Thank you,” said Charlotte, touched that Frannie would have gone to the trouble of getting her a farewell present. She opened it up. It was a gift package of plump California dates.

“For inspiration.”

“Dates!” Charlotte threw back her head and laughed. “If you think I’m going to come back as a desert hermit, you’re crazy. But thank you very much.” Charlotte was amused, but she was also sad—sad that Frannie had such a good-natured sense of humor about her off-the-wall ideas.

“Maybe as a Mother Superior in a very posh, very elegant convent,” offered Frannie with her crooked smile.

“That sounds all right.”

After bidding Frannie a fond good-bye, Charlotte took a seat in Anne-Marie’s office to await her follow-up personal consultation. Anne-Marie arrived shortly, striding into the room with the confidence of a champion tennis player walking onto the court.

“I understand congratulations are in order,” said Charlotte as Anne-Marie took a seat behind her desk.

“Thank you. Did you see the announcement in the
Times?
”

“Yes. Paulina showed it to me.”

“Paulina!”

“She seemed very proud. She thinks you’ve made a good match.”

“Did she? I’m glad to be back in her good graces. But I’m puzzled. She doesn’t usually forgive a grudge so readily.”

“She may be softening.”

“Paulina, never.”

“You’d be surprised. Maybe it’s because she’s going to be a grandmother. Claire’s going to have a baby.” Charlotte didn’t think it was her business to tell Anne-Marie about Paulina’s cancer, which might have been another reason for her change of heart.

“Oh, that’s wonderful,” said Anne-Marie, looking up in pleased surprise. “When’s the baby due?”

“November. They’re getting married next month. Paulina’s already making all the arrangements. Starting with the engagement announcement, which she specified should be ‘bigger than yours.’”

Anne-Marie chuckled. “That sounds like Paulina. How is she?”

“I haven’t seen her today. But she seemed all right yesterday.”

“Good. Such a terrible thing. Do the police have any leads yet?”

“None,” lied Charlotte. Anne-Marie was obviously unaware that until yesterday her ex-husband had been the chief suspect. She changed the subject: “Speaking of weddings, when is yours?”

“September fifteenth. We’re leaving for our honeymoon on the twentieth. We’re going to Nepal.”

“Climbing mountains?”

“Yes. It will be Gary’s first major expedition, although he’s done a lot of climbing in the Tetons. We’ll be climbing Annapurna Four. It’s one of the easier summits in the Annapurna massif.” She pointed to one of the mountain photographs hanging on the wall. “That’s Annapurna there.”

The photo showed a wall of cloud-hung peaks. It looked immense. Next to it was the photo of the two people on the narrow ledge. She now recognized the sharp-pointed features of Anne-Marie’s fellow climber to be those of Gary. It wasn’t the way she would have wanted to spend her honeymoon.

“I wish you both luck.”

“Thank you,” said Anne-Marie. She picked up the printout. “Now, let’s see. Are you ready to start climbing mountains yet?”

“Heartbreak Hill is about it for me.”

“Heartbreak Hill is as good a place as any to start,” she said. She studied the printout. “Well, you’re not going to win any prizes.”

“I didn’t expect to.” The spa awarded prizes in the form of a brooch of the Indian maiden to the guests who had lost the most inches and the most pounds during the course of their program. But at least she had earned an achievement pin for graduating to a steeper grade of the Terrain Cure.

Anne-Marie continued: “But you’ll be pleased to know that if you maintain the health habits you’ve established here, you’ll cut another three years off your biological age.”

At her age, three years was beginning to look like a long time. Though she stil didn’t believe in all that biological age mumbo jumbo. “The cigarettes and the cocktails?”

“That, and the exercise.”

“But I do exercise. I walk. A lot.”

“Not enough. You should be taking a brisk forty-minute walk four times a week. That’s easy to remember: four and four. At a moderate pace, forty minutes should be about two miles.”

“There never seems to be enough time,” Charlotte protested.

“That’s because you think of exercise as an intrusion on your life. You have to start thinking of it in the same way you think of brushing your teeth—as a part of your day. It will become a pleasure—you’ll see.”

Anne-Marie wrote down her instructions in Charlotte’s booklet. “You’ll notice that we’re not giving you a lot to do. Only the shoulder exercises and the walking. We don’t want to overwhelm you.”

“That’s good.”

“But that doesn’t mean we’re not encouraging you to do more. What I’m writing down is the bare minimum. By the time you come back next year, you should be ready to run up Heartbreak Hill.”

“I doubt that.”

Charlotte spent the next half hour being bombarded with self-improvement advice. She left with her booklet full of instructions and her head full of resolutions and promises, including one to return next year.

She always felt uplifted by a resolution to turn over a new leaf, no matter how ephemeral she knew it to be. She therefore found herself feeling the sting of irritation less acutely than usual when she ran into M.J. in the lobby of the Health Pavilion.

M.J. explained that she was in-between treatments. She had already had a manicure and a pedicure and would be returning to the salon in a few minutes for a facial, a haircut, and a perm. “A complete make-over from the neck up,” was how she described the rest of her treatment.

Charlotte repressed the urge to comment that a complete make-over from the neck up was just what M.J. needed.

M.J. wriggled her fingertips to display the polish on her inch-long nails. It was a revolting shade of purple. “I know it’s vulgar, but I couldn’t resist,” she giggled. “Blackberry Brandy—it sounded so good. My toenails are Chocolate Mousse. After a few days at this place, you start pickin’ colors because they sound good to eat. That reminds me, have you been to Mrs. Canfield’s yet?”

Charlotte replied that she hadn’t.

“Oh, so noble. I must confess that I have. But I only had a cup of coffee and a chocolate truffle. It couldn’t have done me much harm. Look,” she said. Thrusting out her right breast (whose dimensions Charlotte knew to have been augmented by an implant of silicone), she proudly displayed the brooch that was pinned to the jacket of her light gray B-group sweat suit.

“You won the prize!” said Charlotte. “Congratulations.”

M.J. nodded proudly. “For losin’ the most pounds in the Four-Day Rejuvenation Program,” she said. She stood on her tiptoes to whisper in Charlotte’s ear: “Strictly on the q.t.—it was the laxatives that did it.”

Charlotte raised an eyebrow.

“I know it’s not real weight, but it gives you a psychological lift to lose four pounds in a day, you know?” She slid her hands down her hips and rotated them in an imitation of Mae West. “Irwin’s going to l-o-v-e the new me. Listen, Charlotte, did you ever get your cell injections?”

“No. Just the Reinhardt test.”

“I’ll bet you were goin’ to get glands. All the older ladies get glands. But don’t worry. You can still get ’em. Dr. Sperry’s goin’ to open a new clinic in Mexico. A friend of mine’s goin’ to back him. When it opens, I’ll give you a call. It’ll still be a lot cheaper than goin’ to Switzerland.”

London, the Bahamas, High Rock, Mexico. Sperry was like the street vendors in New York who fold up shop when they see the cops coming, only to resume selling gold chains and wristwatches on another corner fifteen minutes later. He was probably getting out of the country one step ahead of the FDA.

“Thanks,” said Charlotte. She wondered if M.J. would still be able to collect her two-hundred-dollar referral fee.

“It works, I guarantee it,” M.J. went on. “Look at me: my biological age is only thirty-seven. Do you believe it? I owe it all to Gil, I mean Dr. Sperry. Isn’t it terrible that they fired him? I know cell therapy’s against the law and all that, but it isn’t like he’s a murderer or anything.”

“Not it isn’t,” agreed Charlotte emphatically.

“Anyway, I’m goin’ to be even younger by the time I check out of here. I have my follow-up later on. I wouldn’t be surprised if I got down to thirty-five. Which would mean I’ve still go a lot of years left.”