Chapter 4 - The Poison in the Porcelain
"Rosemary!" I cried out, rolling my mother-in-law onto her back on the thick wool rug and pressing two fingers against her carotid artery.
Her pulse was terrifyingly slow and thready—barely thirty-six beats a minute—and her pupils were sluggish while cold sweat beaded across her pale forehead.
During my six years working in the cardiac step-down unit at Mercy University Hospital before I cut back my hours, I had seen this exact clinical presentation three times.
Someone had crushed a massive, lethal dose of metoprolol and digoxin—the exact heart medications sitting in late Harold’s old upstairs bathroom cabinet—and dissolved the powder into the honeyed chamomile tea Daniel had insisted on carrying out to his mother himself before he came upstairs to find me!
"Jade, call nine-one-one right now and tell the dispatcher we have an acute beta-blocker and cardiac glycoside overdose at Hollis Manor!" I shouted over my shoulder while tilting Rosemary’s chin back to keep her airway clear.
Jade fumbled inside her designer clutch with shaking hands, pulled out her gold cell phone, and swiped the screen open to dial emergency services.
Before her thumb could press the third digit, Daniel lunged across the parlor rug like a cornered wolf, tore the phone out of Jade’s grip, and hurled it with all his strength into the cast-iron backplate of the blazing fireplace.
The lithium battery exploded in a shower of blue sparks and black smoke inside the flames as Jade screamed and stumbled backward over an ottoman.
"Have you lost your mind, Daniel, your mother is dying on the floor!" Jade cried in horror, pressing her back against the mahogany bookshelves.
Daniel didn't even look at his mother gasping for air on the carpet; instead, he strode three paces into the front foyer, threw the heavy iron winter deadbolt across the oak front door, and pocketed the massive antique key.
When he walked back into the parlor archway, he was breathing hard, his hair falling across his forehead and his eyes wide with the terrifying, cold calculation of a man who knew he had just crossed a line from which he could never return if a single witness talked.
"Nobody is calling an ambulance to this house tonight," Daniel said in a flat, chilling voice as he reached out and ripped the landline telephone cord straight out of the plaster wall by the mantel.
"If paramedics walk through that door and run a toxicology screen on her blood, I spend the rest of my life in a maximum-security cage instead of closing the thirty-million-dollar land deal on Monday."
"She is your mother, Daniel!" I said fiercely, positioning my body between him and Rosemary while my left hand slipped silently into my skirt pocket to feel for my cell phone.
"She is sixty-eight years old with a documented history of hypertension, Maggie, and old women suffer tragic fatal heart attacks after heavy holiday meals every single year," Daniel replied coldly, stepping toward me with his hand held out.
"Now give me your cell phone and step away from her so nature can take its course, or I swear to God I will lock you and Jade in the cellar until the coroner leaves tomorrow morning."
I pulled my phone halfway out of my pocket, pretending to surrender it while my thumb blindly hit the emergency SOS triple-click button on the side casing—only to see through the parlor window that the violent November sleet storm outside had knocked down the rural cellular repeater tower on the ridge, leaving my screen flashing with the dreaded words No Service.
We were five miles down a private wooded road with no cell signal, a severed landline, and a locked iron gate at the highway.
As Daniel lunged forward to snatch the phone from my grip and grab me by the hair, Jade Prescott suddenly realized that a man willing to watch his own mother die on the parlor rug would never let a witness who knew about his two-million-dollar fraud walk out of this house alive.
With a shrill cry of sheer terror and fury, Jade grabbed the heavy brass fireplace poker from the hearth stand and swung the iron rod with both hands straight across the back of Daniel’s right shoulder blade!
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Daniel roared in pain and dropped to one knee on the hearthstones, and before he could recover, I hooked my hands beneath Rosemary’s arms, shouted for Jade to grab her legs, and dragged my unconscious mother-in-law straight through the dining room into the reinforced oak-and-steel butler’s vault—slamming the three-inch Prohibition-era door shut and throwing the interior iron crossbar home a split second before Daniel’s weight crashed against the outside wood!
Then, as I sank onto the cold marble floor beside Rosemary in the cramped vault, a white-hot blade of agony tore across my lower back and stomach, and when I looked down at my hands in the dim amber light, I realized the stress and lifting had triggered violent preterm contractions eight weeks early!
