Nevada Barr - Naked Came The Phoenix

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.