The more I learned, the more I wondered if that language was deliberately vague in order to cover up some long-standing shortcomings of the system. Of course, I knew we weren’t alone among our peer institutions in the dismal state of our record keeping. We were still struggling to make our way out of the nineteenth century (spidery brown ink on file cards), and here it was the twenty-first century. We’d been blindsided by the Internet, and had been scrambling for the past couple of years to try and keep an oar in the water while figuring out what it all meant and how we could possibly deal with it, with a budget that was already running a chronic annual deficit, and with a small-very small-endowment.
Latoya looked pained. “You want the short course on the state of our cataloging?” I nodded. She sighed. “Okay. You know the catalog room downstairs?”
“Yes,” I said. Of course I did-I walked through it daily.
“That was state-of-the-art fifty, a hundred years ago. There are seven-yes, seven-individual catalogs, all on file cards. Books, manuscripts, music, photographs, maps, objects, ephemera.” She ticked them off on her fingers. “And there are some subcategories for those. These are not integrated, but kept together as individual catalogs, all lined up side by side.”
I interrupted. “You mean, if I’m looking for a particular person or a place-a cemetery, say-I have to look through multiple catalogs?”
Latoya nodded. “Yes. Now, as you know, we applied for and received a grant a couple of years ago to put our most heavily used collections into an electronic format, so they could be accessed remotely, viewed from the website.”
I nodded encouragingly. That had been one of my proudest moments, and the grant had enabled us to take at least a baby step into the modern world. Alfred’s new cataloging software had been part of that package. Though I was a bit ticked at her use of the word we, since she hadn’t been around when the grant application had gone in-that had been my work.
I sighed inwardly. If we had lots of money available, we could do wonderful things, online and on-site. We could share our city’s and our nation’s glorious history with schoolchildren and the general public, near and far, and have them begging for more. All it would take was infinite resources, financial and human. But that wasn’t going to happen, unless Bill Gates decided that we were his favorite institution in the whole wide world. I wish.
Latoya went on. “Then you know that grant covered only three of the seven collections, which in themselves amounted to only about forty percent of the total of the existing file cards. Those collections were chosen because they were the easiest to scan-they had the fewest handwritten entries, they conformed best to standard cataloging protocols, and so on.”
I nodded again, with less enthusiasm. This was not encouraging.
“And that effort has been going on for over a year now, and while the bulk of the material has been scanned, translating that scanned material into new, consistent digital records and into an online format has been exceedingly slow.”
I was getting depressed. Time to divert the flow of gloom. “So what you’re saying is, we have modern cataloging for only a small percentage of our collections, and even that is incomplete?”
“Exactly.”
I pondered for a moment. “All right, let me cut to the chase. Let’s talk about the Terwilliger Collection, which I know is physically still maintained as a single collection. What state is it in?”
“We received that collection starting in, oh, 1967, I think. It came in several installments-the bulk of it when John Terwilliger moved out of his big family home and into a retirement community, and the rest upon his death. There was a catalog of sorts, but it was largely anecdotal, descriptive-nothing like a formal library catalog. I think some ancient cousin put it together a long time ago. It was better than nothing, but it was hardly specific. And if you’ve seen it, you know that the collection is massive, and we’ve only begun to scratch the surface. That’s why Rich is here. You wrote the proposals to help fund him, so you probably know it as well as anyone here. Except me, of course. So Marty is worried?”
“Unfortunately, yes.”
Latoya sat back and stared pensively at the ceiling for a long moment. Then she straightened.
“All right. Let me pull the files and get back to you. Later today?”
“Fine,” I said as I rose to leave. And then I realized that neither of us had mentioned Alfred. Latoya had worked with him for nearly three years, but she seemed unmoved by his death. I stopped in the doorway. “It’s a shame about Alfred, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it’s unfortunate. It won’t be easy to replace him.” Latoya turned back to her computer monitor: I was dismissed, and so, apparently, was Alfred. Or so I thought, until she said, “Will there be a service?”
“Yes, tomorrow. I’ll send you the details.” As I went out the door, I sent up a silent prayer: Please, please let this all be a mix-up. I didn’t like what I was hearing. It would be interesting to see if Latoya’s findings jibed with Alfred’s, or if she even mentioned his reports.
I had started two hares, so to speak, and now I wasn’t sure where to turn next. I went to my office and shut the door, which I never do. But I wanted a quiet minute to think, to try to put my thoughts in order. Unfortunately, what I didn’t know about how the Society managed its collections far exceeded what I did know. It was embarrassing-how many years had I been working here? Why hadn’t I ever asked anyone these things before?
I stared at the peeling paint on the ceiling for a while and decided to start with what I did know. Point one: some things might or might not be missing from the building. Point two: nobody could say for sure if they were missing, because most of our records were at least a half century out-of-date. Point three: if they were missing, the list of people who could have taken them was pretty extensive. Point three, sub (a): was it one person or lots of people? Point three, sub (b): was this recent or ancient history? Oh yes, this was going very well.
I decided to turn to the don’t-know list. Top of that list: if we determined that some things-either the Terwilliger letters, or those and a whole lot more-had really been stolen, who was I supposed to tell? According to Alfred, Latoya knew that things were going missing, or at least she should have, if she had read Alfred’s reports. She had apparently dismissed them as insignificant. Presumably Charles and the board knew, too, since Latoya had supposedly reported those findings at board meetings, at least in vague terms, but if she hadn’t sent up any red flags, they wouldn’t have worried.
But assuming the items had actually been stolen, who should be informed? The police? The FBI?
At that point I stopped cold in my mental tracks. Telling the police about the missing items would be disastrous to the Society, especially to me. How was I supposed to raise money if we went public with the fact that we didn’t know what we had already or where it was? And that we seemed to be losing what we did have? That would not exactly inspire confidence among donors. A body in the stacks was bad enough, but losing documents-that was unforgivable; preserving and protecting them was our core mission.
I still had no proof that there was any crime involved, anyway. It could just be human carelessness. But somehow I knew in my heart of hearts that it was more than that. After all, if Alfred had been worried, there was probably a good reason. Alfred had dutifully told his superiors, and if we were lucky, Alfred had left his usual careful notes buried in Cassandra. I could only hope he had left adequate instructions on how to penetrate Cassandra’s recesses.
At this point I laid my head down on my desk and wished I was dead. The gala had been so nice, after all our planning. And then everything had fallen to pieces, and I had the feeling there was more to come.
Focus on the documents. I was completely out of my depth when it came to assigning a value to the collections. It was a daunting prospect. We had things that had been accumulating for well over a hundred years. Some of them were garbage: Great-Aunt Tilly’s pen wiper and that ilk. Some of them were u
nique: personal correspondence from then-presidents to the men who had shaped this city, this country, for example. The collections had grown and become increasingly unwieldy, as more and more was shoehorned into the same limited and antiquated space. Things were stacked in piles, and I had seen at least one suitcase used for document storage, somewhere in the stacks. We couldn’t even identify half of the items, much less assign a dollar value to each one of them-a value that would change all the time because of shifting economic conditions, tastes and trends among collectors, et cetera, et cetera. Did we carry insurance? Yes, on the building and equipment, but not on the collections. They were, literally, priceless.
All of this was making it clear to me just how complacent we’d been. Things had always gone along just fine, managed by the local old-boy network for their own personal use. They were all gentlemen, and they all knew each other. I had seen documents from the early twentieth century that showed that there were only two or three employees running the Society, one of whom doubled as a security guard and lived in a small apartment upstairs. Who had needed more than that back in those days? And then there was the problem I had just run into: knowing what we had and where it was, at any given time. It was easier to assume that everything just stayed put. There had been some indefinable element of trust, a belief that the people who used a library or archive were honorable and sincere in their interest.
Well, the world had changed. We had visible evidence in the neighborhood around us: what had once been an orchard and gardens was now peopled by hookers after dark, and drive-by shootings were not unknown. And people had changed. Now there were street people who wandered in, looking for warmth or a toilet, and who had to be gently persuaded to leave. And not just the lobby, but the steps as well, where they would beg for change, scaring the little old ladies who made up a large portion of our users. The academic world had become more and more cutthroat, with everyone fighting to publish something new, something noteworthy. It was hard to believe, but professors and graduate students were not above spiriting away an essential document or slicing the relevant pages out of a book to keep it away from their competitors. And even the swelling ranks of genealogists had sticky fingers. When they found a will or a letter that some long-dead relative had penned, they thought, Hey, this should by rights be mine-and they would pocket it or stick it under their shirt. We had no way to search everyone who walked out of the building. What’s more, only a full body search would nab a really determined thief-were we supposed to strip-search every patron in the lobby?
It was depressing. It might have been encouraging that technology had grown along with the problem, making it theoretically easier to keep an electronic eye on the stacks, to track who came in and left the building, who requested which documents. The problem I kept coming back to was that all that lovely electronic gear was expensive. Many of our sister institutions were chasing after the same pot of limited grant money for technology and security upgrades, and it wasn’t happening very fast.
So, what to do? I couldn’t come up with a solution, so I decided to turn the problem over to my subconscious and do something else instead. Carrie wasn’t in today-not that I blamed her, for she was young, single, and not terribly devoted to her job-but I could check how many of the gala checks she had already processed. I was sure there were more, too, like the ones that had been left on my desk, which in the turmoil following Alfred’s death I had neglected to hand over to her.
Which reminded me of Alfred’s list, in the same pile. I pulled it out and smoothed it carefully on my desk. I made an effort to relax before running my eyes over the list. It was far longer than I had expected, and even I recognized the names attached to a lot of the items there. My heart sank. If anyone asked me-and I prayed they wouldn’t-I would have to guess that someone with a fine eye and specific expertise had been cherry-picking the good stuff out of our collections. And had gotten clean away with it, for quite some time.
I needed time to think about this, and to think about what to do with what I knew. I lined up the papers and carefully returned them to their envelope. And then changed my mind, pulled them out, and headed for the copy machine. I wasn’t sure who could re-create this list, with Alfred gone. I knew I couldn’t. So it seemed prudent to make an extra copy and stash it somewhere safe. As I stood over the machine, its scanner lights moving underneath the copier cover, I almost laughed at my own cloak-and-dagger attitude. I was copying a list that nobody else knew existed, to protect it from-who? I had no idea. I just wanted to be sure Alfred’s list had a backup.
Back in my office, I slid the original list in amongst the files in my desk drawer. It was highly unlikely that anyone would find it there, since I often had trouble finding my own files. The copy I stuck in my carry bag. Impatient now, I sifted through the stack of checks from the gala, made a few notes, then bundled them up to be input by Carrie on Monday and deposited to the Society’s bank account. Better sooner than later, in case some donors had second thoughts after hearing the news of Alfred’s death and decided to stop their checks.
But it was now late afternoon, and I’d had enough. I was going home to put my feet up, chill out, and try to figure out just what the heck was going on at the Society. I was almost out the door of my office when I remembered one last thing: I had promised Marty that I would let the staff know about Alfred’s funeral. I went back to my desk and wrote a brief email giving time and place, and sent it to all staff and board members. Then I shut down the computer, turned off the lights, and headed home.
CHAPTER 11
Returning to Bryn Mawr and my home always felt like going from one universe to another. Charles and I seldom got together on weekends, since he lived in the city and I lived in the Far West, and there was a great chasm between that I’d heard described as the urban-suburban split. The distance was no more than twenty miles, but to the denizens on either end, it could have been light-years.
My house was small, but it was all mine, and if I wanted to put on my grubbiest sweats and go barefoot, I could. I also had shopping to do, a new Nora Roberts romance novel by the bed, and a lengthy to-do list to work on. I enjoyed the endless small projects that an older house generated. With all the thinking and writing and talking I had to do at work, it was nice to go home to silence or music, and then make something, shape something-sand, polish, reweave, whatever-and have a tangible result to show for it at the end. I found it therapeutic.
I decided to let my subconscious mind gnaw away at Alfred’s list while I did unrelated things, and went about my distinctly suburban business. I shopped, made myself an extravagant dinner on Saturday, and read most of the book. But the problem wouldn’t let go of me. Things looked fine on the surface, but if the issue of the missing documents proved to be the tip of the iceberg, what would happen? I had to assume that there would be a lot of ass-covering and finger-pointing, which would be toxic in a small, tightly knit shop like ours.
Sunday night, I dreamt that I was searching for something in my kitchen cabinets and I kept finding random and illogical things, but not what I was looking for, except I really wasn’t sure what I was looking for in the first place, or why it would be in my kitchen. In any event, I woke up out of sorts and restless on Monday morning. It was a dark, dreary day, and I had to rush to catch my train, which then kept stopping and starting, the garbled announcement over the tinny loudspeaker making the usual excuses about “signal problems.” You’d think after more than a hundred years the commuter-rail system would have worked out their signals. Normally I enjoyed my commute, catching up on my reading, but today I was impatient. I watched the towers of Center City loom through the low clouds and wondered what unpleasantness I might find today.
Like many museums, the Society was closed to the public on Mondays, although the administration staff was expected to be there. Actually, Mondays were usually rather nice, since most of the building was dark and quiet, and there was a more relaxed feeling among the staff who were there. I doubted that today w
ould be enjoyable, though, given Alfred’s death and Marty’s looming deadline. I knew she would hold me to it, and I was beginning to believe that she had every right to do so. I just wished I had better answers for her.
As one more delaying tactic, I stopped at the kiosk down the street for a double cappuccino. Maybe that would jump-start my day. Carrying the cup, I let myself into the building. The heavy metal door swung closed behind me with a reassuring click. The lobby was shadowed, and there were no lights on in the catalog room beyond. I made my way to the elevator and up to the third floor, to my office, without seeing anyone.
I turned on the overhead light in my office and hung my coat on the back of the door, then sat down with my coffee. I squared the piles of papers on my desktop, opened my coffee, sat back, and tried to think. What did I need to do first?
Since no one was around, I pulled out Alfred’s list again and looked at it analytically. The missing items came from no single collection, had been stored all over the building, and represented all different kinds of media-manuscripts, books, letters, objects. But, as I’d noted before, they seemed to share one outstanding characteristic: they all appeared to be potentially valuable. Everything on the list could easily be disposed of on the open market. Or, more likely, on the so-called grey market-to collectors who were less concerned about the source of their acquisitions than having them in their possession. The Terwilliger correspondence between Major Jonathan and George Washington-which wasn’t even on this list, since we didn’t officially know the letters were missing-fit quite neatly into the group.
Fundraising The Dead Page 8