Fundraising the Dead Read online

  As I walked to the front entrance, I was relieved to see that everything looked completely normal. Rich was waiting for me in the lobby, fidgeting. We had barely exchanged greetings when Marty arrived, dressed in jeans, apparently ready for a hands-on attack of the stacks. “Hi, guys. Rich, Nell told you what we’re looking for?”

  Rich nodded diffidently. “I haven’t seen the stuff, but I’ll do my best to help.”

  Marty said crisply, “Okay, let’s go.” Then she took off toward the rear of the building, with Rich and me trailing behind. He and I exchanged a wry glance behind her back, then hurried to catch up. We headed for a room that had once been the heart of the Society—the fireproof vault, built in 1905 with a special endowment from a then-board member who was concerned about the vulnerability of our largely paper-based collections to fire and theft. At the time the room had been state-of-the-art. Now it was just a closely sealed room with metal doors, which made it marginally safer than some in the building. A newer fire-retardant system had been installed sometime in the last fifty years, but it would probably do more harm than good in the event of a fire. One more item for the capital budget. The Terwilliger Collection took up approximately half the room, some four hundred linear feet of books, folders, boxes, and miscellaneous bundles.

  Most people either love or hate old libraries. To some, a room like this—dim, high-ceilinged, dusty, smelling of old paper and crumbling leather—would be oppressive, a place to flee from in search of sun and air. To others, like me, it was a wonderful cave filled with unimaginable treasures and unexpected treats. I always found myself inhaling deeply when I entered the stacks, as if trying to absorb part of them into my bloodstream.

  Marty, however, wasn’t bothering with any romantic illusions, but instead headed straight for her family papers. She stopped in front of the first array of bookshelves, which stretched far over our heads, and turned to face us, arms akimbo.

  “OK, the collection begins here, right?” She laid a hand on the shelves behind her. “And the earliest stuff is at this end, beginning around 1720?”

  I looked to Rich and he nodded. “Right, with a couple of exceptions—some of the larger folio sizes we’ve had to move around a bit, to save space. But I did a quick pass through yesterday of all the file boxes and cross-checked what I found against the map I made for myself when I started, and this is where they start.”

  Marty went on relentlessly. “And the war materials start about here, right?” She pointed to the second tier of shelves. When Marty talked about the war, it could only mean the Revolution. “Now, you know that Major Jonathan Terwilliger and General George Washington began corresponding before the war was declared—before Jonathan was a major—and continued until Washington’s death, right?”

  I hadn’t actually known, but I nodded anyway.

  “I’ve seen these papers plenty of times, over many years. In fact, I grew up with them. Daddy used to show them to us when we were kids—he was really proud of our history, and he wanted us to be, too. And I’ve seen them since they came to the Society. They used to be on the second-to-top shelf here—I saw them there last month. But they’re not here now.”

  She stopped, crossed her arms, and glared at us. I looked briefly at Rich, who said quickly, “As I said before, I haven’t gotten up this far yet. I’ve been transferring some of the boxes to my desk for the more detailed cataloging—about a rolling cart’s worth at a time—but the last batch I took came from those shelves back there.” He pointed toward the far end of the shelves behind Marty, where there was indeed a gap about the size of a document box.

  “Would anyone else have been looking at them?” Marty demanded.

  I spoke up. “When Felicity comes in, we can ask if anyone has requested them—if so, they could still be down in the reading room, waiting to be reshelved. But I understand that the cataloging is still pretty sketchy, right?”

  “Unfortunately,” Rich said.

  “So, in order to have requested them, someone would have had to know they existed,” Marty pointed out.

  “We don’t let the public in here, wandering in the stacks and browsing. You know that—we’ve discussed access policies at board meetings,” I said.

  “Well, if they haven’t been signed out, and Rich isn’t working on them, and they’re not on the shelf . . . they could have been stolen,” Marty said bluntly. “Damn it, that’s a whole box, not just a single letter. To do that, you’d have to have major balls—and inside help.”

  I could almost see Marty’s thermostat rising. “Let’s not jump to conclusions, Marty,” I said in my most soothing tones. “There are several steps we ought to take before we say that. Let me check with the staff, ask if anyone has seen what we’re looking for. Then we can do a more thorough search of the stacks, the reading room—maybe someone in-house decided to take a look at the letters and forgot to put them back, or put them in the wrong place. It happens. Please, give us a chance to sort this out, before you start crying fire.”

  Marty gave me a long, calculating look. “I’ll give you a week, until Friday, to find them. And if you don’t, there’ll be hell to pay. I’ll go to the board—and the press. I want those papers.”

  That kind of publicity was something the Society definitely did not need, especially coming hard on the heels of Alfred’s death. “I hope it won’t come to that, Marty. I’m sure there’s some reasonable explanation, and I’ll get to work on it immediately.” As though I didn’t have anything else to do. “I’m very glad you called this to our attention—clearly we need to look carefully at our procedures.”

  Marty hardly seemed mollified. “One week,” she said again, then turned on her heel and marched out of the stacks. I exchanged another look with Rich, who was several shades paler than he had been a few minutes ago.

  “If I weren’t such a lady,” I said, “I’d say we were in deep shit. We’d damn well better find the those papers.” I took a deep breath, then let it out slowly. “Well, I guess I’d better start talking to the staff.” I made my way out of the stacks, followed by poor Rich, who resembled a puppy who had just had his nose swatted.

  Rich headed upstairs, but I found Marty waiting for me in the hall. “Did you need something else, Marty? I assure you I’ll keep an eye on things.”

  She shook her head abruptly. “It’s not that. Alfred’s funeral will be on Tuesday. Will you let the staff know?”

  Marty was handling Alfred’s funeral? That seemed odd. “Of course. Can you give me the details? I’ll send out an email blast right away. Why ...”

  Marty handed me a sheet with information on the funeral home and the cemetery. “Why’m I doing it? Alfred wasn’t close to most of his relatives, and nobody else stepped up. Thanks for letting people know.”

  She turned away to leave, but I wondered if I had seen a glint of tears.

  CHAPTER 9

  I went back to my office, flopped down into my desk chair, and tried hard to think. Marty Terwilliger was important to the Society, not because she had a lot of money (which she didn’t—the old Philadelphia families had run through most of their fortunes a long time ago) but because of her family’s history with the place and because of her extensive and intricate connections with a whole lot of Philadelphia-area society. We needed them, as a group. Which meant that we needed to keep Marty happy, and that made fixing this mess my first priority.

  That was the business decision. But I had this unsettling feeling that there were bigger issues involved: namely, how we kept track of our collections, how we fulfilled our obligation to the public and to all those, dead and living, who had entrusted us with protecting their historic treasures. From its inception, the Society had been run like a club. All the members knew each other, and it was a pleasant place to fritter away a couple of hours. It had been a trusting place then, but the world had changed and that trust was no longer justified.

  At board meetings, staff and board members had debated about security on many occasions, as I knew well.
Certainly the technology had changed, and various consultants had been called in to lay out high-tech options for strategically positioned video cameras, on-screen monitoring, sophisticated alarm systems, motion sensors—the list went on and on. But all of these glitzy systems cost money, big money, and we were barely able to keep the heat and lights on, not to mention pay staff salaries. Somehow electronic surveillance had been bumped far down the wish list, and no one had really protested.

  But had we been wrong? Had we been too gullible, too innocent—and were we about to pay the price? I stared at the handsome framed etching on my office wall, but I didn’t see it. What I saw was looming catastrophe. Hang on, Nell, you’re looking at the worst possible case. Maybe somebody just moved the box to clean. Ha, I responded to myself, when was the last time anyone had cleaned in the stacks? Maybe the missing papers were on a cart, waiting to be reshelved. Maybe an inexperienced new hire had simply reshelved the box in the wrong place. Too many maybes.

  Sometimes I regretted not having any sort of formal library training, and this was one of those times. I had a lot of questions, and I needed information. But I wasn’t quite sure where to start. As I swung idly back and forth in my swivel chair, I saw two paths: first, I needed to review, for my own understanding, how we tracked items as they traveled within the building. Second, I needed to find out exactly what, if anything, was being done about the items that Alfred had been unable to find. For the first, I needed to talk with our head librarian, Felicity; I’d talk to Latoya second. Maybe that was backwards, since Latoya was officially responsible for managing our collections, but I’d known Felicity longer, and she was far more knowledgeable about what was where in the building than Latoya could hope to be. And, I reminded myself, I still hadn’t given Charles the heads-up about the problem of the missing items; he wasn’t in today, but Marty’s complaint would demand his attention sooner or later—sooner, if I couldn’t come up with an answer for her within the week. I decided to do a little digging myself first, but if I didn’t come up with anything by, say, Tuesday, I’d have to tell Charles that we had a problem.

  Before I headed downstairs to the reading room to find Felicity, I stopped to talk with Joan. She had been on staff less time than I had, and had been hired to replace a charming woman who’d been here decades but was completely oblivious to the changes that computers had wrought upon modern communications. “Hey, Joan—have you sent out that statement about Alfred’s death?”

  “Sure did, yesterday, once we got wind that the media were already on it. It was kind of generic, since I couldn’t find anybody who knew him well. And before you ask, I also added something to the website.”

  “You are good, lady! Maybe you can put together a little more about him—you know, what he did, the collections he worked on, and so on—for the next issue of the magazine?”

  “I’m on it. Poor guy! I don’t know if I ever had a conversation longer than two minutes with Alfred, but he always gave me exactly what I asked for, and quickly. Let me know when you’re going to advertise his position—I’ve got some ideas about where to post it online.”

  I could tell she was already way ahead of me. “Sounds good, and thanks. I’ll leave you to it.”

  I stood up and headed downstairs. Felicity Soames, senior staff librarian, had been at the Society forever, and after Alfred, she was the best person to ask where things were—or where they should be. Briefly I wondered how she and Alfred had gotten along—hadn’t I seen them together at the gala? She was of a certain age, as the French like to put it, had never married, and lived for the purpose of managing the unwieldy mountains of paper housed in the Society’s building. Luckily, she also loved to help other people, in the often-futile hope that they would come to share her passion. A hapless researcher, fresh off the bus from Des Moines with two hours to spare, would be greeted by Felicity and inundated with stacks of books and promises of photocopies to come. They went away either glassy-eyed or starry-eyed, but it made no difference to Felicity. She was an incredible resource, and we were lucky to have her. Of course she was the first person I turned to in my quest.

  I found her at her usual station: the elevated desk in the reading room, where she could survey her domain and keep an eye out for people foolish enough to use a pen rather than a pencil, or to think about bending a fragile book spine.

  “Got a minute, Felicity?” I asked quietly (in a library, always quietly) as I approached.

  Felicity scanned the crowd, though crowd was a rather loose definition, since it consisted of four people, at least one of whom was asleep. The room could hold a hundred easily. It didn’t look like any murder-ghouls or newshounds had made it past the lobby, though, and I made a mental note to ask our front-desk attendant if he’d had to keep any at bay.

  “I think so,” she said.

  “Privately, please.”

  She gave me an odd look, then said, “The new room, then?”

  Perfect, I thought. The absurdly designated new room was another artifact from an earlier, more gracious age. Once it had been a comfortable sitting room for gentlemen—I had seen old photos showing overstuffed armchairs and brass floor lamps. Then it had been modified to house our collection of paintings, on specially designed vertical racks, but more recently it had been turned over to much-needed shelving, for those reference books we allowed the general public to access. I followed her there, making sure there was no one in the room. The chairs were long gone, so we retreated to the furthest corner and leaned gingerly against opposing bookshelves.

  “What’s up?” she asked. “Does this have to do with Alfred’s death? Such a tragedy. He had a most meticulous mind.”

  I debated for about a half a second about whether to bring her into the loop about the missing Terwilliger papers, and then decided that she needed to know; she would be essential to figuring things out. “No, this is something else. We have a problem. I hope it’s a small problem, just a minor mix-up. You know Marty Terwilliger?”

  She nodded. “Of course. I saw her in the reading room earlier today.”

  “She came to me just before the gala and said she couldn’t find a particular group of documents from the Terwilliger Collection, and she knows that they were there not long ago. Rich and I went with her to look for them again this morning, and we couldn’t find them, either—at least, not where they were supposed to be. So, before we all fly into a panic, I wanted to check with you about the tracking procedure for a document in the building—you know, if somebody calls something up to use in the reading room, or if one of the staff takes it to look at, or if it goes out of the building for restoration, or something. Whatever you can tell me.”

  Felicity pinned me with a look that combined contempt and pity: How could you be so ignorant? her stare said. She cleared her throat. “Certainly we have procedures in place for any such movement within the building—and of course, items seldom leave the building, and then only under very carefully regulated restrictions. Here,” she said, pulling a slip of colored paper from a small pile on the shelf behind her, “this is a tracking slip. When a book or folder or box—whatever—is removed from its place, the staff member who removes it fills out this slip, with the item’s title, call number, and shelf location, and then signs it. It’s a multipart form: one copy remains on the shelf, and the other is inserted into the article in question.” She fixed me with an eagle eye. “Surely you’ve used these? I know I’ve seen items from the collections on your desk.”

  I tried to avoid her look. All right, I’d been guilty of sneaking a book out of the stacks now and then if I couldn’t find the form, or I didn’t have a pencil, or I was in a hurry and I was going to bring it right back . . . “Well, I always put things back,” I said defensively.

  She sniffed. “Actually, we prefer if people don’t reshelve things on their own—all too often they end up in the wrong place.” Oops, she’d nailed me again.

  I threw up my hands. “Mea culpa, mea culpa. I’ll never do it again, I promise.
But in this instance, if something was removed legitimately from the shelf by an authorized person, there should be a multipart tracking slip—have I got that right?”

  Felicity nodded. “Exactly. And when the book is returned to its rightful place, the two slips are stapled together and filed.”

  At last, a ray of light. “Could we check the slips to see if this particular item was requested anytime recently?”

  “Of course. Do you have the call number?”

  “I’ll get it for you—if it exists. This collection isn’t really cataloged yet, you know—that’s what Rich has been working on. Oh, another question. If, say, this was a box full of individual documents, or folders of documents—would you sign out the whole box or just the items from inside the box?”

  Felicity said primly, “The box, of course—or, if you requested such a folder to be brought to the reading room, the shelver would bring the whole box, not just a single folder. Again, it’s far too easy to mislay a single folder, and often they are identified only in the broadest of terms. We’re working hard to correct that, but there are many, many boxes, and a limited number of staff members. I had asked Alfred to pursue that, as time permitted.”