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"Get help!" she ordered, righting to clear her own vision as it threatened to gray. "Hurry. Get help now!"
"It's… It's…"
"I know." Caroline's arms were trembling, with both effort and fear. "Hurry, Mom. Please."
While Hilda fled, screaming still, Caroline braced herself and stared down in horror at Claudia de Vries's mud-bathed and very dead face.
Chapter Three
HELP CAME HALF NAKED.
"Oh!" exclaimed Caroline, when her mother returned with the man in the turquoise thong. Directly faced, as it were, with the skimpy patch of electric blue, she nearly slipped her oozing grip on Claudia's body. Blushing as if he had arrived to ask her to dance instead of to assist her in a grisly task, she bleated, "Help! I can't hold her up any longer."
He bent down quickly and slid his forearms under Caroline's. For a terrible, intimate moment, they were locked together in a slippery embrace with the corpse.
"Do you know CPR?" Caroline squeaked.
Adonis shifted slightly, cradling Claudia's upper body with his arm and supporting it from below with his knee. He bent his magnificent head over the victim's muddy face, and for a long minute Caroline held her breath while he listened, as if waiting for Claudia to say something. Then he laid two fingers against the spa owner's neck. He shook his head gravely. "Let go," he whispered, and she thought she heard an accent.
Caroline slid her arms out from under his, and backed far enough away to be able to lean against a wall. Even a lifetime of holding a cello propped between her legs had not prepared her for bearing the weight of a dead body. Her arms quivered with exhaustion. Her knees began to tremble, so much that she thought she was going to slip ingloriously to the floor and have to put her head between them to keep herself from fainting. Calm down! she directed herself. If she could play Beethoven in front of a thousand symphony lovers, if she could sit on a political platform smiling up at her candidate husband while three hundred people cheered, if she could steal food from a deserted kitchen, surely she could keep her composure for this.
Douglas!
The thought of her husband made her heart race, partly out of longing for his sweet presence in this moment of emergency but also out of fear of the headlines in tomorrow's tabloid newspapers: Congressman's Wife Drags Corpse Through Mud!
Caroline chided herself for her self-absorption. Her stu
On his knees now, with his feet braced against the wall, the Adonis was tugging, dragging the body out of the muck. He freed her with a grunt and one great clean-and-jerk, as if Claudia were a barbell and he were a weight-lifting contestant. Now only her high-heeled shoes still dangled in the muck. He took one step backward, so that her body was completely clear, but the shoes were left behind. Caroline hurried forward to grab them before they could sink again. For an awful moment, the strength in her legs gave way, and she was terrified that she was going to tumble facefirst into the "grave."
"Got 'em?" her mother crowed, as Caroline saved the shoes.
She peered over at Hilda, marveling at her mother's ability to wrest the trivial from the profound in virtually any circumstance. Where was the hint of new sensitivity she thought she had detected in her mother this morning? She should have known better than to get her hopes up. One good cry did not a better woman make. It was said that a person's true character emerged in crises, and this was a crisis if ever there was one. And here was the old familiar Hilda, bobbing to the surface like a rotten egg in a pan of boiling water.
I knew it was too good to last, Caroline thought.
She put the shoes down by the edge of the bath.
"Those could be saved," her mother said, with a fastidious frown. "Although they might have to be re-covered in a new fabric."
When Caroline turned and looked up, she saw that the young man was still clasping the body to his chest, and looking as if he didn't quite know what to do with it. He and Claudia were locked in a stiff embrace that looked to Caroline as if they were caught in a moment of dancing a macabre tango. For one wild moment, she thought he might whirl the body in his arms, press his ta
"Put her down on the floor," Hilda commanded him.
Gently, he followed her directions.
"Caroline, turn up the lights in here," her mother ordered, and when the dimmed lights came up to their full brilliance, painfully illuminating the scene as if it were an operating room or a morgue, she exclaimed, "Good grief, she's still in that same dress."
Caroline heard an acidic note to her mother's comment, as if this were a judgment on Claudia's fashion sense instead of on the timing of her demise. For surely this meant the spa owner had never gone to bed last night. With a shiver, Caroline remembered the voices she had overheard on her own adventure-the raised voices-and wished she knew who had been taunted by Claudia only a few hours ago on the moonlit path among the trees.
"Why would she take a mud bath in her dress?" Hilda asked in the peevish, superior tone of someone who might have said, "Why would she wear a cocktail dress to a morning wedding?"
Caroline stared at her mother and then looked up at the Adonis. He was shaking mud off his arms, flinging it off onto the tile floor. A glob of it landed on Claudia's still breast. Another bit struck Caroline's own cheek, just missing her eye, and she flinched when it stung her skin.
Didn't they see what she saw?
Couldn't they see the obvious, terrible truth?
With a chill that increased her shivers, Caroline realized she might have overheard the final argument between Claudia de Vries and the one who killed her. For there was no doubt in Caroline's mind that this was no "natural" death. Claudia's peach chiffon dress was plastered to her body. But it was her lovely shawl of a thousand scraps of fabric that told the murderous tale: It was wound around and around her neck, pulled tight as a cello string tuned almost to breaking, and tied with a strangling knot.
"Go get Raoul," Hilda imperiously told the muddy Adonis.
He cast her an unreadable look but then turned to do as he was bid. As he brushed past Caroline, he muttered, "Your mother acts as if she owns the place." She cast him an apologetic glance that her mother couldn't see. Caroline had to agree that even for Hilda, her mother was being uncommonly bossy. His accent, she was startled to hear, was English, and not just any old Cockney, either, but decidedly upper-class. What in the world was that accent doing with those black eyes, that wild hair, and that swimsuit?
"What was that?" Hilda demanded when they both jumped at the shock of a loud splash in the adjoining room. "What's he doing?"
Caroline walked on shaky legs to the co
Adonis had plunged into the swimming pool to wash off.
She watched him swim the length of it, fast as a shark, graceful as a dolphin, as smooth in the water as if that were his natural habitat instead of land. I've never felt that sure of myself she found herself admitting with a shock of piercing regret, not even as a musician, certainly not as a daughter, a wife… a woman.
"Caroline?" her mother called out behind her.
Without turning, she answered, "He's washing off the mud."
By the time he climbed out-with a single muscular lunge, his entire weight supported on one hand-his body was gleaming and clean again though a dark trail lingered behind him in the turquoise water. He shook himself, casual and efficient as a dog, but this time it was only water that flew off him. She watched him stride toward the front door, open it, and go off into the morning light without closing the door behind him. He didn't amble, but neither did he race. There was no visible urgency to his mission, nor did he appear to be the least bit self-conscious about walking around half naked. Rather, he moved across the ground with measured, graceful strides, as if he were merely moving to the side of a pool to scoop out a bit of litter that happened to be floating there.