1 A Dose of Death

by Gin Jones

  Interesting, Helen thought. In the governor's mansion, financial skirmishes among colleagues were the norm, but physical assaults were largely unheard of. In Jack's world, assault was practically respectable, while theft was considered bad form.

  "If you trust your cousins," she said, "then so do I."

  "Good." Jack parked in front of her cottage. "I like you, Miss Binney, but I couldn't work with someone who didn't trust me and my family."

  CHAPTER TEN

  Jack delivered Helen back home at noon, two hours after they'd left, which should have been plenty of time for Rebecca to leave. The nurse apparently had a deeply buried stubborn streak, though, judging by the fact that she was still waiting on the front porch, sitting on the uncomfortably hard brick, looking anxious and apologetic.

  "I know you don't want me here, but I can't charge for time when you're not here," Rebecca said as she rose to her feet. "I don't have any other appointments for today, and I really need the money. I won't be a bother, I promise. You'll hardly even know I'm here."

  Helen could feel herself succumbing to guilt at the thought of sending the nurse home without her billable time. Helen didn't need a nurse, but she could use some help.

  "As long as you're here," Helen said, "you might as well come in and help me organize some papers."

  "Papers?" Rebecca said. "But I'm from the nursing agency, not the secretarial one. You don't expect me to type, do you? I've never been very good at it. It takes me forever to key my notes into the new electronic patient files."

  Helen unlocked the front door. "No typing, I promise. But if you come into my house, I expect you to provide the help I actually need, not the help I don't want."

  She clutched her bag uncertainly. "I'm supposed to take your blood pressure. I'm not sure I'll get paid if I don't do it."

  "If they won't pay you for the visit because of that, I will," Helen said. "Or you can leave. I don't need anything other than the help with my papers."

  The nurse took a tentative step into the cottage, without closing the door behind her. "Maybe I should call someone to find out what I should do."

  "That's up to you." Helen limped over to her built-in desk space. Her hip still hadn't settled down after the tumble out the bedroom window. She should have taken the spare cane with her on this morning's trip, but she'd been counting on finding the other one at Tate's office, and she hated the way the spare one's ugliness drew attention to her mobility issues even more than the one she'd lost. Next time she went out, though, she wasn't going to be so vain. It was more important to get her hip stabilized. If her nieces saw her hobbling like she was now, they'd have her committed, for sure.

  Rebecca looked at her cell phone uncertainly, while Helen checked her answering machine. Lily had called to let her know that a security consultant would be visiting the cottage to design a system for her.

  Oh, goodie. More visitors.

  Helen looked at the stack of scrapbooks filled with newspaper articles about the burglar and then looked at the dithering Rebecca. "Make up your mind," Helen snapped, "If you're going to stay, then you can help me carry these scrapbooks over to the kitchen island. After that, I could use something to eat to keep up my strength. We both could. There's plenty of food in the fridge. Or do I need to hire a caterer?"

  "No, no," Rebecca said, dropping her cell phone back into the pocket of her pastel pink scrubs top. At least there were no sickeningly cute animals on it. "I can make lunch for you. I've been taking nutrition classes, you know."

  "I don't want nutrition lectures." She didn't need another person telling her what she could and couldn't eat, on top of everyone already telling her what she could and couldn't do. "I just want lunch."

  Rebecca let the door shut behind her and scurried across the room to retrieve the scrapbooks and carry them over to the kitchen island. She then went to investigate the contents of Helen's refrigerator. Fortunately, Helen had chosen the food in there herself, so whatever Rebecca came up with couldn't be too bad. Helen could afford to be nice to her, this once. After all, it was going to be Rebecca's last day here. If Tate's nephew was even half as good as Tate claimed he was, he'd have the agency's contract cancelled by tomorrow.

  Rebecca was putting the final touches on a salad and mumbling about the high-fat content of the available dressings, when there was a knock at the front door.

  "I'll get it," Rebecca said, pushing aside some of the papers on the island to make room for the salad bowl next to Helen's right hand.

  Helen's first impulse was to tell Rebecca to ignore the visitor, but then she realized it was probably the security system guy, so she didn't object.

  When Gordon Pierce walked in, though, Helen regretted not insisting on answering the door herself. This was what she got for letting other people help her: a visitor wearing a lime green and pink plaid seersucker jacket with a matching green cravat.

  He bent to whisper to Rebecca. "How's she doing today?"

  "I can hear you," Helen said.

  Rebecca looked back over her shoulder at Helen, as if asking for permission to answer her boss.

  Helen took pity on Rebecca and said, "I'm fine. I'm always fine, or I would be if everyone would just leave me alone. That's what I keep telling everyone, and no one ever listens to me."

  Pierce nodded, and confided to Rebecca in the same, perfectly audible whisper, "I see she's in one of her moods again. Don't worry. It's not your fault. You can head on out now. I'll stay with the patient for a while."

  "But I haven't taken her blood pressure yet, and you can't do it." Rebecca's hand came up to cover her mouth, as if belatedly realizing she'd criticized her boss.

  Helen silently cheered her on. You tell him, girl. Damn right Pierce wasn't taking my blood pressure. Not unless he wanted to have assault charges filed against him.

  Pierce took Rebecca's hand and patted it. "I think we can skip the blood pressure reading, just this once."

  Rebecca turned to Helen, pleading for understanding.

  "Stay or leave, it's up to you," Helen told her before turning to Pierce. "My blood pressure is fine. Or it was until you showed up. What do you want?"

  "Nothing worth your getting all worked up about," he said.

  Rebecca scurried across the room to grab her bag and leave. She shut the door behind her, so carefully that Helen didn't even hear the door latch click into place, having already turned back to the pile of scrapbooks on the island in front of her.

  "I was just wondering," Pierce said as he took the seat across from Helen. "Did Melissa leave any of her paperwork here? You know how the medical insurance companies are, I'm sure. If we want to get paid, we have to dot every "i," cross every "t." In triplicate."

  "Melissa didn't leave anything inside the cottage." Except a couple cans of Diet Pepsi, but Helen had poured them out already. "The police confiscated everything she had on her."

  "They don't have what I'm looking for." Pierce helped himself to a cucumber slice from Helen's salad, and she slapped his hand away before he could take another one.

  "Maybe they're in her car."

  "I've already checked there."

  "I didn't know they'd found it," Helen said. "Where was it?"

  "At the repair shop," Pierce said. "Apparently it broke down on the way to your cottage that morning. Something to do with the alternator, I'm told. Such a dedicated nurse, Melissa was. She called for a tow, and then hitched a ride here, so you wouldn't be here all alone."

  "I like being alone," Helen said automatically. She would have been more irritated with Pierce if it weren't for the fact that at least now she knew that Melissa had been killed in the morning, not the night before. If she could find out exactly when the tow truck had been called, it would help to narrow down the time of death even more. "Melissa wasn't supposed to be here that morning. It would have been better if she'd gone with her car to the repair shop."

  "I understand. You don't want to feel responsible for her being surprised by the burglar." He r
eached for another cucumber slice, and Helen pushed the whole salad toward him. She certainly wasn't going to eat it now.

  "I'm not responsible for Melissa's being here that morning," Helen said. "Especially if it was before 9:00. I never do anything before then, and she knew it. If she was driving somewhere at that hour, it wasn't to come see me."

  "Where else would she have been going?" he said, picking up her salad bowl. "She called for the tow a little after 7:30 that morning. It wouldn't have taken more than ten or fifteen minutes for her to get here from where her car was picked up. Even if she had to wait a few minutes to catch a ride, she'd have been here by 8:00. There wasn't enough time to go see another patient before coming back to check on you, especially without her own car. She must have come straight here, planning to wait outside until you woke up, but instead she ran into the burglar."

  He was probably right, up to the point where it was the burglar doing the murder. Helen usually got out of bed around 8:30, and that morning had been pretty routine up until the discovery of Melissa's body. Certainly no fatal scuffle had been going on outside. Helen would have noticed.

  The call to the tow company put Melissa's time of death between 8:00 and 8:30. It also meant that Helen didn't have much of an alibi. Being at home, alone and asleep, was even more worthless than usual when the murder occurred a few feet away from the suspect's bedroom window. The police really should have been investigating Helen instead of assuming that a petty burglar had suddenly graduated to murder.

  Pierce set down the empty salad bowl. "So, how do you like Rebecca?"

  "I'm sure she's a very nice person and is very skilled," Helen said, "but I don't need a nurse."

  "We could try someone else." He pulled out his smartphone. "What about…"

  "No," Helen said. "I'm not agreeing to anything without my lawyer present. If you haven't talked to him already, he'll be calling you. It's the firm of Tate and Bancroft."

  Pierce stopped scrolling through his database. "You don't need a lawyer to talk to me. I'm here for you, whatever you need."

  "That's the whole problem," Helen said. "I don't need anything, and I don't want you or anyone else here."

  "I understand," he said, putting away the smartphone and taking Helen's hand to pat it.

  She was so startled by his easy capitulation that she didn't pull her hand away.

  "You miss Melissa," he said. "We all do. She was so beloved by her patients. It's why I hired her, you know—her dedication to her work. It wasn't easy to steal her away from the nursing home."

  Now that he mentioned it, she did wonder why Melissa would have agreed to give up the job she supposedly loved so much. "How did you get her to leave the nursing home?"

  "I wouldn't have been able to, without the budget cuts there," Pierce said. "You know how it is with government-run entities these days, and the nursing home is owned by the town. It's been hit with budget issues like every other department."

  That was the sort of thing Helen could understand. It had been hard enough running the governor's mansion before all the recent state budget cuts. She couldn't imagine how her successor, her ex's cousin, was managing in the current economy.

  Pierce continued, "Melissa loved her work, didn't ever want to retire completely. And they were cutting hours at the nursing home. She couldn't bear to see what it did to her patients, and she couldn't live on what they were paying her, not without a second job, and if she did that, she wouldn't have time to volunteer at the radio station. I could offer her enough to live on, even working part-time."

  "So the money was the only reason she left?"

  "What else is there, really?" Pierce said.

  "Job satisfaction." Even when Helen's duties in the governor's mansion had been overwhelming, she'd always known that she was doing something worthwhile, and that she was appreciated. Leaving the work behind had, in many ways, been harder than leaving her marriage behind. "What about her patients? Didn't she feel like she was abandoning them?"

  "Of course. And they loved her. All of them. But she didn't have any choice. She needed a living wage. It's not like she had any family who could help her out."

  Or friends, as far as Helen had been able to tell from the attendance at Melissa's wake. The woman really had been all alone in the world. There was no one with any strong emotional ties to Melissa, the sort where love might turn to hate or murderous rage. But if the murder wasn't personal to Melissa, it really did mean the burglar was the most likely suspect in her murder. Other than Helen, of course. She knew she hadn't done it, and the burglar theory still didn't feel right. That left only one other possibility: that the murder had been completely random.

  She had to force herself to consider the possibility. A random killer meant that, in all likelihood, he would never be identified and charged with the crime. Notwithstanding all the advances in forensics, there was no way to find a random killer, no way to stop him, no way to feel secure from him. Just thinking about it made her feel more helpless than everyone already believed she was.

  Helen was relieved to hear a vehicle's tires crunching to a stop in her gravel driveway. Even the prospect of more visitors was better than dwelling on helplessness. It was probably the security company, but Pierce didn't need to know that. Better to let him think it was something he wanted to avoid.

  "It sounds like my lawyer is here," she told Pierce. "He said he might stop by this afternoon. As long as you're still here, you might as well make yourself useful, and let him in, so you can discuss cancellation of the contract."

  "Actually, I was just leaving," Pierce said, jogging toward the back door. "I'll talk to him later."

  She was relieved to see him go, and amused by how much of a rush he'd been in, as if he'd thought she might try to stop him. There was no chance of that. She couldn't have caught up with his long-legged pace on a good day, and today definitely wasn't a good one.

  * * *

  The arriving vehicle actually belonged to Lily. Laura got out of the passenger side and raced over to the front porch to hug Helen.

  A moment later, Lily joined them and said, "Pierce from the nursing agency called me first thing this morning. He's not happy."

  "Too bad," Helen said. "Come see my latest scrapbook."

  "I'm sure it's beautiful." Laura let herself into the cottage and headed over to the kitchen island, where she dutifully turned the pages filled with newspaper clippings. Even Laura couldn't bring herself to consider the unembellished text esthetically pleasing, so she settled for saying, "Interesting."

  "I thought you gave up scrapbooking," Lily said. "Didn't you switch to photography?"

  "That's the beauty of retirement. I can do both." Helen pushed aside an empty scrapbook and found the packet of pictures she'd picked up from the local print shop earlier. "Want to see my latest prints?"

  "Not unless they're a lot better than the ones you emailed us," Lily said. "If you hadn't told me they were from your visit with us, I wouldn't have recognized anything in them."

  "She's bound to get better with practice," Laura said, pulling the pictures out of the packet. "Or not."

  Lily glanced at the top one. "That's a picture of grass. Not bad, if that's what you're aiming for, but why would you want a picture of grass?"

  "I like grass." Helen reached for the pictures. "It's a classic subject for art. Walt Whitman wrote a whole book of poems about grass. Why can't I photograph it?"

  "Wait." Lily tugged the packet out of her sister's hands and flipped through the pictures. "I know what these are. They're pictures of the crime scene in your yard. You're still trying to prove you killed Melissa."

  Helen took the pictures back. "Someone has to do it."

  "The police," Lily said firmly. "Not you. You're supposed to stay safely inside your nice little cottage, scrapbooking or doing whatever else you enjoy, not wandering around outside taking pictures of grass and police tape."

  Laura said, "They're very nice pictures of grass and police tape, actually. I d
o think you're getting better at photography. Maybe you're just better at landscapes than portraits."

  "That's a kind thought," Helen said. "I may have a better hobby lined up, anyway. I met someone who offered to teach me to knit. Or crochet. Something that involves yarn, anyway."

  "I'm not buying it," Lily said. "You wouldn't give up your murder investigation that easily. At least promise me you won't interfere with the official investigation."

  "There's nothing to interfere with," Helen said. "The police are investigating the wrong suspect."

  "What if they're right?" Laura said. "What if the burglar really was here, and he comes back, and he finds you here, all alone?"

  "I'm getting an alarm system."

  "That's a good start," Lily said. "But it's not enough. By the time the police could respond—assuming you haven't totally alienated them, so that they dally on the way—you could be seriously hurt."

  "I'll get a dog," Helen said. "Burglars are supposed to be afraid of them. More than they worry about alarm systems."

  "I'd like a dog," Laura said. "Howie says we have to wait until the children are older, though."

  "Aunt Helen won't get a dog," Lily said. "The only creature that irritates her more than homo sapiens is canis lupus familiaris."

  "I'll get an attack cat."

  "Cats are nice too," Laura said. "Maybe we'll get a dog and a cat for the kids. But a cat might be dangerous for you. They can get underfoot. What if you tripped over it?"

  "Besides, a pet can't really help if someone's here to kill you," Lily said. "A vicious enough dog might protect you, but you wouldn't be able to handle him by yourself. And a pet can't dial 911 for real help. You need someone here with you, at least part-time, and you know it."

  "I don't need anyone," Helen said. "Look what happened to the last person who was here, and she wasn't even full-time. I don't want another death on my conscience."