Pink Balloons and Other Deadly Things (Mystery Series - Book One)
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Authors: Nancy Tesler
“Nancy Tesler is author of one of the most original and brilliant series featuring an amateur female detective.... This is a novel of real quality. Scarcely anywhere in the whole genre of female detective fiction will you find a better depiction of the emotion of jealousy, the breakup of a marriage, and the tentative growth of new affection.... Into the familiar format Nancy injects powerfully felt emotion and characters who are true to life. Best of all, underlying the serious account of Carrie’s troubles is a deep humor—-a sense of cosmic irony which ultimately gives the novel its meaning. As a debut in a packed and competitive field “Pink Balloons and Other Deadly Things” ....is way out front.”
JOHN LEWELL
Female Detective
“Carrie is a clever slightly neurotic heroine whose personal life is in disarray—-the kind of heroine that Susan Isaacs might put in a mystery....Fortunately, the detective on the case finds Carrie’s inept assistance charming and together the two make a fine team....this, combined with her burgeoning romance should keep readers interested in her next appearance.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
“The mystery is tricky and I didn’t see “whodunit” until the last minute....An enjoyable fast read.”
MYSTERIOUS STRANDS
“....vulnerable, spunky. Carrie Carlin is irresistible.”
CAROL LEA BENJAMIN
AUTHOR OF
THIS DOG FOR HIRE
The Carrie Carlin Mystery Series
PINK BALLOONS AND OTHER DEADLY THINGS
SHARKS, JELLYFISH AND OTHER DEADLY THINGS
SHOOTING STARS AND OTHER DEADLY THINGS
GOLDEN EGGS AND OTHER DEADLY THINGS
SLIPPERY SLOPES AND OTHER DEADLY THINGS
ANTHOLOGY ESSAY
—Smart Pop Series, BenBella Books Inc., edited by Leah Wilson,
PERFECTLY PLUM
—unauthorized essays on the life, loves and other disasters of Stephanie Plum, Trenton bounty hunter.
“Eeny, Meeny, Miney, Mo---Can Stephanie have her cake and eat it too?”
A SECOND HELPING OF MURDER
Culinary contributor to the 2
nd
edition of the Mystery Writers of America Cookbook, Poison Pen Press, edited by Robert Wiebezahl and Jo Grossman.
More Diabolically Delicious Recipes from Contemporary Mystery Writers.
The Hands of Esau
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to persons living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Copyright © 1997 by Nancy Tesler
Book design by eBook Architects
Cover image by Karen Adler
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In loving memory of
Ann Loring
1915—2005
Insightful mentor and rare friend, whose unflagging faith and encouragement through the worst of times and the best of times kept this writer writing.
Saturday, May 22
AFTERWARD I WOULD blame myself for having missed the warning signs. Among my colleagues I have a reputation for being intuitive. Probably I was too close to the situation. Couldn’t see the sky for the storm clouds.
Or the killer for the smoke in my eyes.
My name is Caroline Carlin Burnham, Carrie to my friends, Ms. Carlin to my clients at the biofeedback center, Cat to my husband, Rich. But that was when we were together and pet names were a sign of his affection. In the early days of our marriage, it was Kitten. At the end it was Nudnik. (Translated, that’s nag, nuisance, and all-round pain in the ass.) Definitely no affection intended. If he has a name for me now, I don’t want to know what it is.
Adding insult to the agony of my impending divorce, last Saturday I turned forty. A double whammy.
Chances are none of it would have happened if it hadn’t been for the heat wave. Certainly not in the way it did, anyway. The thermometer outside my window had soared to ninety degrees for four days running. My office, which is in one of those buildings with a sensational view of the Hudson from hermetically sealed picture windows, and without air conditioning until June, could have doubled for a sauna.
When my three o’clock canceled at the last minute, I had the computer switched off before it had spewed the final session printout. I flew out of the building, got in my ‘04 Honda, blasted the air conditioning in my face, and gave my trusty steed its head. Was it my fault it aimed straight for the street it used to call home?
Don’t ask me what it was that day that impelled me to drive past my old house. I thought I’d worked through the worst of the jealous crazies. Maybe the heat had gotten to me and affected my judgment. Maybe it was hearing about the wedding plans.
Or maybe it was the dream.
I am barefoot on wet tile, staring at a giant beach ball leaking port-wine splotches, staining the snowy tiles as it bounces alongside a pool. I watch as it slips over the edge, glances off a body floating face-down, a ribbon trailing from the blood-caked, mud-caked tangled mass of hair. Red. Like the water. I scream, but there is no sound, only the lap...lap...lap of the water as it sloshes against the aquamarine wall.
She was poolside, lolling on my favorite chaise longue wearing only the bottom half of a bikini. The suit’s stark whiteness set off the bronze of her oh-so-smoothly-tanned skin. Her honey blonde hair was plaited into a heavy braid and encircled her head like a misplaced halo.
From where I’d parked in my former next door neighbor’s driveway, I could see without being seen.
A phone rang, and I watched as she lazily extended one graceful arm and plucked her phone from her partially open Fendi hand-bag. My sixth sense was working overtime. I knew who was calling. Her shrill laughter carried across the manicured lawn, catapulting me from the car as though I’d been ejected from a jet plane.
Like a burglar casing his next hit, I skulked along the overgrown bushes that separate our raised ranch from the Millers’ colonial, suppressing a wail of protest as I recognized the antique gold chain nestled between those curvaceous twenty-eight-year-old breasts. Its diamond and ruby clasp glittered and sparkled in the sunlight.
Phone tucked under her chin, she unscrewed the cap on a bottle of nail polish and began applying appropriately scarlet paint to her talons.
“...just back from Bergdorf’s,” she was saying. “Anything fabulous’ll run at least five.” A pause, then a giggle. “Thousand, you dinosaur. And don’t tell me you can’t afford it. I’m your marketing director, remember? Shit!”
She made a grab for the bottle as it toppled from its perch between the heaving mounds, leaving a crimson trail across her evenly tanned bra-line-free shoulders.
“‘S what bridal gowns run nowadays. You want me looking drop-dead gorgeous, you’re going to have to live with the price tag.”
Our divorce wasn’t even final. The corpse wasn’t cold, and they were burying the body!
She gave a throaty laugh. “Well, I’m a little smarter than
she
was.”
Oh, Erica Vogel, you are a lot smarter. You have Rich Burnham paying five thousand dollars for a wedding dress. Mine had cost five hundred on sale. That was eighteen years ago, and it had never occurred to me that I shouldn’t pay for it myself. I started calculating how many hours I’d have to work for five thousand dollars. Matt could go to soccer camp for the whole summer for five thousand dollars. Allie could take singing lessons forever. The top of my head felt like a pressure cooker about to blow. If the gown cost that much, how much was Rich forking out for the wedding? And at the Waldorf, yet.
I was about to find out. Tiptoeing from behind a row of pine trees, I made it to the protective branches of the giant weeping willow I had planted as a sprout fourteen years earlier.
“...haggling with the banquet manager,” she was saying as she mopped at the congealing polish. “November’s the earliest date I could get. Figure around three, maybe three-fifty a person, not counting the flowers and the band. And the invitations and the photographer, of course. So if we don’t invite more than a couple of hundred...”
The pressure cooker exploded into hiccoughs. I clapped my hands over my mouth to muffle the sound and sank to the ground, oblivious to the pebbles and brambles that scraped my legs. Frantically I mumbled my mantra. “I’m calm, this is not a life-threatening situation...” Erica frowned, glanced in my direction, but went on painting. The sharp edge of a toy boomerang half buried in the loose soil cut into my ankle. I shoved it aside, barely feeling the sting.
Her voice became syrupy but the expression on her face said something quite different as she swung one foot and viciously kicked Matt’s favorite soccer ball into the mucky half-filled pool.
“Whatever you think, honey. Twelve’s a little old for a flower girl, but if you really want Allie in the wedding party...”
Over my dead body! Better yet, over hers! My hand found a rock. Stoning! That was it. The punishment for adultery in the Old Testament. To hell with that turning-the-other-cheek stuff they're pushing in the new one.
“‘Course,” she snickered, “the dragon lady might have something to say about that.”
The “dragon lady” certainly would. My daughter would be her flower girl the day flowers grew on glaciers.
I’d heard all I could stand. I had to get out of there before I grabbed that nail polish and smeared a gigantic A across those perfect boobs.
I scrambled to my feet and sneaked out of the yard. My imagination went into orbit. Stoning was too kind. Strangling, decapitation-—those had potential. I envisioned myself twisting that chain around her slender throat, hurling Matt’s boomerang across the yard, severing the Aryan head from its willowy neck. I pictured the bleached braid hanging on my belt, stretched her on a Spanish Inquisition rack. I burned her at a stake in Salem. No, wait. First I wanted her pilloried, with the whole town throwing rotten fruit in her face. Then I’d stone, strangle, and rack her.
I dashed across the Millers’ lawn to my car, nearly mowing down Sue Tomkins who was walking her Yorkie.
“Carrie? What’re you doing here?”
Mumbling something inaudible, I jerked open my car door, jumped in, turned the key and roared off, leaving Sue standing openmouthed, the yapping Yorkie straining at its leash. By morning the whole town of Alpine would be buzzing. Maybe all of Bergen County. I didn’t care. I was plotting my revenge.