When they got to the house, Hazel recognized Gord Sunderland's car sitting at the curb. 'Gord,' she said when he rolled down the window, 'we don't have a comment at this time, and neither do the Chandlers. You're just going to have to wait for a statement back at headquarters.'
'Is there going to be a statement?'
'Not today,' she said. 'Monday morning, business hours.'
'That's for the boys from Hillschurch and Dublin, Hazel,' he said. 'I'd appreciate a one-onone.' 'I can't make any promises, Gord.'
'The Westmuir Record is the main source of news for the people of this county, Detective Inspector. They expect a thorough report from us, and the Monday paper was already put to bed Thursday night. If you don't want me speculating aloud, you'll call me at my office when you're done here.'
'I'll call you. Will you go now?' He closed his window without another word and she waited for him to drive off. Greene came up behind her.
'What'd you offer him?'
'Knitting tips.'
'He's a sucker for the knitting tips,' said Greene.
The Chandler house was a nicely appointed second home – after their children, Diane and Grant, had left the childhood house in Port Dundas, Bob and Gail had bought themselves this brand new bungalow, the 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 chilies in the kitchen, and a big abstract over the fireplace. The Chandlers welcomed them into the house sombrely, 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 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 him.
She asked to be dropped off at the station house. They sat in the idling car. 'I can drive you home,' Greene said. 'You should go home.'
'My car's in back.'
'I know you. You go in there and you won't come out until tomorrow.'
'I just want an hour to think,' she said.
He stroked the wheel, looking out the wind-shield. 'There's nothing a CO would be able to tell you right now that you don't already know.'
'Don't read my mind, Ray. It's creepy.'
'I'm just saying.'
She twisted in her seat to face him. 'I should be able to lead this investigation without worrying there's no one in there to look after the shop. That's what a commanding is supposed to do. Did Central think this would never happen? That there wouldn't come a day when something would happen in this town that would need my full attention?'
'I wouldn't use the word think in connection with Central.'
'Six years, Ray. And counting. And if we guff this, Mason will use it as proof that we should be amalgamated.'
'So let's not guff it, Skip. You have me and a dozen good men and women in there who will put in the time and effort. And, hey, you have Spere too.'
'Don't remind me.' She opened the door. 'You going home?'
<
br /> 'Eventually.'
'Uh-huh,' she said. 'Thanks for the pep talk.'
She watched him drive south toward Main Street. His house was north. South was the Kilmartin Inn and the horse track.
Back in her office, she put a call through to the operator and asked her how to bypass a direct connection to someone's line and get right into their voicemail. She wrote down the method and then dialled into Gord Sunderland's messages. 'Oh hi, Gord,' she said. 'I'm sorry I missed you. In any case, I'll be making a statement on the station house steps Monday morning at nine. I'll see you there.' She hung up and grinned at the silent receiver.
4
Sunday, 14 November, 7 a.m.
He passed out of Westmuir and into Renfrew County to the east. As the sun was coming up, he was within fifty kilometres of the Linnet County border, the last county before Quebec. The towns in all of the province were much like the ones he'd encountered in British Columbia and the Prairies – outside of the cities, the villages appeared like beads on a string along two-lane country roads, one perhaps every fifteen or twenty kilometres, about the distance between where you might have last rested your horse and where you might want to stop again. The villages were small, tiny even, some with nothing more than a church, a store and a Victorian post office long since converted to another purpose: a pub now, a bed and breakfast, an antique store. Here, in Humber Cottage, where he pulled over after driving in a mainly easterly direction for three hours, it was a small café. He was tired and in need of something to eat.
He'd sat with Delia until two in the morning, doing his ministrations, cleaning up after himself, and wandering around the house. Just before two, when she was ready, he brushed her hair, sat her up on the couch, and photographed her. He thanked her then, blessing her, and took to the road. He spent the rest of that day, Saturday, 13 November, in a roadside forest, praying and resting. At 4 a.m., he'd got back into his car and started east again. At 6 a.m., he'd switched to smaller roads, and now, an hour later, a predawn gloam was spreading a fan of thick orange light over the few buildings that lined this part of Highway 121 – the hamlet of Humber Cottage – where he would breakfast.
As he came to the door of the café, a pretty woman in her mid-thirties unlocked it for him. 'Early riser?' she said.
'Just passing through.'
'Coffee isn't even on yet. Come in though.'
He told her he didn't drink coffee, not to make any on his account, that if she would bring him some hot water, he would make his morning drink. She brought him a little teapot, stained from years of the hard water in this part of the province, and watched him drop a pinch of grey leaf into the pot. He swirled it around and poured it out into a cup.
'Imported stuff, huh?' she said. 'I have a cousin who has a teashop in Cottingham, just back twenty or so klicks. You should visit her.'
'I grow my own,' he said. 'This is damiana. A natural tonic.' He sipped it. 'Have you any fruit?'
'I can make you cottage cheese with berries in it. That's a good breakfast.'
'If you don't mind, miss, I'd rather just the berries. Nothing else.'
She shrugged her shoulders good-naturedly and turned for the counter. 'I don't mind anything, hon, but you look like you could use a proper meal.'
'It's early for a full breakfast,' he said, 'but thanks. Put the hot water on my bill of course.'
'Wouldn't think of it,' came the reply.
She disappeared into the kitchen, where he presumed she was now slicing his breakfast. He hoped she might bring strawberries with the tops still attached; the greens were rich in astringent, and his gut felt damp and heavy. But it attracted strange looks, a man who ate something destined for compost. We are all destined for compost, he thought, and smiled to himself. We are but clay.
She brought out the fruit – blackberries, strawberries without their greens, raspberries. She had brought a couple of slices of honeydew, which he would not touch, as it broke down in the mouth and caused anything in the stomach to ferment, and he did not touch alcohol. 'Nothing else, then?' she said.
'Not for now.'
She stood by the side of his table, regarding him with a gentle look. 'Are you some kind of a doctor?' she said, her head tilted with curiosity. 'You have the look about you of a doctor.'
'And what does a doctor look like, my dear?'
'A little tired from saving lives.' She laughed at herself. 'Have you been saving lives all through the night, Doctor?'
This one was very charming, he thought to himself. Sweet, even-tempered. But very young. 'I have, in fact, been saving lives. So you can pat yourself on the back for a good guess, miss.'
'What kind of doctor are you?'
He crunched a blackberry between his back teeth. The juice was flat, without its electrics. He was disappointed. 'I'm not really the kind of doctor you might be thinking of. I'm more of what you would probably call a naturopath. I treat the soul as well as the body.'
'Ohhhh,' she said, knowingly. 'You're an herbalist.'
'I do use herbs,' he said. 'But I use many things.'
'And they work?'
'They do. Usually. If it's not too late.' This last statement seemed to sting her, and she laid her hand on the chairback across from him. When he looked up at her face, she was staring past him, out the window and onto the road. 'I've upset you somehow,' he said.
'No. You haven't. But it's sad to think that it could be too late for anyone.'
'You can't unsalt a soup,' he said.
She smoothed the back of the chair and then patted it, as if it were an animal she cared for. 'I have a niece. They keep her at home now because she has seizures. She stiffens up and falls over, as if she's dead.'
'That sounds very serious indeed.' He poured more hot water into his cup. They come to me, he thought. I am called. 'Has she seen a doctor?'
'A raft of them.'
'Bring another cup, Miss ...'
'MacDonald. Grace MacDonald.'
'I'll make you a cup of my tea, and we'll discuss your niece.'
She protested mildly – it was impolite of her to harass him like this at 7:20 in the morning – but he insisted, and she went back behind the counter and got herself a cup. He put a tiny amount of the damiana in it and covered it with hot water. 'It tastes like camomile,' she said.
'Very much like camomile,' he replied. 'Now tell me about this girl.'
When Grace called her sister Terry, it was still before eight in the morning. She told her that she wanted to bring someone over to see Rose. Terry sighed on the other end of the line. Rose was sleeping, at last she was sleeping. But Grace pressed her: she'd had a visitor in the café and she felt he could offer something none of the doctors could. 'He gave me a tea that makes you feel like Wonder Woman,' said Grace. 'You should meet him. He's like a shaman.' She could hear the exhaustion in Terry's voice – Rose's attacks happened around the clock. She would shriek in surprise while in bed, and Terry would rush into the child's room to find her stretched out stiffly on the floor, quaking, or standing in the corner, a look of stark terror on her face. It was like having a newborn in the house again, a haunted newborn.
'I don't want a visitor right now, Grace. I look like hell.'
'He won't care, Terry. I have a feeling. Let us come over.'
She came back to the table with a look of elation on her face. 'You are such a good man to do this,' she said. 'You have no idea what my sister has been through. First her divorce and now this. She and Rose go back and forth to Toronto for tests – they stick her inside of every machine you can think of. Can you imagine?'
'I can.'
She lowered her voice. 'She lives in that house as if her daughter is already dead. As if she's already mourning her. They need some hope.'
'Let's see what we can do,' he said.
The house was only two blocks from the café. He took his valise out of the back of his car, and tugged on the bar fridge door, a habit. He checked the cable from the fridge to the lighter outlet. Then the
y walked together under the fall sun, now fully up over the horizon and casting a lemony light over the road. Terry greeted them at the door with a tired smile. 'It's very kind of you to come, sir.'
'I was just passing through. It's pure coincidence, if you believe in such a thing.'
'Do you?'
'No, I don't. Is she awake?'
'She is now.'
Terry led her sister and the stranger into the house, a lovely old building raised more than 150 years ago. Travelling across the country, he'd seen the materials used in houses get older and older. Here, in Ontario, the farther east you went, the greyer and rougher the stone got. Miss MacDonald's sister lived in a house that in the city would have been an estate for a barrister. Here it was common. He cast his eyes around the stale-smelling home. A framed sampler hung on the wall over the piano, a shibboleth. It meant that, in that town, the family went back generations. The television was on, but it was muted. On it, a woman in an apron stirred a white paste in a bowl.
The girl was waiting in her bedroom, still in her nightdress. She looked at him with black-ringed eyes, inured completely to the appearance of doctors and specialists who came to the house to study her, or saw her in their offices, syringes ready for filling with her blood; machines primed to take pictures of her insides; and their hands, always their clasping, palpating, compressing hands. 'Are you going to stick me, mister?' she said.
'With a needle you mean?'
'Which arm?' She offered to him the insides of her elbows. Her skin was pitifully white, her veins a pale blue beneath her skin.
'I don't need any of your blood, Rose. I just want to talk to you. Maybe look at your tongue and your eyes.'
'Co-operate with this nice man,' said her mother from the doorway. 'He's agreed to take time out of his busy day to have a look at you.'
Rose nodded, resigned, and lowered the sleeves of her nightdress. She sat back down on the edge of her bed. 'I probably have a great big stinking brain tumour,' she said.
'Rose ...'
'Did a doctor tell you this?' asked Simon.
'No, he told Terry something,' said the child, looking at her mother. 'She won't tell me—'
The Calling Page 4