Shadows in Scarlet Read Online Free PDF

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,