I laughed. “I’ll have to remember that. Well, then, what about this little FBI trap? Has James told you anything more about it? What’s the bait?”
“You remember that Bucks County collection that was left to the Society a couple of years ago? That guy who had a strange house museum, and who’d never changed anything in the place?”
I nodded. “Yes. I worked with the executors to see that there was enough money to catalog the materials.”
“But it hasn’t happened yet, right?”
“Right. They finished probate maybe a year ago and delivered the stuff to the Society, and we stuck it in storage boxes on the fourth floor until we could get to it. We were going to advertise for a student intern to work on it next semester.”
Marty cocked her head at me. “So nobody really knows what’s in all those boxes?”
“Not really. I looked at some of the stuff right after the man died, when it was still at his house, just to get an idea of the scope, how much space we’d need, things like that. It was a real hodgepodge—junk like his Aunt Minnie’s diaries, which talked mainly about the weather, mixed in with some really good items like detailed eighteenth-century records of the construction of the first house on the property, which architectural historians would love to get their hands on. I don’t think the man ever threw anything out, and he was the last of his family.”
“I’ve been through it,” Marty said.
I looked at her quizzically. “What? When?”
“Not at the Society. His sister was married to my aunt’s husband’s brother, so I spent some time at the house. Since he never married and never had children, and had this big place on the river, he used to hold family reunions every now and then when I was growing up. He loved to show us his treasures when we were kids, and I was one of the few who cared. And when I got to college, I asked if I could use some of his documents for my undergraduate thesis. Why do you think he ended up leaving all the stuff to the Society?”
“Marty, are you related to everyone in the five-county area?”
“Maybe half, or at least the families who’ve been around a couple of hundred years. Anyway, bottom line is I know what’s in the collections now at the Society. So I pointed Jimmy to a couple of real gems. Like some William Penn letters, and the original land grant for the old man’s property, signed by the founder himself.”
“Wow. I had no idea.”
“Thing is, I know who else was poking around the collections.”
The gears in my mind were grinding rather slowly. “You mean—Charles?”
“Yup. I ran into him up on the fourth floor recently—he was rummaging through the boxes. He gave me a nice song and dance about familiarizing himself with the collections, and I bought it at the time. I think we ended up having lunch together that day. Maybe he thought he could distract me with his charms.”
There was a little bell ringing somewhere in my head. William Penn . . . “Marty,” I said slowly, “when I was planting the bugs at Charles’s place, there was a deed on his desk signed by William Penn. I asked him about it, and he told me he’d picked it up at an auction in New York. I didn’t think much about it at the time, but it sounds as though it could have come from that collection.”
“Would you recognize it if you saw it again?”
“I think so. You don’t get to handle original Penn documents that often. And I remember that the purchaser’s name on the deed was the same as one of our major donors.”
“That’s the one. So that would make two of us who would recognize it. Anyway, to get back to the FBI side—Jimmy’s been working with some of his colleagues in the New York office. They’ve got more people there who work with art thefts, dealers, collectors, and such—and besides, they’re somewhere that isn’t Philadelphia, which is good. They’ve got somebody working with them who’s put out the word that he wants an autograph piece from William Penn and is willing to pay big for it. All very low-key, word of mouth, that sort of thing.”
“That kind of stuff really goes on? And is it legal?”
“You really are an innocent, aren’t you? Of course it goes on, all the time. And there are various dealers who are willing to act as go-betweens without asking too many questions—for the right price, or finder’s fee. The FBI knows who they are, but they don’t usually hassle them, because they’re reasonably small fish, at least by their standards. We’re not talking about Rembrandts or Impressionists here, we’re talking about letters, diaries, little stuff. It’s a whole lot easier to trade in, especially below the radar. And, as we’ve already proved, a whole lot harder to identify and track. Anyway, our undercover collector in New York got a discreet message—from someone in Philadelphia.”
“No! You think Charles is selling that deed?”
“Already has. Charles moves fast. He knew you’d seen it, and he probably wanted to get it off his hands ASAP. The collector in New York will be watching for it, and he’ll let Jimmy know when it arrives.”
“He wouldn’t just stick it in the mail, would he?” I was worried about that poor, fragile, three-hundred-year-old piece of paper.
“He’s probably got a courier service, if he does this regularly. I bet the faithful Doris Manning would know.”
“You’re right. She handles all that kind of stuff for him. Heck, she even picks up his dry cleaning.” I grimaced.
“I wonder if she’s in the office today?”
“Maybe, if Charles asked her to be. Should we call her?”
“Let me. She’s more likely to answer the phone if it’s a board member.”
Marty got up and went to the kitchen to make the call. She was gone a couple of minutes, and when she came back she said, “She’s there. She said Charles was in earlier and, in her words, “left some work” for her. I didn’t dare ask any more.”
“Well, if the Penn deed is going out today to the guy in New York, at least we’ll know where that is. I hope there’s nothing else in that shipment.”
“Amen. Anyway, when that arrives, Jimmy should have what he needs to make his move on Charles—if we haven’t given him enough other stuff. The fact that you saw it closes the circle, from the Society to Charles to the FBI’s collector.”
“But James doesn’t know some of it officially.”
“There is that. But cheer up, Nell. Charles’s days are numbered.”
We raised our coffee cups to each other in mock salute.
CHAPTER 29
I had a lot to think about on the way home from Marty’s, so I started by making yet another mental list. One, I’d been flattered and touched by what Marty had said about me. I did care about the Society, and I tried to do a good job—it was nice that someone had noticed. Two, I’d been a fool about Charles. Looking back, I realized that in fact he had gotten a lot more from me than I had ever gotten from him. I’d been the perfect dupe. I had believed that whatever our personal relationship might be, at least he respected my professional abilities. Wrong: he’d assumed I was both blind and stupid and tried to frame me. Great judge of character you are, Nell.
But the nagging voice inside kept coming back to the big Number Three: who killed Alfred? We didn’t seem any closer to an answer, and we were woefully short of suspects. Had Charles actually hired someone to do the deed? Was he working with someone else inside the Society? Had Latoya felt threatened by Alfred’s insistent reminders that things weren’t where they were supposed to be, and silenced him? Heck, for all I knew, Felicity Soames had grown tired of playing watchdog and whacked Alfred. All of the above seemed equally unlikely.
At least James would have enough evidence now to arrest Charles. That was a plus. All he had to do was collect the proof from his sham collector in New York, completing the chain of evidence, and reel Charles in.
But when was this going to happen? How long would it take the Penn deed to reach the New York buyer? Sunday I was reluctant to leave the house in case I missed a phone call from James or Marty, so I stayed home and cleaned things I�
�m not sure I had ever cleaned before: the tops of high cupboards, under the refrigerator. I scrubbed the grout lines of the tile in the bathroom with a toothbrush. Then I made lists of my CDs, my books. I labeled and filed all my photographs. I updated my address book.
In between I fidgeted, staring at the phone, willing it to ring. Naturally, when it finally did, I jumped a foot and snatched it up quickly.
“Hello?” I said breathlessly.
“Is this Nell?”
“Doris? Is that you?” She was the last person in the world I would have expected a call from on a Sunday. Why was she calling me?
“Yes, it is. Charles asked me to call you. He said there’s something here at the Society that you need to see.”
My brain was working slowly. “What is it?”
Doris sniffed. “I’m afraid I can’t say. He just told me to call you and ask you to come. We’ll be waiting for you here.” She hung up before I could protest.
Well, that was certainly interesting. I tried to work out who knew what at the moment. Charles didn’t know that I knew he was behind the thefts. Maybe he had collected all the things he hadn’t already sold and concealed them somewhere in the Society building, and he was inviting me to share in his big discovery—Aha, the lost is found! To someone who was not in the loop on this, it would sound quite plausible. Well, I could play along.
But I wasn’t going to be stupid about it. I picked up the phone and punched in Marty’s home number—no answer. I dredged up the business card James had given me and tried that. Someone in the office answered, but James wasn’t in. I left a message for him to call me and gave both my home phone number and my cell phone. Then I called Marty’s phone again and waited for her voice mail to pick up so I could leave a message.
“Marty? It’s Nell. I just got a call from Doris at the Society. She said that Charles told her to call me and ask me to come in, but she didn’t say why. I figure I might as well go in and see what it’s all about. Heck, maybe he’s ready to confess. I’ll give you a call when I know what the story is.”
There. At least somebody would know where I was. I took an extremely quick shower, dressed, and went out to the car: trains ran so rarely on weekends that it was far faster just to drive, and on a Sunday, parking in the neighborhood of the Society wouldn’t be a problem.
But I had guessed wrong. Apparently there was some sort of Center City holiday event going on, and I ended up parking a couple of blocks away. I walked back to the Society and let myself in with my key. On the third floor the offices were dark, except for Charles’s suite. When I walked in, Doris was waiting primly behind her desk.
“Hello, Doris,” I said. “Where’s Charles?”
“He’s downstairs in the basement. He asked me to wait up here and take you down when you arrived.”
“Okay, lead the way.” I followed her back to the elevator, and once inside, she keyed in the basement level. “What’s this about?”
She remained facing forward, waiting for the elevator to hit bottom. “I don’t know, but he said it was important that you see something.” The elevator doors opened. “This way.”
Doris led the way through the warren of cluttered rooms in the basement. I had never spent much time down here, except for a few occasions when I needed to estimate the scope of a collection. Plus the Society had been making a concerted effort to remove vulnerable items from this area, because the below-ground rooms were damp, and they were also affected by the steady rumbling from the subway trains that ran directly beneath our building. What remained was a jumble of broken furniture, unused display cases, and outdated electronic equipment. Doris kept going, down the long central corridor; she opened one of the doors at the back of the building. I could see lights on in the room beyond.
Doris didn’t stop but marched into the room, and I hurried to follow, mystified. She pointed at an open door to a small room at the back. “Charles is in there.” She turned and looked at me expectantly.
I went to the door and peered in. And then something slammed me in the back. I fell forward into the space, and the door swung shut behind me with a solid clang, and I was in the dark. And, apparently, alone.
CHAPTER 30
It took me a moment to figure out what had happened. Doris had just locked me into a very small dark place in the basement, and Charles was nowhere around. I picked myself up off the floor, turned around, and sat, my back against shelves. Then I clamped down hard on the incipient panic attack.
I was not claustrophobic; I was not afraid of the dark. Good. So now it was time to use my brain and think. For starters, I knew where I was. Despite not having spent much time down here, I knew every corner of the building, since I had written more than one grant proposal begging for money to upgrade our lovely but aging 1900 building. This was the former wine cellar, an artifact of the glory days when the Society was run like a gentlemen’s club, and those gentlemen liked to have a place to lay down their vintage port, the perfect accompaniment to perusing old documents. Needless to say, the space had not held wine for a very long time; now it held miscellaneous crap. It was located in the farthest corner of the basement, far away from any human traffic, and, as I knew well, it was well insulated.
As the product of an earlier, simpler era, it also had no internal light switch . . . and no ventilation. I squashed another moment of panic and tried to keep my breathing slow and even. I forced myself to look carefully around—any pinpricks of light visible through a crack? Nope. But no doubt Doris had turned off the lights in the room outside, and there were no windows in there, either. It felt cold in the room but was probably only around fifty-five degrees Fahrenheit; big deal—nobody froze to death at fifty-five degrees, although they might be uncomfortable. It was the possible lack of air, not the temperature, that was a bigger problem, I thought. It seemed unlikely to me that the room was hermetically sealed, and even if it had been once, the heavy metal door had warped from its own weight over the years, so it was letting in a little air. And anyway, weren’t there plenty of stories about miners trapped underground in air pockets, who survived for days? All I had to do was avoid strenuous exercise and breathe slowly, slowly . . . easier said than done, of course, when trapped in the dark in a basement where nobody ever came.
Now, what did I have to work with? I had carried my purse with me to the basement, so I did a quick mental inventory. I had my keys, with a mini-flashlight on the keychain, but I wasn’t sure how old the battery was and how long it might last—best to keep that in reserve. A half-empty box of Altoids—oh, goody, sugar. Kleenex, Band-Aids, my wallet—sure, like I was going to work my way out of here with a credit card. Not likely. Cell phone.
Cell phone! I grabbed it out of its little pocket, flipped it open, and pushed the button to turn it on. Come on, come on, I urged it. Its small screen provided a surprising amount of light, though maybe it was just in contrast to the absolute darkness around me. Finally it woke up and started searching for its service area—and found nothing. And then I remembered that I was in the bowels of a concrete-and-reinforced-steel structure, surrounded by metal shelves, in a room with a theft-proof metal door, with a subway track running beneath me. Of course it wasn’t going to find a signal. Reluctantly I shut it again, conserving its light—I might want it later, if only for a little company.
What now? I pulled out the flashlight and flicked it on, so I could survey my dungeon. The feeble beam swept over more metal shelving, stacked with old books, outdated piles of Society publications, and miscellaneous junk. Unfortunately, no former visitor had left a handy sledgehammer for me to use to batter my way out. Nor a pry bar, nor anything else that might have an impact on the sturdy walls and door. I swiveled the light toward the door; no interior handle or keyhole. OSHA would be appalled, but the building had been constructed in a different era. And I didn’t know how to pick a lock anyway—another skill I had been meaning to acquire.
Think, Nell, think! That’s what you’re good at! . . . Yeah, you and Butch
Cassidy, and look where that got him. I made myself as comfortable as I could against the shelves. I had left Marty a phone message. Good for me. But I had no idea where Marty was and when she might listen to her messages. Assume the best case: she came home, immediately played her messages, and heard that Charles asked me to meet him here. So, eventually she’d expect me to report back about what he wanted. But when? Would she start calling me later today? Would she wait until tomorrow?
Again, best-case scenario, she would get worried late in the afternoon when I didn’t answer at any of my numbers, so she’d start checking around. She’d call the Society, but no one would answer. Say Marty could track down Charles; he would profess ignorance of the whole thing. I had mentioned Doris in my message to Marty, so maybe she would try to find Doris—who would also profess ignorance, and who knows what phone she had called from. But Marty had my message, and if both Charles and Doris stonewalled her, she would know something was wrong. The problem was, how long would it take her to figure all this out?
Maybe she would call James. But didn’t agencies have to wait until an adult had been gone forty-eight hours before getting involved in a search? Still, at least Marty and James knew what was going on, what was at stake. They would have to be concerned when I disappeared and didn’t show up again. Certainly by Monday, when I didn’t appear at work, right?
But Monday was a day away. Did I have enough air for that long? And how long would it be before somebody did a full search of the building? Nobody ever came down to this corner of the basement; there was no reason to come down here, maybe not for weeks. Maybe some future renovation would reveal my rotting corpse—or would I be mummified by then? How long did that take?
Stop it, Nell, I scolded myself. I decided to assume the best of all possible worlds: that Marty would worry sooner rather than later, that she’d demand that the FBI and the Philadelphia police do something immediately (and that she had enough clout to make that happen), and that they would be thorough and look in every nook and cranny of the building, and they would find me soon. Very soon.
Fundraising the Dead Page 23