Shadows in Scarlet Read Free Page B

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.
    She turned back to her notebook, wondering if Abigail Adams in her stays could even remotely be considered the Gloria Steinem of her time period—or Mary Shelley, writing Frankenstein buttoned up to the chin....
    The room disappeared in a blast of white light that was gone as quickly as it had appeared. The music stopped in mid-phrase. Amanda sat goggling blindly into total darkness as thunder exploded in her head. Shit! Lightning had taken out a nearby transformer. A good thing she hadn't turned on the computer. A good thing she had a flashlight. Swallowing her heart, she rose from her chair and groped across the room.
    The flashlight was in the kitchen cabinet. She flicked it on and waved the circle of light around the room. Lafayette had subtracted his tail and was completely hidden. Raindrops poured over the roof, slowed, and stopped. A cold wind sent the blinds knocking against the window frames.
    The phone still worked. She called in the power outage, then considered her options. If someone was snooping around the house, they now had an engraved invitation to come inside. The doors were locked, yes, but it would be easy enough to break a window. Her presence wouldn't stop a thief from taking the silver tea