Sheila Connolly: Fundraising The Dead

“Nell, I need to talk to you. We’ve got a problem,” she said curtly. “It’s about the Collection.” Whenever Marty spoke about her family’s papers, you could see the capital letters: The Terwilliger Collection.

“I’m sorry to hear that, Marty. Please, sit down and tell me what I can do,” I said, far more calmly than I felt.

Marty looked at the piles of books and papers on my sole guest chair and remained standing. “I was in yesterday, looking for a folder of papers, an exchange of letters between Major Jonathan”-she seemed to be on a first-name basis with all her dead family members-“and George Washington. I know I saw them a few weeks ago. But they aren’t there now.”

Great: a collections problem. Why was she talking to me about this? I did not need to hear about a collections problem at this moment. What was I supposed to do? Drop all the gala preparations, take a flashlight and go hunting through the file boxes in the stacks?

“Are you sure that Rich didn’t take them to his cubicle to catalog them?” Rich was a sweet boy, but he could be absentminded.

“No,” Marty said with conviction. “He was the first person I asked. He hasn’t gotten up to the 1770s yet, and he hasn’t seen them.”

“Maybe they were just misfiled?” I parried. Please, let there be a quick solution to this so I can get back to putting out event-related fires , I prayed.

Marty was not about to back off. “Well, if they were, they aren’t in any of the adjacent boxes. No, I know I saw them just a couple of weeks ago. I was checking where the major spent Christmas in 1774, for the family history”-of course she was also working on a family history, and had been for several years, although no one to my knowledge had seen even a page of it-“and they were there then. But they aren’t there now.”

“I’m not sure what I can do, Marty. Why come to me, rather than to someone in collections, like Latoya?” Latoya Anderson, our vice president of collections, was the most likely person for Marty to talk to about any items that might have gotten misplaced.

“Because we’ve worked together in the past, Nell, and I know you can get things done,” Marty said curtly. “Latoya will just give me the runaround. I need answers.”

“Marty,” I said in my most pacifying tone, “I can understand your concern, and their absence is very troubling. But there must be some simple explanation. Why don’t you and Rich and I get together tomorrow and see if we can track them down?” I smiled hopefully. Tomorrow: the day after the event.

She still looked miffed. “I suppose. But let me tell you, if those letters are really missing, there will be hell to pay. Do you have any idea what they’re worth?”

I didn’t, but I knew that whatever insurance we had wouldn’t be enough. To be totally honest, I didn’t even know if we had insurance for the collections. But I smiled even more brightly. “Marty, of course I know how important they are. And I’m sure we’ll find them.” I stood up, hoping to urge her out the door. “I’ll tell Rich, and we’ll meet you in the lobby at nine tomorrow morning, before anyone comes in, all right?” I came around my desk and moved toward the hall, and Marty grudgingly followed. “And you’ll be back for tonight? It’s going to be a wonderful evening. I’m very pleased at the RSVPs.” I mentally reviewed tonight’s guest list, which included at least six of Marty’s cousins, and those were only the ones I remembered offhand. Marty took her board obligations seriously, and I knew she would be at the gala, no matter how annoyed she might be at the moment. I continued my progress toward the elevator, with Marty trailing behind.

“All right, nine A.M. sharp tomorrow. And of course I’ll be here tonight,” she said tartly. “This party had better be good. The Society can use the money.”

As if I weren’t well aware of that. I kept the smile glued to my face as the elevator doors closed behind her, but it faded immediately once she was out of sight. Just what I needed, one more problem-and I didn’t like the sound of this one. I took a quick look at my watch and cursed silently. There was too much to do in the time I had left, and now Marty had just dumped a whole new problem in my lap. One which I was hardly equipped to deal with, since I had very little working knowledge of the vast collections in the building. Still, I could probably start the ball rolling, and then I could tell her that I was making progress when I saw her at the party. Our registrar, Alfred Findley, the person who’d be most helpful right now, had absolutely nothing to do with the party, so unlike the rest of the staff, at least he wouldn’t be running around like a headless chicken.

Alfred’s cubicle was only fifty feet from my office, but today was no ordinary day, and I was stopped twice en route with questions that absolutely, positively had to be answered immediately.

My membership coordinator, Carrie Drexel, was the third. “Nell, did you want to use the sticky name badges? You know the guests complain when they have to pin something on.”

“Good catch, Carrie. They’re in the supply closet outside my office. We ordered a huge batch after the last members’ meeting.”

“Oh, right. Thanks!” She turned and dashed back the way I had come.

I made it another ten feet before the next interruption: Felicity Soames, our head librarian, emerged from the staff room at the back of the building, a mug of coffee in her hand. “Hi, Nell,” she began. “How’s the-”

I held up a hand. “No time now, Felicity. See you at the gala?”

“Of course. It’ll be grand, don’t worry.”

I turned and all but ran to Alfred’s lair.

As registrar, Alfred Findley was in charge of the minutiae of recording and organizing the Pennsylvania Antiquarian Society’s collections. Alfred had come to the Society some fifteen years ago, had fallen in love with the place, and had never left. In appearance, he was short and sort of doughy-you had the feeling that if you poked him, the dimple would linger for a while-and he was also very pale, as if he never saw the light of day, which may have been true. The bare description made him sound rather like a fungus, but he was a really sweet guy. It was rumored that he was gay, but since he said very little about his personal life (in fact, we weren’t sure he had one outside of the Society, and some people whispered that he actually lived somewhere deep in the stacks), no one knew for sure. But it was clear that the collections at the Society were the one true love of his life, and if anyone knew where something was, it would be Alfred. He had been lobbying the other staff members, and what board members he could bring himself to approach, for upgraded computer systems and more support for a full recataloging of the collections. He and I had been on great terms ever since I found funding for his new, state-of-the-art computer system and cataloging-software a couple of years ago.

Our collections management procedures could certainly use the electronic assistance. Together, the books and manuscripts in our collections total about two million items, which is rather mind-boggling when you think about it. I should add, we think it’s two million-it depends on how you count. I mean, are five pieces of paper in a folder one item or five? It’d been counted both ways, as far as we could tell. So we just used the figure two million and hoped for the best. It was at least that and possibly quite a lot more.

And although our original mandate is closer to that of a library-focusing on historical books, manuscripts, and other documents-over the course of the Society’s century and a quarter, we’d also somehow accumulated paintings, furniture, and other memorabilia. Many of them arrived in the early days, over a century ago, when the Society was grateful for anything. Some came lumped in with estates or bequests, and how could we say no? The problem was, we were fast running out of space. Worse, our handsome building was never set up for the storage of articles like these. And some things, like paintings, could be rather finicky. They liked the right conditions, such as certain temperatures, humidity, exposure to (or avoidance of) light, and so on. If you don’t treat them nicely, the paint tends to fall off the canvas, which leaves you with a mess. But selling or otherwise getting rid of these gifts could be tricky, so we compromised by putting the best examples on public display and keeping far more odds and ends stuffed into dark and dusty corners, unused spaces, wherever they would fit, for a very long time.