Nevada Barr: Naked Came The Phoenix

The air was warm for late October, but an indefinable tang of autumn-dispelled summer's somnolence. In the morning the palette of black and silver would be burned away by a conflagration of fall colors blazing in the ancient hardwoods that pressed close around the spa's grounds.

The spa's services were housed in four centers, one set on each side of the lake, Caroline learned as they walked. The square they formed, Claudia told them, created a proper feng shui pattern guaranteed to enhance mental and physical well-being.

The first was the bathhouse. "An old-fashioned name," Claudia said as she pulled a ring of keys fit for a jailer from a beaded evening bag. "Though we welcome the new, we've been careful not to throw the baby out with the bathhouse. The old methods of soothing the soul and stimulating the spirit carry with them a special alchemy."

Claudia must have given this talk a thousand times, yet her love of the place breathed life into the worn spiel. While Claudia talked she opened three locks on the bathhouse doors. Two were dead bolts; Caroline heard them slide free and wondered at such heavy-duty security measures. What in this idyll, tucked away from urban areas and the fly-by crime of the turnpikes, needed to be kept out? Or in?

The double doors swung open and the lights came on, either triggered by the movement of the doors or an electric eye. Caroline joined the others in an appreciative, "Ahhh."

The architect had managed a harmonious marriage of Swedish modern and the stained-glass-and-tile opulence of a vintage nineteen-thirties bathhouse. A fountain, sprung to sudden life with the lights, sparkled under a high ceiling cut through with skylights, each of the panels depicting a flowering herb in jewel-toned glass.

Claudia arranged herself prettily in front of the falling water. "I won't show you all the facilities tonight, but I wanted to give you a glimpse of the world you entered into when you chose Phoenix Spa." She went on to list the wonders that awaited behind the closed doors: mud baths in stone tubs from the turn of the century, steam rooms with aromatic and healthful plant extracts added to the boiling water, massage rooms, facials. Most of the treatments were standard, made unique to Phoenix by the addition of herbal therapy. Herbs, plants, and flowers, all, Claudia insisted, gathered from the surrounding woods by an expert in botany brought over from Bombay specifically for his arcane knowledge of how to use plants for spiritual enhancement.

Caroline couldn't help but wonder what a guy from Bombay could know about the plants of the Blue Ridge, but she didn't interrupt. She liked good theater as much as anyone and had to admit the concept intrigued her.

"Plant materials are used in many of our treatments," Claudia went on. "By using only those indigenous to the area, the harmony of persons, places, and things brings harmony between the spirit and the flesh of each of you precious people who have come to us for succor."

The rhetoric was getting a bit thick. Caroline's attention wandered as they returned to the lakeshore and Claudia triple-locked the bathhouse doors behind them. With a wave of a beringed hand that set her evening wrap, a shawl of a thousand scraps of feather-light fabric, to quivering like an aspen in a windstorm, Claudia led the troop onward.

Caroline found that she had fallen in step with the stalwart psychic. Phyllis Talmadge's head barely came to Caroline's shoulder. She couldn't have been more than five feet tall even in her sensible one-inch pumps.

"Hah!" the little woman puffed.

"I beg your pardon?" Caroline said politely.

"Hah!" she repeated for Caroline's edification. "Herbal, schmerbal. What bullshit. They'd better not go smearing any of that muck on me. Bombay. Hah."

Caroline snorted unbecomingly, a startled laugh that went up her nose when she tried to smother it. "What brought you here?" she asked, since it didn't seem to be the promise of youth-rejuvenating vegetative wraps or the energizing properties of aromatherapy.

" They told me to come," Phyllis Talmadge replied enigmatically. "The center is threatened. It may not hold." With that garbled quote from Yeats, she trundled on, a small female tank with a mission.

Caroline slowed, letting the others move ahead so she could better enjoy the play of the light on water, the stealthy promises whispered by the wind as it passed through dry leaves.

"You hear it, too?"

The voice in her ear was as smooth as the autumn breeze and as hard-edged as winter's first bite. Shying in the time-honored way of startled colts, she bumped into the man standing as close as a lover behind her. He had appeared without a sound, without her sensing him, and it scared her. Either her survival instincts were at low ebb, or he was as conversant with the night as Count Dracula.

"Easy." He caught her by the shoulders as she stumbled over the hem of her evening gown. He was tall, six-four or -five, and lean without weakness or frailty. His dark hair fell in a wild mass past his shoulders, the green highlights creating the illusion of seaweed. King David. The rocker. What had she read in Rolling Stone ? Ah. That he'd gotten rabies biting off the heads of live bats at a concert in Detroit in 1979.

"Easy," he said again and smiled. The effect was electric. The lightning bolt tattoos at the corners of his eyes crinkled and straightened, and his very white teeth flashed. Pure animal magnetism boiled off the man. For an instant Caroline was afraid she was going to swoon like the heroine in a cheap romance. No wonder he was still packing stadiums with shrieking fans after thirty years.

Carefully, as though he'd long been aware of his effect on the weaker sex, he let go of her arms and watched to be sure she could stand on her own two feet.

"Did I hear what?" she snapped in response to his earlier question. Humiliation was turning her hostile.

"The music," he said softly. "You're a musician. You hear it."

The wind in the leaves, the minute skittering as those already fallen whispered across the brick walk: the music she'd been listening to when he'd come upon her. "How did you know?" she demanded, suddenly afraid that this strange man knew all her secrets.

He caught her left hand in both of his. Running his thumb over her fingertips he said, "Calluses. Violin?"

"Cello." His touch was paralyzing. She willed herself to snatch her hand back with some show of indignation, but nothing happened.

He released her. She felt relieved, bereft, and ridiculous. A gust of wind whipped the hair across King's sharp features, then pulled it away. A dark curtain closing on one scene and opening on another. The lightning sewn into his skin flashed, his eyes narrowed, and he said, "Musicians are mad, you know."

She was aware that he spoke not only of himself but of her.

"Not cellists," she retorted. "We aren't amplified."

He laughed and she was drawn into it. Annoyed that a man old enough to be her father was giving her vapors, she began to walk toward her cottage. He's good at this , she thought. It's a game he's played for longer than I've been alive .

Without being invited, King fell into step alongside her.

"Why are you at Phoenix?" She asked the most banal question she could think of to reintroduce normalcy into what was becoming a seriously peculiar evening.

"The same reason you are," he replied in his ice and honey voice.

"And why is that?" Irrationally, she was afraid of what the answer might be.

"I'm looking for something that once belonged to me."

Caroline walked faster. Refusing to take the hint, he stayed beside her, his long stride easily matching hers.

"You don't have to walk me to my cabin." Caroline was aware she sounded desperate but was unable to do anything about it.