[06] The Deer Leap by Martha Grimes

Author:Martha Grimes
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2014-02-06T20:00:00+00:00

It had once been an arbor, now bricked in, ivy-bound, and moss-encrusted. The stone mason had done rather a sloppy job of it: there were cracks, some of them stuffed with rags against the weather. Though the weather today was fine, a throwback to spring.

The building was long, and at first he saw not her but the wooden crates and metal cages. Some were empty, unused perhaps, or temporarily vacated by their tenants.

Their keeper must certainly have been a virtuoso performer. Cats, dogs, a rooster scratching in the dust, and in the largest compartment — more of a horse box — was a donkey. And on his walk through the grounds he had been startled to see a pony that definitely bore the stamp of the New Forest. It chomped at grass in a patch of woodland behind a statue with a broken arm. It had looked at him for some few moments, apparently used to the occasional two-legged animal, and then returned to its grazing.

• • •

Jury’s appearance in the doorway caught her by surprise. She had been forklifting hay into the donkey’s stall. He tried to remember where he had seen such an expression before; it might have been struck from metal, and that was where he had seen it, on all of the coins bearing the profile of the Queen.

A black and white terrier with a missing leg stayed close to her as she went about her work.

“Now, what’s a New Forest pony doing roaming through the woods of ‘La Notre’?” Jury smiled.

He was surprised to see her blush before she turned back to the donkey. “It got hit by a car. Tourist, probably,” she added without rancor.

“But how did you get it here?”

“Pickup truck.”

He leaned against the doorway of the dark hutlike place and simply shook his head. If she shot, no reason to be surprised she drove.

“Doesn’t the Forestry Commission take care of them anymore? Those ponies are protected.”

“Nothing’s protected,” she said evenly. She stepped back and surveyed the donkey. “I got him from a tinker. I had to pay him twenty pounds. Him, his caravan, and everything in it wasn’t worth that. But I didn’t have a gun.”

“You usually carry a gun?”

“No. Mostly when I’m in the woods. Poachers, see.”

“Most people don’t go along with the idea of somebody carrying a shotgun around, you know.”

Carrie opened a cage door in which some mourning doves cooed, put in some feed, and turned to look at Jury. “Especially policemen.”

“Especially.”

There was a long silence. She stood there in her blue dress with a sweater underneath, very straight, like a lightning rod. Jury thought that in that place she was quite firmly grounded. And the longer she looked at him, the deeper the blush. She turned the high color of her face away and took a cat out of its cage. It was a rather ugly black tom with one eye permanently closed.

“Blackstone,” she said. Carrie put him down and hunkered down beside him. “Blackstone, come on.” There was a combination of command and kindness in her tone.

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