Pink Balloons and Other Deadly Things (Mystery Series - Book One) (22 page)

As sweet air filled my lungs, a blind hot fury took hold of me. My hands were on Vickie’s throat, and I think I was banging her head on the floor, and then two strong hands were prying my hands loose, and Ted’s arms were lifting me, pinning me to him and I could feel the comforting roughness of his jacket against my face, and his voice was murmuring softly, calmly, “Stop, Carrie! Let her go. Stop. It’s over. You did it. You got her. It’s over.”

“I LIKE YOU. I REALLY DO. But you’re Dickie’s wife, so I have to send you off in a pink balloon just like the others...”

VICKIE’S CHILDISH VOICE invaded the room as I stood by my desk and played and replayed the tape. I couldn’t believe she had taken my innocent suggestion about a harmless way to deal with her destructive feelings and turned it into something deadly.

I rewound the tape, hit the play button.

“...you're Dickie's wife, so I have to send you off in a pink balloon just like the others.”

I sank into my chair, buried my face in my hands. “How could I have missed how sick she is?” I moaned aloud.

“You want to blame someone, Carrie, blame her father or her psychiatrist. Or better yet, blame your husband.” Ted materialized in the doorway. He walked into the room and hit the stop switch.

“I should have seen it,” I whispered.

“No one saw how crazed with jealousy she was. You stopped the slaughter.”

Strange how just the sound of his voice made me feel better.

“How’d you know to come?”

“Your husband finally gave me Vickie Thorenson’s name. She was the girl at Haji’s. He’d been trying to keep her out of it. Embarrassed, I suppose, to have it get out he’d been fooling around with a teenager.”

Funny how that part of it hadn’t struck me. Vickie would have been celebrating her first birthday the year Rich and I celebrated our wedding.

“One of my very efficient detectives remembered seeing it on your patient roster,” Ted continued. “Coupled with your messages and a message from Meg about the attack on you and telling me you were alone in your office---” He touched the bandage on my arm. “I thought I'd better move my ass.”

“Thank God for Ruth-Ann. If she hadn’t shown up and had that pepper gas in her bag...” I shuddered.

“Pepper spray’s illegal in New York, you know.” Ted’s voice was solemn. “Might have to arrest her.”

My eyes flew to his face. “Oh, right, just like a cop! I could've been killed!”

He was laughing. “Just kidding. They changed the law. But I’d’ve been lenient.”

“Big of you.”

“Who would’ve thought that shy, ultra-religious little girl would be packing Mace?” he mused.

I knew why. Ruth-Ann had been raped.
“People like us--we have to fight back,
she’d said
. “Tell them never again.”

“She told me she loves you. You’d saved her life, and she would’ve done anything for you.”

“She almost gave her life for me.” It was a sobering thought.

He reached out and touched my cheek. “You must give a lot of love, to inspire that.”

“Funny. For so much of the past year and a half, I’ve been filled with a very different emotion,” I said softly. “I hated Erica. You don’t know how often I imagined killing her myself.”

“The green-eyed monster’s inside all of us. Difference between us and the Vickies of the world is we keep our monsters caged.” His hand rested lightly on my hair. “Let’s get out of here. Feel like some lunch?”

I rose and gave him a shaky smile. “Okay.”

“How about dinner Saturday night?”

We walked to the door, and I flipped off the light, closing the door behind us. “You asking me out on a date?”

“Sounds like it.”

“Haji’s?”

“That’s for people still looking.” He pulled me to him. “I know a terrific little restaurant right here in Piermont—-soft music, dim lights, great food. Kind of place couples go.”

Something stirred inside me then, a warmth, a letting go, something I hadn't felt in a very, very long time. I tried to identify the emotion, and slowly, it came to me. I think it was what I used to call—-feeling happy.

Keep reading for an excerpt from
Nancy Tesler’s next
Carrie Carlin Mystery

CHRISTMAS USED TO BE my favorite time of the year. Technically, it’s not even my holiday, but I’ve always been a sucker for all that fah-la-la-ing and tinsel and good will toward men stuff. That is until two years ago when my ex, Rich “Casanova” Burnham, chose Christmas Eve to fly the family coop. For the usual--a younger woman. Originality isn’t one of Rich’s strong suits. Neither is timing. Or cherishing unto death. Considering, though, that a couple of his cherished girlfriends ended up under water and subsequently underground, I guess I’m lucky to have fallen out of favor.

Anyway, since then I’ve had a tough time staving off a sense of impending doom as the holidays approach. So I shouldn’t have been surprised when on this Christmas Eve, the malevolent winds of Christmas-past swept across my horizon.

The day had started out normally, innocuously. No ominous dreams had shattered my sleep the previous night; no ghostly apparitions hovered on the periphery of my consciousness. I’d roused Allie and Matt at seven and over breakfast shared in their excited chatter about the upcoming ski trip with their father. Then I’d seen them off on the bus for the annual middle-school sight-seeing trip into New York City, which this year included the Christmas Show at Radio City Music Hall. I was feeling upbeat about having made a tough-love decision to cut my favorite patient loose, despite my certainty that her initial reaction would be mild to severe panic. She outdid my expectations.

“I’ll have a relapse!” she wailed. “I’ll blow up like one of those Macy’s parade balloons.”

I refused to back down. “Ruth-Ann,” I said unsympathetically, “the whole point of what we’ve been doing is so you can apply the techniques you’ve learned here to your life.”

The limpid eyes filled. “But I have so much further to go.”

“Oh, honey, look in the mirror.”

“Vanity’s against my religion,” she said quite seriously, then giggled through her tears at my rolled eyes. Her mid-calf-length skirt and high-collared navy blue blouse, required attire in her Orthodox Jewish circles, could only partially camouflage the voluptuous form they draped.

When Ruth-Ann first came to my office, she weighed a hundred and sixty-five pounds. At least fifty of it had settled in one amorphous blob above her waist, resulting in the almost total disappearance of any distinguishable features, such as eyes, nose, and a mouth. Over the past several months I’d watched in awe and delight as a soulful-eyed butterfly emerged from the cocoon. The shedding of all that blubber was accomplished through biofeedback brainwave training, which allowed me to pinpoint the source of her eating disorder. To Ruth-Ann, I’m a miracle worker, a female Moses. It’s a flattering comparison, but I can’t take that much credit.

As a biofeedback clinician, mostly what I do is relax stressed-out people. Give me half an hour, let me hook you up to my computer, and I can demonstrate all the destructive things stress does to your body, then teach you how to keep it from killing you. Using another software program, I brain-wave-train Attention Deficit Disorder kids and addictive personalities like Ruth-Ann.

I spent the rest of the session bringing her to a relaxed alpha state and filling her head with positive “self-talk”, stressing how proud she should be feeling at what she’d accomplished rather than the fact, vanity being a ‘no-no’, that she was undoubtedly going to be turning more than a few yarmulke-covered heads. Hannukah, I knew, would be the supreme test for her, so I threw in a little weight control stuff, comparing matzoh balls, (my grandmother should forgive me) to things shot out of a cannon, and potato ‘latkes’ to hockey pucks. My grand finale was a stern admonition. “You no longer allow anyone to influence your eating habits. You have learned to say no to “Eat, bubbela.”

I’m terrific at mental tune-ups. Ruth-Ann left my office all smiles, her face lit up like one of those Christmas trees on the mall outside my building.

I hadn’t scheduled anyone after Ruth-Ann because I was anxious to get home before Rich and his new girlfriend picked up the kids. He had insisted they be ready at six-thirty to make a nine-ten flight out of Newark. I’d determined to let them go without even one crack to my ex about his predilection for cradle-robbing. Progress indeed. My New Year’s resolutions were all about keeping my big mouth shut, the better to ward off the slings and arrows of outrageous ex-husbands.

Married for eighteen years, Rich and I were living a fairy-tale existence in a beautiful home in Alpine, New Jersey. The fairy-tale ended abruptly when the prince ran off with the wicked witch. So when the witch was found floating face down in his (formerly our) swimming pool, I didn’t exactly don sackcloth and ashes. Nor did I rend my garments when girlfriend/witch number two was found floating in her bathtub in the same condition. The “death by water” thing did shake me up, but panic didn’t set in until fingers started pointing in my direction. Cop fingers. Fingers that had a detective by the name of Ted Brodsky attached to them.

Obviously, Detective Sergeant Brodsky’s and my relationship didn’t get off to a galloping start, what with his pointing fingers and my resentment (make that hysteria), at his considering me the prime suspect. But chemistry and the fact that the killer was caught in record time, won out in the end. When you’ve been dumped and an attractive man comes on to you, every hormone in your body starts shrieking “Go for it!” And Ted’s a very attractive man. The monumental lust he inspires in me borders on the embarrassing. But for a variety of reasons, we’ve decided to cool it.

It’s been eleven days and four hours since we came to that decision, so I was surprised that evening, when I pulled into the driveway of the small brick house in Norwood, New Jersey where my children and I now live, to see his shiny white Miata parked by the curb.

When I opened the front door, he was sitting in our combination family room-kitchen talking to the kids, while alternately petting our monster dog, Horty, and Luciano, Alpha cat of our Siamese trio. Horty, who loves me more than anything in the world, barely managed a tail-wag in greeting.

“Well, hi there,” I said, as I concentrated on pulling off my boots. “It must be Christmas. Santa’s brought us a hot new car.”

“In your dreams,” he chuckled. “Just thought I’d drop by and wish the kids
Bon Voyage
.”

“Oh. Nice.”

Horty finally roused himself, meandered over to me and planted a slurpy kiss on my hand.

Allie bounced to her feet. “Didja get my phone? You didn’t forget, did you?”

“I promised, didn’t I?” I said, as I extracted the shiny red Sanyo from my briefcase and held it out.

“Red! Awesome!” Squealing in delight she grabbed it from my hand, gave me a crushing hug and headed for her bedroom. “Thank you. Thank you. I love you. Gotta finish packing.”

“Don’t forget about the radiation emissions. Keep it on speaker away from your ear when you call me,” I called after her and turned to my son. “Mattie, are you packed?”

“Pretty much.”

“Won’t cut it. Go finish.”

My ten-and-a-half-year-old, mature-beyond-his-years son looked at me, troubled. “You’re gonna be all alone on Christmas. One of us should stay home.”

I felt a tug at the back of my eyes. Every so often one or the other of my children says something that really gets me.

“We talked about that, sweetheart. How often do you and Allie get a chance to ski out west? I’ll be okay.”

“You sure?”

“I’m sure.” I wasn’t, but that was between me and my box of tissues. “I may decide to drive up to Worcester and see Grandpa and Gramma Eve.”

“Maybe Ted’ll go with you,” he said, eyeing the man hopefully.

Ted smiled. “Better hurry, kiddo. You’ve only got fifteen minutes.”

“Sorry about that,” I said when we were alone. “He’s a little confused about us.”

“He’s not the only one.”

I wasn’t going to touch that, not now anyway, so I made a big thing of greeting José and Placido who were having a wonderful time depositing Siamese cat fur all over my pant legs.

Ted let me go through the routine, waited till I was ensconced on the couch with a cat on each leg and one in my lap, and Horty weighing down my feet; then he leaned over and whispered in my ear. “Mattie’s right. Animals or no animals, it sucks to be alone on Christmas.”

“You have something else in mind?” I asked, concentrating on scratching behind Placido’s ears.

“I’m hell-bent on seeing the tree in Rockefeller Center. Want to go with me?”

“On Christmas day to Rockefeller Center?”

“Yeah.”

I looked out the window and noticed how crispy clear the night had become, how bright and sparkling the stars. “It’ll be a mob scene.”

“Then maybe we’ll just make a fire in my apartment and watch it on TV.”

Was that the cats purring or was it me?

RICH PULLED UP promptly at six-thirty. Cheerfully, I told the kids to have a wonderful holiday and to be careful not to fall off the mountain, and blew them kisses until the car was out of sight.

Ted was on the phone ordering Chinese food when I came back into the house. In light of our recent pact I was a little taken aback when, after dinner, while we were listening to some angelic boy sopranos singing about the little town of Bethlehem, he pulled me close and kissed me.

“Very nice,” I said trying to ignore my elevating heart-rate. “But I’m not quite sure I know how we got here.”

“It’s our first Christmas together,” he replied. “Peace on earth time. It struck me it’s stupid to be making war.”

“We just made plans for tomorrow. We aren’t making war.”

He grinned, nibbled my earlobe. “We aren’t making love either. Though I’m open to changing that.”

The kids were gone, we had the house to ourselves, and the offer was infinitely more attractive than anything I’d had planned for the evening. But I have this lousy problem with foot-in-mouth disease. “I thought we were taking time off to re-assess.”