Fundraising the Dead Page 2

  “All right, nine A.M. sharp tomorrow. And of course I’ll be here tonight,” she said tartly. “This party had better be good. The Society can use the money.”

  As if I weren’t well aware of that. I kept the smile glued to my face as the elevator doors closed behind her, but it faded immediately once she was out of sight. Just what I needed, one more problem—and I didn’t like the sound of this one. I took a quick look at my watch and cursed silently. There was too much to do in the time I had left, and now Marty had just dumped a whole new problem in my lap. One which I was hardly equipped to deal with, since I had very little working knowledge of the vast collections in the building. Still, I could probably start the ball rolling, and then I could tell her that I was making progress when I saw her at the party. Our registrar, Alfred Findley, the person who’d be most helpful right now, had absolutely nothing to do with the party, so unlike the rest of the staff, at least he wouldn’t be running around like a headless chicken.

  Alfred’s cubicle was only fifty feet from my office, but today was no ordinary day, and I was stopped twice en route with questions that absolutely, positively had to be answered immediately.

  My membership coordinator, Carrie Drexel, was the third. “Nell, did you want to use the sticky name badges? You know the guests complain when they have to pin something on.”

  “Good catch, Carrie. They’re in the supply closet outside my office. We ordered a huge batch after the last members’ meeting.”

  “Oh, right. Thanks!” She turned and dashed back the way I had come.

  I made it another ten feet before the next interruption: Felicity Soames, our head librarian, emerged from the staff room at the back of the building, a mug of coffee in her hand. “Hi, Nell,” she began. “How’s the—”

  I held up a hand. “No time now, Felicity. See you at the gala?”

  “Of course. It’ll be grand, don’t worry.”

  I turned and all but ran to Alfred’s lair.

  CHAPTER 2

  As registrar, Alfred Findley was in charge of the minutiae of recording and organizing the Pennsylvania Antiquarian Society’s collections. Alfred had come to the Society some fifteen years ago, had fallen in love with the place, and had never left. In appearance, he was short and sort of doughy—you had the feeling that if you poked him, the dimple would linger for a while—and he was also very pale, as if he never saw the light of day, which may have been true. The bare description made him sound rather like a fungus, but he was a really sweet guy. It was rumored that he was gay, but since he said very little about his personal life (in fact, we weren’t sure he had one outside of the Society, and some people whispered that he actually lived somewhere deep in the stacks), no one knew for sure. But it was clear that the collections at the Society were the one true love of his life, and if anyone knew where something was, it would be Alfred. He had been lobbying the other staff members, and what board members he could bring himself to approach, for upgraded computer systems and more support for a full recataloging of the collections. He and I had been on great terms ever since I found funding for his new, state-of-the-art computer system and cataloging-software a couple of years ago.

  Our collections management procedures could certainly use the electronic assistance. Together, the books and manuscripts in our collections total about two million items, which is rather mind-boggling when you think about it. I should add, we think it’s two million—it depends on how you count. I mean, are five pieces of paper in a folder one item or five? It’d been counted both ways, as far as we could tell. So we just used the figure two million and hoped for the best. It was at least that and possibly quite a lot more.

  And although our original mandate is closer to that of a library—focusing on historical books, manuscripts, and other documents—over the course of the Society’s century and a quarter, we’d also somehow accumulated paintings, furniture, and other memorabilia. Many of them arrived in the early days, over a century ago, when the Society was grateful for anything. Some came lumped in with estates or bequests, and how could we say no? The problem was, we were fast running out of space. Worse, our handsome building was never set up for the storage of articles like these. And some things, like paintings, could be rather finicky. They liked the right conditions, such as certain temperatures, humidity, exposure to (or avoidance of) light, and so on. If you don’t treat them nicely, the paint tends to fall off the canvas, which leaves you with a mess. But selling or otherwise getting rid of these gifts could be tricky, so we compromised by putting the best examples on public display and keeping far more odds and ends stuffed into dark and dusty corners, unused spaces, wherever they would fit, for a very long time.

  Bottom line: we have a whole lot of stuff, and it could be anywhere in the building. It was Alfred’s job to try to keep track of it—and he was the first person the Society had ever hired to do that specific job. It wasn’t easy. In theory, each item had an identifying number, which would tell you when the item came in, but that number had to be linked to some sort of map, which would tell you where it was right now. I shudder to think what this process was like before the advent of computers. Still, Alfred handled all of it with good cheer. He massaged his computer programs and made them sing. He prowled the dark corners, and he had unearthed some unexpected treasures in his wandering. He was the man I needed to talk to.

  Alfred and his machines lived in a cubicle constructed of modern movable partitions, which gave limited privacy—not that it seemed to bother Alfred, even though it meant that everyone had to pass by his cubicle to get to either the restrooms or the coffee room. Inside his cubicle, he had two desks, one where he worked and one that housed his computer and a scanner-printer; behind him loomed a massive array of filing cabinets holding all the earlier paper records, which he was slowly transferring to electronic format. Luckily, Alfred was extremely conscientious about the transfer process. Though it made a slow job slower, he took very little on faith, usually insisting on seeing the item and verifying its number and current location, before entering it into his precious database. He estimated he’d completed perhaps ten percent of the total to date. Barring any disasters, Alfred could count on doing exactly what he was doing now for the next twenty years, before retiring at seventy or so.

  I poked my head around the corner of his lair. “Hi, Alfred.”

  “Hello, Nell. You need me?”

  “Alfred, what I need is to pick your brain. Do you have a minute?”

  “For you, sure.”

  I slipped around the corner of his partition and sat down, allowing myself a small sigh of relief. “I don’t have much time before the gala, but I need to ask you about something. Let me give you a hypothetical. Let’s say I’m writing a heart-wrenching appeal letter about Dolley Madison’s boot scraper, given to the Society in 1883 by her great-grandniece four times removed, detailing how the poor boot scraper will disintegrate into a pile of rust if we don’t buy a mink-lined box for it immediately. Are you with me?”

  Alfred gave me a shy grin. “All the way.”

  I went on. “And I really want to take a smashing picture of the boot scraper to send out with the letter. How do I locate it?”

  Alfred looked thoughtful. “Do you have the accession number?”

  I shook my head. “No, I have a lovely note in my file—copperplate hand, mind you, but at least there’s a date on it—that says that the donor hopes we will treasure Aunt Dolley’s boot scraper. That’s it.”

  Alfred was warming to his task. “Was it a single item or part of a larger collection?”

  “No clue.”

  “And you’re sure it was a boot scraper, and not a snaffle bit or a peach pitter?”

  “Well, the great-grandniece thought so, but we have no idea what Dolley did with it. Maybe she beat her children with it. Did she have children?”

  “Can’t tell you. Okay, so we have an unknown object, possibly a boot scraper, with an accession number that should begin eighty-three something or
other. Type: object, not paper. I punch those facts into Cassandra here . . . and voilà, a list of possibilities.”

  “Cassandra? That’s your computer?”

  “Yes. She’s often issuing predictions of dire catastrophes, when she isn’t crashing altogether. Somehow it seemed appropriate, especially since I usually ignore her and plow on regardless. But don’t worry, I back things up all the time, just in case.”

  “Right.” I was not reassured, though I did chuckle at the appropriateness of Alfred naming his computer system after a Greek prophetess, who, if I recalled correctly, was doomed to be always right yet was never believed.

  “Then we look at our list . . . and we see that Metal Objects, Miscellaneous, are housed on the fourth floor, northeast corner, shelves eleven-A to twelve-G. So that would be a good place to start. Unless, of course, the thing weighed fifty pounds or more, in which case it would be on the floor someplace, so nobody gets brained trying to get it down off the shelf. You would go up to the fourth floor and look for it.” Alfred sat back and beamed at me, clearly pleased.

  “What about if the great-grandniece also donated her diaries? How would I find books and documents?” I pressed on.

  “Well, you know the card catalogs downstairs, right?”

  I nodded sagely, even though I was fairly clueless, knowing that Alfred wouldn’t understand how someone working here might not be intimately familiar with our catalogs.

  “They give you the call number for the book, but sometimes we move books, or even whole collections, so we have to cross-reference in Cassandra here, so we know where the books actually are,” he said.

  “You keep all this up-to-date?”

  “As far as possible. That’s just the bare-bones version. I’ve only been working with it for two years, so the data are kind of limited. Everything that’s come in since I started using Cassandra is in here, or anything that I know has been shifted, but the earlier stuff, not so much. I’m working on it.”

  “And how much of a lag time is included in that possible?”

  Alfred almost blushed. “A couple of weeks? Depends on the scope of the shift, or the backlog.”

  I contemplated the poster behind his desk. It was a picture of the Old Library at Trinity College in Dublin, where it looked as though no book had been moved for at least two hundred years. Comforting, that. “All right, Alfred—here’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. What if the item is not where Cassandra says it is?”

  He looked at me bleakly. “Well, that’s actually a multipart question. One, I might not have gotten around to entering the details of the move into Cassandra. Two, it’s been misplaced, or put back on the wrong shelf. Or, three”—he paused and swallowed—“it’s gone missing.”

  A thick silence fell and lasted for about five beats. Alfred looked around him; he stood up and peered over the panels that made up his cubicle. Then he sat down again, rolled his desk chair closer to my chair, and leaned forward conspiratorially.

  “Have you heard something?” he whispered, sounding worried.

  I stared at him. “Should I have?” Our eyes locked for several seconds, until I roused myself. After all, the party clock was ticking. “Alfred, I have the feeling that there’s something you want to talk about. Something about the collections?” I said, my tone coaxing.

  He nodded. “I just don’t know what to do. At first I thought, well, the files were incomplete, or some files had been archived. And then I began to wonder if I was getting sloppy, misplacing things, forgetting things . . .” He had picked up a piece of scrap paper from his desk, and he was folding and unfolding it, making and unmaking a fan. He wouldn’t look at me, keeping his eyes on his hands.

  “Alfred,” I said firmly, “you are the most organized person I know, and the most conscientious. You’re worried about something. What is it?”

  Finally he looked up at me, with something like fear in his gaze. “I don’t want to make any trouble. I mean, I love my work, I love the Society, and I’d hate to think that there was anything wrong, but . . .” He swallowed, and I resisted the strong urge to shake him, to hurry the words out of him. “You must know that a lot of what I do is very repetitive. Some people would say boring, but that doesn’t bother me. I’m happy doing what I do, even though it seems very slow. But even I like a little break now and then. So, over the years, I’ve devised a sort of reward system for myself. I’ll do however many regular entries, or a single collection, or some specific batch of processing, and then I’ll treat myself to something special. I’ll save the really nice pieces until I need a little boost, and then I’ll check their tracking history and go visit them, just to make sure everything is right. You know, there are some wonderful things in the collection—real stars—and a lot of people, even staff, don’t even know they’re there. But I do.”

  “I completely understand, Alfred—I do the same thing myself sometimes. Go on,” I urged.

  He gave me a wavery smile, but it faded quickly. “Well, recently, I’ve found that a number of items aren’t where they’re supposed to be. At first I thought, oh, they’re just misfiled, moved to a different shelf. Or someone had decided that they were important or valuable and had moved them to a safer place, without making a note in the record. That certainly does happen, even in the best-run places. When you’ve got a century’s worth of sloppy cataloging, of course some things have slipped through the cracks.” Maybe he was trying to convince himself, but Alfred didn’t look very certain.

  “And you were beginning to get worried?” I prodded gently.

  “I was afraid that I’d messed up something or that there was a bug in Cassandra. So I started double-checking. And I couldn’t find a number of these things, even in unlikely places. They’re just not in the building.”

  Alfred and I stared at each other for several seconds. Then I said carefully, “What kind of things are we talking about?”

  He considered. “Books, prints, letters, and some artifacts. Not just one group. Not just one period, either. But they all share something: they’re what you might call valuable to a collector or on the open market.”

  “You mean worth a lot of money?” Alfred put monetary value far down the list of criteria when evaluating the worth of a historical item, but others might not feel the same way.

  “Well, for example, I was at an auction at Freeman’s last year, where there was a Jefferson autograph letter that sold for twenty thousand dollars. Just out of curiosity, I checked our records after the auction, since I knew that we should have had one a lot like it. But that was one of the things I couldn’t find.” He lapsed into a glum silence.

  My mind was churning furiously, turning over alternatives. Finally, I said carefully, “Alfred, let me ask you this: do you think this is the result of long-term carelessness—no, I don’t mean you—or are you saying that you think that these things have been deliberately removed from the Society?”

  He looked positively miserable. “I don’t know. At first, as I said, I thought it could be human error or just bad record-keeping. But as more and more things turned up missing, and I looked at them as a group, I realized that they were important items—the type of things that someone would be likely to take for gain or for the sake of owning them. They’re definitely desirable. So, to answer your question”—he took a deep breath—“yes, I’m afraid someone has been stealing from the Society.”

  We both sat back in our seats. I was stunned, though of course there were a million things I wanted to ask. I decided to start cautiously. “Alfred, have you discussed this with anyone else?”

  He looked at me with a mixture of guilt and trepidation. “No. At first I didn’t want to believe it. And then when I did, I was afraid someone would blame me. I’ve been trying to avoid thinking about it at all.”

  “All right, Alfred. Let’s step back a moment. Walk me through the process. When you think something is missing, you do a very thorough search first.” When he nodded, I went on. “And when you don’t find it and
decide it is officially missing, what do you do?”

  “I fill out a missing-item form and put it in the file. Oh, and in Cassandra, now.”

  I gazed at him with no little incredulity. “And that’s all? You don’t report it to anyone else?”

  “Like who?” He eyed me curiously.

  “Latoya, to begin with.” The vice president of collections was his immediate supervisor. “Or the president, or the board. Or the police.”

  Alfred looked horrified. “The police? Why would I tell the police?”

  “Because it could be theft, Alfred, and that’s a crime. But let’s take this one step at a time. Do you report missing items to Latoya?”

  He gulped. “Yes. I give her a monthly status report that lists items processed in the month and includes items not found.”

  I reflected on that. “So, in an average month, what do those numbers look like?”

  “Oh, a few thousand input, in a good month—and usually there are maybe ten or twenty that turn up missing. But that could just mean I can’t find them, not that they’re really gone.”

  “I understand. But it’s safe to say that the percentage of missing items is very small, right? And that the numbers here fall within the normal range for a place like this?” He nodded. “Do you identify the missing items?”

  “Sometimes—it depends on what they are.”

  I knew that Latoya would report those results, in condensed form, to the president at monthly staff meetings, and then they would be passed on to the board at their quarterly meetings. But both the lack of detail and the repetition each month would dull the impact—it was just another piece of standard information to be checked off a list at the meeting. In addition, board members were seldom museum professionals, so if the Society’s leaders told them not to worry, they wouldn’t.