Privy to the Dead

by Sheila Connolly

  The net result was that we were free to take off on excursions at the drop of a hat, and I was already compiling a list of future possibilities. An impromptu excursion to Lambertville fit nicely. Just over the river in New Jersey, it was in easy reach, and when we arrived there the next morning I realized how well it suited our needs. We wandered through store after store, from junky to high-end, and pointed out what we did and didn’t like. We didn’t make any serious decisions, just filled in the broad outlines. It was fun, especially once we discovered that our tastes were more or less in tune. Although I loved Victorian styles, even I was willing to admit some of them were kind of overblown, so we both gravitated toward plainer designs. Still, with so much space to fill, we had a long way to go. We rambled, and tried sitting on various pieces, which either creaked ominously or felt like concrete (usually the ones with the original horsehair stuffing, which was as prickly as James had said). We picked up and put down a few dozen items, and even bought a few small odds and ends, then simultaneously fell in love with a small, simple end table that probably dated to around 1800, and would even fit in the car. We managed to haggle down the price—or rather James did. Clearly his agent training paid off, because he had only to fix the vendor with a silent glare and the price miraculously dropped. We found a lunch place and talked piffle over coffee and sandwiches. It all felt good, and right. We had fun. I’d almost forgotten what that was like.

  At the end of the day we meandered our way home via country lanes, and pulled into our driveway in the gathering dusk. There was a car parked in our driveway, and Marty was sitting on the front steps waiting for us. When we were within earshot she said, “We need to talk.”

  CHAPTER 11

  James and I exchanged a look, then he went up the steps and unlocked the front door. He held it open for Marty, and I followed her in. She’d been inside the house once or twice before, but never for more than a few minutes since we’d moved in. That would made her our first official guest, not that we’d invited her or anything.

  “Love what you’ve done with the place,” she muttered, as she strode toward the back. James shut the door and we followed.

  In the kitchen she turned to face us, almost belligerently. “You got anything to drink?”

  I assumed she wasn’t talking about iced tea. “Wine? Or the harder stuff?”

  “Scotch, if you’ve got it. I don’t care how many malts or whatever.”

  I located a glass in a cupboard—after opening only two wrong ones—and half filled it with Scotch. I looked at James, and he nodded. What the heck—Scotch all around. Now I knew where the glasses were, so I filled another two and set the bottle, seriously depleted, in the middle of the kitchen table.

  Marty sat; we sat. She addressed me first. “You told him?”

  “Yes, last night.”

  When James started to speak, Marty held up a hand. “Let me tell this in my own way, okay? You can ask all the questions you want at the end.”

  Marty took a healthy swig of her Scotch before starting. “You know that the Terwilliger family has been involved with the Society for a long time, starting back when the place was more like a gentlemen’s club than a serious collecting institution and there were only a couple of actual employees. Terwilliger family members sat on the board, raised money, solicited donations of family papers—the whole nine yards.” She glanced briefly at James before resuming.

  “My father married late, so he seemed old when I was young. He’s been gone almost twenty years now.” She took another drink. “I never knew my grandfather, but he donated a large portion of the family papers, going back to the first Terwilliger to set foot in this country, when he was on the board. My father donated another portion years later, while he was on the board. That’s pretty much all the historical documents the family had, except for bits and pieces scattered around among different relatives. If you recall the official catalog description, there’s something like a hundred thousand items in the Terwilliger Collection, housed in five hundred boxes. I’ve been working for almost two years on organizing all the stuff into a detailed catalog.”

  Another swallow finished her drink, and then she helped herself to the open bottle. “After a while I realized I wouldn’t finish until I was a hundred and seven at the rate I was going, so we hired Rich to help, and he’s been great. He’s pulled stuff from all over the building and brought it together, and even this recent shuffling for the renovation, inconvenient though it is, turned up a few more bits and pieces. Bottom line, there’s a lot of stuff from a lot of Terwilligers, and we’re still not finished sorting through it, and I don’t know when we will be.”

  I interrupted gently. “Marty, if you’re going to keep drinking, you’d better eat.”

  “I’m not hungry,” she muttered like a sulky child.

  “I can make us all eggs or something,” I coaxed. “I already know a lot of this story, so I’ll listen with one ear while you tell James the rest. Okay?”

  “Yeah, sure, fine.” She waved me away. I got up and went to explore the contents of the refrigerator as Marty resumed talking. James, bless him, let her set her own pace. He was a good interrogator, and that meant he knew when to keep his mouth shut.

  Marty continued, “So Grandfather had a seat on the board, and if you think I’m a busybody around the place, he was worse, from all I’ve heard. When he got too old to get around, he kind of handed the role off to my father. Not that my father minded—he’d more or less grown up at the Society and he loved it, too, though maybe that was because there were so many good hiding places in the stacks and nobody bothered him. Anyway, he passed the crown on to me before he died. And here I am.”

  As I broke eggs into a bowl, found leftover ham in the freezer and onions in a basket, chopped, and mixed, I was trying to figure out when Marty would get to the meat of the matter. She hadn’t yet said anything that I hadn’t heard before.

  She drank some more, her glass near empty again. “So after Rich and I dug into the Terwilliger collection of documents and had created some kind of order—my relatives may have been nice people, but they had no concept of organization—we started from the beginning chronologically. As you might guess, there’s not much from the real early years, but by the mid-eighteenth century there are boxes and boxes of records, as the Terwilligers settled in and started making money. And those guys did keep good records. Then the war came along and John Terwilliger signed up early and ultimately became a general. Washington really respected him, and there’s lots of correspondence between the two of them, as you know, Nell.”

  For Marty, “the war” was always the Revolutionary War. “Yes,” I answered from across the room, where I was heating butter in a pan. “I’ve enjoyed looking at some of the originals.”

  She twirled her half-empty glass between her hands, watching the liquid slosh around. “Grandfather made an inventory of the family furniture, back before it got split up among the relatives—I’m sure you know that story, James.” He nodded silently. “Anyway, when I left you today I went home and looked at his list, and I noticed something I hadn’t paid attention to before—a description of a wooden writing desk General John bought. Which could have been anything, but given when he bought it, it might have been a lap desk, something that he could have taken along on his military campaigns. So I dug around some more among the family papers and found more short references that pointed in that direction.” She looked up at me then. “It was a small mahogany box, with brass fittings, made by one of the joiners who’d made several other pieces of Terwilliger furniture.”

  Was Marty telling us in a roundabout way that she thought we’d held whatever had been left of that box earlier that day? It seemed possible.

  I was struggling to wrap my head around that piece of information when I realized the toast was burning, and I jumped into action before all the smoke alarms went off. Marty fell silent, staring glumly at the bottom of h
er glass. James looked . . . perplexed, but he seemed to be waiting for me to take the next step.

  I dished up eggs, threw some toast on the plates, and slapped them onto the table before sitting down. James wordlessly got up, found forks and napkins, and sat down again.

  I picked up the thread again. “All right, I’ll go ahead and say what we’re all thinking: what we pulled out of the pit in the basement is what’s left of General John Terwilliger’s campaign writing desk. Whether it held anything when it went into the pit and broke is anyone’s guess.”

  “I think so,” Marty said, and began poking at the food in front of her.

  That still didn’t explain why she was so upset. “Was that part of your family’s gift to the Society?” I asked.

  Marty started eating, avoiding my eyes. “It’s not on the accessions list,” she mumbled between bites.

  I took the opportunity to eat a few bites of my own dinner, which gave me time to think. My guess was that Marty was trying to tell me something she didn’t want to put into words. Her ancestor had had a fine writing desk. His descendants had given much of the family treasures and documents they had held to the Society, over time. Had they included the lap desk? If it had been in the donated collections, Marty would have recognized it immediately, even in pieces, because she’d combed through the Society’s Terwilliger collections many times. She hadn’t been sure, so she’d looked at the items at the Art Museum and then checked with Henry Phinney. Which meant . . .

  “So that particular lap desk shouldn’t be at the Society at all?” I asked. Another nod from Marty. “And you think that somebody really doesn’t want anyone to know that it was there a century ago?”

  “You got it,” Marty said and drained her glass again.

  We all sat in silence for a minute or so, digesting what we’d heard. “Just to be clear,” I said slowly, “that unrecorded Terwilliger lap desk was hidden in the pit, and you believe that Carnell Scruggs’s finding it was what led to his death?”

  “I think so,” Marty said.

  I swept the last of food on my plate into my mouth, chewed, swallowed, and demanded, “Okay, what now?”

  James looked pained. “You know you don’t have evidence of anything, just a lot of guesses and leaps of logic. And some bits of wood and brass.”

  “That’s the way we work best,” Marty said.

  James turned to her. “Yes, Martha, I realize that, but what kind of action are you suggesting? You go to the police and say, ‘I think somebody did something a hundred years ago and that’s why the construction worker was run down this week’? I assume you can guess just how the police will react to that.”

  “James, don’t be unkind,” I said. “We’ve only just heard this for the first time. It’s not like we have a plan. Just more questions.”

  “Nell, I can fight my own battles,” Marty said sharply. “Jimmy, I’m only suggesting this as a possibility, but I think it hangs together.”

  “So what’ve we got?” I asked. “This lap desk belonged to your family but was not part of any of your family’s gifts to the Society. But we may have found it smashed in the bottom of a privy under the Society building, and we have no idea why. Are there any sale records for it?”

  Marty shrugged. “Not that I know of, but I haven’t looked for them yet. You know, it was around 1900 that a lot of the furniture changed hands, and some family members were really ticked off. Not that it was worth a lot then, or at least, it didn’t bring real high prices. Maybe somebody smashed it as revenge because it turned out to be worth less than he thought. Or something.”

  “Then why dump it in a pit in the basement?” I demanded. “That makes no sense. How about this? Maybe it was stolen, and the thief thought someone was close to finding out, so he ditched it. Although wouldn’t the statute of limitations have run out for theft? James?”

  “Probably,” he agreed tentatively. “But you both sound crazy.”

  “Maybe,” I replied. “But remember, a man is dead, and we’re pretty sure he was last seen alive showing off a piece of this presumed lap desk. Which piece is now missing.”

  “Which could also be lying in a Philadelphia gutter or storm drain and have nothing to do with his death,” James countered quickly. “You’re getting ahead of yourselves.”

  Marty blew him a raspberry, and I realized she was rapidly getting drunk. “You’re no fun, Jimmy,” she said.

  “What, you two enjoy wallowing in crime?” he responded quickly. “As you pointed out, a man is dead. This isn’t a joke.”

  I knew he was right, but I didn’t know what any of us was supposed to do now. “James, of course it’s not a joke. It’s just a very fragile link between his death and something he may have found while at the Society—something that was not supposed to be at the Society at all. It could be a coincidence. Or there could be something else going on.”

  James regarded me with what must be his professional stare: calm, level, and giving nothing away. “So you’re saying that you think Carnell Scruggs may have died because of what he found at the Society? Then tell me this: Who knew about the box? Who recognized that brass piece for what it was? Most important, who cared?”

  That silenced Marty and me.

  But not for long. “It’s going to sound petty and/or pompous if I say it out loud, but the Terwilliger family has had a long and important history in Philadelphia and the area. We may have petered out, and God knows we’ve spent most of the family fortune, but we still have our good name. The same is true at the Society: we’re proud that the Terwilligers have nurtured it and kept it strong all these years. So if there’s something fishy about this, and it led to that man dying, then it’s a nasty blot on our record, and as for the Society, either Grandfather and my father may have been personally involved.”

  “Fair enough,” I told her. “James, what do you think?”

  He sighed. “Martha, a century is a long time. How do you intend to prove that anything happened back then, and then figure out who might have done it, and then figure out who might have a motive now that led to the murder of an innocent stranger?”

  “Jimmy, we’ve done it before—right, Nell?”

  “Uh—” I began.

  Marty ignored my clear lack of enthusiasm. “Look, I know the Terwilliger family tree inside and out. I’ll start there. Who in the family back then knew about the lap desk? Who had the last known possession of it, and where did it go? Who had the means, motive, and opportunity to toss it in the pit?”

  James couldn’t suppress a smile. “Martha, you are a piece of work.” But his smile faded when he added, “I cannot see the police swallowing your absurd story—they’re already stretched thin. And I cannot involve the FBI. You—and presumably Nell, and your intern, Rich, and any other innocent bystanders you can dragoon—are on your own. But, absurd or not, be careful. If your wild assumptions turn out to be correct, there could be a modern-day killer out there.”

  “Thank you for your concern, Jimmy,” Marty said sweetly. “We’ll be careful. Won’t we, Nell?”

  Great—now I was stuck between the two of them.

  CHAPTER 12

  Marty bounced to her feet. “I’d better get going.”

  James rose more slowly to his six-foot-something height. “Martha, you’ve had, by my count, at least three straight Scotches. You’re not going anywhere.”

  Marty cocked her head and studied his expression, then caved with some dignity. “Oh, goodie—a sleepover!”

  I had a moment of panic. Much as I supported James’s suggestion, I couldn’t remember if we had any clean sheets for the guest beds, or where I’d last seen them since we moved in. And then there was the bathroom issue: there was only one on the second floor. Oh, it was a palatial bathroom, about as big as my former living room, with a magisterial claw-foot tub that I adored—but there was still only one. And the spare towels wer
e probably hiding along with the sheets . . .

  But Marty’s safety came first. “James is right, Marty—you shouldn’t drive. Please stay.”

  “You guys are the best. Which way are the stairs?”

  Marty was definitely acting un-Marty-like, so I thought we’d made the right decision, however inconvenient. “Right behind you,” I said, pointing to the back stairs that led up from the kitchen. I gently pushed her in that direction and followed so she wouldn’t fall backward, although she seemed steady enough. “James, we’ll meet you upstairs posthaste.” Posthaste? I remembered that I’d had my own share of Scotch, which seemed to have affected my vocabulary. In any case, by the time Marty and I made it to the top, we were met by James (who’d taken the front stairs), bearing towels. No wonder he was such an asset to the FBI.

  “The bathroom’s that way, Martha,” he said, handing her the stack of neatly folded towels. She took them and disappeared into the room, closing the door behind her.

  “I don’t suppose you found the sheets, too?” I asked hopefully.

  “I did. Let’s go make the bed.”

  “Have I told you lately that I love you?”

  “Not often enough. But let’s save that until we get Martha tucked in.”

  “Gotcha.”

  By the time we had assembled the bed, complete with blankets, a duvet, and pillows, Marty emerged from the bathroom. “Aw, you guys . . .”

  “Good night, Marty. We can talk in the morning.” I all but grabbed James and we made a swift exit toward our room at the other end of the hall. But once there we kind of lost momentum.

  “Did you know what Marty was so worried about?” James asked.

  “No. Marty’s been very closemouthed about all of this, and now I can see why. She’s very protective of her family—all of it, past and present. Does it matter? What she told us, I mean?”