Murder at the Spa

by Stefanie Matteson

  At the pavilion, Charlotte took a seat facing the cone of the spring—the “rock” of High Rock. The cone, which had been built up over the millennia from minerals deposited by the mineral water—stood about six feet high and about twelve feet wide. From a well in its center the water gushed, pulsing with the pressure that would thrust it skyward. Like the spring at the center of the lake, it was a geyser. On its surges, it shot a column of water twelve feet into the air. At its ebb, it bubbled fitfully, occasionally regurgitating a belch of water that would overflow the lip of the well with a gurgle of satisfaction. For eons, it had been thus: the salty, mineral-rich waters of a primeval underground sea had been forced to the surface of the earth by a charge of carbonic acid gas. In the last century, she had read, inquisitive scientists had raised the cone with a giant crane to find out what lay below. They had found only layer upon layer of muck and mineral, and, at the bottom, seventeen feet below the apex, the charred remains of a three-thousand-year-old campfire. The mysterious aboriginal people who had built their campfires here were lured by the abundance of game, which was attracted by the water’s salty taste. Later came the Indians of the Iroquois Confederacy, who called it the Medicine Spring of the Great Spirit. On the lintel of the pavilion were engraved the words of a Mohawk Indian song:

  Far in the forest’s deep recess,

  Dark, hidden, and alone,

  Mid marshy fens and tangled wood,

  There rose a rocky cone.

  According to what she had learned of the spa’s history, the first white man to visit the spring was Sir John Williams, the Superintendent of Indian Affairs for the British crown. The early explorers had heard tales of the healing powers of the waters that spouted from a rock in the forest, but until Williams, the Indians had kept its location a secret. Williams, who was much beloved by the Indians, first visited the spring in 1767. He was carried there on a litter by Iroquois braves for treatment of a wound. He recovered, and word spread of the spring’s powers. Before long, a settler named Elisha Burnett had opened a tavern where visitors could quench their thirst with stronger stuff than that which issued from the spring. And so the spa at High Rock, as it came to be called, grew. The Elisha Burnett Tavern was enlarged again and again. By the Civil War, it had become the High Rock Inn, and by the turn of the century, the High Rock Hotel, a faux French extravaganza modeled after the palace at Versailles. At the time it was built, the High Rock Hotel was the largest in the world, with a thousand rooms, a mile of piazzas, and a dining room a city block long. New springs were discovered. The Union and Sans Souci springs became almost as famous as High Rock Spring. The Washington Bathhouse was built, where Victorians suffering from dyspepsia, arthritis, and the general debility known as “nerve fag” or “Manhattan madness” took the cure in the effervescent mineral waters. And when the spa outgrew the Washington Bathhouse, the Lincoln Bathhouse was built—the world’s most modern and luxurious. The spa had become the playground of the nouveau riche.

  And then, in 1900, it burned. Only the cone survived, the mineral waters spilling down its sides saving it from the conflagration. The spa lay idle for a while, but by the twenties, it had become the dream of Dr. Rudolph Flexner, a German balneologist, to build a new spa that would rival the great European spas like Baden-Baden and Montecatini. Dr. Flexner didn’t live to see his dream come true, but his son, Samuel, did. Samuel, a friend of the governor of New York, Franklin D. Roosevelt, interested Roosevelt in the scheme. It wasn’t difficult; Roosevelt was a proponent of mineral baths, having taken the waters at Warm Springs, Georgia, for his polio. Roosevelt’s interest in the spa continued once he was elected president. It was built in 1935 with New Deal funds: two and a half acres of red-brick neo-Georgian buildings. Nothing was spared in terms of quality: the finest craftsmen were imported to lay the floors of multicolored Italian marble, to raise the Doric columns of pale pink Indiana limestone, to forge the ornate wall sconces of heavy wrought iron. The result was dignified, patrician, elegant.

  The new spa enjoyed enormous popularity, until the war. The war ushered in a new era in medicine. The generation that had put its faith in the healing powers of mineral waters was replaced by a generation that believed in antibiotics and inoculations. The number of spa-goers dwindled. The buildings fell into disrepair. Rain poured through holes in the slate roofs. The paint peeled; the masonry crumbled; the marble floors became coated with a layer of slime. Mineral deposits clogged the pipes. So precipitous was the spa’s fall from grace that by the fifties the elegant Hall of Springs was being used as a storage depot for Civil Defense equipment. What to do about the spa became a public issue. After long debate, the legislature decided to lease the spa and the bottling plant, which still bottled High Rock, Union, and Sans Souci waters, to private investors.

  It was then that Paulina stepped in.

  And so Charlotte sat in the High Rock Pavilion, a replica of the rustic Victorian pavilion that had burned in the great fire, sipping a glass of the famous mineral water. She knew that sipping wasn’t what you were supposed to do. Sipping didn’t allow the bubbles to perform their miracles on the digestion; you were supposed to toss it back like a belt of whiskey. She also knew that the water was best taken on an empty stomach, preferably before breakfast. But she wanted to sip, to taste the hint of iron, to feel the fizz of bubbles in her nose. She slowly drank the rest of her glass. It had a not-unpleasant saltiness, like something you’d gargle with for a sore throat. A rustic sign mounted on a column proclaimed: “High Rock Spring: A naturally carbonated saline alkaline mineral water. Contains more minerals than any other water in the world.” Another sign asked visitors not to chip souvenirs off the famous mineral cone.

  Rising from her seat, Charlotte tossed her plastic glass into a trash basket and headed across the esplanade to dinner.

  2

  Charlotte began her Rejuvenating Plan with breakfast on the veranda. It consisted of half a grapefruit, a low-fat bran muffin, and a cup of peppermint tea. The grapefruit and muffin weren’t so bad—she seldom ate much for breakfast anyway—but the peppermint tea was a sorry substitute for her morning coffee. The night before, she had taken dinner in her room and gone straight to bed. Breakfast was to have been her first chance to look over the other guests. She had wanted to see if there were others of her advanced years. But the dining room was deserted. Although it was only eight, most of the guests were already out on the esplanade. In front of the High Rock Pavilion, a group of sweat-suited figures of indeterminate age and sex was doing aerobics under the direction of an energetic blonde in a pink leotard. A recorder blared a fast-paced disco tape, to which the sweat suits pulsed, bounced, and dipped. Another group jogged in strict military formation around the esplanade behind a young man with bulging biceps. Strict military formation, that is, except for the three fatties who lagged behind, alternately lurching forward in determination and falling back in distress. Charlotte didn’t smile; she would be happy not to be the only one bringing up the rear.

  After breakfast, Charlotte headed toward the lobby, where she was to meet her personal exercise advisor, Frannie LaBeau. Frannie was a thin blonde with metal-rimmed granny glasses. As Charlotte’s personal exercise advisor, she explained, she would be responsible for overseeing Charlotte’s spa stay. She would review Charlotte’s program daily, making adjustments and suggestions. Charlotte thought this sounded vaguely despotic. She wondered if a black mark would be entered against her name if she didn’t do the required number of push-ups. In fact, her impression turned out not to be far off the mark. The first event on her schedule was a two-part Fitness Appraisal. The first part, Frannie explained, would be a physical evaluation, the results of which would be fed into a computer along with information from Charlotte’s preadmission physical. The second part would be a computer interview, the subject of which would be her health habits. From this data, the computer would calculate her biological age (as opposed to her real, or chronological, age). “Hopefully,” said Frannie, “your biologi
cal age will be younger than your chronological age.”

  Frannie explained most of this as they walked across the esplanade. Or rather, Charlotte walked. She had a long leggy stride, as forthright as a man’s. Frannie kind of lurched, her body convulsing with the effort of moving a leg that was withered to a thin spindle. It was the kind of disability that had been common before the polio vaccine, but Frannie was too young to have had polio. Charlotte wondered: a birth defect, muscular dystrophy? On the foot of the withered leg, she wore an orthopedic shoe whose sole was built up to compensate for the shortened leg. But even with the shoe, she walked with a limp, swinging the leg forward stiffly in a kind of choppy rhythm, like an exaggerated dance. They were headed toward the spa quadrangle, which was entered via a set of low steps flanked by wisteria-covered pergolas. The steps, which Frannie managed with a surprising degree of sprightliness, brought them face-to-face with the Hall of Springs, an imposing brick building with a hipped slate roof. To either side stood the two other buildings of the spa: the Roosevelt Bath Pavilion and the Flexner Health Pavilion. The symmetry of the design was completed by a reflecting pool in the center of which stood a graceful bronze sculpture of an Indian maiden filling a gourd at High Rock Spring, and by the open-air colonnades linking the three buildings, giving the quadrangle the contemplative feel of a medieval cloister.

  From the steps, they set out across the quadrangle toward the Health Pavilion, startling the peacocks that strutted proudly at the edge of the pool. Entering under an entrance portico whose pediment was adorned with a bas relief of Hygeia, the Greek goddess of health, they found themselves in a lobby, which, with its two-story rotunda, its massive Doric columns, and its glossy black-and-white-tiled marble floor, reminded Charlotte of the lobby of the Bowery Savings Bank on East Forty-second. In the center stood a fountain from which High Rock water flowed continuously. A pair of elliptical staircases led to the second floor. At the stairs, which were steeper than those at the spa entrance, the rhythm of Frannie’s stride was broken. After pausing to grip the brass banister, she proceeded to slowly and tortuously make her way to the top. Reaching the top, they proceeded down a corridor to the Diagnostic Room, a mirror-lined chamber the size of a classroom, in which twelve stations were laid out, each marked by a large red number on the wall. At each station, a different fitness parameter was measured—height; weight; blood pressure; chest, hip, thigh, and arm measurements; and so on.

  For the next hour, Frannie put Charlotte through her paces, prodding and measuring with the brisk, impersonal efficiency of a sergeant at a Marine induction center. After the basic measurements came the cardiovascular stress assessment: after being wired with electrodes, Charlotte was asked to pedal hell for leather on something called an ergometric lifecycle. Next came the skin fold analysis, in which the unsightly folds of flesh on the undersides of her upper arms—her bat wings, Frannie called them (somewhat indelicately, Charlotte thought)—were gripped between the menacing pincers of a set of jawed calipers. Then came the pulmonary analysis, in which she had to blow into a balloonlike contraption called a spirometer. And so it went—grip strength, stress profile, flexibility, posture analysis, musculoskeletal assessment. As she made her way from station to station, Charlotte was assailed by words that conjured up a frightening image of degeneration: dowager’s hump, which, thank God, she didn’t have; bunions, which she did. Sagging breasts, liver spots, chicken neck—what grim specters of the grave Frannie didn’t invoke, Charlotte readily imagined for herself. She found it all mildly disturbing. The state of her flesh wasn’t a subject to which she ordinarily gave much thought. She preferred to banish it from her consciousness in the same way that she disguised her bat wings by wearing long-sleeved dresses.

  While Frannie fed the results of the physical evaluation into a computer, Charlotte was directed to a cubicle where she spent the next half hour being questioned by its nosy mate. The green characters that appeared so impersonally on the screen demanded answers to intimate questions about her sex life (none) and her bowel movements (regular), as well as to less intimate ones about her smoking, dietary, and drinking habits. Next came a series of stuffy questions about her fitness goals. What would she like to accomplish most? What did she consider her area of greatest weakness? Where would she like to be in five years? The answer to that question was easy: alive and kicking, which she was coming to view as an accomplishment in itself.

  She now sat in the office of the spa administrator, Anne-Marie Andersen, awaiting her “personal consultation,” in which she would be presented with the computer’s verdict. The walls of the office were hung with photographs of mountain peaks. They were pyramid-shaped and ridged, domed and saw-toothed, sheathed in ice and strewn with rocks. Seeing them, Charlotte remembered that Anne-Marie was a mountaineer. In fact, she had been the leader of the first all-female team to climb some Himalayan peak or other. Several of the photos were of the blonde who had been leading the aerobics class, whom Charlotte concluded must be Anne-Marie. In one, she was standing atop a snow-covered peak, an ice ax raised in triumph to the sky. In another, she was sitting with a fellow mountaineer on a narrow ledge, their sleeping bags wrapped around their dangling legs. Others showed her camping on alpine glaciers or crossing raging torrents on flimsy rope bridges. If the photographs were meant to be intimidating, they were. Charlotte wondered what the intrepid mountaineer would have to say in judgment of an over-the-hill movie star with a weakness for manhattans and marzipan.

  Anne-Marie was familiar to Charlotte by reputation. Charlotte had often heard Paulina speak of her. She was a Swede whom Paulina had discovered at the famous Bircher-Benner Clinic in Switzerland, where she was working as an exercise instructor. Paulina had hired her away to supervise the exercise programs at the two-hundred-odd Langenberg salons around the world. Since joining the Langenberg organization, she had gone on to become a celebrity in her own right. She was the author of several books extolling the virtues of exercise and good nutrition, which, breezy in tone and replete with common sense advice, had been very popular. Another book recounted her adventures as leader of the all-female mountaineering team. In addition, she had played a large part in the creation of the spa. It was Anne-Marie who had drawn up the guidelines, chosen the treatments, hired staff, and purchased equipment. In beauty industry circles, she was widely regarded as Paulina’s confidante. Although it could never be said of Paulina that her decisions were subject to any judgment other than her own, to the extent that she required a sounding board, it was Anne-Marie who served that function.

  But any image Charlotte might have had of Anne-Marie as a less-than-feminine body cultist were dispelled by her appearance. She was muscular—compact would be a better description—but far from masculine. In fact, she was the kind of radiant, tawny-skinned blonde who had earned Scandinavian women their reputation for beauty. Although she looked thirty—an impression fostered by her round, rosy cheeks and her short, boyish haircut—Charlotte suspected she was at least fifteen years older.

  Taking a seat, Anne-Marie introduced herself and told Charlotte how happy Paulina was that Charlotte was finally visiting the spa.

  Charlotte made the appropriate replies, all the while eyeing the green-and-white-striped computer printout that would tell her whether her name was entered in the debit or the credit column of the giant ledger in which second helpings and late-night parties were recorded by a merciless celestial hand.

  Anne-Marie chatted on about the spa: that it wasn’t a fat farm or a clinic, but a holistic center that dealt with the entire individual—physical, mental, and spiritual—and that its goal was to provide guests with the tools to overcome bad health habits. “We’re what’s called a permissive spa. We don’t demand that our guests attend classes. We don’t post monitors in the dining room. These are futile exercises: what good do they do if our guests go back to stuffing themselves with chocolate chip cookies the minute they get home?”

  She paused for a reply. But Charlotte had no answer to the ch
ocolate chip cookie question. Why not go back to stuffing yourself with chocolate chip cookies the minute you got home? She knew a lot of chocolate chip cookie eaters and candy bar eaters and potato chip eaters (to whose ranks she belonged) who had led long, happy, and productive lives.

  Anne-Marie continued. She spoke in earnest tones: “We believe the way to conquer bad habits is to restore the broken link between the inner self and the body. Most of us exist only from the neck up.” She held her hand out palm down beneath her chin. “We feel alien in our bodies. It’s our aim to help our guests restore the connection. But not by setting rules—if we try to fight our bad habits, we only create conflict, which leads to anxiety and depression—but by purifying and conditioning the body through exercise and nutrition. Through exercise and nutrition, we can create the kind of spiritual atmosphere in which our bad habits will give us up.” Leaning back, she smiled brilliantly. She was one of those blondes who are all teeth and hair.

  “That sounds like quite a trick,” said Charlotte. She also thought it sounded vaguely heretical, as if doing push-ups and drinking carrot juice were somehow the key to spiritual salvation.

  “I think you’ll find that it works. We’ll see in nine days, won’t we?” She smiled again, and then passed the computer printout across the desk. “I expect you’re anxious to find out how you did.”

  “Yes,” replied Charlotte. She had the odd feeling that the printout would divine her fate, like tea leaves in an empty cup or the pattern of cracks on a heated bone. She donned her eyeglasses; they were reading glasses with tortoise-shell frames that gave her a professorial air.

  “At the bottom,” said Anne-Marie, pointing with a long, tanned finger.

  Charlotte scanned the rows of figures. “Forty-nine?”

  “Yes. Are you surprised?”

  No, Charlotte thought.