A Trick of Light

Robinson ( Something to Hide ) mixes romance with suspense in this hard-to-credit mystery set in a small town on the Carolina coast. Actress Jervey Parmalee returns home from New York City to direct a revival of a play her late father had last produced 10 years earlier. In the attic of the family home, she and her actress mother Roberta come across a mummy case, complete with bones, used as a prop in the play's original production. Then Jervey is unnerved to find the prop bones hanging in another place. In trying to assemble members of the original cast, Jervey can't locate two: itinerant actor Keith Lynch and Elissa Dowell, who had captivated many in the cast. Jervey fills Keith's role with Chance Crown, a backwoodsman to whom she is attracted. She asks the ``semi-retarded'' playhouse janitor about the bones in the mummy case, but he dies in a suspicious fall before he can tell her what he remembers. Although Jervey becomes convinced that the bones belong to Keith and that the cast harbors a murderer, neither she nor her mother tell the police of their suspicions. Putting herself in danger, Jervey seems more a foolish old-fashioned damsel in distress than a modern female sleuth. (Mar.)