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 Point two: nobody could say for sure if they were missing, because most of our records were at least a half century out-of-date.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