“Here.” He said, as he removed his jacket as he reached for his daughter.
Ryan stared at Carrie’s unblinking eyes as he put his hands around the infant’s body, tugging gently.
“Please.” He said simply as Carrie released her grip on the baby and finally he had his daughter in his arms as his wife wept, defeated. Ryan quickly wrapped the baby in his jacket, shielding her little body from the cold.
A bright pair of lights suddenly appeared above them, along with the deafening sounds of the rotary blades of an aircraft, as two helicopters from the NYPD appeared over them.
Carrie screamed as the super-bright spotlights trained on them, falling out of her trance as she briefly shielded her face and then tried to run as the helicopter’s loudspeaker trumpeted over the night air.
“STAY WHERE YOU ARE! DO NOT MOVE! STAY WHERE YOU ARE!”
At that moment, a number of uniformed and plain-clothes police officers came running out of the stairwell and onto the roof as that light stayed on them.
Ryan hugged the baby closer to his chest as she continued to cry, most likely scared from the noise.
Carrie shrieked and ran right up to the edge of the roof, as if she were going to jump.
“Carrie, don’t!” Ryan screamed in horror, in spite of himself.
She screamed and motioned the cops away from her as they tried to subdue her.
“Get away from me!” she screamed as she again made ready to jump, but one of the officers caught her by the back of her tee-shirt and yanked her away.
Carrie was dragged to the ground kicking and screaming as EMTs appeared on the scene now, one of them readying a syringe as she screamed Joan’s name over and over at the top of her lungs.
Ryan looked up away as Connie staggered out onto the roof, a hand to her forehead, which was bleeding.
“Ryan!” she called, running towards where he stood with the baby, who had started to calm down a bit. The little girl was staring up at him with Carrie’s eyes, and he was startled to see how much she really did look like him.
“You okay?” he asked her, as she nodded breathlessly.
“I’ll live.”
Ryan started in surprise as he saw Detectives Chandler and Harvey heading his way.
“Ryan.” He said, looking around at the chaos. “Looks like you had quite a day.”
“How did you know we were here?” he asked, as Sandy reached over and plucked something tiny from the shoulder of his jacket.
“Tracking device.” He said, as Millie looked pleasantly surprised. “That was pretty slick, that trick you pulled on us with the car back there at the station. But I had a trick or two up my sleeve, too.”
Ryan nodded, as the two moved closer to see the baby and Millie took one of her tiny little hands and smiled, genuinely.
“She looks just like you.” She said in awe, as Ryan laughed and nodded.
“Yeah.”
Then they all looked at Connie, who was smiling sadly as she stood patiently off to one side.
“It’s time, Connie.” Sandy said gently, removing his handcuffs, as she nodded.
“Wait.” Ryan pleaded, turning to Connie before they took her away. “Thank you.”
Connie nodded again, tears in her eyes as she walked with Sandy and Millie towards the roof access door. She turned and looked back at him one last time before she was led out of sight.
An EMT came over to him, beckoning Ryan to follow them to where they had a stretcher for him. He insisted he was fine and could walk, and he told them that he was going to be carrying the baby down.
He had his daughter back and he was never letting her go.
Chapter twelve
Ryan sat in the living room watching the news three nights later with Zoe Isabelle, as he had decided to call her, in his arms dozing peacefully.
One of the women who had come to visit earlier that day had dressed her in the pink outfit she wore, complete with an enormous pink headband adorned with a fluffy bow. It looked slightly ridiculous, but he didn’t really care at this point. He had his daughter and she had him.
That was all that really mattered.
He pressed his lips against her little forehead tenderly as she slept, sighing happily.
She had been checked out thoroughly at a nearby hospital and Zoe was fine, despite the events that had taken place.
People had been stopping over left and right to see Zoe, and ask him how he was doing and that kind of thing. Their story was the leading one on every news station in the state right now, but he would be glad when he could just have his privacy back. Try to get things back to normal.
Ryan hadn’t slept in the bed he’d shared with Carrie at all since coming home, opting to sleep on the living room sofa instead.
Sometimes late at night, when he was restless, he would see his wife’s beautiful face in his mind. Her enchanting smile as she kissed him as they made love.
Sometimes he thought that it was all a bad dream, and that none of it had ever happened. But then he’d turn on the television, which he had tried to stop doing, or read a newspaper and it would all come flooding back.
He was taking it a day at a time, and he knew it would be a long time of healing before he got over all of this.
He had reached out to his parents, who were already on their way down from Hartford to help him pack up the house, which he had put on the market just that day. The same real estate company that handled the sale of Joan’s house would now handle his. He wanted nothing more to do with it, and he planned to use the money to start over up in Connecticut.
His parents had been very excited about meeting their granddaughter, but they were more excited about mending relations between the three of them and trying to be a family once again.
Ryan watched the television screen as a perfectly coiffed reporter talked about the Ashby Case and how he and Connie had exposed everything that had happened, along with Detectives Chandler and Harvey.
He had just spoken to the both of them on the phone earlier that day, promising to stop by the station with Zoe to say goodbye before he left New York for good.
Carrie had confessed to everything, hoping to get a lesser sentence by fully cooperating with the authorities.
She admitted that she and Joan had planned everything, even killed Doris when she threatened to tell Ryan about their nearly lifelong love affair.
Apparently, Doris had always known about them and used it as leverage to make life difficult for her daughter. She had been disgusted by her daughter’s love for another woman and made it clear that she ‘owned’ Joan.
In return, and unbeknownst to her mother, Joan had taken out the life-insurance policy on Doris. She had always intended to kill her, according to Carrie, but once they needed money to pull off the abduction Joan decided she wanted out from her mother’s thumb, with severance pay for a lifelong sentence of verbal and physical abuse.
They had finally linked Zachary Bronson to the murders of Morgan Pines, and an old couple living in Jackson Heights Queens, Gladys and Jerry Wright. Zach, afraid that they would talk to the cops, decided to take them out of the equation altogether.
Carrie revealed that she and Joan conspired to kill Zach because he was trying to extort more money from them and they figured that he would be blamed for Morgan’s murder as well.
Connie was still trying to work out a plea deal for a lesser sentence. Because of her help with capturing Joan and Carrie, and blowing the case wide open which led to arrests, it looked like she might get off with a lighter sentence than originally thought.
Of course she was fired from the hospital, and she would probably never be able to get a job in the security field again, but she had told Ryan it was only fair after what she’d done.
Ryan had been furious with her, but in the same token he could not have gotten Zoe back without Connie’s help. Ryan knew that he’d owe her for the rest of his life for this.
He laughed out loud as Zoe’s little rosebud mouth opened in
a wide yawn and then closed as she continued to slumber.
They would be all right.
Epilogue
Carrie waited her turn in line to use the pay telephone, shifting nervously from one foot to the other impatiently as the inmate in front of her gabbed on and on, as if there weren’t others waiting.
She hated this.
She hated being in here.
Finally it was her turn, and with shaking fingers she slid her quarter in and dialed the phone number that she knew so well now and waited as the phone trilled in her ear.
“Hello?” Ryan answered.
She could hear her little girl’s laughter in the background and party music going, the smile spreading slowly on her pale face as her eyes welled up with tears.
“This is the State Correctional Facility of New York State....” The pre-recorded voice announced to let Ryan know that he was receiving a phone call from an inmate of the prison.
The phone clicked loudly in her ear, and the tears slid down her cheeks as she lowered the phone. She wondered if they’d allow her to make one more phone call, since it was her baby’s birthday and all. Just as she furtively began dialing again after slipping her quarter into the slot, a guard called out to her.
“Move it, Ashby! Back to your cell!”
Nodding, Carrie put the phone back up on the hook and ambled slowly away.
She wasn’t going to be able to take six more years of this.
Her body wracked with sobs as she moved back towards the visitation room where all of the other inmates were visiting with their children. She put her hands up on the glass as she watched the children and babies, her lips trembling.
She waited to be escorted back to the cell she shared with a sociopath who did her best to intimidate Carrie. She didn’t bother to talk too much to anyone and she kept to herself, kept her nose clean.
The only thing that kept her going was her journal, which she took out from underneath her mattress once she got back to her cell. Sometimes she’d read it, laughing as she remembered all the good times she’d had with Joan. It was her favorite thing to do and it made being in this hellhole bearable a lot of the times.
It was the only thing that made her happy, besides the thought of seeing her baby again someday, and she opened it and turned to the page where she’d written last.
“Okay, Joan.” She whispered, using her finger to write down what she could hear Joan’s voice saying inside her head. “We’ll get out of here soon. Soon......soon.....”
Carrie repeated the word over and over as she continued to use her finger as a pencil on the blank pages of the worn composition notebook.
***
Ryan watched as Zoe, clad in a pretty white sun-dress, chased another little girl around the tree decorated with colorful streamers in their backyard. It was his daughter’s fourth birthday and her long, dark hair gleamed in the early afternoon sun as she giggled and screamed along with about a dozen of her friends.
He gazed next at the small birdbath fountain he’d brought with him from New York, the only thing he had wanted from that place, opting to place it near his flowerbeds. No matter what Carrie had done, he still wanted to honor his son. Screams filled the air as the kids raced around the stone fountain and then back over to the tree again.
The party guests were mostly kids from the neighborhood, as well as from the pre-school she went to, and he was glad that Zoe had gotten to be so popular.
The decision to move to Hartford had been an easy one, the two of them enjoying the mild summers and snowy Connecticut winters. He taught Zoe how to garden, and she’d watch him as he chopped wood for their fireplace. He had gotten to be pro at fixing her hair and doing many of the household chores he never thought he’d learn how to do.
Sometimes it was hard, doing it by himself, but it was a learning process and he and Zoe were making out okay by taking it a day at a time.
He didn’t bother to tell his mother that Carrie had called a short while, just as she did every year on Zoe’s birthday. She had even sent Zoe a card, which simply read ‘love from Mommy and Mommy-Joan’.
He had thrown it into the trash.
“We need to talk to the judge, put a stop to this.” Mary advised him the last time it had happened, at Christmas. Now it had happened again, and he didn’t want to upset his mother so he didn’t say anything about the card the mailman had just left a short while ago.
Ryan shook his head as he toyed with a white ruffled sock from the laundry he’d done early that morning.
“She doesn’t call that often.” He said, sighing heavily as he thought about his upcoming appointment with the therapist.
He had decided to go to therapy after all of this had happened, and Ryan had been feeling better than he had in a long time. He was even considering dating, having decided to move on with his life.
His eyes cut now to Eve, who lived a few houses over from his, that he’d had coffee with a time or two. They were supposed to be going out for a show that weekend, and he could admit that he was excited about that. As if she knew he’d been thinking of her, the slender, dark-skinned woman smiled at him from her place near the table and he returned it. They had started out as friends, but recently he started to feel attracted to the beautiful woman and asked her out.
Eve was an African-American woman who he’d met at church when they first moved there, one of the rare times he’d been able to attend services when he wasn’t working. She and his mother had gotten to be good friends over the last four years and he was just taking things slow. He liked the fact that both of his parents adored Eve.
Zoe was nuts about her, and he snapped a quick picture of the two of them as the girl ran to hug her before running off to play.
Ryan watched as Frank laughed and held his arms open as Zoe ran to hug her grandfather and then her grandmother, who gave her little bottom a loving pat before she scampered off again.
His business was booming and he had a crew of six that worked for him, his little business growing by leaps and bounds daily.
It was something that he had always dreamed about doing, but never thought he’d be able to pull it off. He liked having his own business, and he liked the fact that he was able to make his own hours. His parents sometimes watched Zoe when he was on a big job, and he appreciated it, but he didn’t want to burden them.
His little girl could be boisterous sometimes and she had a touch of tomboy in her, too. He had learned that when he bought her a little pink hard-hat of her very own to wear when she came with him to a job site on rare occasions.
“I don’t want it!” she’d proclaimed, handing it back to him, “I want a yellow one, like yours.”
And he had gotten it for her, complete with her name in bold letters across the front. His mother had found cute little denim overalls and little tan Timberland boots that Zoe insisted on wearing if she knew he was going to a job site to check the crew.
Those guys got a kick of his little girl, all of them grinning from ear to ear as she tried to use a hammer or pull a bag of concrete with all of her might, failing miserably.
More and more women were into construction now, and he figured maybe that’s the way Zoe would go someday. He always figured her to be more like Carrie, into clothes and jewelry but she was definitely a complete opposite of her mother.
Ryan never really talked about Carrie, and neither did anyone else. It was as if she didn’t even exist, but for the sweet girl she’d given him.
“Daddy! Can I open my presents now?” Zoe asked, running up to him as he held his arms open to her. “Please?”
“Sure, why not.” Ryan said, hoisting her little body up into his strong arms as he carried her towards the table that had been set up with a small fondant-covered cake he’d ordered special from one of those fancy bakeries, home-made ice-cream and the mounds of presents they’d gotten for her. A few of them had come from Sandy and Millie, the pair still keeping in touch with him.
Sandy had retired about a y
ear after they’d moved, but Millie was still giving the criminals hell as she rapidly worked her way up the ranks. Ryan knew that someday Millie would make Chief of Police, undoubtedly. He had extended an invite for them to come up for a visit, since he did not ever plan to go back down to New York. They had both promised to make it happen, and he knew that Zoe would be happy to see them. They talked to the officers on FaceTime once in a blue-moon, but it would be great to see them again.
Connie ended up getting five years of probation after serving eighteen months in a minimum-security prison for her role in the kidnapping ploy. Even though she kept in touch, it wasn’t as often and Ryan understood. He knew that Connie would probably never forgive herself for what she’d done, but he had. The last time he’d spoken to her, about two years ago, he’d told her about how well Zoe was doing and promised to send her pictures.
Connie had thanked him for that, and told him that she had started an online business selling handmade soaps, body-scrubs, body-washes and other all-natural cosmetics on an online selling platform. She had always wanted to do something like this, but didn’t know how to go about it. The eighteen months in prison were well spent as she researched how to start her business and was already basically running it just months after her release.
Ryan smiled broadly, aiming his camera at the table as Zoe ripped into one package after another. She squealed as she unwrapped the American Girl doll she’d been begging him for, her dark shining eyes happy as she smiled, making dimples appear in each cheek.
She was Carrie all over, no doubt about that.
And he’d tell her about her mother, someday.
But not today.
Today was theirs.
Please turn the page to read a preview of
Company Policy
A Psychological Thriller
By. Erica R. Stinson
Coming Fall 2017
1
Flashing lights.
Red strobes.
Blue strobes.
It was all a blur in her mind as she revisited the familiar scene in her dreams.
Code PINK_A Novel Of Suspense Page 10
