Shadows in Scarlet

by Carl, Lillian Stewart

  “Bill,” protested Helen, “this is deadly. No pun intended. Can’t you jazz it up?”

  “I’m not a movie star,” Hewitt said.

  “Well no, you’re not, are you? Okay, let me get a few more general shots and we’ll find some talent to do a voice-over. What’s in these boxes?”

  Hewitt acknowledged Amanda’s presence with a nod and bent over one of the trays. “Bits and pieces of fabric, leather, and metal. Lots of metal. He might have been a military officer. Revolutionary War, maybe. Or Civil War. There’s an epaulette.” His forefinger indicated a dirt-encrusted doodad that could have been anything from a tea strainer to a dead hedgehog. Amanda shook her head. Hard to believe those lumps were the silver buckles and braid in Grant’s portrait.

  “Doesn’t look like much,” said Helen.

  “When the conservation people get done it’ll be photogenic,” Hewitt promised. “This object still in the ground is interesting. I think it’s a scabbard.”

  An uneven muddy ridge barely emerged from the soil. Amanda felt a tickle between her shoulder blades. She’d seen that scabbard already. Then it had been cleaned and polished and held in strong hands. Now it was tarnished and crushed by the weight of dirt and time… .

  The tickle between her shoulder blades was a bug. She contorted herself until she could slap at it.

  “Just a scabbard?” Helen asked. “No sword?”

  “Not yet. We’ll give the hole another going-over tomorrow. Sift out trouser-buttons. Shreds of fabric. The small bones of the hands and feet. If the sword’s there it’s buried deep.”

  Don’t hold your breath for those trouser buttons, Amanda thought. And she doubted that the sword was in the grave, since Captain Grant was wandering eternity without it.

  “Hmmmm.” Helen looked narrowly at the lengthening shadows and reached for her camera case. “Let me know when you get everything tidied up. I need some personal details, bringing history to life and so on.”

  Amanda turned a laugh into a cough. “When can I visit the lab?” she asked. “I’d like to know what you find out about the body.”

  “Next Monday?” Hewitt suggested. He wiped his hand across his domed forehead, adding one more smear of dirt.

  “I’ll be there. Thanks.” She scratched her back. “So what happens to the bones if you can’t identify him?”

  “They’ll be re-interred. With his comrades, if we can at least establish which war he was in and which side he was on. Assuming it makes a difference after all this time.”

  “Someone was waiting for him to come home,” said Helen.

  Thank you, Amanda told her silently.

  “I didn’t mean,” Hewitt began, and then shrugged. “I’ll keep you posted, Miss Witham, Miss Medina.”

  “Ms.,” Helen corrected with a grin.

  “Amanda’s fine,” said Amanda, even though she hated to discourage Hewitt’s courtly manners. “I’ll check back with you tomorrow.”

  The last bedraggled student carried off the last dirty box. Amanda and Helen strolled away through the dusk, leaving Hewitt to cover the excavation site with sheets of plastic. “You want to come in for a glass of tea?” Amanda asked.

  “Thanks, but I promised Lady C. I’d drop in this evening and sketch out ideas for a video about the body.”

  “Isn’t Cynthia jumping the gun? No one knows anything yet.” Mentally Amanda crossed her fingers behind her back.

  “Yes,” said Helen, “but she serves a damn good brand of bourbon.”

  Laughing, Amanda waved Helen off to the parking lot and went back inside the house. Dehumidifiers on. Floodlights on. Alarms set.

  She flopped down on the couch, pitched the clipboard onto the chair opposite, and scratched her back against the throw pillows. It’d be nice to have a guy around, she thought, if only to reach the places she couldn’t reach.

  Twilight lingered outside, making Lafayette a silhouette against the pale square of the window, but her apartment was dark.

  I’m not alone at night, she thought. It didn’t seem to bother the cat that he couldn’t go out after dark because of the alarms. He was so smugly certain he owned the house he had to be a reincarnation of Page Armstrong himself. His black and silver stripes and white breast even made him look formally dressed. Amanda wondered how old he was. Wayne said he’d appeared as the renovations were getting underway and kept coming back, no matter how many times the Benedettos tried to take him in. Not that that was a problem, the tourists loved him and he made a good little buddy… .

  Lafayette sat up, his ears cocked forward, his eyes reflecting the last few rays of light. Amanda, too, sat up.

  Lafayette’s ears flipped back. His teeth flashed sharp and white as he hissed. In one fluid movement he was off the windowsill, across the desk, and under the couch.

  Now what? Amanda got up and peered out the window. Nothing moved within the floodlit perimeter of the house… . Wait a minute. The cat hadn’t been looking out the window but through the room and at the door.

  Oh for the love of… ! Without turning on the lights, Amanda tiptoed across the room, put her hand on the doorknob, and flung open the door.

  Nothing. The corridor was dark and empty and—cold. Very cold. But Grant had appeared last night—she’d gotten the message, already … A soft warm breeze dissipated the cold, caressing Amanda’s face and raising gooseflesh on the back of her neck. The scent of whiskey filled the air around her. A man’s questioning laugh echoed in the corridor. Then warmth, scent, and laugh were gone.

  Amanda backed away and shut the door behind her. She turned on the lights, wincing at their glare. So he intended not just a cameo but a continuing role? Was that it?

  Great. She was now caretaking a haunted house. Which was one protocol that sure as hell wasn’t written up in her textbooks.

  Chapter Four

  Amanda peeled off her dress, petticoats, and the fashionable torture device of the stays. Thank goodness she had a different outfit for every day of the week, and full use of Colonial Williamsburg’s laundry services. She’d read how the reek of Queen Elizabeth I’s elegant velvet gowns would have dropped a moose at ten paces. Personal hygiene had made some progress over the centuries, even if advertisers wanted to take the “personal” out of it.

  Thursday had gone well. She’d been preoccupied—go figure—but the tourists had come and gone in an orderly manner, Wayne had been thoroughly professional, and temperatures had been a bit cooler. Lafayette had earned cute points playing with Roy and a dangling piece of paper. No telling how many family vacation albums immortalized the likable tabby.

  Once more in T-shirt and shorts, Amanda made her inspection of the house. From Sally’s room she saw Bill Hewitt’s crew packing up and heading home. “They must have found everything there was to find,” she said to the miniature portrait by the window. “I’ll go ask about your sword.”

  The painted features gazed silently up, not at her but past her. Making a face at herself in the mirror—talking to his picture, right—she hurried down the stairs and intercepted Hewitt on the first terrace. “What else did you find?”

  “Buttons. Finger bones. Swatches of fabric.”

  “So the grave is empty now? You never found a sword to go with the scabbard?”

  “Yes, the grave is empty,” said Hewitt. “No, there was no sword. I’ll send the paid workers out here tomorrow to continue tracing the footprint of the summerhouse. The students I’ll keep with me in the lab. This is a textbook case. Monday about one o’clock?”

  “That’s cool. Thanks.” Amanda stood bopping the clipboard against her thigh while the excavators’ cars pulled out of the parking lot. Silence fell over the sun-saturated lawns and roofs. The opening at the end of the allee that had once framed the summerhouse now framed nothing but leaves trembling in the wind and shadows stretching across the grass. Even if she walked down there she wouldn’t see anything except a hole in the ground. James Grant deserved better than a hole in the ground. Not that everyone
didn’t come to one—or its equivalent—in the end, but the traditional rituals added some dignity to the process.

  She dawdled at her circuit of the house, picking up the odd piece of litter, propping up a top-heavy zinnia in the kitchen garden, watching a boat cut a furrow in the shining surface of the river. The sun sank. The dusk thickened, softening the precise face of the Hall.

  At last Amanda went inside, pushed buttons, and flicked switches. She stared into her freezer at the boxed meals. No reason she couldn’t go into town and buy herself a Big Mac, but she was oddly reluctant to leave the house. And it was too far out for pizza delivery.

  She pulled out a Chinese dinner, microwaved it, and ate it in front of the television. Nothing was on but reruns of reruns. She turned the television off.

  Her ears were tuned so finely to the sounds of the house that Lafayette’s slurps as he groomed himself sounded like a lion dismembering a zebra. But beyond the hums of the refrigerator and the fans she heard nothing.

  Her computer stared blankly at her. Yes, she had to work to do. Just one more quick inspection tour would do.

  She walked through the house, thinking that even while the light fixtures were carefully shaded, the rooms that had been designed for candle and lantern-light seemed harshly lit by electric bulbs. In the entrance hall she stood with her hand on the switch but didn’t turn on the lights. The glow from the dining room was more than enough to show her the staircase.

  It ran upward into night, empty. The warm, still air pressed against her damp skin. The only presence was her own.

  Like that Zen tree in the forest, did a ghost exist only if someone alive was there to see it and hear it? Amanda had seen and heard it. Him. Unlike Wayne, who’d been scared by his own imagination, she hadn’t imagined the man on the stairs. If she needed any proof, “Dundreggan” was written on the back of the miniature. She’d never heard of the place until he’d named it.

  She wasn’t scared. Amused, sort of. Intrigued, like any red-blooded woman would be by an attractive man. Resentful, even—that man was putting her in an awkward position. If she wasn’t careful she’d have to decide between the truth and ridicule or a lie and her conscience… .

  The truth, Obi-Wan Kenobi said in Return of the Jedi, depended on your point of view.

  Amanda turned herself around and walked back through the house, plunging each room into darkness behind her. In her apartment Lafayette was asleep on his favorite chair, half turned on his back, thoroughly at peace. Must be nice, she thought as she sat down and booted up her computer.

  *

  Carrie Schaffer arrived at the Hall Friday morning with new scripts for the interpreters, which she handed out at a council of war in the main kitchen. “Helen’s news release hit the papers last night,” she explained. “There’s nothing like a dead body, no matter how old, to bring in the sightseers. Can’t I turn my back on you for a minute, Amanda, without you digging up some new attraction?”

  “I didn’t dig him up,” Amanda replied. “Bill Hewitt dug him up.”

  “Showing people the gravesite and answering questions means stepping out of character,” protested Roy.

  Wayne nodded. “The Armstrongs didn’t know there was a dead body at the foot of the garden, did they?”

  Did they? Amanda asked herself. Page the host would never sneak up behind a guest and crack his skull with a fireplace poker or slip a letter opener between his ribs. Whether Page the patriot—and the father—might have gone right ahead and offed an enemy was another matter.

  “Do the best you can,” Carrie said. “We’re skating a fine line between realism and parody here anyway.”

  “Just as long as we get points for artistic interpretation,” said Amanda. Everyone laughed except Wayne, who looked faintly puzzled.

  One of the women playing the part of a house servant glanced out the window. “Here comes a gaggle of little girls. Maybe I should say a giggle of little girls.”

  “Battle stations,” called Wayne, in his best bass voice.

  Funny, Amanda thought as she turned toward the door, when he was around his mother Wayne’s voice rose a full octave.

  The girls were waiting on the doorstep. “Welcome to Melrose Hall,” Wayne began, and Amanda made her first curtsey of the day.

  By the time she reached her last curtsey it was not so much the tourists’ questions about the skeleton as her own cautious answers that were rubbing a blister on her patience. Aware of her own irritability, she was extra nice to Wayne when he complimented her on her dress, the same one she’d worn every Friday. “Thanks. Your mother did a good job picking out fabrics and designs, didn’t she?”

  “She’s an expert on eighteenth century stuff—furniture, clothing, you know. Some of my earliest memories are of being dragged around to estate sales and flea markets. She found a lot of period pieces for the Hall.” Wayne opened the door to the kitchen and ushered Amanda through.

  Carrie was sitting at the table filling in a report. “We had more visitors than usual today,” she announced. “Just wait until tomorrow. It’s going to be a zoo.”

  Wayne took off his wig, loosened his neck cloth, and mopped his face. “How about dinner at the nice, cool Trellis, ladies? My treat.”

  He knew Carrie would have to go home to her family. Amanda didn’t have the energy for another “just friends” speech. She abandoned her brief vision of wineglasses slippery with condensation, meat and vegetables which had never touched microwaveable plastic, and dessert, any dessert, as long as it was chocolate. “Thanks, Wayne. But I really need to work on my thesis.”

  “Oh. Well, okay. See you tomorrow.”

  Carrie waited until the noise of his footsteps on the gravel walk outside had faded and died before she said, “He has a heck of a crush on you.”

  “You think?” Amanda retorted, and added more seriously, “Every relationship I’ve ever had has been safe. Nice. Shades of beige. Just once I’d like to attract a guy with some zing, some style.”

  “Jack wasn’t exactly Mr. Sophisticate when I married him, but he got better.”

  “Don’t even think about matchmaking.” Amanda flopped down in a chair and squeaked as the fake whalebone of the stays gave her a vicious poke. Aristocratic women didn’t flop, did they?

  “Good God, no,” Carrie returned. “We girls get to make our own matches and our own mistakes these days. If Sally met handsome Captain Grant now she’d run away with him and have a quick glorious fling. And end up in a council house on the wrong side of the Britrail tracks, mobbed by kids who ask for biscuits instead of cookies, running up a transatlantic phone bill begging Page to send her a plane ticket home.”

  Amanda’s whoop of laughter was reduced to a wheeze. “And you were the one talking about the importance of romantic illusions!”

  “Illusions in the sense of ideals, not delusions.”

  There were delusions, Amanda told herself, and then there were delusions. “Where did that miniature of Grant come from?”

  “Cynthia bought it at a London auction house several years ago. She’s been on the art and antiques circuit for years, so the dealer knew it was something she’d want and contacted her in plenty of time for the sale. Earning himself a tidy sum in the process, no doubt.”

  “And before that?”

  “Someplace in Britain. In Scotland, I guess, since Grant was in a Highland regiment. He had to come from somewhere, didn’t he?”

  Other than the fourth dimension, Amanda thought. “It says ‘Dundreggan’ on the back of the picture… .”

  Carrie’s brows rose.

  “I knocked it over the other day,” Amanda explained. “It’s all right, I put it back together.”

  “Watch it, young lady,” Carrie told her with mock severity. “Never heard of Dundreggan, sorry. I can look it up, if you like, when I get back to the library next week.”

  “I’ll see what I can find on the Net. Clan Grant, that sort of thing.”

  “The other day you’d hardly admit
James Grant existed.”

  “Yeah, well… . I thought I’d include Melrose’s cast of characters in my thesis. Hang the artifacts on the family tree.”

  “Human beings wandering among the jargon in an academic paper?”

  Amanda grinned. “All this time you thought I was a meek little scholar and I turn out to be a radical anarchist.”

  “There’s plenty about Page and Sally at the library,” Carrie went on. “About all the Armstrongs, for that matter, if you’re wanting to get that close and personal. But Grant… . Hmmm. The histories on this side of the Atlantic are written from the American point of view, naturally, but maybe I can order his military records from the UK. An army bureaucracy grinds slowly, but it grinds exceedingly fine.”

  “There’re regimental museums all over the UK, aren’t there? And everybody’s got a web site these days.” Amanda saw menus and links unfurling like battle flags before her eyes.

  Carrie stood and stretched. “Why don’t you ask Cynthia where the miniature came from? Art dealers aren’t always as picky as they should be about provenience, but Lady C. would never buy something that wasn’t authentic.”

  “Thanks a lot, Carrie. You’re a big help.”

  “No problem. Can’t have you wandering the groves of academe all by yourself, you might get mugged by a footnote.”

  “Isn’t that the truth.” Careers were made and broken on the strength of your sources. The problem was, Amanda had a source she couldn’t footnote at all.

  “I’d better run,” Carrie went on. “Every now and then I have to maintain the illusion I’m a responsible housewife and mother. See you tomorrow.”

  “Take care.” Amanda hauled herself to her feet, saw Carrie out into the amber-rich sunlight of early evening, and locked the door after her.

  She stood for a few moments listening. The house was silent, like the chattering groups of tourists had taken sound away with them. The moist air echoed hollowly in her ears. Not a breath stirred.