Naked Came the Phoenix

by Marcia Talley

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  Copyright Page

  To the millions of

  breast cancer survivors everywhere,

  in hope of an imminent cure

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The making of this novel has been, in every way, a collaborative effort.

  First, to the thirteen amazing women who said “yes” when I called—Nevada, Nora, Nancy, Lisa, Pam, Mary, Judy, Faye, Mary Jane, Anne, Diana, Val, and Laurie—thank you for your talent, enthusiasm, cooperation … and patience.

  To my agent, Jimmy Vines, for giving me the idea and sticking with me every step of the way while I ran with it—thank you for the countless hours you spent helping me put the project together and keeping it on track.

  Thanks to Jennifer Weis at St. Martin’s Press for giving us a good home.

  And to the dozens of authors’ agents and assistants who juggled a seemingly endless stream of contracts, schedules, correspondence, and e-mails … thanks, we couldn’t have done it without you.

  INTRODUCTION

  When my agent first suggested that I try my hand at putting together a novel like Naked Came the Manatee, a collaborative effort first serialized in the Miami Herald by a baker’s dozen of top Florida journalists, including Carl Hiassen, Dave Barry, and Edna Buchanan, I smiled. I remembered—because yes, I am that old—a 1969 literary hoax perpetrated on the reading public by Mike McGrady and twenty-four of his Long Island Newsday coworkers; an unabashed sexual romp entitled Naked Came the Stranger that succeeded beyond McGrady’s wildest dreams. In fact, “Naked Came …” is now synonymous with a collaborative novel written serially.

  “Penelope Ashe,” Naked Came the Stranger’s fictional suburban housewife/author, wasn’t the first to pen such a collaboration, of course. The roots go back much further, to 1931 Britain and The Floating Admiral, written by “Certain Members of the Detection Club,” including Dorothy L. Sayers, Agatha Christie, G. K. Chesterton, and other giants of the mystery genre. Wouldn’t it be fun, I thought, to assemble a group of modern mystery and suspense writers—all women—write such a novel, and donate a portion of our royalties to breast cancer research? I sketched a cast of characters, plopped them down in an exclusive health spa because, let’s face it, there are dozens of interesting ways to bump off a character in a health spa, and Naked Came the Phoenix was born. Twelve women accepted my invitation, Nevada Barr picked up her pen, and six thousand words later, the game was afoot.

  The rules were simple. Each chapter was to be written in the third person and, in the spirit of The Floating Admiral, with a definite solution in view, even though we were well aware that subsequent authors might take—indeed were expected to take—the plot in divergent directions. “It was dangerously liberating to know I didn’t personally have to deal with the consequences of whatever I put in my chapter,” wrote Nancy Pickard.

  Although authors were cautioned to avoid cliff-hanger endings that would require Houdini-like efforts on the part of the next author (and our heroine), “the real fun” comes, according to Laurie R. King, “in seeing thirteen sweet-tempered lady crime writers stab each other thoughtfully in the back.” Nancy, too,”loved the diabolical feeling of cooking up an outrageous plot twist and cackling, ′Heh, heh, heh, let’s see what you do with this, Lisa!’” Because, as the game is played, there is no going back. No fair asking a previous author to change a clue. Against the rules to beg her to bring a promising character back to life. Pssst! Hide this bloody knife in the potted palm in chapter two, will you? is simply not allowed. Each writer is left to plant a new clue, target a fresh victim, point the finger at another suspect, introduce a new character, catch another in a lie, overhear a heated conversation—on and on—until it falls to the hapless writer of the final chapter to pick up all the problematic threads and tie them off in a nice, neat solution. I am deeply grateful that Laurie R. King volunteered for this task and that she did it so brilliantly.

  And we had fun. Anne Perry enjoyed the discipline of writing about characters already created and thinking, “What can I do with them to give the story a twist and stay within the bounds set?” For her and others, it was the chance to try out a completely different time and place setting—the present day United States, for example, as opposed to Victorian London or sometime in the future. Still others relished the opportunity to experiment with new characters and new voices. What I enjoyed most was borrowing a character from my Hannah Ives mystery series and giving him a job at Phoenix Spa. And, of course, we all felt it necessary to do exhaustive, firsthand research in luxury health spas all across the country.

  As Naked Came the Phoenix goes to press, it pleases me to learn of a new link with The Floating Admiral. We have come full circle, with one of our sisterhood, Val McDermid, being elected to membership in the famed Detection Club.

  Val’s a professional. And as Laurie reminds me, it takes a professional to play the game well. I think you will find thirteen of them here.

  MARCIA TALLEY

  Annapolis, Maryland

  May 2001

  1

  SHE WENT THROUGH LIFE LIKE AN open razor. Caroline couldn’t remember where she’d read that phrase, but there was little doubt in her mind that it had been inspired by a woman like her mother. Maybe Hilda herself had been the muse. She cast a long shadow, Caroline knew firsthand; she and her father had lived in it, Hilda always center stage between them and the light.

  Two weeks before, Hamlin Finch, Caroline’s father, had finally been set free. Throat cancer, brought on, Caroline was convinced, by decades of angry words unspoken, had killed him. Now she hoped he was standing in the light. Hoped, not believed.

  She toyed with the idea that her father watched them. Because Sunday school had left its benign scar across her psyche, she pictured him in his battered La-Z-Boy, Frosty, his beloved Siamese cat, across his knees, the newspaper in an untidy heap on the puffy white cloud supporting his chair. The sky above was impossibly blue, the clouds TV-commercial white, the sun gold and sentient.

  Would he be pleased that after thirty-seven years of berating him for ruining her life, his wife had toppled into a bleak depression once he died? Or would he, like his daughter, wonder if it was another of Hilda’s cunningly executed manipulations to get what she wanted?

  This time what Hilda had wanted was a ten-day stay at one of the most exclusive—and expensive—spas east of the Rocky Mountains. And she’d gotten it. Douglas had paid for it.

  Douglas. Thinking of her husband, Caroline smiled. Husband. The word was still magical. In the eleven months they’d been married, she’d often thanked the gods for bringing this man into her life. Douglas, a freshman congressman from the state of Tennessee, was handsome, respected, admired. And he was kind. It was the kindness Caroline loved most. He’d found the twelve thousand dollars to send them to Phoenix Spa because he believed Hilda was in pain and he was a good man. Caroline had agreed to accompany her, not because she was a good daughter, but because she was afraid that Hilda’s increasingly bizarre behavior since Hamlin’s death would reflect badly on Douglas’s career.

  Phoenix Spa was so exclusive that it was booked two years in advance. Once Hilda knew Douglas would foot the bill, she’d wrangled two spots in less than a day. Claudia de Vries, the spa’s owner, had been Hilda’s roommate her first—and only—year at Brown University. Hilda said Mrs. de Vries made room for them because of old
friendship. Judging by the bitter undercurrent that soured her greeting when they’d arrived, Caroline couldn’t help thinking it might have had more to do with a spot of petty blackmail.

  Caroline looked across the table at her mother. She didn’t bother with a covert glance. Hilda liked to be watched and courted attention. Hilda was in her element, or what she’d always believed her element should be. Phoenix was a favorite hideout for the rich and famous and those who wanted to be rich and famous. They paid for the promise of the motto carved in gothic letters across the massive stone arch at the entrance: Incipit Vita Nova—the new life begins.

  To Hilda’s left, elbows planted heavily on the crisp white tablecloth, was Howard Fondulac. Claudia swooshed by their table, dust and fawn silks fluttering, exquisitely applied makeup doing a fair job of camouflaging the sharpness of her eyes and an age she surely lied about, and introduced Fondulac in what was apparently the most important factor at the spa: not who you were but what you were. Caroline was “Congressman Blessing’s wife.” Fondulac was a “leading Hollywood producer.” Claudia listed highlights from Fondulac’s resume: a Mel Gibson film, movies by two of the Baldwin boys, one with Sarah Jessica Parker. If Caroline remembered right, the most recent had been made six years ago.

  Claudia de Vries was more of a politician than any congressman Caroline had met in her time as a political wife. Small of stature and big of ego, she had dragged herself up from poverty to become an arbiter of health and fashion for the privileged few. Hilda, smug in her own upper-middle-class heritage as a podiatrist’s daughter, said Claudia went to Brown on scholarship. Not even having enough money for a nice dress for homecoming, she had to borrow one Hilda had worn in high school.

  In a flurry of silks, Claudia moved on. Caroline looked back at the movie producer. “Nerves” was the explanation he gave for being at the spa. Alcohol was Caroline’s guess. Watching him stare morosely into his water glass, forlornly clinking the ice cubes against the side, she could almost smell his whiskey wish. Despite the aging properties of the booze, at fifty he was still a handsome man in the craggy school of Robert Mitchum and Kirk Douglas.

  Hilda loved the movies. Lived life like she was writing her own script as she went along. At the moment she played her newest role to perfection. The attractive widow in flattering weeds: subdued, grieving, but not sloppy about it. Bitter tears stung Caroline’s eyes.

  “Are you okay?”

  So deep was she in reverie, it took Caroline a moment to realize she was being addressed. Turning to the speaker, she smiled. The woman was younger than she, twenty-two at most, and achingly pretty. Caroline had seen her, dressed in expensive clothes that hung like empty sails from her angular frame, peeking out from magazine covers. Her name was Ondine, just Ondine, and she’d held pride of place in the fashion industry’s pantheon of waif goddesses for nearly six years. Like a professional gymnast, she had the undeveloped body of a girl denied puberty. Her hair was as fine as corn silk and as pale. Tonight she wore it down, adding to her trademark look of a lost and ethereal child. A faint brown discoloration covered her right eyelid and ran in an irregular stain to the corner of her mouth. That was never seen in the photographs.

  Caroline was no slouch in the looks department. Light brown hair, softly curled and kissed by the sun, skimmed her shoulders. Her trim, almost boyish body was sleek and strong and usually did what she asked of it. Partisan politics in the Nashville Philharmonic Orchestra where she’d played cello for seven years had honed away the roundness of her face and carved lines at the corners of her hazel eyes. Age looked good on her; it brought out the fine bones of her face. Caroline knew she was pretty.

  Ondine was not pretty. She was stunning. Because of the girl’s beauty, Caroline was sufficiently shallow that she wanted to hate her but, instead, found herself feeling protective.

  “I’m fine,” she said and felt better because Ondine had asked. “It’s all so … so much.”

  To her relief the model laughed, and for a few seconds the two of them looked around like awestruck teenagers on their first trip to Bloomingdale’s. Phoenix Spa didn’t stint on luxury. The tablecloths and napkins were linen, not polyester spun to look like it. The tables were set with fine china, plates, cups, and bowls ringed in a lapis pattern set off in gold. The dining room’s decor was white and wood and glass; clean, modern; a perfect backdrop for the huge urns of cut flowers that fed the eye’s need for color and the soul’s for anarchy.

  The dining room captured that rare blend of spaciousness and intimacy—just large enough to comfortably seat the spa’s thirty pampered guests but two stories tall. Peaked cathedral windows framed a view of the lake and the grounds.

  “Too much?” Ondine asked, arching a manicured eyebrow.

  “I could get used to it,” Caroline admitted.

  “I am used to it,” Ondine confided. “I’m here to see if I can’t hang on to it at least a few more years.”

  “How so?” It was a personal question and one Caroline usually would not have asked on such short acquaintance, but Ondine had an openness about her that made them friends with a single shared admission of lusting after the finer things.

  “I’ve got to lose this.” Ondine brought both fists down on her midsection.

  Weight. It took a second for the meaning to register in Caroline’s brain. Ondine was here to lose weight. Had it not been for the low clatter of forks and tongues, Caroline was convinced she would have heard the clack of Ondine’s wrist bones hitting her pelvic bones when she struck herself. She was that thin. Suddenly Caroline was afraid for her.

  She looked at the plate in front of the girl. The small square of salmon, lifted from mere food to an art form by the fan of baby asparagus spears and a drizzling of dill sauce that Jackson Pollock would have been proud of, was largely untouched. One tiny corner had been disturbed as if a mouse nibbled briefly before being frightened away. Caroline had sucked her own dinner down and had to refrain from devouring the nickel-sized orchids used as garnish.

  Caroline was a musician. She knew nothing about medicine or diet. But she knew skinny when it poked out of a silk sheath in the chair next to her. Ondine was pathologically skinny, her perfect bone structure all too apparent beneath translucent skin. Not flesh, the woman had none of that, just skin.

  Casting about for something to say, she settled on careful inquiry. “Have you planned out your diet with Mrs. de Vries?”

  “Oh, yes.” Ondine laughed; a breathless sound. “She and Raoul have promised to lock me in my room and keep me on tofu and water if that’s what it takes. My manager would probably call out the Virginia state troopers if they ever did that!” Ondine’s face took on the pouty cast of a spoiled child but remained lovely.

  “Is your manager here?” Caroline asked, already liking this caller-out of the troops.

  “Always. Everywhere. Endlessly. Ubiquitously.” Ondine smiled shyly. “I just learned ‘ubiquitously,’ and it fits Christopher Lund to the eyeteeth. That’s him over there sitting between Raoul and that guy who looks like a roadie for Alice Cooper.”

  Ondine pointed ostentatiously, clearly hoping her manager would see her doing it. Playing along, Caroline stared, taking her time studying the occupants of the next table. Raoul was Claudia de Vries’s husband. From the scraps of gossip Caroline had picked up since their arrival, that’s how everyone thought of him, but he didn’t look like a second fiddle. He wore his tux like a man born to it, and his face was shaped by a long line of aristocratic genes. Self-assurance hung on him like a shimmering cloak. Opposite Raoul was the man Ondine had characterized as a roadie. Caroline knew better. Her mother had pointed him out in excited whispers not two minutes after the valet had taken their car. King David, a rocker from the seventies, who still toured, still brought in the crowds, though his fans were now approaching the age of his grandkids, presuming the man had grandkids. Passing years had honed King’s look: dangerous. Body lean from exercise or heroin, long hair streaked with iridescent greens and
tattoos in the shape of lightning bolts at the corners of both eyes made him ageless and intimidating.

  The man between King and Raoul, the one Ondine pointed out as her manager, was in profile, his attention fixed on his plate, making a workman’s job of the delicate dinner. Noting the conservative suit, tie carefully knotted, short, neatly brushed brown hair, and bland unapologetic face, Caroline said, “He looks out of place.”

  “He won’t have an ounce of fun. Count on it. He’s here to protect his interests,” Ondine said scornfully. “If I’m not careful he’ll be force-feeding me chocolates when Raoul’s not looking. Raoul’s the doctor here. I thought Christopher was going to deck him when he found out Raoul had okayed three hours of aerobics every day to get the fat off me. You’d think Christopher of all people wouldn’t want me blown up like a blimp. I’m his meal ticket.”

  Caroline barely heard the last. She was staring at Raoul de Vries. Tomorrow she had an appointment with him. “A complete physical by the spa’s own physician.” It was in the brochure. She made a mental note to take a look at his walls for medical degrees. What kind of doctor would prescribe hard exercise for a woman who was clearly teetering on the brink of anorexia?

  “Newcomers’ moonlight walk.” The words pattered down like light rain, surprising an unladylike grunt from Caroline. Claudia de Vries had wafted to their table on soundless wings of peach chiffon. Everyone at Phoenix was encouraged to dress for dinner. Slightly ill at ease in a clingy burgundy spandex number gussied up with black bugle beads and a velvet shawl, Caroline had the bad grace to wonder if it had been thus decreed not to “celebrate your own personal glamour” as the brochure said but so Mrs. de Vries could float about in Hollywood confections a la Ginger Rogers.

  Claudia drifted on, Caroline and her mother following in her wake. The woman was definitely eccentric, perhaps even a touch absurd, but the force of her personality could not be denied. Claudia was one of nature’s true charismatics.