Fundraising the Dead Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Acknowledgements

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  More praise for

  FUNDRAISING THE DEAD

  “She’s smart, she’s savvy, and she’s sharp enough to spot what really goes on behind the scenes in museum politics. The practical and confident Nell Pratt is exactly the kind of sleuth you want in your corner when the going gets tough. Sheila Connolly serves up a snappy and sophisticated mystery that leaves you lusting for the next witty installment.”

  —Mary Jane Maffini, author of the Charlotte Adams Mysteries

  “National Treasure meets The Philadelphia Story in this clever, charming, and sophisticated caper. When murder and mayhem become the main attractions at a prestigious museum, its feisty fundraiser goes undercover to prove it’s not just the museum’s pricey collection that’s concealing a hidden history. Secrets, lies, and a delightful revenge conspiracy make this a real page-turner!”

  —Hank Phillippi Ryan, Agatha Award-winning author of Prime Time

  “Sheila Connolly’s wonderful new series is a witty, engaging blend of history and mystery with a smart sleuth who already feels like a good friend. Like all of Ms. Connolly’s books, Fundraising the Dead is hard to put down. Her stories always keep me turning pages—often well past my bedtime.”—Julie Hyzy

  Praise for the Orchard Mysteries

  “Sheila Connolly’s Orchard Mysteries are some of the most satisfying cozy mysteries I’ve read . . . Warm and entertaining from the first paragraph to the last. Fans will look forward to the next Orchard Mystery.”

  —Lesa’s Book Critiques

  “An enjoyable and well written book with some excellent apple recipes at the end.”

  —Cozy Library

  “The mystery is intelligent and has an interesting twist . . . Rotten to the Core is a fun, quick read with an enjoyable heroine.”

  —The Mystery Reader (four stars)

  “Delightful . . . [A] fascinating whodunit filled with surprises.”

  —The Mystery Gazette

  “[A] delightful new series.”

  —Gumshoe Review

  “The premise and plot are solid, and Meg seems a perfect fit for her role.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “A fresh and appealing sleuth with a bushel full of entertaining problems. One Bad Apple is one crisp, delicious read.”

  —Claudia Bishop, author of the Hemlock Falls Mysteries

  “A delightful look at small-town New England, with an intriguing puzzle thrown in. And anybody who’s ever tended a septic system is going to empathize with amateur detective Meg Corey.”

  —JoAnna Carl, author of the Chocoholic Mysteries

  “A promising new mystery series. Thoroughly enjoyable . . . I can’t wait for the next book and a chance to spend more time with Meg and the good people of Granford.”

  —Sammi Carter, author of the Candy Shop Mysteries

  Berkley Prime Crime titles by Sheila Connolly

  Orchard Mysteries

  ONE BAD APPLE

  ROTTEN TO THE CORE

  RED DELICIOUS DEATH

  Museum Mysteries

  FUNDRAISING THE DEAD

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  FUNDRAISING THE DEAD

  A Berkley Prime Crime Book / published by arrangement with the author

  PRINTING HISTORY Berkley Prime Crime mass-market edition / October 2010

  Copyright © 2010 by Sheila Connolly.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-44378-1

  BERKLEY® PRIME CRIME

  Berkley Prime Crime Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  BERKLEY® PRIME CRIME and the PRIME CRIME logo are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

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  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  W.C. Fields once said, “I’d rather be in Philadelphia.” Of course, he was talking about an epitaph for his tombstone, but Philadelphia is a lot better than dead. It’s a great place, with something for everyone—culture, sports, history. I’ve spent a big chunk of my life in and around the city, and that’s why I set my new series there.

  This book is based on an institution in Center City where I worked for several happy years, and where I met some wonderful, dedicated people. Let me assure you that no character in this book is based on any employee there, past or present, living or dead, and the crimes in the story are my own invention. There has never been a murder there, to my knowledge.

  There was, however, a real crime that was discovered while I worked there. That event and its aftermath inspired this story, because it became painfully obvious how easy it is to take advantage of both the trust and the shortcomings of such a venerable cultural institution. In that case the culprit was caught quickly and prosecuted successfully, thanks to the FB
I. As for the rest, the descriptions of the outstanding collections, and the ongoing efforts to digitize catalogs and make the collections more widely available to the public, are all true. And like many peer cultural institutions in Philadelphia and throughout the country, this place suffers from chronic underfunding, which contributed to my decision to make my protagonist a fundraising professional (that and the fact that I was one), one of the people who fight to keep the doors open and the lights on so that the public can enjoy the collections.

  Of course my thanks go to Jacky Sach and Jessica Faust of BookEnds, who made this book possible, and my patient editor, Shannon Jamieson Vazquez, who has shepherded this through more than one revision, making it stronger each time. Carol Kersbergen, a colleague of mine at the museum, reminded me of a number of details about how things really worked behind the scenes. And as always, the ongoing support of the generous members of Sisters in Crime, and particularly the Guppies, has been essential.

  I hope this story gives you something to think about the next time you visit a museum. And please do visit—collections are meant to be enjoyed!

  CHAPTER 1

  The sight of Marty Terwilliger charging into my office with fire in her eyes was never a good thing, but it was particularly unwelcome right now, as I was trying to put the finishing touches on the grand gala planned for this evening. Tonight was a big event, a really big event, and I was in charge of making it happen. The venerable Pennsylvania Antiquarian Society in Philadelphia was celebrating its 125th anniversary as the guardian of the historic treasures of Philadelphia and the surrounding counties. We were expecting nearly two hundred people, which would set a new record for a Society event.

  Our famed vaults housed at least two million books, documents, and ephemera, ranging from manuscript letters signed by William Penn and George Washington, to advertising flyers from late nineteenth-century hatters, to financial records for several of the long-defunct companies that had put Philadelphia on the map of the commercial and industrial world. And that’s not including our fairly respectable collection of paintings, silver, clothing, and some truly weird artifacts (like a horse’s hoof made into an inkwell with silver fittings). The Society’s stately neoclassical building had been constructed to reflect the seriousness of its purpose, and loomed over a neighborhood that had seen many transitions, both good and bad, and had weathered them all.

  I’m Eleanor Pratt—Nell to my friends—and I’m the director of development for the Society. If that job title means nothing to you (I get a lot of blank looks), it means I’m a fundraiser. I’m the one who writes those begging letters you get from nonprofit organizations every couple of months. It’s not my name at the bottom—oh, no, it’s the president’s, or, if your bank balance runs to seven figures or you’re sitting on your great-grandfather’s priceless library of Americana, the president’s and the board chair’s. But I’m the one who writes the letter, and also makes sure that there is a current address and the correct, intimate salutation on each one (Dear Binkie, et cetera), and that there is enough of the good stationery to print them all, and that the president actually gets around to signing them (well, most of them—my staff and I usually end up doing a bunch), and that they get into the mail, with postage on them. I’m the invisible person who keeps the money flowing.

  I’m also the one who, when I say I’m a fundraiser, you run screaming from, your checkbook tightly clutched in your hand. Why would anyone go into fundraising? What starry-eyed college student ever said, with a gleam in his or her eyes, Gee, I want to beg for money when I grow up? Well, my answer is simple: I was an English major in college. Need I say more? I had drifted into development after a few years of trying to find an academic job, and then discovered that I liked the work. I’ve been at it for more than a dozen years now, and at the Society for the last five of them. In addition to sending out endless mailings and grant proposals, and currying favor from potential donors, party planning is one of my responsibilities. And finally, after many, many months of agonizing over the theme of the evening, the perfect font for the invitations, the menu selections, the arrangement of the tables, and dozens of other details, here we were, just hours away from the anniversary gala.

  Now, however, instead of talking to the caterer just one more time to be sure he had the head count right; instead of counting the wine bottles that the liquor store had just delivered; instead of supervising the tables and plates and glassware that were at this very moment being off-loaded in the back alley, I pasted on what I hoped was a sympathetic smile and welcomed Martha Terwilliger, aka Marty.

  “Hi, Marty. What brings you here so early? The party doesn’t start until six.” It was barely past three, though I needed every minute between now and then.

  Martha Terwilliger was a board member—actually, a third-generation board member; her grandfather had been president of the Society in the distant past, and her father had grudgingly accepted a board position as an inheritance—and she took it quite seriously. She was fiftyish, with a brusque, wry manner and a sharp intelligence, and related to half of Philadelphia. Following the disintegration of her third marriage, she had decided that she needed some focus in her life, and she had adopted the Society with a vengeance. Her father, upon his death several years earlier, had bequeathed to the Society his vast collection of family papers—records that went back to the original Terwilliger settlers, in the early eighteenth century, and included one of the great leaders of the Revolution, Major Jonathan Terwilliger, as well as a host of lesser dignitaries and movers and shakers of Philadelphia political, economic, and social life. The collection was huge, a true treasure trove, and it was quite literally priceless.

  Marty’s father had also left an endowment to support the daunting undertaking of cataloging the Terwilliger papers. Unfortunately, the endowment had produced only enough income to cover a cataloger’s pay for a couple of days a week; as a gesture in recognition of the importance of the papers, the Society was underwriting another day or two, bringing the position up to bare full-time status. A few months ago we had hired Rich Girard for the position, fresh out of college, and he had barely scratched the surface. Marty, annoyed at the glacial pace of progress, had decided to step in and get to work herself. Luckily, she was smart and persistent, and it was possible to visualize an end to the project . . . some five or ten years down the road. In any event, Marty was now bearing down on me with a full head of steam.

  “Nell, I need to talk to you. We’ve got a problem,” she said curtly. “It’s about the Collection.” Whenever Marty spoke about her family’s papers, you could see the capital letters: The Terwilliger Collection.

  “I’m sorry to hear that, Marty. Please, sit down and tell me what I can do,” I said, far more calmly than I felt.

  Marty looked at the piles of books and papers on my sole guest chair and remained standing. “I was in yesterday, looking for a folder of papers, an exchange of letters between Major Jonathan”—she seemed to be on a first-name basis with all her dead family members—“and George Washington. I know I saw them a few weeks ago. But they aren’t there now.”

  Great: a collections problem. Why was she talking to me about this? I did not need to hear about a collections problem at this moment. What was I supposed to do? Drop all the gala preparations, take a flashlight and go hunting through the file boxes in the stacks?

  “Are you sure that Rich didn’t take them to his cubicle to catalog them?” Rich was a sweet boy, but he could be absentminded.

  “No,” Marty said with conviction. “He was the first person I asked. He hasn’t gotten up to the 1770s yet, and he hasn’t seen them.”

  “Maybe they were just misfiled?” I parried. Please, let there be a quick solution to this so I can get back to putting out event-related fires, I prayed.

  Marty was not about to back off. “Well, if they were, they aren’t in any of the adjacent boxes. No, I know I saw them just a couple of weeks ago. I was checking where the major spent Christmas in 1774, fo
r the family history”—of course she was also working on a family history, and had been for several years, although no one to my knowledge had seen even a page of it—“and they were there then. But they aren’t there now.”

  “I’m not sure what I can do, Marty. Why come to me, rather than to someone in collections, like Latoya?” Latoya Anderson, our vice president of collections, was the most likely person for Marty to talk to about any items that might have gotten misplaced.

  “Because we’ve worked together in the past, Nell, and I know you can get things done,” Marty said curtly. “Latoya will just give me the runaround. I need answers.”

  “Marty,” I said in my most pacifying tone, “I can understand your concern, and their absence is very troubling. But there must be some simple explanation. Why don’t you and Rich and I get together tomorrow and see if we can track them down?” I smiled hopefully. Tomorrow: the day after the event.

  She still looked miffed. “I suppose. But let me tell you, if those letters are really missing, there will be hell to pay. Do you have any idea what they’re worth?”

  I didn’t, but I knew that whatever insurance we had wouldn’t be enough. To be totally honest, I didn’t even know if we had insurance for the collections. But I smiled even more brightly. “Marty, of course I know how important they are. And I’m sure we’ll find them.” I stood up, hoping to urge her out the door. “I’ll tell Rich, and we’ll meet you in the lobby at nine tomorrow morning, before anyone comes in, all right?” I came around my desk and moved toward the hall, and Marty grudgingly followed. “And you’ll be back for tonight? It’s going to be a wonderful evening. I’m very pleased at the RSVPs.” I mentally reviewed tonight’s guest list, which included at least six of Marty’s cousins, and those were only the ones I remembered offhand. Marty took her board obligations seriously, and I knew she would be at the gala, no matter how annoyed she might be at the moment. I continued my progress toward the elevator, with Marty trailing behind.