Pink Balloons and Other Deadly Things (Mystery Series - Book One) by Nancy Tesler Page B

party, except that the couch looked familiar. I’d probably spent the entire evening stuck to the plastic.
    I walked around, searching for something to search. No bookshelves, no desk, no chest of drawers, no buffet, nothing to open. I glanced into the kitchen, was about to look in the cabinets, when I was again seized with an undeniable urge.
    I remembered that the only bathroom was off Dot’s bedroom. I made a dash for it, tripped over something lying in the entranceway, cursed as I fell, and felt a stinging in my hand. Scrambling to my feet, I stumbled into the bedroom, stopped. Not neat. Chaos. Dresser drawers open, contents scattered. Closet doors ajar. Clothing strewn everywhere. Sheets and blankets jerked from the bed, lying in rumpled heaps amid splinters of glass.
    My first impulse was to turn and run. The second was to call the police. No. How would I explain my presence?
    The crunching sound under my shoes focused my attention on the hundreds of glass shards littering the rug. It was as though a tornado had flown in through the window and randomly trashed every picture in the place, leaving untouched the large-screen television and the bookshelf filled with paperback novels, as if they lay outside the storm’s path.
    Picture hooks indicated that the room had been wall-to-wall pictures, framed photographs now lying smashed on the carpet.
    This was no normal break-in.
    I bent down and picked up a broken frame. And froze. Rich looked back at me from a blowup of a photo I remembered as having been taken for the company’s annual report. Knife slashes mutilated his face.
    I saw blood on the picture! Panic swept over me as, for one moment of dementia, I thought the picture was bleeding. Then I realized the blood must be coming from my own hand.
    Another picture. Rich again, this one an enlargement of a snapshot taken at a company Christmas party. Slashed. Rich and me at Dot’s party. I’d been cut out of this photo before the mutilation took place. Another enlarged snap of Rich, standing by the building next to his logo. Cut to ribbons.
    Was this Dot’s handiwork? A woman gone over the brink, so consumed with jealousy, she had desecrated her own home?
    Heedless now of the debris that tore at my knees, I crawled over to get a closer look at a stack of photos lying by an open bureau drawer, all of which seemed to be professional headshots of young beautiful women. The photographs separated in my hands, leaving me clutching torn half-faces. Familiar faces.
    There was more blood on these. I looked at my hand. The blood had congealed. The bleeding had stopped. The blood on the pictures wasn’t coming from me!
    I was trapped in a horror movie. Run! Get out! Get downstairs to Meg!
    I was shaking like a cornered animal when I reached the door, but something—-maybe it was that urge most of us have to gawk at disaster scenes, compelled me to take a last look. And I saw, coming from under the bathroom door, a tiny trickle. Barely aware I was moving in the wrong direction, I propelled myself back through the sea of glass, my feet pulverizing it, the sound augmented like a drum roll in my ears. Dazed, I pushed open the door.
    Water dripped over the tub rim, puddling on the gray tile floor, berry juice canals winding across the room to the door.
    I thought she was alive. Injured but alive. Naked, she lay half in, half out of the bathtub, eyes wide open. She moved! Suppressing a scream, I started forward. Much later I would be told the draft created when I opened the door had probably disturbed the water causing her body to sway.
    A hand, gashed as though attacked by a vicious animal, hung over the side of the tub, a mottled purplish look to the fingers. Her hair had come unpinned, was hanging disheveled around her shoulders, bleached by the fluorescent lighting to a mustard yellow. Her face, the color of wax, had taken on its texture. Congealed blood streaking from her nose, food protruding from her mouth...no! God, no, not