Murder at the Spa Read Free Page A

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