The Deer Leap by Martha Grimes

way.
    Melrose needed no warning about dawdling on his way back up the path. The sprite had probably tired of waiting — he had spent perhaps thirty seconds assuring himself the woman was, indeed, dead — and the kettle was whistling its long, screeching note.
    He shoved it off the burner and went for the telephone.

Fifteen
    T here was so little room in the playhouse, they kept bumping into one another, or at least Wiggins and Pasco did. Jury managed to keep his own space clear. Pasco had called the Selby station. They would try to get hold of Farnsworth, the doctor they seldom needed to call in as a medical examiner. If not him, someone from the local hospital.
    â€œNot a mark, except for the hands.” Jury got up. “Leave it until the M.E. gets here.” He shook his head, looking around the single, square room. Perhaps twelve by twelve, he figured. Tiny. The few scraps of furniture — rocking chair, small bed, lamp, table — were clearly leavings from the dustbin men or unwanted sticks from the pub.
    â€œMacBride’s little girl’s place?” He saw a sack of catfood in the corner.
    â€œNiece,” said Pasco, still looking wonderingly at Melrose Plant, now wearing a Chesterfield coat over his dressing gown.
    Plant was getting damned irritated. “Constable Pasco. I wish you’d stop looking at me that way.”
    â€œI just can’t figure out what you were doing down here — getting a can of Kit-e-Kat, you said?” Pasco gave him a flinty smile.
    â€œHell,” said Melrose.
    â€œStop it, both of you.” Jury was not happy.
    Neither was Plant. “Look, what I really wanted was tea. So I followed the ghostly child to the kitchen —”
    â€œNeahle,” said Pasco.
    â€œWhat? What sort of name is that?”
    Pasco, used to sleeping in until nine, yanked from bed before eight and with another death on his hands, was not happy either. “Neahle Meara. Irish.”
    â€œNail? What an awful name for one so young.”
    â€œSpelled N-e-a-h-l-e.”
    â€œOh. Rather pretty.”
    Jury had picked up an enamel doorknob, handkerchief wrapped around it. “Bag this, Wiggins.”
    Sergeant Wiggins had been standing hunched in the doorway. There wasn’t room for a fourth. He took a plastic bag from a supply he carried about like cough drops. “Shouldn’t we wait for the Selby —”
    â€œProbably, but I’m afraid of too many more feet mucking up this place. We’ve probably done enough damage as it is.”
    Plant said, “Look, I didn’t touch anything.”
    Jury smiled up at him from his examination of the metal stem from which the knob had come off. “I know that.” He got up. His head nearly brushed the ceiling. “You only came for the Kit-e-Kat.”
    Pasco smiled. Melrose smiled back.
    Pasco was kneeling where Jury had kneeled, looking at the inside of the wooden door. “Terrible. It looks like she was trying to claw her way out.”
    â€œClaustrophobic,” said Plant, frowning. “You remember how she was talking about cracking their bedroom door atnight.” Plant bent to look at the marks. Splintered wood and blood.
    Jury could tell from the state of the fingers where the streaks of dried blood on the door had come from. “Absolute panic.” He frowned and turned to Pasco. “Why would she be down here, anyway, Pasco? How well did you know her?”
    Although Pasco’s about as well as anyone else, I guess was casual enough, Jury noticed the flush spreading upward from his open collar. “I don’t know why she’d be down here.”
    Â â€¢Â â€¢Â â€¢Â 
    After the Selby police pathologist had examined the body and it had been zipped up in a rubber sheet, he put the cause of death down to heart failure.
    â€œLike Una Quick.”
    â€œBrought on by fright, from the looks of it,” said the pathologist. “If she was,