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 Point two: nobody could say for sure if they were missing, because most of our records were at least a half century out-of-date.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 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.
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