Fundraising The Dead

CHAPTER 10

My next step was to check in with Latoya Anderson, our vice president of collections, and the person charged with oversight for all collections. Latoya was a relative newcomer to the Society: she’d been on the staff just over two years, one of Charles’s first major hires, and she was, in grant-writing terms, a “person of color.” I always found it offensive to label any staff member based on race (or gender, sexual preference, handicap, whatever), but the reality was that a lot of the organizations that awarded grants gave extra points to your application if you could demonstrate diversity, especially if it was not just for show. Luckily for everyone, Latoya was extremely well qualified, with an undergraduate degree in history from Princeton and a degree in library science from Simmons in Boston, and we were very lucky to have her. We had snagged her not because of our shining status in the historical world (although we did all right in that department), or the magnificent salary which we could offer (we couldn’t), but because the Society had an outstanding and largely unexplored collection of documents pertaining to slavery and the abolition movement in Philadelphia, and Latoya had been smart enough to negotiate for time to continue her own research, using those collections, while giving the Society four days a week.

I liked Latoya, or maybe respected was closer to the truth. She was smart and politically aware-which was more than could be said for many of the staff members. At the same time, I had a small but nagging doubt about her: she wasn’t a risk taker, and was almost fanatical about maintaining the status quo. She did her job well and conscientiously, but she stayed strictly within the confines of a narrow job description-which I thought could have been broadened to greatly enhance the Society’s standing within the academic world. Sometimes I wondered if she was giving one hundred percent to the Society. Or one hundred percent of the eighty percent she was committed to, anyway. Maybe I was biased because we didn’t have a particularly warm relationship, but as far as I could tell she had remained aloof from most people at the Society.

I was pleased and surprised to actually find her in on a Saturday. I wasn’t sure how many people had left as soon as they could yesterday, but if they had, they were here in force today. I rapped on her door. “Latoya?”

She held up one elaborately manicured hand and said, “One minute,” her eyes never leaving the screen of her laptop. She added a few sentences, then sat back and sighed. She looked up at me. “Didn’t want to lose the thought. What do you need?”

I made my way into her office. Unlike mine, hers was almost obsessively neat. All her books were lined up on her bookshelves. There were no stacks of papers sitting on any surfaces. There wasn’t even any dust. Me, I’ve always subscribed to the theory that an empty desk is the sign of an empty mind. Let me tell you, my mind is very full. In any case, Latoya’s visitor’s chair was free of encumbrances, so I sat down facing her.

“I’m surprised to see you here. You didn’t have to come in today.”

Latoya sighed. “Alfred’s unfortunate death means I have to attempt to reconstruct his methods. I’m afraid I’m not as well versed in his computer system as I should be.”

Nor was anyone else. I was glad that she was stepping up quickly. “I need to ask you something. I’ve encountered a, uh, situation, and you might be able to help me with it. And I could use a quick review on our cataloging procedures, at least as they apply to this.”

I had her interest. “What’s the problem?” she asked.

“You know Marty Terwilliger?”

“Sure. I can’t say I know her well, but I know she’s a board member and she does a lot of research here, and of course there’s the Terwilliger Collection. Why do you ask?”

“She came to me and said that some things she knew we had in that collection of hers weren’t where they should be, and she can’t find them. She says it’s an important group of items, and I believe her. Anyway, she’s mad, and I said I’d look into it. She gave me a week to work it out.”

“Hmm. Why did she come to you rather than me? Is she a troublemaker?”

“No, not at all. In general, she’s one of our strongest supporters, and she has a right to be mad, I think. So I’m hoping that we find what she’s looking for ASAP, and that it turns out to be some perfectly normal human error, or it was in transit somewhere in the building, or something like that.” But why did I have this ominous feeling deep inside even as I gave Latoya all the possible excuses? Unfortunately, I have pretty good instincts. And they weren’t telling me that the papers had been innocently mislaid. “When she brought this up, I realized I didn’t really know a lot about the current status of our inventory, or catalog, or whatever you all call it. I write about it a lot, but mostly I just drop in the boilerplate on collections-the stuff that you and your staff hand me-so I don’t really think about it. I have no idea if it’s accurate or even what it means. It’s pretty fuzzy.”

The more I learned, the more I wondered if that language was deliberately vague in order to cover up some long-standing shortcomings of the system. Of course, I knew we weren’t alone among our peer institutions in the dismal state of our record keeping. We were still struggling to make our way out of the nineteenth century (spidery brown ink on file cards), and here it was the twenty-first century. We’d been blindsided by the Internet, and had been scrambling for the past couple of years to try and keep an oar in the water while figuring out what it all meant and how we could possibly deal with it, with a budget that was already running a chronic annual deficit, and with a small-very small-endowment.

Latoya looked pained. “You want the short course on the state of our cataloging?” I nodded. She sighed. “Okay. You know the catalog room downstairs?”

“Yes,” I said. Of course I did-I walked through it daily.

“That was state-of-the-art fifty, a hundred years ago. There are seven-yes, seven-individual catalogs, all on file cards. Books, manuscripts, music, photographs, maps, objects, ephemera.” She ticked them off on her fingers. “And there are some subcategories for those. These are not integrated, but kept together as individual catalogs, all lined up side by side.”

I interrupted. “You mean, if I’m looking for a particular person or a place-a cemetery, say-I have to look through multiple catalogs?”

Latoya nodded. “Yes. Now, as you know, we applied for and received a grant a couple of years ago to put our most heavily used collections into an electronic format, so they could be accessed remotely, viewed from the website.”

I nodded encouragingly. That had been one of my proudest moments, and the grant had enabled us to take at least a baby step into the modern world. Alfred’s new cataloging software had been part of that package. Though I was a bit ticked at her use of the word we, since she hadn’t been around when the grant application had gone in-that had been my work.

I sighed inwardly. If we had lots of money available, we could do wonderful things, online and on-site. We could share our city’s and our nation’s glorious history with schoolchildren and the general public, near and far, and have them begging for more. All it would take was infinite resources, financial and human. But that wasn’t going to happen, unless Bill Gates decided that we were his favorite institution in the whole wide world. I wish.

Latoya went on. “Then you know that grant covered only three of the seven collections, which in themselves amounted to only about forty percent of the total of the existing file cards. Those collections were chosen because they were the easiest to scan-they had the fewest handwritten entries, they conformed best to standard cataloging protocols, and so on.”

I nodded again, with less enthusiasm. This was not encouraging.

“And that effort has been going on for over a year now, and while the bulk of the material has been scanned, translating that scanned material into new, consistent digital records and into an online format has been exceedingly slow.”

I was getting depressed. Time to divert the flow of gloom. “So what you’re saying is, we have modern cataloging for only a small percentage of our collections, and even that is incomplete?”

“Exactly.”

I pondered for a moment. “All right, let me cut to the chase. Let’s talk about the Terwilliger Collection, which I know is physically still maintained as a single collection. What state is it in?”

“We received that collection starting in, oh, 1967, I think. It came in several installments-the bulk of it when John Terwilliger moved out of his big family home and into a retirement community, and the rest upon his death. There was a catalog of sorts, but it was largely anecdotal, descriptive-nothing like a formal library catalog. I think some ancient cousin put it together a long time ago. It was better than nothing, but it was hardly specific. And if you’ve seen it, you know that the collection is massive, and we’ve only begun to scratch the surface. That’s why Rich is here. You wrote the proposals to help fund him, so you probably know it as well as anyone here. Except me, of course. So Marty is worried?”

“Unfortunately, yes.”

Latoya sat back and stared pensively at the ceiling for a long moment. Then she straightened.

“All right. Let me pull the files and get back to you. Later today?”

“Fine,” I said as I rose to leave. And then I realized that neither of us had mentioned Alfred. Latoya had worked with him for nearly three years, but she seemed unmoved by his death. I stopped in the doorway. “It’s a shame about Alfred, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it’s unfortunate. It won’t be easy to replace him.” Latoya turned back to her computer monitor: I was dismissed, and so, apparently, was Alfred. Or so I thought, until she said, “Will there be a service?”

“Yes, tomorrow. I’ll send you the details.” As I went out the door, I sent up a silent prayer: Please, please let this all be a mix-up. I didn’t like what I was hearing. It would be interesting to see if Latoya’s findings jibed with Alfred’s, or if she even mentioned his reports.

I had started two hares, so to speak, and now I wasn’t sure where to turn next. I went to my office and shut the door, which I never do. But I wanted a quiet minute to think, to try to put my thoughts in order. Unfortunately, what I didn’t know about how the Society managed its collections far exceeded what I did know. It was embarrassing-how many years had I been working here? Why hadn’t I ever asked anyone these things before?

I stared at the peeling paint on the ceiling for a while and decided to start with what I did know. Point one: some things might or might not be missing from the building. Point two: nobody could say for sure if they were missing, because most of our records were at least a half century out-of-date. Point three: if they were missing, the list of people who could have taken them was pretty extensive. Point three, sub (a): was it one person or lots of people? Point three, sub (b): was this recent or ancient history? Oh yes, this was going very well.

I decided to turn to the don’t-know list. Top of that list: if we determined that some things-either the Terwilliger letters, or those and a whole lot more-had really been stolen, who was I supposed to tell? According to Alfred, Latoya knew that things were going missing, or at least she should have, if she had read Alfred’s reports. She had apparently dismissed them as insignificant. Presumably Charles and the board knew, too, since Latoya had supposedly reported those findings at board meetings, at least in vague terms, but if she hadn’t sent up any red flags, they wouldn’t have worried.

But assuming the items had actually been stolen, who should be informed? The police? The FBI?

At that point I stopped cold in my mental tracks. Telling the police about the missing items would be disastrous to the Society, especially to me. How was I supposed to raise money if we went public with the fact that we didn’t know what we had already or where it was? And that we seemed to be losing what we did have? That would not exactly inspire confidence among donors. A body in the stacks was bad enough, but losing documents-that was unforgivable; preserving and protecting them was our core mission.

I still had no proof that there was any crime involved, anyway. It could just be human carelessness. But somehow I knew in my heart of hearts that it was more than that. After all, if Alfred had been worried, there was probably a good reason. Alfred had dutifully told his superiors, and if we were lucky, Alfred had left his usual careful notes buried in Cassandra. I could only hope he had left adequate instructions on how to penetrate Cassandra’s recesses.

At this point I laid my head down on my desk and wished I was dead. The gala had been so nice, after all our planning. And then everything had fallen to pieces, and I had the feeling there was more to come.

Focus on the documents. I was completely out of my depth when it came to assigning a value to the collections. It was a daunting prospect. We had things that had been accumulating for well over a hundred years. Some of them were garbage: Great-Aunt Tilly’s pen wiper and that ilk. Some of them were unique: personal correspondence from then-presidents to the men who had shaped this city, this country, for example. The collections had grown and become increasingly unwieldy, as more and more was shoehorned into the same limited and antiquated space. Things were stacked in piles, and I had seen at least one suitcase used for document storage, somewhere in the stacks. We couldn’t even identify half of the items, much less assign a dollar value to each one of them-a value that would change all the time because of shifting economic conditions, tastes and trends among collectors, et cetera, et cetera. Did we carry insurance? Yes, on the building and equipment, but not on the collections. They were, literally, priceless.

All of this was making it clear to me just how complacent we’d been. Things had always gone along just fine, managed by the local old-boy network for their own personal use. They were all gentlemen, and they all knew each other. I had seen documents from the early twentieth century that showed that there were only two or three employees running the Society, one of whom doubled as a security guard and lived in a small apartment upstairs. Who had needed more than that back in those days? And then there was the problem I had just run into: knowing what we had and where it was, at any given time. It was easier to assume that everything just stayed put. There had been some indefinable element of trust, a belief that the people who used a library or archive were honorable and sincere in their interest.

Well, the world had changed. We had visible evidence in the neighborhood around us: what had once been an orchard and gardens was now peopled by hookers after dark, and drive-by shootings were not unknown. And people had changed. Now there were street people who wandered in, looking for warmth or a toilet, and who had to be gently persuaded to leave. And not just the lobby, but the steps as well, where they would beg for change, scaring the little old ladies who made up a large portion of our users. The academic world had become more and more cutthroat, with everyone fighting to publish something new, something noteworthy. It was hard to believe, but professors and graduate students were not above spiriting away an essential document or slicing the relevant pages out of a book to keep it away from their competitors. And even the swelling ranks of genealogists had sticky fingers. When they found a will or a letter that some long-dead relative had penned, they thought, Hey, this should by rights be mine-and they would pocket it or stick it under their shirt. We had no way to search everyone who walked out of the building. What’s more, only a full body search would nab a really determined thief-were we supposed to strip-search every patron in the lobby?

It was depressing. It might have been encouraging that technology had grown along with the problem, making it theoretically easier to keep an electronic eye on the stacks, to track who came in and left the building, who requested which documents. The problem I kept coming back to was that all that lovely electronic gear was expensive. Many of our sister institutions were chasing after the same pot of limited grant money for technology and security upgrades, and it wasn’t happening very fast.

So, what to do? I couldn’t come up with a solution, so I decided to turn the problem over to my subconscious and do something else instead. Carrie wasn’t in today-not that I blamed her, for she was young, single, and not terribly devoted to her job-but I could check how many of the gala checks she had already processed. I was sure there were more, too, like the ones that had been left on my desk, which in the turmoil following Alfred’s death I had neglected to hand over to her.

Which reminded me of Alfred’s list, in the same pile. I pulled it out and smoothed it carefully on my desk. I made an effort to relax before running my eyes over the list. It was far longer than I had expected, and even I recognized the names attached to a lot of the items there. My heart sank. If anyone asked me-and I prayed they wouldn’t-I would have to guess that someone with a fine eye and specific expertise had been cherry-picking the good stuff out of our collections. And had gotten clean away with it, for quite some time.

I needed time to think about this, and to think about what to do with what I knew. I lined up the papers and carefully returned them to their envelope. And then changed my mind, pulled them out, and headed for the copy machine. I wasn’t sure who could re-create this list, with Alfred gone. I knew I couldn’t. So it seemed prudent to make an extra copy and stash it somewhere safe. As I stood over the machine, its scanner lights moving underneath the copier cover, I almost laughed at my own cloak-and-dagger attitude. I was copying a list that nobody else knew existed, to protect it from-who? I had no idea. I just wanted to be sure Alfred’s list had a backup.

Back in my office, I slid the original list in amongst the files in my desk drawer. It was highly unlikely that anyone would find it there, since I often had trouble finding my own files. The copy I stuck in my carry bag. Impatient now, I sifted through the stack of checks from the gala, made a few notes, then bundled them up to be input by Carrie on Monday and deposited to the Society’s bank account. Better sooner than later, in case some donors had second thoughts after hearing the news of Alfred’s death and decided to stop their checks.

But it was now late afternoon, and I’d had enough. I was going home to put my feet up, chill out, and try to figure out just what the heck was going on at the Society. I was almost out the door of my office when I remembered one last thing: I had promised Marty that I would let the staff know about Alfred’s funeral. I went back to my desk and wrote a brief email giving time and place, and sent it to all staff and board members. Then I shut down the computer, turned off the lights, and headed home.