Fundraising The Dead Read online

  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.
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  “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.

  “All right. Is there any way for you to determine how long these things have been missing? Even very broadly-say a century versus a year?”

  He shook his head. “No, not really. It depends on when the item was originally cataloged, or if it’s been accessed since. In some cases, the more notable things have been used by scholars in publications, or they’ve been loaned for an exhibition somewhere else. We’re always careful to keep close records of cases like that, and keep copies in the file. You know, for copyright issues or insurance questions. But those would be pretty much the only instances when there would be intermediate evidence of where something is, between its first entry and now.”

  Items flowed into the Society, had been flowing in for more than a century; they were assigned a number, and then wandered around the building-or, quite possibly, out of the building. Any number of people could have laid hands on these things, both staff and outsiders such as researchers and board members. Any number of these people could have slipped a rare and valuable item into a pocket or bag and just walked out the door. And we had little or no way of knowing who, what, or when.

  Damn-I did not need to hear this now, with the gala less than three hours away. I was definitely getting a headache.

  Alfred’s voice interrupted the spinning in my head. “Nell? Why are you asking this now?”

  I glanced at the clock behind Alfred’s desk and cut to the chase. “Marty Terwilliger came to me today and wanted to know where the letters between Major Jonathan and George Washington from the Terwilliger Collection were. She’d seen them recently, so she knew they were there. But apparently they aren’t now. So I said I’d look into it.” And I was beginning to regret that I had. I should have just dumped this into someone else’s lap and run screaming. But now I knew about it, and what was worse, I was beginning to understand how much could go wrong with our system. But what was I supposed to do about it? Alfred was still looking at me nervously.

  I sighed. “Alfred, can you give me a list of all the things you think are missing? And any other information that goes with them?” From what he’d said, it could be quite a few items, but I wanted to see them all together before I made any assumptions-or any decisions about what to do, like what to tell Marty. “It would be a big help to me.”

  He nodded. “Sure, no problem. When do you need it?”

  “Tomorrow’s fine. You weren’t planning to go to the gala, were you?”

  Alfred shook his head vehemently. “No way-too much noise and fuss. Not my kind of thing. But I can stay late and run out the report for you, so you’ll have it when you come in tomorrow. That okay?”

  I gave him a warm smile. “That would be wonderful.” I stood up to head back to the next item on my multipage to-do list, but stopped at the edge of the cubicle. “Unfortunately, I don’t think Marty’s likely to let this go, unless we come up with a good answer for her. Or better yet, the documents themselves. So I think we’d better think about what to do next. But at least now I can tell her we’re working on it, right?”

  As I made my way back to my office, I congratulated myself. I’d started one ball rolling. Time to get back to all the other balls I was juggling. Only two and a half hours until the guests started arriving.

  But there was one more thing I had to do first: talk to Rich Girard. Luckily the staff members who spent a lot of time in the stacks carried beepers, so I could get hold of him quickly. When he responded to my page, I said, “Rich, can you come to my office for a moment?”

  “I’m up on four-I’ll be right there,” he responded.

  Rich Girard was barely twenty-two, just out of Penn with a degree in history, and this was his first full-time job. He was trying to make up his mind whether he wanted to go on in history in graduate school or get a library science degree or do something totally different. He had been hired specifically to work on the Terwilliger Collection, which worked out for everyone: the collection got a dedicated staffer, the materials he was working with would serve him well if he applied to either graduate school or library school, and because he was young and inexperienced, we could pay him a miserable pittance and tell him that he was gaining valuable experience. Still, he was smart, conscientious, and hard-working, and seemed really excited about the work.

  When he showed up three minutes later he began, “Hey, Nell, what’s up? I mean, aside from the obvious party stuff.” He slouched in the chair, all angles and legs.

  I had no time for chitchat, with the gala loomin
g. “Have you talked to Marty lately?”

  “Yeah, she asked me how far chronologically into the collection I’d gotten to by now. Why?”

  I went on. “She came to me to say she couldn’t find something she was looking for in the collection, something she knew was there earlier. I said I’d ask you if you had set anything aside to work on.”

  He looked perplexed. “No, I had a couple of boxes out so I could catalog them to folder level, but I put those back over a week ago. I told her that. What’s gone missing?”

  “Something from Major Jonathan, apparently. But she’s coming by tomorrow morning, and I said I’d help her look. Can you join us?” I was being polite, since I was a senior staff member conveying a board member’s request, and he would have to be there unless he came down with malaria. Or maybe smallpox.

  “Sure, no problem. There’s some other stuff I wanted to ask her about anyway.” He seemed unworried.

  “How’s the project going overall?”

  “Oh, great. There’s some amazing stuff in there-the Terwilligers were definitely pack rats. That’s good and bad from my point of view. I mean, there’s all this fascinating material, but it’s all jumbled together, sort of loosely grouped by date. So you can find a letter from Benjamin Franklin thrown in next to somebody’s nineteenth-century shopping list. I’m having a lot of fun, but it’s a long, slow process.”

  “You’ve been here for four months now, since, what, July?” He nodded. “How much do you think you’ve covered?”

  He looked up at the ceiling while he considered. “Lessee. I decided to approach this chronologically, so I started at the beginning, and there’s less stuff there…” I knew that the Terwilligers had arrived in Philadelphia early in the eighteenth century and had set themselves up as bankers and merchants and done extremely well for themselves, all the while reproducing and establishing their offspring in businesses in Philadelphia and beyond. “I’d guess I’ve finished roughly twenty percent in terms of volume. Of course, that’s just to folder level-if I was going to do it down to item level, it would take a lot longer.”