Gin Jones - Helen Binney 01 - A Dose of Death Read Online Free PDF Page A

I’m still an officer of the court, and I’d be obliged to turn you in.”
    “ You’re just like everyone else I know.” She shook her head in fake disappointment. “Always warning me against every little plan I make, never letting me do anything fun.”
    “ Yeah,” Tate said with as much sincerity as she’d shown. “Life’s unfair like that. I’d never have gone to law school if it weren’t for family pressure. I could have been a homeless drifter for the past twenty years, and instead I wasted them practicing law.”
    “ I won’t waste any more of your time, then.” Helen turned to leave. “I’ve got a visiting nurse to dispose of. In an interesting manner.”
    “ I appreciate the thought,” he said, “but I’m still obliged to advise you not to kill anyone.”
    Helen retraced her steps to the front door, vaguely disappointed that she couldn ‘t hire Tate. He wasn’t like any of the lawyers at her husband’s beck and call, but he seemed every bit as competent as they were. If she had him on her side, Melissa would be gone before she could drink another can of soda, and her nieces would be too amused by him to be upset. If Melissa continued to be a problem, Helen would just have to convince Tate to come out of retirement. Preferably without having to kill anyone.
     
    *  *  *
     
    Over the course of the next two weeks, Helen tried scrapbooking, like she’d told her nieces she’d planned to do. Melissa, a political junkie, helped sort the hundreds of pictures, fascinated by the candid shots of famous politicians.
    Helen found them depressing, a reminder that she had nothing to show for twenty years of hard work except a box full of pictures of people she no longer cared about. Thinking she might find scrapbooking more interesting if she actually took the pictures instead of just organizing and embellishing them, she purchased a camera and figured out the basics for using it before her nieces made their regular Saturday lunchtime visit.
    Helen had opened the front door to let them in, noticing that her cane wasn’t hanging on the doorknob. She must have left it in Jack’s Town Car when he’d taken her to the camera shop. She’d have to ask him about it later.
    For now, she needed to convince her nieces that Melissa really wasn ‘t working out. Helen snapped pictures of them while explaining how annoying the visiting nurse was. It turned out to be more difficult to put into words than she’d expected. She told them about how Melissa was showing up on days when she wasn’t scheduled, letting herself into the cottage with the key that had been given to her only for emergencies. And then there was the blaring of the local talk radio station throughout her entire visit. Helen could have been lying on the floor, slowly dying from internal injuries, having fallen the night before, and she’d have been a goner before Melissa finished adjusting the radio and deigned to notice her patient. Helen had taken to hiding the radio after each visit, but the nurse managed to home in on it with the speed and precision of a GPS tracker.
    Laura wavered, but Lily held fast, insisting that those were trivial nuisances, and any replacement would have similar foibles.
    There was also the matter of Melissa’s clumsiness, but Helen was reluctant to mention those incidents. She couldn’t entirely blame the nurse for inadvertently drowning an entire bottle’s worth of expensive pills. It had been an accident, after all, something that could have happened to anyone. Never mind that it had been the one drug Helen couldn’t ever skip, not even a single dose, without the risk of a serious flare-up. Fortunately, she kept an extra two-week supply in an emergency bag, a habit she’d picked up from the time she’d had to evacuate the governor’s mansion once, due to a bomb threat, and they hadn’t been allowed back in for a week. And then there was also the time that Melissa had bumped into Helen, knocking her onto the