The Bohemian Connection by Susan Dunlap Page B

automatically, as if it were already filled with sewage. I’ve caught myself doing that. I’ve seen other people. No one strolls right next to it as if it were a pothole.”
    “So?” He glared down at the hole. Beyond it one of the deputies was driving off.
    “So Michelle wouldn’t be casually standing at the edge and step back by mistake.”
    “Look, you told the deputy that she came home from a bar. You don’t know what time she got here. She was probably drunk. Half the Russian River area is drunk. If we didn’t have drunks driving into trees, getting into fights, falling down flights of stairs, or wading out into the river until they forget where they are and drown, we wouldn’t need two-thirds of the sheriffs here.”
    “You don’t know she was drunk.”
    “We’ll find out. The lab will tell us.” He took a step toward his car.
    “When?” I demanded.
    “As soon as they can,” he snapped. “It’s a busy time for them. It’s not just the merchants who do a big business when the Bohemians are here. The lab’s got plenty of samples to analyze and they’ll have lots more as soon as the festivities get going proper.”
    “So the question of whether Michelle Davidson was murdered is going to sit on the back burner?”
    “I didn’t say that.”
    “You didn’t say anything definite.”
    He took another step and then swiveled back to face me. “Is there something conclusive, some piece of evidence that you want to tell me about? You’re good at concealing evidence, I know that. Now if there’s something that’s made you decide this is murder, tell me.”
    I had seen his face harden like this before. It had the leathery look of suntan and of disgust. His blue eyes looked icy. There might be more behind that expression, but it was impossible for me to say what it was.
    “Michelle was a gymnast. She had good balance. She knew how to move. Even if she had been drinking she’d still have better reactions than you or I. She wouldn’t fall flat on her back like that. She would roll instinctively.”
    “Everyone has off days.”
    “Then what about the boards. The boards that covered the sewer hole were too close together for her to have fallen between them—particularly backwards.”
    He glanced at the hole. “One board wasn’t even on it.”
    “I know. I moved it.”
    “You what?”
    “Well, I needed to see down there. I wasn’t looking for a body—” I caught myself before admitting I was looking for Ross’s picture. “I explained all this to your deputy.”
    “How close were the boards then?”
    I held my hands about a foot apart.
    “That’s what you remember now?” he asked.
    “Give or take.”
    “Uh-huh. ‘Give or take.’ Six inches Or twelve or fifteen. She was a small woman. She could have fallen through.”
    “No, she couldn’t have.”
    He shook his head. “I have only your very inexact recollection for that. I can’t base an investigation on that, not this week.”
    “You can’t just let this go so you can have more men patrolling the streets. Michelle Davidson had a family. It will make a big difference to them whether she came home so drunk that she fell into a sewer and died, or whether she was murdered. If you leave them with that question, it’s like sticking her body in their living room until you’re ready to deal with it.”
    Under his suntan his face flushed with anger. “I said I’ll handle this investigation. That’s what I do. That’s why I’m a sheriff and you are a meter reader. So leave it alone, okay?”
    “Are you through with me then?” I said, matching the anger in his voice.
    “I just want you to tell me that you’re going to stay out of this.”
    But that was the one thing I couldn’t do.
    I sat in the cab of my pickup and watched Sheriff Wescott drive back toward town.
    I hadn’t realized till I blurted it out to the sheriff how undignified Michelle Davidson’s death was. In life she had been the pompom leader, the prom queen. Once