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first in a new subdivision. Now it was surrounded by variations on its theme: Where there had once been the Hoxley farm, there were now eighty homes, all built in the last fifteen years, that looked like they’d been assembled out of a builder’s Lego kit with eight different window types in it, six roofs, twelve front doors, eight variations on the lintel, a couple of turrets, and a bunch of gables. Mix them all up and they turned into homes with a soupçon of individuality, but to Hazel, they looked like a botched exercise in architectural cloning.
    Inside, the prerequisite Robert Bateman and Alex Colville lithographs, laminated posters of different varieties of chilis in the kitchen, and a big abstract over the fireplace. The Chandlers welcomed them into the house somberly, and now Bob and Gail sat on the couch across from the two chairs occupied by the officers, each of whom held a glass of ice water in their hands. After the offering of regrets and after Gail had dried again a face that had been drenched in tears all day, Hazel put her glass under her chair and took out her notebook.
    “I know this isn’t easy for you folks,” she said. “But we do have to ask you some questions.”
    “Go ahead,” said Bob Chandler.
    Hazel flipped open her notebook and turned to a clean page, fixing it down with the black elastic. “First off, Bob, Robert . . . how was your mother’s mood recently? Did she seem upset to you about anything?”
    “Well, she had cancer, Hazel.”
    “And how do you think she was coping with it?”
    “I guess okay. She was resigned.”
    Hazel wrote “resigned” in her notebook. “So she wasn’t despondent?”
    “Did that look like a suicide?”
    “No, no, not at all, Bob. And it wasn’t. But the thing is . . . ” She flipped back a couple of pages in the notebook.
    “The thing is,” said Ray Greene, “your mother let whoever did this to her into the house. She knew him. It’s possible she asked someone to help her . . . ”
    Bob Chandler’s face was changing color. “To help her
what?
”
    “To . . . assist her,” Greene said. “I know it’s not pleasant to think of, but we have to consider all the possibilities.” He continued in a measured way. “What do you think . . . the chances are that, maybe, your mother arranged with someone . . . ”
    “
Bullshit,
” said Chandler. “My mother was a church-going woman. She would never have . . . ” He trailed off.
    Hazel held her hand up to Greene, who gratefully closed his notebook. “Bob, there was an IV puncture in her upper inner thigh. We found it after Cassie Jenner brought you home. The person who visited your mother put a needle into her vein. We have reason to think he did it with her permission.”
    “So he, what? He offered to euthanize my mother but then tried to cut her head off? What are you saying?”
    “We’re saying,” came in Greene, “that your mother may have picked the wrong person to ask for help.”
    Both Bob and Gail stared at him for a moment.
    “People do uncharacteristic things when they’re facing the unknown,” he continued. “Your mother may not have been herself when . . . 
if
 . . . she made these kinds of arrangements.”
    Bob Chandler seemed to subside in his chair. “I don’t know . . . I just don’t know.”
    “Would it be one of her doctors, maybe?” asked Gail. “Although, I just can’t imagine.”
    “Do you know
all
of her doctors?” said Hazel. “Did she have any home care? Maybe she took a delivery of something.”
    “Bob was her delivery boy,” said Gail. “He took her to her doctors, he took her shopping, everything. She didn’t need a stranger to bring anything to her. Bob once brought her an aspirin at two in the morning.”
    Hazel thought about this and realized she could not remember the last time she’d seen Delia Chandler in town by herself, and she certainly had not visited that house, not since Eric Chandler’s wake