Shadows in Scarlet (2 page)

She finished morphing by drinking a glass of iced tea, plain, no sugar. Leaving Lafayette grooming his already sleek fur, Amanda picked up her clipboard and walked outside to begin her evening tour of inspection.

The sun hung just at the tops of the trees, casting stripes of shadow across the grass. At the foot of the lawn shimmered the James River, its far bank lost in a moist haze. Clouds massed on the horizon. Crows called from the parking lot, probably fighting over some pizza crusts.

Amanda made an about face and gazed narrowly at the house. Not one rust-red chimney sagged out of plumb, not one white stone facing was dirty. The two and a half story main section, flanked by the one-story service wings, was a model of Georgian grace. Three years ago it had been a mess, a clumsy 1850s portico pasted onto the facade, brickwork cracked, woodwork scarred or missing. That was when the Chancellors had the wisdom—and the tax incentives—to donate it to the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation.

Amanda picked up a couple of candy wrappers, stowed them in her pocket, and headed around the end of the kitchen wing of the house. The sun slipped behind the trees and a cool breath of air, scented with rain, teased her cheeks.

Across a gravel drive lay the kitchen garden, herbs and vegetables arranged in tidy rows. Beyond it the formal gardens were still under reconstruction. The brick-walled terraces close to the house had been replanted with roses and other flowers, but the ones beyond the boxwood allee were still overgrown, waiting for the touch of the landscape archaeologist and the banker both.

There was a puddle in the path, Amanda noted. Better check the drainage system. And.... She craned her neck over the boxwood. The archaeologists were standing around like onlookers at an accident. Maybe somebody had been bitten by a snake. She crunched off down the path toward them.

The summerhouse had once been surrounded by an artificial wilderness, trees and shrubbery carefully planted to look “natural.” Now it was natural with an attitude. The archaeologists had waded into the tangle of blackberry bushes with machetes, and only reached for their shovels a week ago. Underbrush and a few small trees hemmed in the site. Leaves of everything up to and including poison ivy tossed in fitful gusts of wind. Insects hummed.

Bill Hewitt looked like a praying mantis kneeling by the trench cut into the pale dirt. The hairs of his moustache trembled as he scraped delicately away with a spoon. A couple of his gofers stood by, holding trowels, brushes, and plastic artifact bags. The rest of the crew, volunteer students, was so quiet Amanda could hear them breathing.

She edged her way through the dirty and sunburned backs, for once failing to appreciate those that were male. “What is it?"

Hewitt glanced up. “Ah, Miss Witham. You're just in time. Take a look. Very interesting."

He drew back. From the mottled dirt at the bottom of trench emerged a regular series of brown ridges.
Roots,
Amanda thought, and then,
No. Bones. Human bones.

Another chill trickled down her spine as she leaned forward over the grave.

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Amanda realized she was looking at a rib cage, an upthrust shoulder at one end and a similarly upward-curved pelvic bone at the other. The rest of the skeleton was still buried. It looked like the body had been rolled into an unevenly dug hole, head and feet flopping into the deeper ends. Someone sure hadn't had any respect for the dead....

Well, at least that someone had buried him. Her. If not, the bones would've been disturbed by scavenging animals. What a way to go. Amanda straightened and waved away a gnat that was trying to fly up her nose.

"...drainage here,” Hewitt was saying. “Dry soil. Preserved the bones. And hopefully clothing or personal effects to date them by."

"Would you like me to call the police?” Amanda asked. “Or are the bones old enough to be out of their jurisdiction?"

"We'll notify them, of course. But these bones are very old. It's an archaeological matter, not a judicial one. Other than the usual legalities of digging up human remains."

"There were gangsters running rum on Chesapeake Bay back in the thirties,” someone said. “Maybe this is a revenuer who got rubbed out."

"We'll check the records."

"The Chancellors moved here in the twenties,” said Amanda. “The summerhouse was already a ruin by then."

"Ditto."

"The bones might belong to a slave,” suggested someone else.

"The slave cemetery was over there.” Hewitt waved toward the row of outbuildings beyond the kitchen garden. “The Africans made sure their friends and relatives had proper burials. They almost always added broken pots and such as grave decorations."

"Could it be an Indian from before the European settlements?” asked one of the students. “Or some early settler who died in the Indian attack of—whenever...."

"1622,” said Hewitt.

"And the Armstrongs just happened to plunk their summerhouse down right beside him?” replied one of Hewitt's assistants. “No, I bet this body dates from after 1751, when Melrose was built."

"This type of landscape gardening,” Amanda offered, “the formal terraces and little recreational buildings, was really trendy in the 1770's."

Hewitt stood up, rubbing particles of dirt from his hands. “We'll cover this up with a sheet of plastic tonight. Get back out here bright and early tomorrow. Get the entire body uncovered. It'll have to be moved, with the reconstruction of the summerhouse and everything. Identification, that's the tricky part, legally and otherwise. Might have to call in the Smithsonian."

"What if,” one of the students asked, “the rest of the body isn't in there? What if it was dismembered or something?"

"We're scientists. Leave the sensationalism for the tabloids.” Hewitt's black eyes shot the girl a withering glance. She withered. “Let's get the plastic spread out and staked down. Move."

Amanda wondered how she should enter this on her daily summary—under “associated features?” But it was Hewitt's responsibility to make a formal report. She only had to note the body's existence. As an artifact, not a person. With a grimace of sympathy for the unknown deceased she worked her way back through the group of students and headed toward the house.

The sun set, leaving a thin, greenish twilight. Clouds rose halfway up the western sky. A glowing quarter moon, half a disc, hung high overhead. Each of Melrose's windows gleamed faintly, as though interested in the scene in the garden.

The poor guy, if it was a guy, had probably been stuffed into his makeshift grave late at night. Amanda thought of Scarlett O'Hara shooting the Yankee soldier and burying him in her back yard. No telling how many real-life bodies were lying in odd corners of the Virginia countryside. There'd been enough battles over the years to produce an army of skeletons.

Amanda locked the outer door behind her and turned on the exterior floodlights. She thought of Robert Frost's poem, where the skeleton of the murdered man stands outside the door, chalky fingers scratching chalky skull.... “That's what I get for cramming English,” she said to Lafayette, who was waiting by the cat flap in the apartment door. He tilted his head to the side. If he'd had eyebrows, he would've arched them.

She turned to the next page on her clipboard and made her tour of the interior, Lafayette by her side like a general at inspection. Parlor, dining room, drawing room, library, bedrooms—the period furnishings were all accounted for, the attic and cellar doors were locked, the dehumidifiers were working. She really was hearing thunder now, a mutter rising and falling beneath the thump of her own feet.

She shut the door to her apartment and set the alarm system. As she turned toward the kitchen the phone rang. “Melrose Hall, Amanda Witham."

"Amanda!” exclaimed Wayne's deep voice. “I just heard about the body!"

"That was fast."

"Bill Hewitt's having dinner with Mother and me tonight—you know, about the grant for the landscaping—but he called to say they'd found a body behind the summerhouse and he'd be late. Did you see it? Is it really gross, like on
X-Files?"

"No way,” Amanda replied, and added to herself,
thanks, the literary references were enough.
“It's nothing but bones."

"Are you scared? You want me to come out there and keep you company?"

Like she didn't know what he meant by that? “You're living a couple of blocks from Bruton Parish Church and its cemetery,” she told him. “Are you scared?"

"Those are legitimate bodies. Buried will full rites and all that."

"So?"

"So the ones that aren't buried properly get kind of restless...."

"Thanks for thinking of me, Wayne. But everything's cool."

"Well, if you're sure ... Coming, Mother! I'll see my little girl tomorrow, then, okay, Sally?"

"Good night, Wayne.” Making a face, Amanda hung up the phone.

The body in the back yard would be a great excuse to ask a guy over, if she knew any guys more appealing than Wayne. Not that Wayne was repulsive. He was a big, lovable, clumsy puppy who could use a semester at obedience school. His family's wealth made him one of Virginia's most eligible bachelors, but it wasn't his immaturity that was going to keep him one. It was his mother.

A shame the summerhouse was gone long before Cynthia parked her broom at Melrose. The thought of her sipping tea, pinkie extended, a few paces from a positively indecent dead body would've made Amanda grin with glee if she wasn't also thinking of that body as a living, feeling human being who'd probably met a gruesome end.

She opened the windows in her kitchen, living room, and bedroom, and switched on the ceiling fans. She wasn't allowed an air conditioner—its bulge would ruin the look of the house. But the approaching storm sent a cool if damp and musty breeze before it, stirring the turgid air. Lafayette arranged himself on the sill of the living room window, his tail draped artistically over the computer on the desk below.

Amanda popped a frozen lasagna dinner into the microwave and threw together a salad. Tonight she'd definitely get some work done. That was the reason for this job, after all, over and beyond its basic appeal. She was getting an apartment, spending money, and good experience for her resume while she wrote her thesis on the socionomic aspect of historical artifacts. She liked these long, quiet, solitary evenings. She enjoyed being on her own. Really.

Thunder grumbled closer. A few raindrops plopped onto the roof. The breeze fluttered Lafayette's fur. Amanda watched the local news while she ate, and was cleaning up when Lafayette woke suddenly from his doze and looked out the window, nose twitching, ears pricked.

A rabbit? Amanda asked herself. A deer? The kitchen garden attracted all sorts of wildlife....

Every hair on Lafayette's body shot upright. He leaped from the windowsill, scattered the papers on the desk, and dived beneath the couch leaving only his bottle brush of a tail exposed.

The nape of Amanda's neck prickled. She turned off the TV and the lights and looked out each window in turn. Beyond the floodlit halo surrounding the house the night was pitch black. She might as well have been standing on a stage trying to check out the audience. From the bedroom she could see only a smooth sweep of lawn, silent and empty. From the kitchen window she caught an impression of tree limbs tossing in the wind. The living room window overlooked the gravel drive, the kitchen garden, and the first terrace. Raindrops made blotches on the brick. The breeze was growing cooler by the moment.

Maybe someone was out there.
One of Hewitt's students, playing a prank on her. Or someone with more sinister motives. The furnishings of the house included some choice artifacts. If anyone tried to get inside, though, the alarms would raise the dead....

The alarms would call the police, Amanda corrected. She closed the thick wooden slats of the venetian blinds and turned the lights back on. Then she punched the number of the other two caretakers, an elderly couple who lived in a small house where the driveway met the main road, a good quarter of a mile from the Hall itself.

"No,” Mrs. Benedetto answered Amanda's question. “We haven't opened the gates for a living soul. Someone could have climbed the fence, though."

"You think?” Amanda could hear every word of the sitcom on the Benedetto's television. A brass band could have marched up the drive and they wouldn't have noticed.

"Would you like us to call the security service, dear?"

"No—no problem. Sorry to have bothered you."

Rain pattered down outside, sounding like gravel slipping and sliding beneath stumbling feet. Lightning flashed. Amanda peered around the edge of the window blind, waiting for the next bolt. There! In the sudden brilliance she could see every tree, every brick, starkly defined all the way to the eaves of the forest. Nothing and no one was outside.

Amanda blinked away the after-image of garden terraces and boxwood allee. Wearing stays, the eighteenth-century corset, all day had cut off the blood flow to her brain. Was she ever out of it. With an aggravated snort, she put on a classical CD and sat down at the desk. No computer tonight, not with the approaching storm. She'd work on her outline.

Okay. Candles, for example, had both technomic and socionomic uses—for light, yes, but also for status, like at a dinner party, or for marking an occasion, like on a birthday cake. Then there were clothes, which both covered the body and indicated class. Like the aristocratic Sally with her corsets and her pokey little hooks and buttons, sending a very clear signal that if she had to work at all, she worked with her mind, not her hands. And that was the continental divide of Virginia society.

The problem was that it was the silk-stocking crowd who inventoried their belongings, and bought pattern books, and wrote letters gossiping about fashion, leading the unwary researcher into assumptions about the culture as a whole....

The door that led into the rest of the house rattled in its frame and the cat flap shivered. Amanda stared at it. Air pressure from the storm. No one could have opened an outside door into the Hall. Even someone with a key would have set off the alarms. And she could see the alarm panel from where she sat, green lights steady, all systems go.