Dead Letters Read online

I presented myself to the concierge at his building promptly at three fifty-seven and was directed upstairs with a smile. Arthur Logan was waiting at the door when the elevator opened, and escorted me to the living room, where tea was laid out on a low table: silver pot, porcelain cups, sugar tongs in the shape of the claws of a bird of prey. Arthur seemed in good spirits as he fussed about with pouring and sugaring and such and extended a plate of exquisite petits fours toward me. I politely took one and sipped my tea.

  Finally we were settled with our refreshments, and Arthur looked at me directly. “What do you have for me?”

  I returned his gaze and said carefully, “I believe your great-grandfather Jeremiah Logan bilked his business partner, James Reilly, out of his fair share of the Logan Rifle business by omitting him from the patent application for the Logan Repeater rifle. Which means that your family has reaped the profits of what could be called ill-gotten gains. Is that what you were looking for?”

  He smiled, a little sadly. “Indeed, Miss Pratt, my confidence in you was not misplaced. That was much the same conclusion that I had reached. Can you reveal your research process?”

  “Of course. I found a file that contained letters from your grandmother Laura to her niece Josephine that suggested that there was some family matter that would not stand up to scrutiny. When I learned of the Logan Rifle Company, I looked up what we had on the Reilly family and found another file with the patent application and the research and supporting information. James Reilly was the true inventor of the mechanism, right?” When he nodded, I went on, “But the patent listed only Jeremiah Logan.”

  “Precisely.”

  “May I ask how you knew? Or have you always known?” Maybe the latter was a rude question, but I was honestly curious.

  “It did not occur to me to question the early history of the Logan businesses, but as I mentioned to you, I’ve been going through the family papers recently, and I came across a file of letters that James Reilly had sent to members of my family, pleading his case.”

  “Why weren’t those letters destroyed?”

  He sighed. “For good or ill, my family has always had a strong sense of history, and I think perhaps some members felt a lingering sense of guilt. Reilly was not well treated. Had he lived longer, he might have been appropriately compensated, but he died a relatively young man—and a bitter one, as his letters show. I cannot defend my great-grandfather’s actions, although he may have believed that crediting Reilly officially would meet with some resistance. Reilly was an ignorant Irish immigrant, after all—how could his invention be worthwhile? And I prefer to think that old Jeremiah would have seen that he was treated fairly.”

  “Mr. Logan, there’s something else I should tell you. It appears that one of James Reilly’s children was a librarian—in fact, for a long time, the only librarian—at the Society. I have to wonder, if he knew about this situation, why he didn’t approach your family, or even the authorities, decades ago?”

  “A fair question, Miss Pratt, and there are many possible explanations, the first being that his father died when he was very young, so perhaps no one told him of the issue. Or it may be that he saw no recourse at the time he worked at the Society, or even that he felt that raising the issue would tarnish the Logan name. Or that he, a humble library caretaker, could not hope to take on a revered family such as the Logans, or even be believed. We may never know.”

  He was right. Possibly ghost Thomas had been directing my search, but those records might not have been available to him in time to act upon them. But I still had some misgivings. “Mr. Logan, this is going to sound absurd, but I have the feeling that he was directing me to the appropriate documents, ones I might otherwise not have looked at.”

  What Arthur said next surprised me. “So you’ve met Thomas?”

  I was stunned into silence for a long moment. “You knew Thomas?” I said at last.

  He smiled at my confusion. “To be quite honest, I’m not sure. When I was quite young, I recall my father taking me to a place with tall columns and high ceilings that I determined only much later was likely your Society. While there I wandered off and encountered a very kind old man, who directed me back toward where my father was. I’ve often wondered since if that was Thomas.”

  “What year was that?”

  “I must have been no more than four years old, which would make it about 1930.”

  “Thomas died in 1928. He had been the librarian there for thirty years by then.”

  “Ah,” Arthur Logan said, and fell silent. We sat in companionable silence for a few minutes, each lost in our own thoughts. He was the first to break it. “Well, Miss Pratt, you have more than fulfilled your part of our agreement, and I am grateful to you.”

  It sounded like a polite dismissal, so I set down my empty teacup and stood up. “I’m happy I could help. It has been a pleasure working with you, Mr. Logan.”

  “I appreciate your efforts on my behalf. Let me see you to the door.”

  A few months later I read with sadness in the Inquirer of Arthur Logan’s death. The obituary covered several columns. So I was not surprised when the front desk called me that day to say that there was an attorney to see me, a Mr. Jonathan Pepper. I went downstairs and escorted him to my office.

  “How may I help you, Mr. Pepper?” I asked when we were seated.

  He cleared his throat. “Ms. Pratt, I am one of the attorneys charged with settling the estate of the late Arthur Logan. Before his death, he requested specifically that I convey a copy of his will to you.” He handed me an envelope with a substantial stack of pages inside. “I’ve taken the liberty of marking those passages he particularly wanted you to see.”

  The bequest to the Society. I’d had every faith that Mr. Logan would keep his end of our agreement. I scanned the relevant paragraph—he’d made an outright gift of all documents pertaining, etc., and he’d even added an endowment to cover cataloging and conservation, bless the man. Then I turned to the second marked passage, several pages later in the document.

  “I hereby give and bequeath the sum of five million dollars to the heirs and assigns of James Reilly, deceased, to wit . . .” There followed a list of names and instructions. It was too late for Thomas, but at least there were other family descendants who would benefit.

  I looked up at Mr. Pepper, who said, “These were as many of this James Reilly’s descendants as we could identify, and there are provisions for distributing the funds. Mr. Logan did not see fit to explain this clause to me, but he said you would understand.”

  “I do. Arthur Logan was a good man.”

  “He was.”

  When I had seen Mr. Pepper out of the building, I had one more thing to do. I made my way to the third floor, to the shelf with the Reilly files. “Thomas?” I whispered. Nothing happened . . . until an envelope fluttered to the floor.

  I picked it up and opened it, noting the heavy stock and the faint discoloration that comes with age, and pulled out the single folded sheet of paper, on which was written, “Thank you.” It was signed, “Thomas Reilly.”

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  Q&A

  The Museum Mysteries

  What inspired you to set your mystery series in a Philadelphia historical institution?

  I think that Philadelphia has been underused as a setting for novels. The city is rich in both history and culture, but at the same time it’s a modern city—in the past few decades, it’s undergone a lot of major changes, but it continues to be strong. For example, eating in Philadelphia used to be a joke, but now it boasts a wealth of interesting restaurants. It’s not just cheesesteaks any more! And Philadelphia has an ample supply of museums and other cultural organizations, so there’s plenty of fodder for an ongoing book series. Both the children’s museum and the firemen’s museum that I have depicted in this series are inspired by real Philadelphia institutions (although I don’t know of any criminal activities at either!).

  Also, the setting is one I�
�m personally familiar with. I grew up mainly on the east coast, near Philadelphia, so I was always surrounded by American history. As an adult, I found myself working for a financial advisory firm that was trying desperately to keep the city from going bankrupt (we succeeded). Talk about hands-on learning! Later I worked on a couple of Pennsylvania political campaigns. All of these combined gave me a good understanding of the city’s history and its current condition. I knew who the local players were. When I started working as a fundraiser at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, a respected local historical institution, I expected it to be a pleasant change to step back into a simpler, quieter job. But that was before it was discovered that a trusted long-term employee who we all knew and liked had walked off with four million dollars’ worth of collections items over several years, and nobody had noticed (in fact, that was the inspiration for Fundraising the Dead). Luckily many of the items were recovered, but it was a sad episode in HSP’s history—and anything but quiet!

  Is there a real-life inspiration for Thomas?

  Yes, definitely. HSP has at least one ghost that everyone knows about, and he’s been around for a while: he used to run the mimeograph machine when nobody was around, which gives you an idea of how long. I borrowed much of his history for Thomas. And I and several other people heard someone exclaiming loudly, “Ow! Ow! Ow!” out in a hallway, but when we went to investigate, there was no one there.

  All those creaks and thuds in an old building aren’t always due to the plumbing, and that’s something you get used to. In fact, HSP now gives annual ghost tours, as do many other historic places.

  What do you enjoy most about writing for your heroine Nell Pratt?

  Writers are often asked how much we include of ourselves in our writing. I like to think that Nell is pretty much like me, only better. When I started writing, I realized that a fundraiser made an ideal protagonist. I was one for many years (that’s where I polished my skills at writing fiction, putting together grant applications), so I knew I could get the details right. It’s an important role in any nonprofit institution—they always need money. More important, you’d be surprised how much information fundraisers collect, about people and institutions. Sure, the Internet has made is easier to keep track of who’s who, but fundraising staff also records who knows who, what their philanthropic history is, what their interests are, often over many years. And all fundraisers at cultural institutions within a region know each other and can pool information. All of this is useful to my protagonist Nell Pratt when she is faced with solving a crime.

  She really cares about what she does—the survival of the Society is important to her, and not just so she can keep her job. She enjoys getting up close and personal with real historic artifacts (as I did as often as I could—there’s nothing like holding William Penn’s Bible or letters written by early presidents or Civil War soldiers to make history come alive). What’s more, she believes the best of people, and most people like her. Of course, in addition to all that she’s smart and stubborn when it comes to unraveling a murder.

  You show the collections management at the (fictional) Pennsylvania Antiquarian Society as chaotic—is that exaggerated a bit, or is it true to your experience?

  Having worked at several museums and historical institutions, I can assure you that what I describe is pretty much how things look like behind the scenes (I must have gotten it right, since Fundraising the Dead is now required reading for a graduate seminar in public history theory and method at Temple University in Philadelphia). I believe that the majority of people who work at smaller museums and historical societies and the like really care about what they’re doing and try to do it well. But most likely they’ve inherited a lot of problems from past generations, and they’re struggling to catch up.

  Digital options have made collections management easier in some ways, but there is still a bottleneck: to create an image of an item, you have to scan it (which can be physically hazardous to a fragile artifact) or take a good picture of it (which requires the appropriate equipment; you can’t just pick up your pocket camera and expect a high-quality photo). Most important, you have to have people to then organize the digital information you create. All this costs money, which is hard to come by when institutions are fighting for enough funding to keep the lights on and the doors open to the public.

  Should I donate my family’s heirlooms to a museum or historical society? What kind of material are institutions interested in?

  Yes! With a few caveats. First, find out if you have any family members who are interested in all the “stuff” a family collects over generations. They might be justifiably upset if you give away items they’d always wanted for themselves. But the truth is, do those heirs even know—or care—what most of that “stuff” is? Sadly, in many cases the answer is no, and the items you saved for them may end up just pitched into a Dumpster. (Please, if you have family photos, label them! If you have treasured items, provide a description of them somewhere—who acquired them, why they matter to you and your family. That can go a long way towards making the items more historically interesting.)

  And it’s not just personal memorabilia that can have value. Long-established companies are often faced with finding room for new materials and have been known to toss thousands of records. One example: a decade or more ago, a Philadelphia funeral home was moving out of the building it had occupied for nearly a century and was prepared to scrap most of its early funeral records, until the Historical Society of Pennsylvania stepped in and rescued them. Each record described an individual’s funeral—where the person was buried, how much the funeral cost, which family members attended. This kind of information is priceless to anybody working on local family history.

  Admittedly, your local institution may not actually want your great-aunt Mary’s shopping list scrawled on a paper bag, but let them make those decisions. Sometimes it’s those small pieces of daily life that make collections interesting, and which can help preserve a piece of history from their time. Family heirlooms need a home where they will be cared for under appropriate storage conditions and will be made available for others to share. So again, yes: please consider donating your family artifacts and papers to a local institution. It’s not about their monetary worth; it’s about preserving history.

  * * *

  Keep reading for a special excerpt of Sheila Connolly’s next Museum Mystery . . .

  FIRE ENGINE DEAD

  Available in paperback March 2012 from Berkley Prime Crime!

  * * *

  I looked in both directions along the third-floor hallway. Good, nobody in sight. I pulled open the door to the library stacks only wide enough to slip through it, and closed it quietly behind me.

  I was playing hooky. It had been only a few months since I had taken over as president of the Pennsylvania Antiquarian Society, shoved unceremoniously into the corner office from my nice, safe, lower-profile job as director of development. Don’t get me wrong—I loved my new job. Or at least, parts of the job. But while the Society was a venerable and respected Philadelphia institution, it was now my responsibility to keep it solvent, intact, and open to the public. Not easy, especially since the current fundraising climate sucked; the hundred-plus-year-old building cried out for repairs and upgrades that we simply couldn’t afford; and the salaries we offered were so uncompetitive that we had trouble hanging on to enough staff to cover the desks and retrieve and shelve items requested.

  Hiding wasn’t going to improve any one of those problems, but it was going to make me feel better. I’d first come to work at the Society more than five years ago because I loved Philadelphia and I loved local history. One of the unacknowledged perks of the job was the chance to prowl in the stacks. In the past I could claim that I was getting to know the collections so I could write grant proposals about them, but the truth was, I loved to handle original documents and memorabilia from everyone from William Penn to the most recent mayor of Philadelphia. I got a real rush from the h
eady smell of old leather and crumbling paper. I needed to revisit the stacks periodically to remind myself why I had accepted the job of president, especially when board members called every other hour to ask why I hadn’t done A, B, or C. The answer usually was because we can’t afford it, but they were getting tired of hearing that. Heck, I was getting tired of saying it. I needed some new lines—or preferably, more money.

  I trod quietly along the dimly lit aisles, making as little noise as possible. Was I looking for anything in particular? Not really. I was certainly trying to avoid noticing the blue tarps spread over shelves here and there to divert the drips from the leaking roof, and the teetering piles of boxes that I knew were not acid-free archival quality, and which were slowly sinking under their own weight, doing who knows what damage to their precious contents. No shelves to put them on; no staff to shelve them. Come on, Nell—you’re supposed to be cheering yourself up!

  I found myself an old metal chair and took it to a corner, about as far from the door as I could get. I was surrounded by large ledgers from long-gone Philadelphia companies, and I knew if I opened any one of them I’d find some clerk’s careful copperplate script in fading brown ink, recording the day-to-day transactions of daily life a century ago. I shut my eyes and breathed deep, waiting for the calm and quiet to do their work . . .

  “Nell?” a male voice whispered.

  I jumped a foot and opened my eyes. “Eric, how did you find me?” Eric was my administrative assistant. He’d only been in the job for two months, but I swear he had learned how to read my mind.

  “I know you come up here when you get stressed out. I hate to bother you, but you told me to remind you about the luncheon today, and it’s already eleven thirty.”