Fundraising the Dead (2 page)

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, for 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.

“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.

As registrar, Alfred Findley was in charge of the mi
nutiae 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.”