The Deer Leap Read Online Free Page B

evening had brought down a telephone line and she hadn’t been able to ring up the doctor from her cottage. So she had stupidly taken the walk up thathilly High Street to the call box dutifully to report to the doctor.
    The call had never gone through; Una had passed out in the kiosk and instead of slumping to the floor, as one might have suspected, she’d been supported by the telephone box itself. Must have thrown her arm across it — as police reconstructed the case — to keep from falling.
    Dr. Farnsworth did not appreciate the irony of his patient’s death put down to a gradual but nonetheless steep climb to a call box to report on the state of her health.

    It was morning and Barney was still missing.
    Melrose Plant would be here at any moment. Now, of course, she was hideously embarrassed that she’d got him all the way down here to Hampshire under false pretenses. Perhaps she could suggest they take a nice drive through the New Forest or have lunch somewhere. Or something. Polly scrunched down in her chair in the dining room of Gun Lodge.
    Why she felt perfectly comfortable talking to him — he who was, or had been, one of the Earls of Caverness, and Viscounts Somebody, and a baron, and who knew what else, and had given it all up . . . Polly knifed the table mat as if it were one of the defunct titles. Not that she gave a fig for a title. She simply disliked people acting in a way contrary to what she would have them doing in her books. Earls and dukes and marquesses were supposed to stay that way.
    â€œMa’am,” said a spindly girl who seemed as shy as Polly herself. The girl had waited at table last night, had brought her early tea this morning, and seemed to be the only employee in Gun Lodge. She deposited a bowl on the table.
    â€œWhat’s that?” asked Polly, peering into the bowl.
    â€œPorridge, ma’am,” said this pathetic breath of a girl, who then scurried away.
    Polly had no appetite anyway. Not with Barney gone.
    The girl was back. Go away, she thought with the embarrassment of one who doesn’t want to be caught crying. “A gentleman to see you, ma’am.”
    She looked down, listened to the approaching footsteps, said a brief (and rather surly) Good morning to Melrose Plant’s Good morning, Polly, and without preamble, told him: “Coronary occlusion, that idiot doctor said. Well, maybe it was, but why was she in that call box anyway?”
    Melrose Plant put his silver-knobbed stick on the table, sat down, and said, simply, “I don’t know. Why’re you crying?”
    â€œI’m not,” said Polly, his obvious sympathy breaking a logjam of tears, which now flowed freely. “My cat’s missing.”
    â€œBarney?”
    That was the trouble with him. He even remembered the name of her cat. Not only that, but he seemed more interested in her cat than that she’d got him here on a wild-goose chase. She wiped her face with her napkin. Why he seemed actually to admire her was beyond her comprehension. She was off-hand, rude, demanding, and temperamental. “You’re a masochist,” she said, sniffling.
    â€œObviously,” said Melrose, looking at the bowl. “So must you be if you’re eating that.” He took a spoon and stuck it in the porridge. It stood there.
    â€œDon’t touch it. You may never get back to Ardry End. I was met at the door by a gray-mustached, dreadful man who seemed to want a full accounting of my life before he’d rent me a room.”
    â€œWhy did you stay, then? There’s a perfectly good little pub with rooms a bit farther along.”
    Polly looked up, enraged. “He told me there wasn’t any other place.”
    Looking round at the prison-gray walls, the plastic place-mats, the porridge, Melrose said, “How else could he get custom?Never mind. You can have my room at the pub and I’ll stay here.”
    â€œI can’t.