Fire Engine Dead (13 page)

When I arrived at my office at the Society, Eric was already waiting with a few message slips and a cup of coffee for me. “Do you have spy cameras on the corner outside, so you know when I’ll be here?” I joked.

Eric smiled shyly. “Nope, but I looked up the train schedule, and I know you generally take the same train every day. I can even check to see if the train is on time.”

Ah, the wonders of modern technology—which took the mystery out of a lot of things. I reached for the coffee cup and said, “Anything important this early?”

“Agent Morrison left a message. And Latoya’s called twice—she seems upset about something.”

That didn’t sound good. Did she know about Alice already? I had been planning to tell her, really—this morning. Of course, as president I had every right to hire whomever
I chose, but maybe I ought to have at least left Latoya a message. Had Marty said something?

“Thank you, Eric.” I decided to finish my coffee before I confronted Latoya. Which was a nice theory, but it didn’t work, because three minutes later she came charging into my office.

“When were you planning to tell me about this little
intern
you hired?” She made it sound as though I’d brought in a hooker or something.

I was not going to apologize. “Latoya, this only came about late yesterday. When I went to tell you, you’d already left for the day. Shut the door, will you?” When she grudgingly complied, I went on. “This is more complicated than it appears—she comes with dollars attached, and hiring her is a favor to Marty Terwilliger and a donor. I’m sure you can find something for her to do. In fact, I’ve got an idea.” I proceeded to outline my grand if vague scheme for focusing on the Terwilliger Collection.

Eventually she nodded. “I can see that makes sense.”

“How did you even find out about her?”

Latoya smiled, not without malice. “She’s waiting downstairs in the reading room.”

“Oh,” I said lamely. Well, the girl was certainly eager. “I said I’d get back to her by the end of the week. I thought we ought to get Nicholas settled before we saddled him with help. Has he given you a firm date yet?”

She gave me a long look and then started laughing. “Apparently he and his employer agreed that there was no point in waiting. He’ll actually be here later this morning, too.”

I had to join in her laughter. “Well, there you go. Fully staffed, and more.”

“I’ll let you know when Nicholas arrives. I think we
should talk to him and Rich and the intern together. You can explain your vision to them, and I’ll walk them through the details. Finish your coffee now,” she said sweetly, and she stood and went out the door.

I seized the free moment to return James’s call.

“There’s been another fire,” he said without preamble when he picked up the phone. “Warehouse. Different neighborhood. I’m still not sure the museum’s fire is part of this series, but I thought it might be helpful if you and I talked with a specialist.”

How had he known I was going to agree to help? “What kind of specialist?” I asked.

“An arson profiler.”

“I didn’t even know there was such a thing.”

“There is—and there’s a good one in the Philadelphia area. Could you meet tomorrow at nine?”

“That should work,” I said, looking at my calendar.

“Actually, her office is close to your neighborhood—West Chester. You want to meet at the university there?”

I did some mental calculations. West Chester was definitely the suburbs, like my neighborhood of Bryn Mawr, but it was actually west and south of me. Why was it that people who lived in the city had no clue where anything outside of the city was? “Why don’t you pick me up at my place on your way? Then we can ride together back to the city.”

“All right. I’ll be there tomorrow by nine.” He hung up.

By the time I’d replaced my phone, Latoya was back with Nicholas in tow. “Here he is, Nell. Where do you want to start?” I could see she was enjoying my confusion—things were moving a little too fast for me.

And then the pace picked up. I was trying to think up a
response to Nicholas and Latoya when the phone rang and Eric called out, “It’s Bob at the front desk. Something about a delivery from the FBI?”

Oh, shoot—the missing documents! James had said he’d release the recovered papers today, but he hadn’t said they would show up this fast. I picked up my phone. “Bob? Can you please send the delivery people around to the back entrance? I’ll meet them there.”

“Will do.”

I turned to Latoya. “We’ve got to find Rich. The Terwilliger papers are here.” When she looked confused, I realized I hadn’t had a chance to tell her about my conversation with James, either, and I hurried to explain. “The FBI has finally returned our stolen documents, and apparently they’re here, right now.”

Latoya sniffed. “A little notice might have been helpful.” She considered for a moment. “Where do you want to put them? In the vault? Or with the rest of the collection upstairs?”

I was surprised she had even asked. “I don’t know—what do you think? They’re probably not organized, since the FBI has been sitting on them for a while. I know Rich has moved most of the Terwilliger Collection to the third floor, and we can’t just put the other stuff into a public space.”

“Then I recommend we bring them up here to the third floor for processing,” Latoya said.

“Fine by me,” I replied promptly. “Why don’t you go down and accept delivery, and I’ll see if I can find Rich and let him know.”

With that problem solved, sort of, I still had to deal with Nicholas, slouching against the door and looking vaguely
disapproving, and with Alice waiting in the reading room. “Nicholas, come with me. I don’t know how much you’ve heard, but we had some theft issues, and the FBI was involved. We’ve recovered a portion of what was taken from us, and now it’s come back to roost. We can use your help in going through it. Oh, and welcome to the Society. We can deal with the formalities later, but right now we have to get this sorted out.”

“Good idea,” Nicholas said, pushing himself off the door frame.

I led the way to the workroom at the back of the third floor, praying I’d find Rich there. He was, and I thanked the gods. “Rich, I’m so glad you’re here!” I looked around the room: there were file boxes scattered everywhere, although I could see they were carefully labeled. “We’ve got a…situation. The good news is that the FBI has released the missing Terwilliger documents. The bad news is that they were just delivered.”

“What, now?” Rich looked around the room. “You’re telling me you want to put them here?”

“We need to go through them and figure out what’s what. At least you’ll have help—this is Nicholas Naylor, our new registrar.” The two young men exchanged cautious handshakes and kind of mumbled at each other, but I wasn’t going to worry about the social niceties. “We just hired him, and I haven’t had time to make an announcement to the staff. And there’s more help on the way.” Rich looked confused, but I didn’t have time to explain Alice’s presence right now. I turned back to Nicholas. “I have a list of what we know was missing from our collections, and there should be information on the registrar’s computer—I know, you haven’t even seen it yet, but I’m sure you can figure it
out—I’ll get you the password. I’ll give you a hard copy, which will at least get you started. Rich, Latoya is downstairs at the back door. I asked her to accept delivery, but she’ll need help getting things moved upstairs. Can you go down?”

“Uh, sure,” Rich said, still looking a bit startled. Whatever he had planned for the day clearly wasn’t going to happen. He headed out the door.

“Nicholas, do you think you can set up some sort of method to inventory what’s coming in?”

He nodded, unruffled. “Sure. How much stuff are we talking about?”

I realized I wasn’t exactly sure. Items had vanished from our collections over a long period, but I didn’t know how much had been recovered. “I really don’t know. Maybe we should go down, too, and take a look? Follow me.”

I led him down the back stairs to the loading dock at the back of the building. Latoya met me as I opened the door from the hall. “Nell, you’ve got to see this,” she said, her eyes gleaming. She led me out the back door onto the loading dock, where a truck was backed up, its doors open.

“What?” I said, looking at her, then at the truck.

“How many boxes did you expect?” Latoya asked.

“I don’t know. A dozen?” And then I realized what she was saying. “Wait—there’s no way we lost this much stuff. Is there?”

She shook her head. “No. I’ve gone over our records, such as they are, with a fine-tooth comb. I’ve been in regular contact with the FBI. This far exceeds my estimates.”

“Is there an inventory list? Are you sure this is all for us? They want us to sign something.”

Mutely she handed me a clipboard with a multipart form
attached. I scanned it quickly, but it didn’t help much. All I could make out was a line item:
Documents (167 boxes)
. Ours was the only name on the “Deliver To” line. I gulped. “This can’t be right,” I whispered, mostly to myself.

And then the light dawned: oh my God, James must have sent us
everything
the FBI had recovered, not just ours. Which made sense, because how could the FBI have known which pieces were ours? But 167 boxes? I glanced at Rich, and he looked as panicked as I felt.

“Uh, ma’am, I need a signature so I can start unloading,” the delivery driver said.

I looked at Latoya. “Do I sign?”

She shrugged. “I’d rather we had the documents under our stewardship than bouncing around the city.”

She had a point. I had no idea how the FBI had handled them, but further wear and tear jostling around in the back of a delivery truck, not to mention repeated loading and unloading, couldn’t be good for fragile documents and artifacts—assuming that’s what they all were. I took the pen clipped to the board and signed. “Start unloading. Rich, can you coordinate? We’ll need a couple of rolling carts or dollies, at the very least.”

Rich snapped out of his apparent shell shock. “Okay. And let me go up and segregate the T-Collection, so we don’t get even more muddled.”

“What do you want me to do?” Nicholas asked.

“I guess go with Rich and help him prepare upstairs. We can’t start processing everything until we’ve got all this unloaded.” One hundred and sixty-seven boxes, and not a label on any one of them. I felt faint. And if they weren’t all the Society’s materials, what the heck was in those boxes?

He and Rich exchanged nods, and Nicholas followed Rich back to the hallway, leaving Latoya and me to cope with the unloading. “What’s going on here?” she said.

“I didn’t know anything about this until late yesterday. From what I understand, the FBI located our missing items in the home of a local collector. My guess is that they’ve decided to dump everything they retrieved from him in our laps, and leave it for us to sort out. Good God, who knows how long this guy has been collecting, and from how many sources—and how much is his, acquired legally? This is one royal headache.”

It was only when I’d reached the front elevator that I remembered poor Alice. I continued past the elevator to where she waited in the reading room. “Alice,” I said. She jumped to her feet. “I thought you were going to wait to hear from me, but I’m glad you’re here. Follow me.”

She did. In the elevator she said, “I didn’t mean to barge in, but I talked to Uncle Edward last night, and—”

“We can talk about it later. Right now we have a crisis, and you can help.”

“Okay,” she said, looking bewildered.

I led her to the workroom, currently Rich’s domain. “Rich, Nicholas, this is Alice Price. She’s our new intern. I’ll explain later. Right now we’ve got to deal with this delivery, so put her to work. Rich, do you have a lab coat or something she can wear? This may be a bit grubby.”

Rich rallied quickly—it probably didn’t hurt that Alice was young and pretty, although I knew that he’d been seeing Carrie, the membership coordinator, for a while now. “Uh, sure. Come with me. And then you can start moving the boxes on the table here to that corner”—he pointed—“to make room for the new stuff.”

When Rich had herded Alice away, Nicholas turned to me. “Is it always like this?”

I shook my head. “Almost never, I swear. Look, you all work out how to unload everything, and then we can reconvene. Okay?” I figured that would keep them busy while I called James with a few questions.

He nodded again and turned to follow Rich. I stormed back to my office, startling poor Eric. I did manage to refrain from slamming the door behind me. I sat, took a couple of deep breaths, and called James.

When I finally got through, I said, “What the hell is going on?”

“Problem?” he asked.

“Quite a few, thanks to you. When you said you’d release the documents, I thought there would be a nice orderly process and a little advance warning. You know, you’d call, we’d set up a delivery time, deal with all the paperwork—that kind of thing. But no, you have to dump all this stuff on me at once, and I don’t even know what most of it is, except I’m pretty sure it’s not ours. And you know how crammed our building is—where did you think we’d find space to shove all one hundred and sixty-seven boxes on short notice?”

He did sound a bit taken aback by that. “Oh. I didn’t know there were that many. I haven’t seen them.”

How convenient. “Uh-huh. Well, you’re lucky we’d cleared out the upstairs processing room so Rich could spread out the Terwilliger Collection. Otherwise I’d be chewing your head off.”

“You aren’t doing that now?”

Oh, I was just getting warmed up. “And what about all that other material? I mean, really, we can’t be missing
more than, oh, a dozen boxes of documents, some small artifacts. What’s the story on the other one hundred and whatever? You just delivered a
truckload
of stuff. We didn’t
lose
a truckload of stuff!”

“I’m sorry—I didn’t get a chance to discuss it with you when you left so quickly. I sent you everything that we found at that guy’s house. We don’t have the expertise to pull out the bits and pieces you’ve lost.”