1 A Dose of Death

by Gin Jones

  Helen tried to ignore the image of herself sitting here, unable to breathe properly, while the lethal pills dissolved in her mouth and the judge waited patiently for the end. It was a little too easy to picture, which only renewed her determination not to give in. It was bad enough that people insisted on helping her against her will when she knew the help actually benefited her; she was not going to sit still for someone helping her to die, which definitely didn't benefit her.

  Helen's irritation gave her a spurt of adrenaline, and she used it to grab the judge's necklace and twist the cord around a finger, making it into a tourniquet. For a moment, she thought it might break, and she forced herself to slow down, tightening it gradually so as not to put any sudden pressure on the cord or the clasp.

  "Cut it out." The judge pulled back, trying to get Helen to release her without, in turn, releasing Helen's nose. "You're going to break it, and I don't have time to waste on getting it fixed."

  Helen tugged carefully on the necklace and decided that no, the cord was not going to break. She was growing lightheaded, though, so she didn't have time to gloat.

  The necklace was going to hold, and the judge needed to choose between freeing herself and feeding Helen the lethal dose of painkillers. The only question was whether the judge would pass out before Helen did. Helen had the advantage that she could get some air, even if it wasn't anywhere near what her panicked lungs were demanding. The judge's air, as well as the blood supply to her brain was going to be completely cut off in another twist of the necklace.

  Helen twisted, aware that the blood supply to her fingers was also being cut off, and the pain was beyond even the power of the painkillers in her system to deal with. Still, it was better than dying.

  The judge's lips were turning blue around the edges of her lipstick, and her eyes were going wide in anger, but she remained determined to hold onto Helen's nose. She even began dropping pills onto Helen's mouth, pushing them between her teeth and her cheeks.

  They were going to kill each other, Helen thought. Just like in the movies, when the hero and the villain manage to shoot each other in the final showdown. The villain would be stopped, but only at the cost of the hero's death.

  Better than dying without taking the judge with her, Helen decided, and twisted the necklace one more time.

  The judge made a strangled sound, dropped the remaining pills all over Helen's face, and using the one free hand to grab for the necklace, tried to slip her fingers underneath the thick silk cord. It was too tight, and her only escape would have been to jerk away from Helen, but she couldn't do that without releasing Helen's nose.

  The judge gave her head a tiny shake, a show of defiance, and stared at Helen, a wordless challenge.

  What was she doing? Why didn't she just give up and save herself? Helen had a belated realization that the judge, given her experience with criminal trials, probably knew just how long it took to pass out from pressure on her neck compared to how long it would take Helen to pass out from lack of oxygen, and had calculated that Helen was going to go first, and then she wouldn't be able to resist the pills.

  And then it dawned on Helen's painkiller-fogged, oxygen-starved brain, that the judge had dropped all the pills, scattering them all over the chair and the floor. Helen could open her mouth to breathe and even spit out the pills already in her cheek long before the judge could possibly retrieve the ones she'd dropped.

  Helen's grimace became a smile of triumph as she unclenched her jaw and sucked in as much air as she could. She could breathe, and Judge Nolan couldn't. Even before her breathing normalized, the judge's eyes fluttered closed and she dropped to the floor.

  Helen waited a moment to make sure the judge wasn't faking it before releasing the necklace, hoping that she hadn't held it too long. She didn't want to kill the judge, just give herself enough time to escape.

  Helen unwound the cord, massaged the feeling back into her fingers, and checked the woman's pulse, which was still beating. Then she limped over to her bedroom, and just in case the judge regained consciousness before the police and ambulance arrived, she locked herself inside. As she dug out one of her spare cell phones, she couldn't help thinking that if it hadn't been for Melissa, Helen wouldn't have had hidden extra phones all around the house, and she'd have had to scramble out of the cottage and through the woods to the neighbors' house again. She refused to feel grateful, though, as she dialed the emergency number. If it hadn't been for Melissa, Helen also wouldn't have been the target of a murderer.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  "I'm fine," Helen told the paramedic twenty minutes later.

  For once, Helen didn't mind that her nieces were hovering over her, tidying up the cottage and fluffing her pillows while she sat in the recliner. They could stay, but the paramedic had to leave now. He should be outside with his partner, helping to take care of the judge who was out in the ambulance. Detective Peterson hadn't been willing to handcuff Judge Nolan to the gurney, but he did have a couple uniformed officers watching her.

  "Aunt Helen is not fine," Lily told the paramedic. "If you knew her you'd know that the fact that she's letting us fuss over her means that she doesn't feel strong enough to chase us away. That's not good."

  Laura stood behind the recliner with her hands on Helen's shoulders, patting them anxiously. "Maybe you should go to the hospital, just to be checked over."

  "No." Helen looked at the paramedic, a pleasant but persistent young man who was crouched down to be at her eye level. "I've already told you the date, the address here, and the president's name. I'm a little sleepy from the original doses of painkiller, but I'm fully oriented, I'm breathing normally, and I'm not bleeding. You took my pulse and blood pressure, and they're fine, considering someone just tried to kill me. I really don't need your help."

  "Never mind," Lily said. "I know that look. She's not going anywhere. At least not while she's conscious. If she passes out, we'll drag her to the hospital."

  "You'll keep an eye on her?" the paramedic said. "She shouldn't be alone for the next few hours."

  Oh, great. Helen wouldn't mind someone staying here overnight, but Lily was probably already calculating how many hours there were in a whole week, and considering whether she could argue that it counted as the medically recommended few. If Helen wasn't careful, the nieces would be using the paramedic's advice to justify a full-time, live-in nurse for the rest of her life.

  "Could you be more specific about that?" Helen asked the paramedic. "Exactly how many hours do I need to be watched?"

  The paramedic laughed as he packed away his blood pressure cuff. "No one's ever asked me that before. Somewhere between twelve and twenty-four hours. If you're going to have any problems, they should manifest by tomorrow morning."

  "I can stay with her overnight," Lily said.

  Satisfied, the paramedic picked up his equipment and headed for the door.

  "Just the one night," Helen said. "I can take care of myself after that."

  "You haven't done so well at it recently," Lily said. "You've been associating with an infamous burglar, you were assaulted in your own home by a con man, and then you opened your door to a murderer."

  Helen decided not to ask how she knew about Pierce. Adam had probably passed along the news, and the nieces had jumped into the car to check on her without calling first. Bringing it up would only remind Lily that Helen hadn't been the one to tell her nieces about the incident. She'd save that conversation for another day. "Jack wouldn't hurt me, and I dealt with the other two all by myself. No security system, no nurse, no bodyguard. Not bad for a decrepit old woman."

  "A decrepit lucky woman," Lily said.

  On the paramedic's way out he held the front door for Detective Peterson to come in.

  The detective loomed over the recliner. "I just need to go over your story once more. Are you absolutely sure the judge killed Melissa?"

  "I'm sure," Helen said. "She confessed to me. And you saw the pills she tried to make me swallow."<
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  "It's just that, well, you thought it was Pierce before, from what I'm told," Peterson said. "And, well, we're talking about the judge."

  She heard the unspoken words: Judge Nolan was someone he'd known and respected for years. All of his life, probably. And he didn't know Helen at all. Not in any good way at least.

  She knew it was a lot for the detective to absorb. She wasn't sure she'd absorbed it yet herself. But the detective was listening to her, really listening, which was a big improvement over his previous attitude. She didn't have enough energy to get out of her chair and do a proper I told you so dance right now anyway, so she didn't demand an apology for his earlier dismissal of her input.

  "I know it's difficult to believe," Helen said. "I couldn't imagine it at first myself, or I wouldn't have let her into the cottage. I would have caught on faster if I'd remembered that the judge had been here right after you took away the murder weapon. I think she was hoping to find it before you did. She probably hadn't been too worried when you had the wrong murder weapon, and there was no reason to suspect her. But once you knew about the cane, there was a risk that her fingerprints were on it, just waiting for some time in the future when the judge's fingerprints might end up in some database. As long as I kept questioning the theory that the Remote Control Burglar had killed Melissa, she would never have been completely safe from exposure."

  Detective Peterson obviously wished Helen was wrong, but he couldn't simply ignore her this time. "The forensics team did lift some prints from the cane. I'll make sure they're compared to the judge's."

  "There's probably some evidence in her car too," Helen said. "The judge gave Melissa a ride to my house the morning she was killed, so there might be something to confirm that they were together then."

  "Did she tell you anything else we should know?"

  "There's a bag with the judge's blood-covered suit somewhere. Maybe still in her car," Helen said. "Call me if you think of anything else." Detective Peterson left the cottage, appearing as anxious to leave as Helen was to have him leave.

  She could hear voices just outside her front door, although she couldn't make out the actual words as Detective Peterson chatted with Tate and his nephew.

  A couple minutes later, the two attorneys let themselves inside. Adam looked past Helen at Lily, an infatuated look on his face, confirming her guess about how the nieces had found out about the situation so quickly. Adam had ratted her out. She was about to lecture Lily on the unfairness of using her feminine wiles on poor, defenseless attorneys, when she noticed that for the first time ever Lily looked equally infatuated with one of her admirers.

  No wonder Lily had been so quick to volunteer to stay here overnight. She'd be closer to Adam. Next thing, Lily would be volunteering to move to Wharton. At least this way she'd want her own space without an aunt serving as an inconvenient chaperone.

  "Lily," Helen said. "Would you and Adam please go outside and see if there are still police and rescue vehicles blocking the driveway? I bet Laura would like to be able to go home to Howie, and I'd like to talk to Tate for a minute."

  Lily herded Laura and Adam outside, and Tate dropped into the sofa across from her. "I knew you were going to be trouble. Strangling a judge into unconsciousness. How do you think the replacement judge is going to feel about that?"

  "That justice was served?"

  "I doubt it. Judges take a real dim view of their colleagues being attacked, even if it was more than justified. They might even blame the attacker's attorney." He looked more energized by the challenge than his words suggested. "You won't have to work with Judge Nolan's replacement, but I probably will, since you won't let me retire from the practice of law."

  "You did say you liked a challenge," she said. "And you've got to admit that I lived up to my promise that any murder case I got involved with wouldn't be an ordinary one."

  "I appreciate that, but I didn't expect you to get yourself assaulted just to keep me entertained."

  "It won't happen again," Helen said. "I'll leave you to find your own entertainments, all alone out in the garage, as soon as you make sure that the murder charges against Jack are dismissed."

  "About the garage," he said. "Now that you don't need my legal advice any longer, are you going to evict me?"

  "I hadn't planned to." Tate was never intrusive the way Melissa had been, and his presence would keep her nieces from worrying or trying to impose someone else on her. "Not as long as you don't pester me the way everyone else does."

  "You're the one who keeps interrupting me."

  "It won't happen again," Helen said. "Now that Melissa's murder is solved, I can take care of myself. I won't be pestering you for any more advice on criminal matters."

  Still, it was kind of nice to know that while she didn't need help most of the time, on those few occasions when she did she would have someone nearby to call on. She could rely on him to wait until she asked for help, and to never, ever be cheerful when he was helping her.

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  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Gin Jones is a lawyer who specializes in ghost-writing for other lawyers. She prefers to write fiction, though, since she doesn't have to worry that her sense of humor might get her thrown into jail for contempt of court. In her spare time, Gin makes quilts, grows garlic, and serves on the board of directors for the XLH Network.

  To learn more about Gin Jones, visit her online at: https://thewritegin.blogspot.com

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  BOOKS BY GIN JONES

  Helen Binney Mysteries:

  A Dose of Death

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