The Calling Read Online Free PDF Page B

guess what the topic of conversation is back on Main Street.”
    “I doubt there’s a person out there on the sidewalks who didn’t somehow know Delia. She worked in the funeral home until she was sixty-five. There wasn’t a death in any family in this town that she wasn’t a part of.”
    “Now the town’s part of her death.”
    He held the station’s back door open for her and went to his desk. The moment he appeared in the pen, though, Hazel could hear a cacophony of questions erupting from behind the counter—the station house was the last place they should have gone for peace and quiet: It was the most logical place for the local reporters to go. Hazel had an instinct that the standard arrangements with the Westmuir press were not going to hold here. The shouted questions were variations on a theme: Did they have a suspect; what was the murder weapon; what was the cause of death. Greene stood empty-handed behind his open desk drawer with a blank look on his face and pushed it shut with his knee. It took a moment for him to collect himself, and then she saw him step forward out of view. “Detective Inspector Micallef will be making a statement here Monday morning at nine A.M. Until then, we have no comment.”
    Please act like small-town reporters,
Hazel said to herself. She stepped back into the doorway of her office to avoid being seen in
case any of the reporters (who knew they had that many reporters in the whole county?) had parked in back. After a couple of minutes, the footfalls in the foyer died down. Greene knocked on her door. She saw through the frosted glass that he was holding up a bottle, and she told him to come in. She ran her finger around the inside of a coffee cup before putting it down on her desk.
    “Double or triple?” he asked, unscrewing the cap.
    “I just want enough to keep my hands from shaking.”
    He poured her four capfuls, which she drained into the back of her throat. “I’d better call my mother.”
    “You want me to go?”
    “No. Stay there. If I’m still on the line in three minutes, get up and knock on the door like it’s something important.” She dialed and her mother answered on the third ring, which meant she’d made her get up and cross to the kitchen. Hazel had already told her mother to take the cordless phone with her wherever she was in the house, but the elder Micallef didn’t want to be stalked by a phone. She’d already heard the news. “Delia Chandler,” she said, as if she were trying to place the name. “That took a long time.”
    “Don’t be like that.”
    “You should be seriously considering that the killer is a woman.”
    Hazel blinked a couple of times and wrote “killer = woman?” on a piece of paper and turned it to Greene. He looked at it and mouthed
no way.
    “You know she never apologized. Not even at your dad’s funeral.”
    “Well, that would have been great timing.” Hazel heard tapping. “What are you doing?”
    “Just writing an e-mail.”
    “To who?”
    “I have friends, Hazel. I write to them. Don’t worry about me spreading state secrets.”
    My eighty-seven-year-old mother has electronic pen pals,
Hazel thought. What kind of world is this? “Is the door locked?”
    “Did you lock it?”
    “Did you unlock it, Mum?”
    “No. When will you be wanting supper?” Hazel heard a faint gonging in the background—e-mail arriving or being sent. “Hazel?”
    “I’ll be eating here tonight. Then I’m going out to see Bob and Gail.”
    “Poor things,” said her mother. “Eat some greens then, dear. And say hello to Raymond.”
    She hung up and held her hand up to Greene, who’d risen and was getting ready to rap on the door. “It’s fine.” He lowered his arm. “Why ‘no way’?”
    “Women who kill usually do it out of passion. The crime scenes are horror shows.”
    She realized there was a gap in Greene’s knowledge of the town’s secret life—somehow he didn’t know what Delia Chandler had done thirty