Free The Bohemian Connection by Susan Dunlap Page B

house. The screen door was open and by it stood Alison Barluska.
    “Maria Keneally’s not home, Alison,” I called.
    Alison turned abruptly. I couldn’t make out her expression at that distance. From her movements she seemed startled.
    I stood up and called to her again. Alison was just the person I needed to see. She could tell me if Ross had received letters from Michelle. I hadn’t asked her specifically. And she could tell me in greater detail—much greater detail—what Ross had done as the Bohemian Connection. I glanced down, looking for the path through the underbrush. When I looked up Alison was hurrying around the side of the house toward the driveway.
    “Alison, wait!” I called.
    She disappeared behind the house and in a minute I heard her truck pull away.
    I hurried across to the house. Vines grew up the wood sides. The yard was a scramble of low weeds and pine needles. There was another old redwood at the edge of the property that shaded the yard and allowed it to survive untended without being totally overgrown.
    Before she left, Maria Keneally had told me she would unplug all her electric appliances. I had asked her if she wouldn’t feel safer leaving a light on a timer. Housebreaking was an ongoing business in the river area. Each winter, after the summer people had left, a changing crew of winter residents began breaking in. Anyone who went off in September leaving a television or stereo should have been surprised to find it still there when he came back in June. The occasional house was guarded by alarms, a few even connected to the sheriff’s department. But alarms were impractical, particularly for houses as isolated as this one.
    Maria Keneally had been pleased at my concern. She’d made a point of taking me into her living room and showing me her father’s antique pistol that she kept by the door to her garage. “Still shoots ’em dead,” she’d assured me. She wasn’t about to let any shiftless layabout from Guerneville or Monte Rio break into her house and steal her television when she was there, nor did she intend to pay the electric company for light when she wasn’t. And that was that.
    I checked the windows now. No wires were visible. But I hardly expected Maria Keneally to have paid for an alarm system. So it would have been easy for anyone to break a windowpane and let himself in.
    I walked around the house till I found the broken window, a bathroom window shielded from view by overgrown bushes.
    Had Alison broken in here? I had only seen her at the door. Had she been canvassing and knocked, waited, and was leaving when I spotted her?
    I hurried down to the end of the driveway. The Davidson’s Plants truck was not parked by any of the other houses down the road. Alison wasn’t knocking at doors there.
    So, if not canvassing, what had Alison been doing here?

CHAPTER 7
    I DROVE BY DAVIDSON ’S Plants, prepared to ask Alison Barluska what she had been doing at old Miss Keneally’s house. But the nursery was closed and the nursery truck was not in the lot. So Alison had not come back here.
    No matter what Alison had been doing there, I felt sure she would tell me she was canvassing. She might have been working with Ross and checking out the isolated house to use for rendezvous. But she wouldn’t tell me that. She’d say she was canvassing for the gardening service. Or, indeed, she might have been canvassing.
    Ross had been the Bohemian Connection. Had he been succeeded by Michelle, or Alison? Or had all three of them been in it together? Or…
    Before I tried to make sense of that I needed to be sure the man Michelle had met downtown last night was Ross. For that I had to talk to Father Calloway.
    St. Agnes’ Roman Catholic Church was nearly halfway to the Pacific Ocean. St. Elizabeth’s in Guerneville was closer to Henderson, but most of the fishing families had been parishioners of St. Agnes’ for generations. It was Father Calloway who blessed the fishing fleet. It was