Monument to the Dead

by Sheila Connolly

  “If you track down those slips, they’ll tell you who requested the materials?”

  “Yes, and the person would have to have shown ID when he—or she—came in originally and signed in. Although that’s not to say that that person couldn’t have filled in a fake name once he was inside the library.”

  “You mean, like Franklin Washington?” James asked wryly.

  “Exactly,” I replied. Marty looked confused, and I added, “The mystery guest at Louisa’s rehab center said his name was Franklin Washington.”

  “Look, I can help with the call slips, see if I recognize any names, if you get them from Felicity,” Marty volunteered. “After the funeral, of course.”

  “Right,” I said. “Ten o’clock?” Marty nodded in reply.

  “If you’re done here, can I give you ladies a lift home?” James asked.

  “I’ll take Nell home,” Marty said. “I’ve got to visit Harby again anyway, so I’m headed that way.”

  “Call me tomorrow, after the funeral,” James said.

  Marty and I exchanged a glance. “We will.”

  The three of us left the building together, careful to turn off the lights, arm the alarm, and lock the door behind us.

  CHAPTER 21

  I dressed with care for the funeral. I’d attended several in the past few years, mainly in a professional rather than a personal capacity. The Society’s board and many of our best supporters were advanced in age, so I ended up paying my respects fairly often. I refused to regard funerals as an opportunity to network with people of high net worth, nor did I pump grieving relatives to find out what they planned to do with the contents of the library or the collections of the departed—I wasn’t that crass. At best I hoped that people would remember my presence at some later, happier time.

  I found parking across from the church in Wayne and entered the building to find a midsize crowd. I spied Marty and Harbeson in the front row, but I had no claim on that space, so I slid into a pew toward the back and studied the architecture. Nice building, maybe early twentieth century, reverent but not in your face about it. A closed casket, I was happy to see. An older minister whose eulogy proved he had known Edith. A respectful assembly, their grief restrained. I recognized a few people from events at the Society or from the society pages in the Inquirer, although few acknowledged me. The peril of being a fundraiser: you were mostly invisible, and if you were visible, people tended to shun you for fear you would ask them for a contribution. Too often that was true, but not in my case.

  The service was over in less than an hour. It was announced that there would be a cemetery interment for family only, and that was that. I wasn’t surprised: even with Marty’s help, I couldn’t visualize Harby managing a gathering at his house. I waited in my pew as Marty and Harby exited; as they passed me, Marty leaned toward me and mouthed, “We have to talk,” before leaving the building. Something new?

  I drove to work. The good news was, most of the traffic should have cleared by midday. The bad news was, parking in the city would be sticky. But I had to be there. I needed to ask Felicity, our head librarian and keeper of all knowledge, to review the call slips for any Forrest materials that had been requested, hoping that there would be a clue somewhere in there. I should bring Shelby up to date on the trustee research I’d done on Sunday and ask her to see if there was anything I had missed. I should go stare searchingly at the Coriolanus statue and ask Edwin to give me an answer. I knew he’d had a troubled life and career—and they were inextricably intertwined—so in a weird way it was fitting that tragedy should dog him still. Poor Edwin—he’d wanted to do some good, and now people were dead because of it. It wasn’t fair.

  I didn’t talk to him, of course. When I arrived at the Society, I gave Edwin a nod as I waited for the elevator, but that was all. In my office, I dumped my bag and called Shelby. “A word with you, please?”

  “Be right there,” she replied, and she was. “What’s up?”

  “I was here yesterday reviewing the information you put together again. Oh, so was James, if you find anything out of place on your desk. We thought it was worth looking to see if there were any offspring who might worry that the trust was sucking up their potential inheritance.”

  “The next generation?” Shelby asked. “Or should I say, generations, plural?”

  “Exactly. The other thing I’d like to check is whether somebody had been helping themselves to the trust’s funds, but I’d have to see a historical accounting for that. I’m going to try to talk to someone at the law firm that manages the trust. Marty was also here yesterday. I saw her at the funeral but she was busy holding up Edith’s brother. It occurs to me that I should ask her to see if Edith Oakes had any of the documents at her home that would have been distributed for the trust board meetings.”

  “Lady, you sure have been busy! So what is it you want me to do?” Shelby asked. “Oh, by the way, James was the picture of discretion when I tried to pump him about your relationship when he drove me back to the city on Saturday.”

  “All part of the FBI training, I assume.” I wasn’t about to ask her what he had said. “I guess there’s no way for us to check if somebody’s been using the trust as a private bank account, but the lawyer should know, or could find out. Just to be on the safe side, could you check the children of the trustees again? But limit your search to any male children between, say, twenty-five and thirty? Maybe if we ever make this official, the FBI can check their records for any suspicious deposits.”

  “Why male?”

  “We have a lead that whoever’s been approaching the trustees could be a thirtyish male.” I filled Shelby in on the call I’d received Saturday evening from Louisa’s rehab center.

  “Okay, that helps. So your theory is that either a trustee might have been skimming and is trying to cover his tracks, or one of their male children or even grandchildren is doing the covering-up out of a misguided sense of filial loyalty?”

  “Something like that. I know, it’s pretty thin, but it’s the best I’ve got.”

  “I’m on it. James is still stymied?”

  I nodded. “He is. It’s like chasing ghosts—you catch a glimpse of something out of the corner of your eye but you can’t quite see it.” I stood up. “I’m going down to talk to Felicity for a moment.”

  I decided to take the stairs down and walked through the catalog room into the reading room, which looked moderately busy. Felicity was enthroned on the elevated dais (the better to observe the library patrons, who had been known to conceal documents in some rather intimate places), so I approached and said quietly, “Can I have a word with you?”

  “Of course,” she said promptly. “In private?”

  “A quiet corner would do,” I told her.

  “Ah,” she said, “only semisecret.”

  “Disappointed?” I asked, smiling.

  Felicity returned my smile with a more restrained one. “Well, you do come up with such interesting questions.”

  We found an unoccupied corner. “What I’d like you to do is pull the call slips over the past year or so for any items related to Edwin Forrest. I’ve been having trouble locating some of the items.”

  Felicity looked alarmed. “Is there a problem?” She had been extremely helpful when we’d uncovered earlier “disappearances” at the Society, so I rushed to reassure her. “Not that I know of, but let me know if you find anything unusual, will you?”

  “I understand—I think.” She gave me a long look. “Was that all?”

  “For the moment,” I said cheerfully. “Thanks, Felicity.”

  We parted ways at the entrance to the reading room, where Felicity went toward her desk and I went to the elevator. I looked up at Edwin, towering over me, but he avoided my eyes—not that he had much of a choice, since he was looking to his right forever.

  I wasn’t surprised to find Marty waiting for me upstairs. “You made good time,” I said, settling behind my desk.

  Marty had already made
herself comfortable on my visitor’s couch and was forking up a takeout salad. “A couple of cousins are looking after Harby, so I escaped.”

  “How’s he doing?”

  “Better than I expected. I gather that Edith ran the household with an iron hand, and Harby has only just discovered that he can do what he wants—eat when he’s hungry, watch television six hours a day. He’s finding it quite liberating.”

  “By the way, it was a nice funeral, as such things go.”

  “Edith was a grand old woman. We won’t see her like again. Thank goodness—she used to scare the crap out of me when I was a kid,” Marty said.

  “That’s what James said, too. Was there something else you wanted to tell me?” I asked.

  Marty dumped her empty plastic container into my trash can, then sat down again. “Yes. Harby finally remembered that there had been a couple of phone calls for Edith. You can probably guess that he’s not into caller ID and all that stuff, so he answers the phone whenever it rings, which I gather isn’t all that often. Anyway, there were a couple of times he picked up and it was a call for Edith, usually in the middle of the afternoon.” She paused to challenge me with a look.

  It took me a moment to work out what she wanted me to see. “You mean, when Harby should have been at the club?”

  Marty nodded triumphantly. “Exactly. On at least one of those days, Edith was out with the car, so Harby didn’t leave until late. But if the caller had assumed Harby was following his usual schedule, Edith would have been home to answer the phone.”

  “It could have been a solicitor of some sort. Most calls are, these days.”

  “It’s possible, but Harby thought it wasn’t. He said the caller was a nice young man. Polite. Now, ‘young’ to Harby could be anywhere south of fifty, but if there’s a phone record, Jimmy can find it!” Marty finished triumphantly.

  At least the vague description of the caller—young and male—matched the visitor at the rehab center. “Isn’t that illegal?”

  “If it’s for some random person. But Harby is Edith’s executor, and you know he’d give James permission in a second to check the records.”

  “Did he remember when the calls came?” I asked.

  “He might, if he checks his bar tabs at the club and figures out when he wasn’t there. Anyway, there were only two that he can recall, so it shouldn’t be hard to narrow it down.”

  With our luck, it would probably turn out to be an insurance salesman, but it couldn’t hurt to check.

  “You got anything new?” Marty asked.

  “Not really. I hate this, not knowing. If the deaths stop, does that mean it really was just a series of coincidences, or that the killer got smart and is holding off? Speaking of which, another thing I think I found out yesterday was that the trust is in violation of its rules because the board is short multiple members, which means that the mayor, on behalf of the city, has the right to step in and ask that replacements be appointed by the court. I’m not sure how to look at that in relation to the proposed dissolution of the trust. Can you shed any light on it?”

  “Maybe. I’d be willing to bet that the city has a lot of other things on its platter, and it’s not going to bother with a dinky little trust, or at least, not right away, and especially if they know it’s going to be dissolved soon.”

  “What is ‘soon’?” I asked. I had only just realized there might be a ticking clock. “Has anything been filed officially?” Rodney hadn’t seemed to think so, but maybe he hadn’t kept up with the trust doings.

  “I can ask Louisa. Oh, and I looked for Edith’s files on the trust.”

  “I was planning to ask you to look at those. And?”

  Marty shook her head. “There weren’t any.”

  I fought a stab of disappointment. I had hoped that those files would shed some light on how the trust actually functioned. “What do you mean? The files were empty? Or there were no folders at all? Nothing?”

  “It’s like they never existed. Everything else in Edith’s desk and filing cabinet was in apple-pie order, neatly labeled, as you would expect. But no files labeled ‘Forrest Trust,’ or ‘Trust-Forrest,’ or ‘Edwin Stuff,’ or anything else. Believe me, I looked. If they were there, they’re gone. And given how meticulous Edith was, I’d bet there were files.”

  If it was possible to feel simultaneously elated and depressed, that was my reaction. Depressed because there could have been valuable information in those files; elated because if someone had taken the trouble to locate them and take them away, and even tidied up the remaining files, then we were on the right track and Edith’s death did tie to the Forrest Trust. “So whoever had tea with her, took them away.”

  Marty was watching me, enjoying my thinking process. “Exactly what I figured,” she said. “The files that aren’t there are proof that there is something going on with the trust. Right?”

  “That’s what I was thinking. I’ll let James know.”

  “You do that,” Marty said, standing up. “I’m going to go bother Rich some more. Let me know what Jimmy has to say, or if he wants me to talk to Harby about the phone thing.”

  “Will do.” When Marty had left, I looked at my desk. While it was nowhere near chaotic, thanks mainly to Eric’s admirable organizational abilities, there were still several things that required my attention. My first job was running the Society, which seemed to roll on with or without murders on the side.

  The next time I came up for air, it was after four. I leaned back in my chair and stretched.

  Marty’s talk about Edith’s files reminded me that I should take another look for the Forrest files in the stacks. Maybe I’d missed something the first time around. Or maybe I just wanted an excuse to hide out with all the old documents and avoid people. I picked up my annotated finding aid, stood up, and marched out of my office.

  “Eric, I’m going to go look for something in the stacks. If I’m not back by five, you go on home, okay?” I said as I breezed past him.

  An hour later, I had to admit defeat: I couldn’t find a single file, either autograph materials or ephemera or secondary sources from Edwin’s day. I reminded myself to talk to Felicity in the morning. Maybe she had found some sort of paper trail.

  I knew that some of our board members, and even some longtime researchers, kind of bent the rules, and that’s how things get lost or misplaced. But all the Forrestiana, if that was a word? Unlikely. This felt like a systematic effort to me.

  I went back to my office. Most people had already left for the day. Eric’s desk was ridiculously tidy, all ready for the morning. There were no message slips waiting for me on my desk. I picked up the phone and hit the speed dial for James’s private number at the FBI.

  “You have something, Nell?” he said without preamble.

  “Maybe. Can we meet? It won’t take long.”

  “Sixish? I’ll buy you dinner.”

  “Deal.”

  CHAPTER 22

  Over a quick and decidedly non-romantic dinner, I briefed James on what I had found, or rather, not found, at the Society, in the way of Edwin Forrest documents, and Marty’s equal lack of success among Edith Oakes’s records. That some documents at the Society were misplaced would not surprise anyone who has worked with large paper-based collections, but all of one set, scattered throughout the building? Not likely, which meant that somebody was probably “disappearing” them. Worse, it had to be somebody with access to our stacks, and with the knowledge to bypass the usual library protocols; it almost had to be an insider. I did not want to contemplate that possibility.

  “It makes no sense to me,” I complained. “What should I do? Call a staff meeting and ask everybody if they’ve seen any Edwin Forrest papers wandering around the building?”

  “If this person was as thorough as you say, he—or she—has probably already got everything, so all you would accomplish would be to alert the perp.”

  “So your advice is to do nothing?”

  “More or less. Does any
one else know what you’ve been looking for?”

  “I don’t think so. The only person I’ve said anything to is Felicity, because she’s the keeper of the tracking records. We know she’s discreet.”

  “What about Shelby?”

  “She’s only looked for the Society records pertaining to the trust, not for original Forrest documents. So she’s clear.”

  James said carefully, “Is there anyone you suspect?”

  “No! I mean, I don’t even know why anybody who works at the Society would be that interested in Edwin Forrest or the trust. But once you slip outside of rationality, anything’s possible. Right?”

  He was watching me, his expression troubled. “Nell, be careful, will you? You’re right—the logic behind these killings may make sense only to the perp. Which means anyone and everyone could be at risk.” He hesitated a moment before adding, “I don’t want anything to happen to you.”

  For a by-the-book FBI agent in a public place, that was positively romantic, and it warmed me just a bit. “By the way, Marty said that Harby told her that Edith had received a couple of phone calls from a young man, at times when Harby wouldn’t usually be there. Could those be related? Can you look into them?”

  “I’ll talk to Harby again. You’re thinking that Harby will let me get access to those phone records?” When I nodded, he went on, “It may turn out to be nothing.”

  “James, what would be enough? I’m sorry if I sound selfish, but so far we think we have six victims, and some of those are people I knew, or Marty did, or even you. If we’re right, we can guess who the next victims might be, and I’ve just met two of them. I know you can’t personally babysit all of them, but surely there must be something you can do.”

  James sighed. “Nell, I’ve told you, I’m doing the best I can. I’ve asked you and Marty for help, which will not make the FBI happy, but it’s probably the most effective way of getting to the bottom of this, believe it or not. Look how much you’ve uncovered, after only a few days.”