Privy to the Dead

by Sheila Connolly

  I could see Felicity’s sigh, even if I couldn’t hear it. “Tell me it will be wonderful when it’s finished?”

  “Fingers crossed!” I shouted, then pointed toward myself, the elevator, then up. Felicity nodded, then returned to the relative quiet of the reading room, ready to soothe patrons when and if they arrived after we opened for the day.

  Upstairs I was surprised to find Latoya waiting for me by Eric’s desk, looking impatient. “Were we supposed to meet?” I asked her.

  “No, we had nothing scheduled. I thought I should touch base, though. With all the collections shuffling around the building, I’m concerned that some things may be . . . misplaced.”

  As if we hadn’t already reviewed the plans for temporary relocation of records more than once, with the entire staff. I suppressed a sigh. “Come on into my office,” I said, leading the way. “You want coffee?”

  When she nodded, Eric jumped up and went down the hall.

  Once we were settled in the office, I decided to take the bull by the horns. “Are your concerns specific or general?”

  “You mean, am I just worrying about the total chaos under my purview, or do I have reason to believe that specific items are being—how shall I put this—systematically misplaced?”

  “Are you talking about theft?”

  “Not yet, but you have to admit the possibility is there.”

  “You mean the construction crew?”

  “I do.”

  That was not something I wanted to hear, especially now.

  Eric appeared with two coffee mugs, and Latoya stopped speaking until he had gone. Didn’t she trust him? Or did she not trust anyone?

  After Eric had shut the door, I pressed, “Can you be more specific?” I’d worked with Latoya for several years now, and I knew that in general she was unflappable. She might also be a bit stiff and arrogant, but she knew our collections and she was diligent in managing them. If she was worried enough to come talk to me, I should be worried, too. It came with the job.

  “Nothing specific,” she admitted, “but I’m always troubled when there are a lot of strangers coming and going in the building. The construction crew has more or less unrestricted access, and there’s little oversight. Before you say it, I know they’re bonded and all that, and that we’re insured against loss, but that’s not really the point. If items from our collections go missing, they’re irreplaceable, no matter what their financial value.”

  She had a point, of course. “I won’t argue with your concerns, Latoya, but I’m not sure what more we can do. Bob is keeping an eye on things in front. The construction workers sign in and out each day—they’d do that anyway, because they’re paid by the hour. If they wandered into the public spaces they’d be pretty obvious, but there’s no way we can watch all the stacks at once, and I’ll admit they can easily gain access to them. I suppose we could ask the contractor to hire extra people to check every bag that’s going out the door, which we can’t afford to do, but I’m not sure how we can trust the watchers, either. Do you have any ideas?”

  “Not really. I just wanted to go on record as having said it may be a problem. I hope it’s not.”

  Yes, Latoya, your derriere is covered, should anything disappear in the course of renovation, thank you very much. “Is Ben providing much help?”

  She nodded. “He is, despite having been here only a short time. He has created an excellent matrix and has been scrupulous about tracking what items have been shifted and where they have gone. He’s also been proactive about evaluating the capacity of the new shelving and assigning priorities to collections that have seen the most use over the past few years—as long as we’ve been tracking them electronically. He was a good choice for the position.”

  Coming from Latoya, that was high praise indeed, especially since Ben had more or less been presented as a fait accompli when we brought him in—he was an old friend of James, and he had really needed the job.

  “I’m glad to hear you say that. So his management and data skills are making up for his lack of historic collections experience?”

  “So it would appear.” She stood up. “That’s all I wanted to say. Unless you want to add anything?”

  It was only then that I realized there was something more I could do. “This may seem a bit late in the game, but could you pull together the records for earlier renovations? I don’t mean the architectural plans—I think the architect has all those. What I was thinking of were things like budgets, or board discussions during the planning stages. Would that be hard?”

  “Those records might be distributed in several places—for example, the board minutes would be in one place, while the collections records would be in another. But the records are not extensive, and Ben and I have already begun assembling them. I’ll make another pass at the collections files, in case I missed anything, and then I’ll make copies of everything for you. When do you want them?”

  “It’s not urgent. Mostly it’s to satisfy my own curiosity. Maybe we can get an article out of it, for our website. You know, a ‘then and now’ kind of thing.”

  She nodded. “That might be entertaining. I can have most of it together in a couple of days.”

  “Thank you, Latoya. And I’m glad you came to me with your other worries.” To my surprise, I meant it.

  Having heard Latoya’s side of the situation, it occurred to me that I ought to talk with Ben. I hadn’t had much contact with him since he’d been hired, and I was happy that I could pass on Latoya’s compliment to him. I wandered downstairs and into the processing room, where Ben was dug into his corner with the specially altered desk that accommodated his wheelchair. I came up behind him, trying not to startle him. “Hey, Ben, how’s it going?”

  He swiveled in his chair. “Hi, Nell. As well as can be expected. You need something?”

  “Nothing specific. I’m trying to keep an eye on a lot of things at once.” I pulled up a chair and leaned toward him, though there was no one to overhear. “I also wanted to let you know that Latoya thinks you’re doing a great job with managing the movements of our collections during the renovation process.”

  His eyes lit up. “That’s good to hear. The challenge is to keep track of the stuff—it doesn’t matter whether they’re priceless antiques or boxes of rubber bands. You know, where they started, where they’re supposed to go when this is all finished, and where they wander to in between, so we know where everything is at all times. Of course, there are other specific variables here, like frequency of accession, fragility, storage requirements, but those can all be factored in.”

  He really did sound in command of the situation. “Sounds good to me. I know I wouldn’t want to try to do it. By the way, I asked Latoya to find records from our past renovation campaigns, and that would include the construction of this new building on top of the old. Lissa may have told you the chronology—this building opened to the public in 1910, although it was finished in 1907, and I imagine there was a lot of sorting out of the collections in those three years. Obviously the collections were much smaller then, but so was the staff. I was curious about how they kept track of things. She said you two had already started looking at those?”

  “Sure have. I needed to know what was where before it went somewhere else. I’ll keep my eyes open for anything more historical. How’s everything else?”

  “Like, how is the great experiment of living with James going?” Since Ben knew James, his curiosity didn’t trouble me, although as a rule I didn’t share the details with the rest of the staff. “Fine so far, but it’s early days yet.”

  “I’m glad. He’s always been kind of a loner.”

  “So have I, I guess. What do you get when you put two loners together? You know, that sounds like the start of a bad joke, but I don’t have a punch line for it. If we ever get things settled, we’ll have to have a housewarming party.” Even as I said it,
I wondered how that would work: FBI agents plus historic researchers? It would be an odd mix—if any of them came. But no doubt we’d have plenty of Terwilligers. I stood up. “Thanks, Ben. You’ll let me know if you see any red flags with the construction or with stuff migrating around the building?” I wasn’t about to tell him about Latoya’s concerns—I’d let her handle that.

  “Of course. Maybe next time we do this we could get GPS trackers for each box and a computer program to follow them all over time.”

  “Interesting idea, but probably expensive. And I hope there won’t be a next time, at least not on my watch!”

  Since I seemed to be on a roll, I decided to stop by Shelby’s office and add one more piece to the puzzle. I stuck my head in the door to find her desk covered with stacks of paper. “You look busy,” I said.

  She looked up. “Good, because I am busy. You need something?”

  “I was wondering if you could find fundraising records for earlier building campaigns—you know, begging letters and what they claim about what the Society was doing and what was planned? Contribution records? I’d love to go back to the construction of this building, but’s that more than a century, and I have no idea if there are records that old, or where to find them.”

  “Oh, sure, give me the easy jobs.” Shelby softened her comment with a grin. “You want this yesterday?”

  “No rush—end of the week is fine. I’ve asked Latoya and Ben to look out for the same kind of thing for their areas of responsibility. When I put it all together, I’ll see what we’ve got and what we can do with it.”

  “Sounds good. Now go away and let me get something finished.”

  “Yes, ma’am!” I left and went back to my office, and was about to dig into my daily paperwork pile when I realized there was one more detail I wanted to follow up on. I walked out to stand in front of Eric’s desk.

  “Eric, you know where the board records are, right?”

  “Sure do. You need them?”

  “It occurs to me that I don’t know much about the early board members, particularly the ones who oversaw the construction of this building. I’ve asked Latoya and Ben to go through collections records for that time, and Shelby to find contribution records, but I don’t know the people involved. Can you hunt those down those old ones for me?”

  “I can do that. When would you like them?”

  “Friday would be okay.”

  “I’ll find them. Anything else?”

  “Nope, not now. I see you left me a pile of goodies on my desk, so I’ll get right on them.”

  Back in my office again, I mentally patted myself on the back for having figured out what details I might be able to contribute to this investigation. Of course, the records might be missing, or they might have nothing useful in them (board minutes in particular tended to be dry as dust, and for all I knew, when there were only a few people involved back in the day, maybe they’d skipped taking minutes at all). But at least I would have checked. I set to work reading what Eric had left for me.

  The day passed quickly; Eric brought me a takeout sandwich so I could stay focused on my own work. Everything was peaceful until Marty showed up about four, looking unhappy.

  I sat back in my chair and stretched. “What’s up?” I asked, although I probably didn’t want to know.

  “I’ve been doing research on lap desks,” she said.

  “You mean like the one we think was in the pit?”

  “The very same. How much do you want to know?”

  “What do I need to know?”

  “They were mostly an English phenomenon, often used for military expeditions, but they also showed up in libraries and drawing rooms. They usually had a slanted front for the writing part, when they were open, and often, inside, there were wells to hold containers for ink and sand for blotting the ink. And sometimes there would be one or two side drawers to hold letters and so forth.”

  “And drawers mean drawer pulls, right?”

  “Yup. Some of the lap desks even had secret drawers, although I have no clue where you could hide one of those in a smallish box. There was a particular military style, also called a campaign box. You want details?”

  “Sure, why not?” I thought Marty must be leading up to some point, and I was in no rush.

  “They were often made from mahogany, with reinforced brass corners. Early ones had drop-down handles—I guess later they kind of streamlined them with inset handles, which makes sense if you’re traveling with them. Bottom line, these weren’t necessarily pretty parlor pieces—these were mostly made for business. Think of them as the briefcases of their day.”

  “Okay, that’s nice,” I said.

  “Ah, but there’s more. Thomas Jefferson had one he said he designed himself before the Continental Congress in 1776. A little presumptuous, since we know there were plenty in England, but maybe he wanted a colonial product, or wanted to control the design. His had a folding top and a drawer on one end.”

  “You’re not going to tell me that’s the one the Society had, I hope?”

  “Nah, it’s safely tucked away at the Smithsonian. Impeccable provenance—he made a gift of it to his granddaughter, and her descendants gave it to the nation in 1880. Anyway, what’s more important for our purposes is that Jefferson asked a Philadelphia cabinetmaker to execute his plan for his so-called writing box. A man named Benjamin Randolph, who set up shop here in Philadelphia in 1764 and did well enough that he moved to a bigger place on Chestnut Street.”

  I was about to ask why Marty was telling me this, but I realized I could guess. “Don’t tell me: this Randolph made furniture for John Terwilliger.”

  She gave me a thumbs-up sign. “He did. Plus he left good records of the Terwilliger sales, which we’ve got right here at the Society. He closed up shop and retired in 1778.” Marty paused, and when she finally spoke she enunciated very clearly. “Randolph made a lap desk or campaign chest or whatever the heck you want to call it for General John Terwilliger, along with a lot of other furniture.” She waited one beat, two. “There is no record that any such item was ever in the Society’s collections. Nor any record that a member of the Terwilliger family sold it, at least not publicly. It appears in the general’s will, when he dies, and in a couple of heirs’ later wills. Unfortunately some of the family stopped making detailed inventories in the later nineteenth century.”

  She lapsed into silence, which gave me time to work through what she had just told me. Marty had confirmed that lap desks were in general use in the later 1700s, and that was the date we had tentatively assigned to the hypothetical box we had found in the pit. Some of those lap desks did have drawers with handles. That was good. We could point to a link between such a box and a Philadelphia craftsman who had made pieces for the Terwilliger family, at the right time and the right place, and there was proof that he’d sold one to General John. Also good. And Terwilliger family records showed that Marty’s grandfather had included a lap desk in his personal inventory. Odds were good that it was the same one. But it had never appeared in the Society’s acquisition records, although all the other items the family had donated were well documented.

  I looked Marty squarely in the eye. “You’re not going to try to tell me there were two boxes, are you?”

  “Nope. The broken bits we found must have come from the original lap desk. But that doesn’t tell us squat about why it ended up in that pit in pieces,” Marty said reluctantly.

  “So what do we do now?”

  “I have no idea.”

  CHAPTER 17

  “So do we back up and start over?” I suggested. “Reverse ourselves and say that the brass didn’t come from that particular lap desk but could have come from something else altogether? Or that we’re barking up the wrong tree and the desk didn’t contain something important? It was there—in pieces—because some workman probably broke it sometime in 1
907 and dumped the pieces into the convenient hole and hoped no one would notice, and nobody did.”

  “So why is that man dead?” Marty said.

  “He drank too much on payday, then got into a brawl with a stranger, who led him into a dark alley and beat him up and then shoved him in front of a car?”

  “You think the police haven’t thought of that? Besides, nothing was taken, except maybe that escutcheon,” Marty snapped back.

  “Of course they have—that’s what they do. Of course that’s the answer they’d like—it’s simple. I’m surprised that the detective even went to the trouble of asking the bartender if he recognized that piece of brass. And I bet she was surprised when he did. But she did, which tells me that she still has some suspicions about the death. It still might have had nothing to do with Carnell Scruggs’s death. And I’m sure she and her people have looked for the other guy at the bar, but there’s not a lot to work with there.”

  “What about street cameras?” Marty asked, sitting up straighter.

  “She said the coverage between the bar and here was lousy. What are you thinking?” I countered.

  Marty leaned forward, elbows on her knees. “I see two possibilities. One, this was a chance encounter at the bar—guy wanders in, sees the other guy with something interesting, goes out with him, and whacks him for reasons related or not to the brass thing—maybe Carnell was flashing his pay for the day. The second one is that the guy in the bar knew about whatever Carnell had found in the pit and staged the accidental meeting at the bar, then killed him and took it. All we really know is that Carnell had the thing, he died, and then he didn’t have the thing.”

  Marty had raised a troubling idea. “Wait—back up,” I said. “Why would mystery guy know Carnell had it? Or care?”

  “Maybe you should be asking, who else knew about it at all?”

  I didn’t like the direction this was going. “You mean, like the rest of the construction crew?”