Shadows in Scarlet by Lillian Stewart Carl Read Free Book Online

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