Sheila Connolly - Fundraising The Dead

Well, that was certainly interesting. I tried to work out who knew what at the moment. Charles didn’t know that I knew he was behind the thefts. Maybe he had collected all the things he hadn’t already sold and concealed them somewhere in the Society building, and he was inviting me to share in his big discovery- Aha, the lost is found! To someone who was not in the loop on this, it would sound quite plausible. Well, I could play along.

But I wasn’t going to be stupid about it. I picked up the phone and punched in Marty’s home number-no answer. I dredged up the business card James had given me and tried that. Someone in the office answered, but James wasn’t in. I left a message for him to call me and gave both my home phone number and my cell phone. Then I called Marty’s phone again and waited for her voice mail to pick up so I could leave a message.

“Marty? It’s Nell. I just got a call from Doris at the Society. She said that Charles told her to call me and ask me to come in, but she didn’t say why. I figure I might as well go in and see what it’s all about. Heck, maybe he’s ready to confess. I’ll give you a call when I know what the story is.”

There. At least somebody would know where I was. I took an extremely quick shower, dressed, and went out to the car: trains ran so rarely on weekends that it was far faster just to drive, and on a Sunday, parking in the neighborhood of the Society wouldn’t be a problem.

But I had guessed wrong. Apparently there was some sort of Center City holiday event going on, and I ended up parking a couple of blocks away. I walked back to the Society and let myself in with my key. On the third floor the offices were dark, except for Charles’s suite. When I walked in, Doris was waiting primly behind her desk.

“Hello, Doris,” I said. “Where’s Charles?”

“He’s downstairs in the basement. He asked me to wait up here and take you down when you arrived.”

“Okay, lead the way.” I followed her back to the elevator, and once inside, she keyed in the basement level. “What’s this about?”

She remained facing forward, waiting for the elevator to hit bottom. “I don’t know, but he said it was important that you see something.” The elevator doors opened. “This way.”

Doris led the way through the warren of cluttered rooms in the basement. I had never spent much time down here, except for a few occasions when I needed to estimate the scope of a collection. Plus the Society had been making a concerted effort to remove vulnerable items from this area, because the below-ground rooms were damp, and they were also affected by the steady rumbling from the subway trains that ran directly beneath our building. What remained was a jumble of broken furniture, unused display cases, and outdated electronic equipment. Doris kept going, down the long central corridor; she opened one of the doors at the back of the building. I could see lights on in the room beyond.

Doris didn’t stop but marched into the room, and I hurried to follow, mystified. She pointed at an open door to a small room at the back. “Charles is in there.” She turned and looked at me expectantly.

I went to the door and peered in. And then something slammed me in the back. I fell forward into the space, and the door swung shut behind me with a solid clang, and I was in the dark. And, apparently, alone.

It took me a moment to figure out what had happened. Doris had just locked me into a very small dark place in the basement, and Charles was nowhere around. I picked myself up off the floor, turned around, and sat, my back against shelves. Then I clamped down hard on the incipient panic attack.

I was not claustrophobic; I was not afraid of the dark. Good. So now it was time to use my brain and think. For starters, I knew where I was. Despite not having spent much time down here, I knew every corner of the building, since I had written more than one grant proposal begging for money to upgrade our lovely but aging 1900 building. This was the former wine cellar, an artifact of the glory days when the Society was run like a gentlemen’s club, and those gentlemen liked to have a place to lay down their vintage port, the perfect accompaniment to perusing old documents. Needless to say, the space had not held wine for a very long time; now it held miscellaneous crap. It was located in the farthest corner of the basement, far away from any human traffic, and, as I knew well, it was well insulated.

As the product of an earlier, simpler era, it also had no internal light switch… and no ventilation. I squashed another moment of panic and tried to keep my breathing slow and even. I forced myself to look carefully around-any pinpricks of light visible through a crack? Nope. But no doubt Doris had turned off the lights in the room outside, and there were no windows in there, either. It felt cold in the room but was probably only around fifty-five degrees Fahrenheit; big deal-nobody froze to death at fifty-five degrees, although they might be uncomfortable. It was the possible lack of air, not the temperature, that was a bigger problem, I thought. It seemed unlikely to me that the room was hermetically sealed, and even if it had been once, the heavy metal door had warped from its own weight over the years, so it was letting in a little air. And anyway, weren’t there plenty of stories about miners trapped underground in air pockets, who survived for days? All I had to do was avoid strenuous exercise and breathe slowly, slowly… easier said than done, of course, when trapped in the dark in a basement where nobody ever came.

Now, what did I have to work with? I had carried my purse with me to the basement, so I did a quick mental inventory. I had my keys, with a mini-flashlight on the keychain, but I wasn’t sure how old the battery was and how long it might last-best to keep that in reserve. A half-empty box of Altoids-oh, goody, sugar. Kleenex, Band-Aids, my wallet-sure, like I was going to work my way out of here with a credit card. Not likely. Cell phone.

Cell phone! I grabbed it out of its little pocket, flipped it open, and pushed the button to turn it on. Come on, come on , I urged it. Its small screen provided a surprising amount of light, though maybe it was just in contrast to the absolute darkness around me. Finally it woke up and started searching for its service area-and found nothing. And then I remembered that I was in the bowels of a concrete-and-reinforced-steel structure, surrounded by metal shelves, in a room with a theft-proof metal door, with a subway track running beneath me. Of course it wasn’t going to find a signal. Reluctantly I shut it again, conserving its light-I might want it later, if only for a little company.

What now? I pulled out the flashlight and flicked it on, so I could survey my dungeon. The feeble beam swept over more metal shelving, stacked with old books, outdated piles of Society publications, and miscellaneous junk. Unfortunately, no former visitor had left a handy sledgehammer for me to use to batter my way out. Nor a pry bar, nor anything else that might have an impact on the sturdy walls and door. I swiveled the light toward the door; no interior handle or keyhole. OSHA would be appalled, but the building had been constructed in a different era. And I didn’t know how to pick a lock anyway-another skill I had been meaning to acquire.

Think, Nell, think! That’s what you’re good at! … Yeah, you and Butch Cassidy, and look where that got him. I made myself as comfortable as I could against the shelves. I had left Marty a phone message. Good for me. But I had no idea where Marty was and when she might listen to her messages. Assume the best case: she came home, immediately played her messages, and heard that Charles asked me to meet him here. So, eventually she’d expect me to report back about what he wanted. But when? Would she start calling me later today? Would she wait until tomorrow?