Closing A Database Connection Opened In Another Class?

I've got a fairly large VB.NET (3.5) project that makes a lot of database calls. So I created a namespace/class just to handle those fuctions. The idea was that this single point of entry into the database would give more control over validating input from users.

So my class looks something like this. (I've chopped some code out for readability, it works just fine except for all the open connections.

[Code]...

So I can close the data reader, but how do I reach back to that original database class and close the connection. If I close it in that original class it will bomb when I try to loop through the data reader the in calling class.I'm sure this is probably pretty obvious but I'm fried from the keyboard.