A Body to Die For (15 page)

“No, I never saw signs of anything like that,” she said. “There
was
this very tight clique, though, kind of a members only thing.”

“Who was in it?” I asked.

“Anna, unfortunately. Piper the Viper—”

“Why do you call her that?”

“Because she likes to eat men alive. This other therapist was in it, too. Lauren. She moved to Hawaii, I hear. That’s all
I can think of.”

“What about Eric? What do you know about him?”

“I heard he and Anna had this little fling. She apparently bruised his heart big-time, but then Anna was the type of person
who liked the heady, early days of a relationship. Once she got in the thick of it, she was ready to bolt. Anna, you see,
could really be quite maddening.”

“So maddening that a man would want to kill her?”

She shifted in her chair, rearranging her legs. Took another sip of the fried bologna broth. “You mean Eric?”

“Eric—or someone else in Warren. A guy she’d dated and rejected. Or someone she didn’t even give a chance to.”

“That’s the obvious conclusion,” she said. “I’m sure that’s what the police assume. But if they do, I think they’ve got it
all wrong.”

I
SAT FORWARD
in my chair, startled.

“What do you mean?” I asked. “What
should
the police be focusing on?”

“Anna’s
past,
” she said indignantly, as if she were ticked because she had a piece of valuable info and no one had bothered to check in
with her.

“Where, when?” I blurted out. “Is there someone who once threatened her?”

“I don’t know anything specifically,” she said. “I just know that she was extremely troubled by her past. Something bad happened
to her once. And I think she was afraid it would come back to haunt her.”

“What exactly did she tell you?”

“It’s not what she
said,
actually. Are you aware that the body is capable of recalling emotional pain?”

Oh boy, I was about to hop a train to kookyville. “No,” I said. “I didn’t know that.”

“Well, it is. Pain can be released during certain types of massage. Memories come to the surface.”

“Can you explain that better?”

“When someone gets through a traumatic event in their life, they experience the pain of it in their body. The body holds that
information below the conscious level. It’s a protective mechanism. The body remembers. It remembers everything.”

“And this information is released somehow during the massage?” I asked, trying to hide my skepticism.

“Yes, the massage reactivates the physical responses that occurred with the trauma. The person experiences a flashback, both
physically and emotionally.”

“And what does this have to do with Anna?”

“One day, when Anna and I were friends,” she explained, “I used this special type of massage technique on her. I’d offered
to give her a massage that day—and since I’d been studying it, I decided to experiment on her. It triggered something very
deep and very disturbing.”

“What do you mean? How did she respond?”

“She started sobbing. It was clear something traumatic had happened, but she didn’t want to discuss it.”

“Do you think she’d been abused?”

“Not necessarily,” Eve said, shaking her head. “It doesn’t have to be about something that
happened
to your body. It can be about how your body felt when you were suffering from some kind of emotional pain that occurred in
your life.”

“How far back in her past do you think this experience occurred?”

“I’m not sure. But it seemed deep. Like something that had happened a long time ago.”

“Do you know where Anna was from?”

“Her sister lived in Florida. I assumed that’s where she was from. But she never talked about her past.”

“Did she ever—”

“Look,” she said, suddenly impatient. “Like I said, I know something bad had happened, but I have no idea what it was. There’s
nothing more I can tell you, and I really need to get back to my work.”

I wasn’t sure why she was shutting down the discussion, but it was clear I was being scooted out.

I apologized for taking up so much of her time and set my mug, still full, onto a chipped table next to my chair.

As I stood to leave, I heard the floor above me creak. Someone was moving around up there in one of the bedrooms. Eve’s eyes
shifted toward the stairs. It was probably a lover, a woman who hadn’t spurned her as Anna had. Or an overnight guest. Or
the ghost of her mother. I didn’t really care. All I knew was that I’d come hoping to find out what was going on at the spa—and
hadn’t learned a thing.

I said good-bye, shook hands with her, and nearly tripped down the steps of the front porch. Before getting back on the thruway,
I found a small café in town and bought a large cup of coffee that I hoped would burn all memory of the Lapsang Souchong from
my taste buds.

The trip back to the city was uneventful. Traffic was heavy, but never bumper-to-bumper. As I drove I considered what Eve
had revealed—not only about the massage, but about the kiss. Regardless of Eve’s theories, Anna
did
seem like someone on the lam from her past: the restlessness, the moving from city to city, the fickleness in love, the experimentation.
I ran through anything I could think of that had the power to haunt someone: physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional cruelty,
rejection, betrayal, illness, an accident, a death. There were so many possibilities, it was hard to imagine what might have
troubled Anna.

I always get slightly giddy when I drive under the overhanging sign on the thruway that says “Now Entering New York City,”
but not today. I felt too ambivalent about being back. Even though I was looking forward to sleeping (or at least attempting
to sleep) in my own bed, having dinner with Landon, and pitching ideas for my next article, I was leaving lots of unfinished
business in Warren. I couldn’t help but feel I’d failed Danny—and failed my mother.

As I exited onto the FDR Drive on the East Side of Manhattan, I rolled down the window. For an October day, it was almost
balmy outside. The East River gleamed in the sunlight.

I parked my Jeep in the garage just before one o’clock and hauled my bags the block home. I live on 9th Street and Broadway,
smack on the border between Greenwich Village and the East Village in a fairly modern fourteen-story building. My one-bedroom
apartment is a gem and a steal, the one thing I have left from my marriage, and that’s only because it’s a rental and my ex
was unable to find a way to use it to cover his gambling debts. In addition to having a walk-in closet large enough to be
a tiny office, there are two drop-dead features.

First, there’s the view. It’s to the west, featuring a skyline of sand- and brick-colored apartment buildings and nineteen
wood-shingled water tanks. It looks, especially at night when the sky is inky blue, like the backdrop for a Broadway play.

And then there’s the terrace, right off my living room. As big as a room itself, it’s the perfect place for contemplating
that view, including sunsets that some nights seem to have set half the sky on fire.

I said hi to the day doorman, picked up my mail and newspapers, and rode the elevator upstairs. For some reason, my key fought
with the lower lock, and by the time I’d managed to undo both locks I was so anxious to get inside that I kicked open the
door. I wasn’t expecting a twenty-one-gun salute upon my arrival, but all the furniture seemed to sit there sullen and aloof
in the dusty air. The
Gloss
decorating editor was right. Santa Fe style looked ludicrous in Manhattan. But it wasn’t my fault that I had no decorating
skills. I come from a line of WASP women who adhered to two basic rules for pulling a room together: Use tons of chintz, and
push all the furniture back against the walls.

I set down my bag and leafed through the mail. It was pathetic—several catalogs filled with Santa dish towels and a wedding
invitation for two people whom I couldn’t recall ever having met. When I turned over the envelope, I realized it had been
delivered to the wrong mailbox.

Without bothering to unpack, I made a cheese omelet and took it into my office. I had a ton of work ahead of me, and I could
tell already that it was going to be hard to get a foothold on a day that was half over—it felt like trying to jump on a moving
train.

My number one priority was tackling my piece on mass hysteria. It was due at the end of the week, and at this point I was
beginning to seriously regret ever taking it on. The case wasn’t nearly as tantalizing as I’d thought when I’d accepted the
assignment, and to make matters worse, my research was feeling thin.

I dug out my tape of the interview I’d conducted with the shrink on Friday, as well as the notes I’d jotted down that day.
I always take written notes as backup—ever since, that is, I had the horrifying experience of replaying an interview I’d done
with a murder victim’s husband and hearing ninety minutes of what sounded like a Delta Airbus starting its engines.

The interview with the shrink turned out to be a dud. At the time, I thought he’d make a few decent observations, but as I
listened to it as an outsider, I realized it was about as fascinating as a Senate hearing on C-SPAN. He hadn’t been able to
say anything of interest about the case because the case just wasn’t interesting.

I was in a code blue situation, and though I’d been in them before with deadlines and had managed to survive, they were never
any fun.

I decided that my only recourse was to call Don, a writer I’d met at a party last Thursday who claimed to have an old file
on the subject of mass hysteria, a file he said he’d be willing to leave with his doorman if I needed it. He lived only two
blocks away on University Place, and it would be a cinch to lay my hands on the stuff.

I ended up with his machine and left a message, but I’d barely hung up the phone when it rang and Don was on the other end.

“Sorry,” he said, “I was just getting out of the shower. So you
do
need the file? I thought you might.”

“I’m pretty set on the piece, actually,” I lied. “I just thought it would be good to have whatever backup I can. If you could
leave it with your doorman like you said, I can swing by and get it.”

“I’ve got an even better idea,” he told me, sounding a hundred percent certain of the fact that he did. “Why don’t you pop
by my place later for a drink and I can explain some of it to you. If you’re looking at it cold, it might not make much sense.”

Oh, beautiful, I thought in exasperation. So the discussion the other night wasn’t about one freelance journalist helping
another. He’d been hitting on me. I tried to conjure him in my mind: frizzy reddish blond hair, a long, angular face. And
he’d had this irksome habit of punctuating his comments to me with the word
lady:
“Lucky lady,” he’d said when I told him about my gig with
Gloss.
“Funny lady,” he’d said when I’d told the story of the
Gloss
fashion editor talking about the duplicity of a designer’s approach when she’d meant duality.

“That’s so nice of you,” I said, squelching my annoyance. “My problem is that I’m kind of pressed for time. I have dinner
plans tonight. Maybe I could just grab the stuff from the doorman tonight, look through it, and then get together with you
later in the week if I need to.”

“It’s not gonna make much sense without me explaining it,” he said peevishly. I knew for sure then that I’d never lay my hands
on it unless I gave him face time. What a jerk. But I was desperate for the information.

“I could stop by on my
way
to dinner,” I said. “About six o’clock. I don’t have to be at the restaurant till eight.”

I was making him think I had more time than I did. Then I could stage an early escape once I got there.

“Yeah, I guess that’s okay,” he said, sounding slightly pissed that his bribery wasn’t producing the results he’d hoped. “You
know the building, right?”

I had planned to walk over to dinner with Landon, but that was out of the question now. I left a message for him saying that
I would meet him at the restaurant at seven.

As I put down the phone, feeling pissy, I realized I hadn’t checked my messages from the weekend. There were two from friends
on Friday calling to see if I wanted to do dinner over the weekend, friends who hadn’t known I’d had plans to be totally rejuvenated
at a fabulous spa and then return to New York ready to hook up with dozens of hot, available hombres. The final call was from
Parker Lyle, the criminal profiler I’d tried to contact from Warren. Though I’d left her my cell number, she had mistakenly
called me at home. I grabbed the phone and punched in her number.

She picked up on the first ring, and by the background noise I could tell she was in an airport. I cut to the chase with her
because that was the approach she preferred. I described the crime scene, the Mylar paper, and what I knew of the actual murder.

“Was she assaulted sexually?” she asked, cutting me off in the middle of a sentence.