Shadows in Scarlet

by Carl, Lillian Stewart

  Amanda took a step toward him. Light flooded in the front windows and the alarm system began to whoop. Her entire body convulsed.

  No one was there. The hall was lit only by the shine of the floodlights outside. The staircase rose blankly toward the second floor. Amanda galloped back down the corridors to her apartment, slamming doors behind her.

  All the lights were on in her living room and kitchen. She threw herself at the control panel and killed the deafening screech of the alarm. The sudden silence made her ears ring.

  No, that was the phone ringing. First the Benedettos, then the police. No, no, Amanda explained, lightning struck a transformer, and when the power came back on it started the alarm, no, everything’s all right, thank you anyway.

  She hung up the telephone. Her legs wobbled and her head spun. She staggered to the couch and plopped down.

  She hadn’t seen him. She’d imagined him. He’d been a trick of the light. Of the darkness… . It hadn’t happened. It couldn’t have happened.

  Lafayette oozed out from beneath the couch and looked accusingly up at her. She looked right back at him. “He’s the body in the garden, isn’t he? You heard him coming, from the summerhouse back to the staircase he remembered.”

  The cat didn’t blink.

  “But what the hell is James Grant, of all people, doing in a hole in the ground in Melrose’s garden?”

  The cat stretched and yawned.

  “I did see him, didn’t I? I haven’t lost it. I’m not nuts. I saw him.” Amanda lay back against the throw pillow, staring upward at the ceiling. She saw a scarlet coat, an empty scabbard, and a fall of reddish-brown hair above a puzzled face. She heard a cultured baritone saying, I do beg your pardon… .

  He’d been there. She’d seen him. And no way did he have knobby knees and jug ears.

  Amanda looked down at Lafayette. “Like you’d make a believable witness? Yeah, right.”

  He sat down and started to wash his face, committing himself to nothing.

  Chapter Three

  The morning was far from cool. The showers of the night before had simply added to the Amazonian atmosphere. By the time Amanda checked out every room of the mansion she was thoroughly hot and bothered.

  Not one door was open. Not one window was cracked. Of all the things in the house, only two had been moved: the miniature of James Grant was lying on the floor of Sally’s bedroom and her portrait at the top of the stairs was hanging off-center. Which was relevant and all that, Amanda told herself as she put both pictures back where they belonged, but didn’t explain anything.

  Nothing else was out of place. Melrose Hall was locked up as tightly this morning as it had been when Amanda settled down to her dinner last night. No one could have gotten into the house and played a trick on her with video projectors or tape recorders. Even if there’d been a secret passage—and there wasn’t, the place had been worked over during renovation—there was still the slight problem of producing special effects without electricity.

  Great. Amanda poured herself into the straightjacket of stays, garters, hoops, petticoats, dress. She had to make an effort to focus her eyes. When she’d finally gotten to sleep last night she’d dreamed of staircases snarled with blackberry and scarlet coats blotched with mud.

  She was trying to fluff up the hair that wasn’t tucked beneath her cap when the back doorbell buzzed. Leaving Lafayette snoozing in a tangle of sheets, none the worse for his night, she turned off the alarm and answered the door.

  Wayne’s beefy face was already glistening with sweat, even though he hadn’t put on his coat and his wig yet. Beside him his mother was her usual cool and classy self. Her pouf of blond hair softened the sharpness of her features. Her size-six summer dress was color-coordinated with her hose and pumps. “Good morning, Amanda,” she said in her beautifully moderated voice. “I hear you had some excitement last night.”

  Cynthia always made Amanda feel like her knuckles were dragging the ground. “Not really. Just a quick power outage because of the storm.”

  “I’ll bet you were scared,” said Wayne hopefully.

  “Just a little startled,” she lied.

  A uniformed policeman appeared around the corner of the house. “Nothing unusual out here, Mrs. Chancellor. May I look around inside, Miss?”

  “Sure,” said Amanda. “But I already… .”

  “Please come in, Officer,” said Cynthia. Amanda found herself plastered against the wall of the corridor as Mrs. Chancellor and her entourage swept by. With a shrug she closed the door and followed.

  Upstairs, downstairs, in Sally’s chamber the procession went. “Everything’s fine,” Cynthia announced at last, from her observation post on the stair landing. “Put on your wig, Wayne, it’s almost opening time.”

  Wayne smoothed the woolly wig over his dark curls. The policeman sneaked a look at his watch. Amanda stood with her hand on the newel post, eyeing the treads of the staircase.

  He’d been sitting right there, in the face of common sense. She hadn’t imagined him. She hadn’t hallucinated him. The closest she’d come to anything alcoholic was the scent of whiskey on his breath. And he had been breathing. That heartbreaking groan… . She wondered if he knew he was dead. She wondered how her brain was able to deal with the matter of daily life and the anti-matter of James Grant without exploding.

  No, she wasn’t going to tell anyone what—who—she’d seen last night. They’d think she was a liar, nuts, or both. Just the kind of person Colonial Williamsburg wanted caretaking an important property.

  Cynthia’s heels clicked down the steps. “I’ll check in with Bill on my way out. Helen Medina will be by sometime today to put together a news release. There’s not much we can say until Bill has some more information about the body, but I’ll see if I can hurry him along.”

  “Excuse me?” Amanda asked. “News release?”

  “The body in the back garden. Our visitors will be thrilled.”

  Amanda saw little plastic skeletons for sale in the Gift Shoppe. “Ah, yeah, sure.”

  “It was nice seeing you again, Amanda.” Cynthia extended her hand, probably, Amanda thought, expecting her to kneel and kiss her wedding ring.

  Amanda spread her skirts in a low curtsey. “I have the honor to remain, Madame, your most humble and obedient servant.”

  “You’ve learned your lines so well,” murmured Cynthia, radiating graciousness. “Come along, Officer, let’s go view the body. I’ve always found forensics procedures fascinating, haven’t you?” She swept out of the door, leaving behind her a whiff of expensive fragrance. The policeman followed.

  Wayne stood awkwardly by the sideboard. “Bye, Mother… .” The door shut. He turned to Amanda. “You were being sarcastic, weren’t you?”

  “Moi?” she replied with a grin.

  Laughing, Wayne advanced toward her, arms outstretched. “How about a morning kiss from my little girl?”

  “So that our guests may discover us in an unseemly moment? Fie, Papa, fie.” She slipped out the door, turned the sign around to “Hall Open” and assumed her pose on the stone steps.

  Wayne took a magisterial stance beside Amanda, but his voice was uncertain. “Not that I really think of you as a daughter, you know.”

  Here we go again. “I’ve noticed.”

  “I mean—have you thought any more about that movie? The new Brad Pitt flick is opening this weekend… .”

  She’d thought about a movie. Theatres were air-conditioned, for one thing. And Melrose didn’t have either cable or a VCR. But Wayne was not relationship material. “I’d enjoy taking in a movie,” she told him, “as long as it wasn’t a date. Just friends, know what I mean?”

  “Yeah, I get it.” His face fell. He probably heard that one a lot.

  Amanda scanned the landscape. No visitors were strolling up the gravel paths or across the glistening green of the grass. A couple of gardeners planted marigolds by the ticket office. A boat glided down the river. Birds sang. The sun shone p
itilessly in a blue sky.

  “I didn’t have too many friends when I was growing up,” Wayne said. “Melrose is kind of isolated, at least when you’re an only child like I was. Like I am.”

  Amanda had never thought of her younger brother and sister as valuable socializing agents before. “When did you move into town?”

  “When I got my driver’s license. Mother wanted me to be closer to the high school so I wouldn’t have to drive so much. And since my father had just passed away she wanted to be closer to her friends.”

  “The place was getting to be a maintenance problem, wasn’t it?”

  “It was getting pretty shabby. Which bothered Mother a lot more than it did me. I’d build forts with wood from the old stable and dig dungeons in the cellar and do chemical experiments with blackberries and paint flakes and stuff. I never blew anything up, though.” He shook his head sadly.

  Amanda smiled. “I grew up in a brand new split-level. Our cellar was partly a rec room and partly my dad’s workshop. Melrose’s cellar must have been really spooky before it was cleaned out.”

  “Oh yeah. I used to scare the heck out of myself down there, imagining that old furnace was some kind of monster.”

  “I would have imagined bodies buried beneath the floor. All these old houses need at least one good ghost story.”

  “We’re falling down on the job, aren’t we? You’d think at least one self-respecting spook would be hanging around here, but no.”

  “You never heard mysterious footsteps or had cold spots in the hallway when you were a kid?”

  “People ask me that all the time. But my father grew up here, you know, and his father, and neither of them ever saw more than a death-watch beetle or two. Maybe we can make up a good story about that body behind the summerhouse. If it wouldn’t scare you, that is,” added Wayne, “with you having to stay out here alone and everything.”

  This is where she’d come in. Amanda glanced toward the driveway. Good—the cavalry was coming. A group of tourists advanced toward the house, escorted by Roy Davis, an interpreter playing one of the footmen. “… my wife was sold to another plantation,” he was saying. “I know I’ll never see her again. It wasn’t as hard on Master Page when his wife died, I reckon.”

  “Heads up,” Amanda muttered to Wayne. He extended his elbow. She placed one hand on his forearm and with the other opened her fan.

  “Welcome to Melrose Hall. My name is Page Armstrong.” Wayne’s expansive gesture almost threw Amanda down the steps. “Allow me to present my daughter, Sally.”

  Amanda recovered herself with a curtsey. “Please come inside.”

  Roy bent in an anachronistic but understandably sardonic bow. With embarrassed looks, unsure whether to play along with the game, the sightseers walked into the house. Amanda shot Roy’s departing back a rueful smile. The interpretation program was, after all, a fantasy that only worked because everyone ignored its paradoxes. If she and Wayne and the others brought history to life, why couldn’t the ghost of James Grant bring life to history… . Yeah, right.

  Wayne dragged Amanda across the threshold with him. “I designed Melrose myself. The classical symmetry of the house represents the ultimate human faculty, that of Reason. As my friend Thomas Jefferson said so meaningly the other day… .”

  Amanda fixed Sally’s sweet, biddable smile on her face. Another normal day at Melrose had begun. Depending on your definition of normal.

  *

  As more and more sightseers arrived, Amanda and Wayne separated and conducted different groups. By now she had her role down pat, and recited it by rote. Fortunately none of the tourists asked any questions more difficult than, “What kind of underwear you got on there, lady?” Only a few inquired about the bones. Amanda directed them to the gardens.

  At last she was once more turning the sign around and locking the door. After the glare of the sun the entrance hall seemed as dark as Wayne’s imaginary dungeon. She felt like something growing on a dungeon wall. She was surprised she didn’t leave a slime trail on her way to the kitchen.

  “See you tomorrow,” she called to the other interpreters. They jostled each other out the door. Wayne, his face the color of a ripe tomato, waved at her and ran for it.

  Amanda raced down the corridor to her apartment, pulling off her clothes on the way. Lafayette, at his post outside the cat flap, rated only a quick, “How can you look so cool with all that fur?” Before the last tourist bus had belched out of the parking lot Amanda was in her shower. A shower on a hot day was as good as sex.

  Sometimes even better, she thought with a grimace. The twenty-first century had left the subtleties of drawing room flirtation and seduction far behind. Now it was cut to the chase and change the channel… . As if those eighteenth-century subtleties had extended to the bedroom. It had simply taken longer to get there then, that was all.

  Amanda toweled off, stepped into a T-shirt and shorts, and fed the cat. Clipboard in hand, she set out on her tour of the house.

  A whisk of the carpet sweeper took care of some dusty footprints. The shell earrings attributed to Pocahontas were disarranged in their case—a shake set them right. The tail of Amanda’s T-shirt polished a smudge from the pier glass in the spare bedroom. For one ghastly moment she thought a silver hairbrush from Sally’s dresser was missing, but she found it on the table by the window, reflecting a blaze of sunlight next to the dull shapes of the embroidery, thimble, and miniature. Kids! No matter how she watched, the small hand was always quicker than the eye.

  With the curtains closed the room glowed amber, as though lit by candlelight. Amanda picked up the portrait of Captain Grant. Yes, it was definitely the same face she’d seen last night, even though his eyes had apparently been blue, not brown as depicted here. His expression in the portrait was much more confident than it was in life… . In death.

  She turned the miniature over. The frame was an ornate metal one of the period, but its backing was a modern piece of acid-free cardboard. Cautiously, with the tips of her fingernails, she pulled out the tiny pins holding the portrait and its backing in place.

  The picture was painted on a thin piece of wood. On its back several words were written in lushly curved eighteenth-century handwriting: James Grant. Dundreggan. 1780. And he died in 1781, Amanda thought. Millions of young men died in wars—her grandfather’s brother had become a statistic on Omaha Beach. Her mind couldn’t take in millions. It could take in one.

  Of course it was Wayne who’d hit the target. James Grant’s ghost was restless. Because of his body’s slapdash burial, Amanda wondered, or because the burial had been exposed? And why had the burial been so slapdash to begin with? She toyed with scenarios of James staggering wounded from Greensprings Farm, back to Sally’s arms… . No. The Armstrongs wouldn’t have had any reason to hide his body. They’d have turned it over to his regiment, like the nice honorable aristocrats they were.

  She put the picture and frame back together and returned it to the table. Clipboard in hand, she stood at the head of the stairs and listened. The house was silent. Faintly from outside came the sound of birds singing. Get over it, she told herself, and clomped down the steps. Seeing a ghost had been a hell of an experience, but she wasn’t going to include it on her resume.

  Amanda went out the back door and inspected the lawns, the drive, the kitchen garden. Everything was in order, including Lafayette stretched sphinx-like in her living room window. She headed down the boxwood allee toward the summerhouse and the bobbing heads of the archaeological crew.

  How long before Hewitt identified the body as Grant’s? If he ever did. It would depend on what associated artifacts he dug from the grave. If Grant had been stripped of his uniform no one would ever know who he was. That wasn’t right, Amanda thought. James Grant deserved the dignity of his name. But making herself look like a total idiot wouldn’t help him.

  Several dirt-daubed students carrying tools and water jugs passed her on their way to the parking lot. “How’d it go to
day?” she asked one.

  “Got almost everything up,” he replied. “Kept having to stop and deal with kibitzers, though.”

  “I don’t think we’ve seen even the first wave of kibitzers yet,” Amanda told him.

  He shrugged. “There won’t be anything to see other than the footprint of the summerhouse, not past tomorrow anyway. Not unless we turn up another body.”

  “Please don’t,” Amanda said under her breath. That was all she needed, phantom regiments trooping up and down the stairs at night.

  Judging by the tangy scent of bug repellent which hung over the excavation, every insect in Virginia had come for lunch and now strummed and throbbed irritably in the underbrush. On the trampled weeds were arranged various trays and boxes piled with brown-stained lumps. Bill Hewitt stood thigh-deep in the trench, holding up a trowel for Helen Medina’s video camera.

  “Great,” the press officer said. She pulled a red bandanna from one of the many pockets of her vest and mopped at her glasses. Her bun of gray-streaked hair, held together by a pencil and a swizzle stick, sagged a little lower on her neck. “Now do something with the bones, Bill.”

  Hewitt clambered from the hole and knelt down by one of the boxes. Amanda inched forward. She expected to see a more or less articulated skeleton, like an anatomical chart, but what lay in the tray was a pile of brown pick-up sticks. Hewitt lifted the skull in one hand and its jawbone in the other. Fitting them together, he held them up for the camera. “What we have here,” he said, “is the skull and the detached mandible of a man probably between twenty and thirty-five.”

  No reason the empty eye sockets should retain an image of the blue-grey eyes and the personality that had looked out from them. But Amanda had expected to feel some tingle of fear or even disgust at the bones, and all she felt was sorrow, that mortality was so dull.

  Hewitt put the skull down and picked up a long bone. “This is the femur,” he said. “By measuring its length we’ll be able to tell approximately how tall the man was. By studying the growth at the ends of this bone and others, we’ll have a better idea of his age.”