An Open Book (8 page)

Keep reading for an excerpt of Sheila Connolly’s first Museum Mystery . . .

FUNDRAISING THE DEAD

Available in paperback from Berkley Prime Crime!

The sight of Marty Terwilliger charging into my office with fire in her eyes was never
a good thing, but it was particularly unwelcome right now, as I was trying to put
the finishing touches on the grand gala planned for this evening. Tonight was a big
event, a really big event, and I was in charge of making it happen. The venerable
Pennsylvania Antiquarian Society in Philadelphia was celebrating its 125th anniversary
as the guardian of the historic treasures of Philadelphia and the surrounding counties.
We were expecting nearly two hundred people, which would set a new record for a Society
event.

Our famed vaults housed at least two million books, documents, and ephemera, ranging
from manuscript letters signed by William Penn and George Washington, to advertising
flyers from late-nineteenth-century hatters, to financial records for several of the
long-defunct companies that had put Philadelphia on the map of the commercial and
industrial world. And that’s not including our fairly respectable collection of paintings,
silver, clothing, and some truly weird artifacts (like a horse’s hoof made into an
inkwell with silver fittings). The Society’s stately neoclassical building had been
constructed to reflect the seriousness of its purpose, and loomed over a neighborhood
that had seen many transitions, both good and bad, and had weathered them all.

I’m Eleanor Pratt—Nell to my friends—and I’m the director of development for the Society.
If that job title means nothing to you (I get a lot of blank looks), it means I’m
a fundraiser. I’m the one who writes those begging letters you get from nonprofit
organizations every couple of months. It’s not my name at the bottom—oh, no, it’s
the president’s, or, if your bank balance runs to seven figures or you’re sitting
on your great-grandfather’s priceless library of Americana, the president’s
and
the board chair’s. But I’m the one who writes the letter, and also makes sure that
there is a current address and the correct, intimate salutation on each one (
Dear Binkie
, et cetera), and that there is enough of the good stationery to print them all, and
that the president actually gets around to signing them (well, most of them—my staff
and I usually end up doing a bunch), and that they get into the mail, with postage
on them. I’m the invisible person who keeps the money flowing.

I’m also the one who, when I say I’m a fundraiser, you run screaming from, your checkbook
tightly clutched in your hand. Why would anyone go into fundraising? What starry-eyed
college student ever said, with a gleam in his or her eyes,
Gee, I want to beg for money when I grow up?
Well, my answer is simple: I was an English major in college. Need I say more? I had
drifted into development after a few years of trying to find an academic job, and
then discovered that I liked the work. I’ve been at it for more than a dozen years
now, and at the Society for the last five of them. In addition to sending out endless
mailings and grant proposals, and currying favor from potential donors, party planning
is one of my responsibilities. And finally, after many, many months of agonizing over
the theme of the evening, the perfect font for the invitations, the menu selections,
the arrangement of the tables, and dozens of other details, here we were, just hours
away from the anniversary gala.

Now, however, instead of talking to the caterer just one more time to be sure he had
the head count right; instead of counting the wine bottles that the liquor store had
just delivered; instead of supervising the tables and plates and glassware that were
at this very moment being off-loaded in the back alley, I pasted on what I hoped was
a sympathetic smile and welcomed Martha Terwilliger, aka Marty.

“Hi, Marty. What brings you here so early? The party doesn’t start until six.” It
was barely past three, though I needed every minute between now and then.

Martha Terwilliger was a board member—actually, a third-generation board member; her
grandfather had been president of the Society in the distant past, and her father
had grudgingly accepted a board position as an inheritance—and she took it quite seriously.
She was fiftyish, with a brusque, wry manner and a sharp intelligence, and related
to half of Philadelphia. Following the disintegration of her third marriage, she had
decided that she needed some focus in her life, and she had adopted the Society with
a vengeance. Her father, upon his death several years earlier, had bequeathed to the
Society his vast collection of family papers—records that went back to the original
Terwilliger settlers, in the early eighteenth century, and included one of the great
leaders of the Revolution, Major Jonathan Terwilliger, as well as a host of lesser
dignitaries and movers and shakers of Philadelphia political, economic, and social
life. The collection was huge, a true treasure trove, and it was quite literally priceless.

Marty’s father had also left an endowment to support the daunting undertaking of cataloging
the Terwilliger papers. Unfortunately, the endowment had produced only enough income
to cover a cataloger’s pay for a couple of days a week; as a gesture in recognition
of the importance of the papers, the Society was underwriting another day or two,
bringing the position up to bare full-time status. A few months ago we had hired Rich
Girard for the position, fresh out of college, and he had barely scratched the surface.
Marty, annoyed at the glacial pace of progress, had decided to step in and get to
work herself. Luckily, she was smart and persistent, and it was possible to visualize
an end to the project . . . some five or ten years down the road. In any event, Marty
was now bearing down on me with a full head of steam.

“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.

* * *

Click here for more books by Sheila Connolly

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Specials

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AN OPEN BOOK