Free The Bohemian Connection by Susan Dunlap Page A

before the age of ten. She had outlived the last of them by thirty years. When I worked the hillside route the cemetery was a good place for lunch. I had sat here many times before when I wanted to sort things out. I had wondered about Maria Keneally and her sad life.
    I sat again on her stone and stared beyond the cemetery at a log house thirty yards away. The house was owned by her niece, an old woman of the same name. When I came to read her meter, she always rushed out, offered me tea (an offer no one who works outside all day can afford to accept), and invariably stated that it was good for an old lady to live so close to the cemetery. Not so far to go.
    After the initial shock, I had smiled at the old refrain. I hadn’t mentioned that this old cemetery was full and her remains would have to be taken to the new graveyard across the river.
    As it turned out, she went to neither, but in May had gone for a summerlong visit to a niece, yet another Maria Keneally, in County Cork. Her yard, however, was so clearly untended that it looked as if she had been deposited in the graveyard.
    A squirrel ran across the yard in front of the house and toward the giant redwood.
    Enough of houses and rodents, I told myself. Why would Ross have killed Michelle? Even though Ross hadn’t been the Bohemian Connection for eight years, the need he had filled in that job still existed. Men still had rendezvous, doubtless still coveted a lid of grass or a snort of coke. So if Ross were no longer the Bohemian Connection, who was? Craig? Ward? Or some other man?
    Or did the Connection have to be a man? A chairman of the board might be unnerved to discover his illicit rendezvous was arranged by a woman, but his minions wouldn’t care. And marijuana farmers and coke dealers will sell to anyone. No, there was no reason the Bohemian Connection couldn’t be a woman.
    Ross had had the necessary contacts both at the Grove and in town. Whoever had taken over after him needed to know those people. The locals would deal only with someone they could trust, and the visitors would be even warier. The only way both groups could feel sure of the new Connection would be if that person were Ross’s hand-picked successor.
    Besides having Ross’s trust, what would someone need in order to be the Connection? A working relationship with the local suppliers. A good knowledge of the area. No one who wandered in cold from San Francisco or Oakland could find a suitable rendezvous for a company president and his lover and know where to get good grass from the backwoods gardens to the north of here. And the Connection would need his time to be flexible. A sudden rush of demands couldn’t be handled in half an hour. It was hardly work that could be farmed out.
    Of the people I had met asking about Michelle’s disappearance, it was Michelle herself who most nearly fit this description. Michelle had had more time than she could handle. She had grown up in Henderson, gone to school here, known all the winter people. And perhaps more importantly, she alone had trusted Ross. It was she whom he could trust in return. It was she to whom he could turn over the Connection trade knowing it would stay as he had left it.
    Or could he? Eight years can alter a lot. In less time than that every cell in the body changes. In those eight years the Michelle who had been an adoring high school girl had become a woman. In that time the Bohemian Connection might no longer have been Ross’s gift to her, but have become her own business. That didn’t seem like something Ross would comprehend easily.
    Had Ross come back wanting a share of his trade? Or perhaps all of it? Had he viewed the intervening years as a period when Michelle ran a business for him, just marking time till he returned and took charge again? Had he announced as much and Michelle objected? Had they had a few drinks, walked back to Michelle’s house, argued, and he killed her?
    Leaves crackled. I looked toward the empty