Read The Calling for Free Online Page A

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 colour. '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
churchgoing 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 homecare? 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 almost eight years ago. There had been a long
period in Delia's life when she had not felt welcome
in town, and after that, she had retreated,
had closed ranks around herself. Where once
she had been a vivacious woman, even beautiful, she
had become frightened, closeted. Hazel could not
imagine Delia Chandler letting a stranger into her
house. 'We'll talk to anyone she might have had
contact with at the clinic here, Bob. Glen
Lewiston was her oncologist, right? She saw him
pretty frequently?'
    'Yes,' said Bob. 'I took her at least once a week.'
    'He'll know anyone she got referred to after she
was diagnosed. We'll follow that trail.'
    'You honestly think my mother was killed by
some doctor or nurse?'
    'We have no idea yet. We're trying to cover all
the bases.'
    * * *
    At the door, both officers shook hands in turn with
the Chandlers. Hazel held on to Bob's hand a little
longer. 'I'm sorry to have to follow all this procedure,
Robert, when all I want to do is tell you how sorry I
am. Do you know, when Andrew and I had Emilia,
your mother drove over to the house with a lasagna
as soon as we got back from the hospital.'
    'She made a fantastic lasagna,' said Bob
Chandler.
    'We lived off it for a week. I blame your mother
for Emilia's pasta addiction – she had as much of it
that week as we did.'
    'It was the béchamel,' he said, laughing, and
then, just as suddenly, he was crying. Hazel stood
there holding the hand of her friend from childhood,
whom she'd dated twice or three times when
she was a senior in high school and he was a
sophomore, whose mother had had an affair with
her father, whose family had gone back with her
own family perhaps five generations, and to keep
herself from crying in uniform, she stepped back up
onto Bob Chandler's stoop and held