Free Shadows in Scarlet by Lillian Stewart Carl Page A

few minutes, if you'd like to wait. Outside."
    Oh. Thanks for telling me. But Amanda had to hand it to Cynthia, the woman eased the tourists out the door and down the steps with the skill of a carnival barker. And the place was starting to resemble a carnival, as another tour group streamed out of the library.
    "If you would do us the very great...” Wayne was saying, and stopped in mid-phrase when he saw his mother.
    "In just a few moments we'll be setting up a small display about the British officer buried in the garden,” she told the sightseers. “If you'd like to wait outside."
    The tourists exited. Bill Hewitt, Helen Medina, and several gofers carrying cardboard cartons, light standards, and display panels entered. “Here you are!” trilled Cynthia. “Wayne, run upstairs and bring down the miniature portrait of Captain Grant. Amanda, bring some wineglasses from the dining room—on the silver tray, the one I picked up in the Portobello Road in London. Carrie, help Helen with her lights."
    Amanda raised an eyebrow at Carrie as she hurried past. Carrie quirked both of hers. The Benedettos retired to a corner. Cynthia shut the front door, closing out the circle of sunburned faces on the top step.
    When Amanda returned with eight crystal glasses, the most she could fit safely on the tray, the exhibit was almost ready. One side of the hall was flooded with light so bright it drained the rich brown of the paneling into ash. In the glare stood the display flats, below the carved and scrolled wooden arch that bisected the hallway at the foot of the staircase. Laminated maps and sketches filled most of the panels—Amanda recognized them as standard-issue Yorktown Campaign illustrations. Wars looked much tidier, she thought, before the invention of photography.
    Several small photos showed James Grant's bones both as they emerged in clumps from the ground and lay at parade rest in the lab. Her face carefully neutral, Amanda dodged Helen, who was snapping picture after picture of the assembly process, and set the glasses down on the sideboard.
    Hewitt fixed a long Lucite box to the middle of the right-hand panel. Inside was the scabbard, mounted on thin prongs that made it look like it was floating in mid-air. One of Hewitt's assistants hung a smaller container on the opposing flat. Amanda craned forward. This box held four bits of brown bone, three no larger than pencil stubs and one considerably smaller. Finger or toe bones, she thought, and a molar. Hewitt was keeping the other ones in the lab until ... Until when?
    Until either he ran down some relatives or Cynthia could orchestrate a funeral, all the national news organizations suitably represented, of course.
    "Bill and I decided,” the woman was saying, “that it wouldn't be in good taste to display an obviously human bone, like a femur or, especially, the skull."
    "Everyone having seen loose teeth,” Carrie returned, without pointing out that displaying human remains was as much a matter of law as of taste. Scientists weren't nearly as cavalier with bodies as they used to be.
    "Absolutely. So we chose these little, rather anonymous pieces of bone, and the scabbard, and...” Cynthia indicated a third Lucite box, “...the silver buckle, a button, and the snuffbox. A shame we don't have the sword. The scabbard is very nice, but it's got that bend in it, and even with the badge it's just not as dramatic as a sword would be, is it?"
    Helen shook her head. “Inconsiderate of Captain Grant, not to leave his sword."
    But he did leave it, thought Amanda. At least, it wasn't with his ghost.
    Hewitt stepped back while one assistant tacked information cards beneath each box and illustration and another fixed a long, narrow lamp to the top of each panel. Vernon Benedetto mopped his balding head with a handkerchief. Wayne thumped down the stairs with the miniature, which he offered to Hewitt.
    Cynthia beckoned. Wayne changed trajectory and gave the portrait to her. She held