Privy to the Dead

by Sheila Connolly

  The later paragraphs of the newspaper article made it clear that Mr. Frazer was an important man in Philadelphia and served on many boards, including that of the Pennsylvania Antiquarian Society. A second, shorter article reported that he was so devastated by the death of his beloved wife of twenty-seven years that he took his own life a few months later and was found hanging in the carriage house behind his home in a nearby suburb. He left his letters and memorabilia to the Society.

  I noticed that Latoya nodded, no doubt recognizing the Frazer gift to the collections.

  I looked up from the page at Shelby. “This is amazing.”

  “Aw, shucks, ma’am, it weren’t nothin’.” Then her expression sobered. “Seriously, it was the only crime that I could find that was linked to any of the people with connections at the Society at the right time. And that was before I knew about the gun.”

  I looked at Marty, but she was staring into space. “Marty?” I said.

  She was slow to focus on me. “What? Oh, right, the Frazers.” She stood up abruptly. “I’ve got to go.” Then without another word she turned on her heel and left the room.

  “What was that about?” Shelby said.

  “I have no idea,” I told her.

  I’d have to chase down Marty as soon as we wrapped up this meeting. In the meantime, I picked up Shelby’s thread again. “All right, then. We have a new hypothesis to add to our string of hypotheses: that Mr. Frazer was the owner of the gun, and he used it to kill his wife and a man we can infer he assumed was her lover. If that’s true, how did he manage to conceal the weapon from the police?”

  “Just how thorough do you think they were in 1907?” Shelby asked. “I mean, the man was wealthy and respected. The shootings took place at his summer house, which was probably one of those hulking, big places on the beach, so the local police were first on the scene. You think they searched very hard? Besides, back then nobody would have blamed him for shooting his wife and her lover, at least off the record. Hell, there are countries today where that’s still considered a legitimate excuse for murder. The article is pretty evasive about where the bodies were found, so maybe we should infer that they were in bed together—this paper wasn’t so much into gory details as we are today.”

  “I wonder if the original files on the murder are available?” I said, mainly to myself. To the group I said, “From what I understand, there is no statute of limitations on murder, so if no one was ever tried on this, it should theoretically still be an open case.”

  “Yes, in New Jersey,” Latoya said, throwing some cold water on my thinking. “Isn’t there a problem of jurisdiction? Are you going to go to the Shore and ask the police there if you can see the files? You don’t exactly have any standing there.”

  Latoya had raised a good point. We still needed more information before we could take any of this to Detective Hrivnak. If we could convince her, she might be willing to approach the New Jersey police and gain access to whatever remained. Maybe. All we had to offer her at the moment was a pretty weak string of conjectures and very little evidence.

  This was getting ridiculous—castles in the air built on straw, or some other, equally mangled analogy.

  I realized that everyone else was waiting for me to say something. “Latoya’s right. We have a series of assumptions but little more. What can we find that will support our theory, that Frazer killed two people and got away with it? And how did the gun end up here? We need to know more about the man. Was he a banker? A lawyer? A businessman along the lines of John Wanamaker? Or just a member of the idle rich? Maybe he belonged to a gun club.”

  “Why didn’t he just pitch it in the ocean?” Shelby asked. “Or bury it in the sand until the police had checked the house? There is sand at the shore, isn’t there?”

  “Yes, Shelby, there is,” I said patiently. “Lots of it. Why don’t you check exactly where Mr. Frazer lived—or rather, summered—at the shore? There must be a record somewhere. For that matter, find out where he lived in this area, and how active he was here. I mean, was he primarily a donor, or was he an historian?”

  “Will do,” Shelby said. “And we’d better find out if Mr. Frazer knew Mr. Terwilliger, right? I know you hope to keep Marty’s family out of this, but if there’s any evidence that her grandfather was involved, it’ll have to come out,” Shelby said.

  “Yes, please look into that, too. You know Marty—she’s honest, and she respects the facts of history. If her grandfather turns out to have been part of any kind of cover-up, she would want to know. Find out anything you can.” Privately, though, I wondered if Marty already had or knew of some evidence of his involvement, which would explain her abrupt exit. I turned to Latoya. “Can you check what was in Mr. Frazer’s donation to the collections? He could have left almost anything, or nothing of value. Let’s find out.”

  “Of course,” Latoya said. “I can have that quickly.”

  I had almost forgotten my request to the bank. “One more thing—yesterday I got in touch with the Society’s bank, which has been the Society’s bank from Day One. I asked if they could retrieve the records from the period we’re talking about. If we’re lucky they’ll be available today. If not, probably early next week. I want to see if there are any unexpected contributions. I’ll share whatever I find with you, Shelby, since you’ve already looked at the development records for the construction projects. We can compare those to the bank records, and look for any odd timing, or an unexpected late contribution. I’ll let you know when the bank receives them and I’ve had a chance to look at them.”

  “Nell, I apologize if this is a dumb question, but what do you hope to learn?” Ben asked. “I don’t know how your donor records work.”

  “Sorry, Ben—I keep forgetting you haven’t been here long. Assume the lap desk went into the pit no later than 1907, when the building was completed. If a donor contributed a significant amount around or after that time, we would take a harder look at him. If his contribution is way out of line with any prior or later contribution of his, then we look even harder.”

  “You think it would be something like hush money?” Ben persisted. “Someone here who knew what was going on said, ‘Ante up and I’ll keep quiet’?”

  “It’s a possibility. It probably would have looked like an ordinary contribution to most people who knew about it.”

  “I’m way ahead of you, lady,” Shelby said. “I’ve already pulled together a list of the Society’s contributors from that particular period. Here, I made copies for everyone.” She tossed another stack of stapled copies on the table, and everyone helped themselves to one. “I included both regular operating contributions and special campaign contributions. I haven’t really had time to digest the results, so if anything pops out at you, tell me and I can look for more detail.”

  Nobody volunteered any comments immediately, so I went on, “Thank you, Shelby. I asked Eric to look for additional financial reports from the board records, and he came up with a few. I have to say I’m appalled at how sloppy the board’s records were back then. There are a few treasurer’s reports from that decade, but it’s not like they’re monthly, or even from every meeting. That doesn’t mean they aren’t somewhere in the records here, but they could have been filed—or misfiled—almost anywhere. But if we can find them, they might bolster whatever you come up with, Shelby.” I looked at the people seated around the table. “Anything else?” I asked, and got no response. “Thank you all for your efforts. I know you’re doing this on top of all your regular duties, and I appreciate it. Okay, that’s all, folks. Back to business.”

  However, before anyone could leave, there was a rapping on the door, and Lissa poked her head in. “Sorry I missed the meeting this morning, but I found something you’ve got to see.”

  CHAPTER 25

  We all settled back in our seats. “Pull up a chair and tell us what you’ve got,” I told Lissa. “But before
you begin, there are some new details you need to know.” When she sat, I gave her the short version that I had presented to the group at the beginning of the meeting and added the bits and pieces that had come up along the way; when I got to the part about the missing weapon, I could have sworn that Lissa grew paler.

  When I was finished, Lissa took a moment to digest what I’d said before speaking herself. “Since we’re trying to find out why anyone would want to . . . harm that poor man who died last week,” she began, “and you believe there’s some link to the Society, you asked me to look at anyone around now who might be related to the people who were in charge back around 1900 through when the new building was finished in 1907. Since I didn’t have time to get over here and go through your records, I used online resources like Ancestry.com as much as I could, though sites like that don’t list living people, so I could go only so far. We’re talking two, three generations, tops. So then I went looking through obituaries and wills and newspaper articles after that, to get as close to the present as I could. I had the names of maybe fifteen board members, an equally short list of high-dollar donors, and the pitifully few staff members they had at the time, all of whom would have had access to the dark corners of the place. I managed to track down something for all of them, though I didn’t look at the Terwilligers, since we’ve got plenty of info on them already. Several lines petered out—either the family members are all deceased now, or the last few moved away and haven’t been heard of locally for years. I could have missed a few female lines who married and changed names.”

  “Understood,” I agreed. “Let’s start with the obvious ones and see what you found.”

  Lissa looked around. “Where’s Marty? And Rich? They really need to hear this, too.”

  “Marty had to leave. She said she thinks Rich might still be researching something. But go ahead—we can fill them in later.”

  Lissa looked at the uniformly somber expressions on everyone in the room. “You really are taking this seriously.”

  “Yes, we are,” I said. “Show us what you’ve put together.”

  “All right.” Lissa started dealing out papers in stacks on the polished oak table. “Ten members of that original list still have descendants living in the greater Philadelphia area. I can’t give you their financial status back around 1900, but you can infer some details from the addresses and professions, I think. I’ve sketched out the line of descent from each of the early Society members to anyone currently in the greater Philadelphia area. Take a look.” She stepped back so that everyone could look at what she had assembled.

  I recognized the surnames of a few modern-day members and realized that, like Marty, they were now third- or fourth-generation within the same family. I suppose there were other cities—and other societies such as this one—where the same was true, but it still sort of thrilled me to be looking at it in tangible form.

  But I came to a screeching halt in front of one stack of papers.

  “What is it?” Lissa asked.

  I placed a finger on the nearest page, the one with the descendant tree on top of one of the piles. “You’re kidding,” someone whispered. I couldn’t tell who because I was still staring at the page.

  Rich Girard. Our intern for the past two years. Marty’s right hand in the cataloging of the Terwilliger papers. Nice guy. Easygoing, funny, hardworking, meticulous with details. And a descendant of Harrison Frazer.

  I turned to Lissa. “You’re sure?”

  She nodded. “I double-checked. You didn’t know?”

  I recalled something about a family connection when he’d originally been hired a couple of years earlier, but it hadn’t registered with me. Marty had vouched for him, and that was all that really mattered then. I took my time in choosing my words. “Lissa, while you were putting this together, we arrived at—well, I guess you’d call it a strong suspicion that former board member Harrison Frazer was involved in the fatal shooting of his wife and her probable lover in the summer of 1907. Nothing was ever proved, and no weapon was found. Shelby told us about the Frazer murders this morning. It seems likely to me that there was a gun that somehow ended up in the Terwilliger lap desk, at least at the time it was tossed in the pit, and that this gun was probably the missing Frazer murder weapon. We also believe that the discovery of this gun by Carnell Scruggs is what led to his death, and someone must have seen him conceal it and take it out of the building. As far as we know, the police have no suspects, but the only visual evidence—the recording from the bar where the man ate dinner—shows him in the company of a young white man.”

  Lissa looked stunned. “So this other man at the bar, you’re saying you think it could’ve been Rich?”

  I nodded. “The bar video isn’t conclusive, but there’s nothing in it to eliminate Rich. It’s just a suspicion, but this whole mess has been rife with coincidences, and they keep adding up. Marty was with Rich last night, but she didn’t tell us if they’d found anything of interest. She stayed at this meeting long enough to hear about the Frazer murders, but then left in a hurry. She may hold some of the answers.” In fact, I suspected she might have left because of those answers.

  I stopped and thought for a moment, then said, “I’m sorry if this sounds, well, procedural, but let’s take a moment and see if we can we put together a timeline for where we all were last Wednesday night, when Carnell Scruggs was hit by that car.”

  “I assume you mean whether and when we saw Rich?” Shelby asked quietly.

  “I’m afraid so. If one of you can tell me that the two of you were together at the dentist at the time Scruggs was killed, I’ll feel a lot better.”

  Everybody sat silently, scribbling notes on pieces of paper. Latoya finished first. “I’m afraid this won’t help much—I spent the afternoon in my office. I did not go to the basement. I might have seen Rich in the processing room, but only in passing—we didn’t speak. He wasn’t working on anything in particular for me. You’d do better to ask the others who spend time in that room.”

  I wasn’t surprised; her recollections were no better or worse than my own.

  “Ben?”

  He was shaking his head. “Rich wasn’t around the processing room that day. Of course, that doesn’t mean he wasn’t in the building somewhere.”

  I nodded. “Shelby?”

  “More or less the same as Latoya. I was working in my office all day,” Shelby said. “I didn’t talk to Rich. If I saw him at all, he would have been trailing after Marty, but I see them a lot, and I couldn’t swear to what day it was.”

  “Does Rich ever look in the development files?” I asked her.

  “Sure, although mostly at the Terwilliger stuff. But he probably looks at the people who knew the various Terwilligers . . .” Shelby’s voice trailed off when she realized what she had just said. “He could know as much as we do about any connections between the Frazers and the Terwilligers. More, in fact. He’s had a couple of years to work on it.”

  Maybe. I had worked with Rich for all that time. He was a nice guy, a competent cataloger. Marty had been pleased with his work. How could he go from that to shoving a man to his death? Why would he do that? I wasn’t ready to believe it. I wanted to hear what he had to say. I wanted to know why Marty had left so fast. I wanted to understand what the heck was going on.

  Since everyone was now staring expectantly at me, I struggled to pull myself together. “Okay, people, let’s focus. We’re looking for anything to do with the Frazer family, whether it’s in collections or development or board records. And I will try to track down Marty and see what she knows.” I was pretty sure she knew something. Maybe even a lot. “And if any of you see or hear from Rich, let me know.”

  “You really believe he’s involved?” Latoya said.

  “Honestly, I don’t know. I hope not. Anyway, thank you all for your work on this.”

  We straggled out to our various offi
ces. On the way, I noticed the lobby was empty, so I stopped to talk to Bob. “Did Marty leave the building, Bob?”

  “She did, maybe half an hour ago.”

  Well, that saved me hunting through the stacks, where she might have hidden herself like a wounded animal retreating to her den. “What about Rich—have you seen him today?”

  “Not that I can recall, but he could have come in early.”

  “Thanks, Bob.” The lobby was a bit too public to ask Bob about where Rich was on the day of Carnell’s death. Surely the police had already talked to them both. Maybe they’d done all of this already.

  I trudged back to my office. Eric was back at his desk. “You look like you need more coffee, Nell. And Rich Girard is waiting for you in your office—said he really needed to talk to you.”

  CHAPTER 26

  I didn’t have time to wonder how Rich had escaped Bob’s notice, but he knew the place well. Had he come to confess? No, that seemed ridiculous—he didn’t even know we knew about his Frazer connections, or that we had reason to care. Had Marty sent him to me? One way to find out. “Hold off on that coffee, Eric. I want to talk to Rich first.”

  I squared my shoulders and marched into my office, shutting the door behind me. Rich was wandering around looking at the framed engravings on the walls, but he turned quickly when I came in. I held my tongue until I had walked around my desk and sat down.

  “Eric said you wanted to talk to me? Why don’t you sit down and tell me what’s on your mind.” Like, have you killed anybody recently?

  Rich dropped into one of the antique visitor chairs in front of the desk. “I don’t know where to start. I’m sorry to bother you when I know you’re busy, but I found something in the Terwilliger papers yesterday, and I didn’t want to show it to Marty until I’d had time to think about it, and I haven’t seen her yet this morning, so I figured I’d better bring it to you. I ducked out of that meeting this morning because I didn’t want to face Marty before I talked to you, you know?”