Read Online Monument to the Dead by Sheila Connolly - Free Book Online

the spreadsheets for barely twelve hours. “So, tell us!”
    “Maybe we’d be more comfortable at a table. Is the boardroom free?”
    “I think so. I’ll ask Eric.” I stood up and walked around my desk and out into the
     adjoining room, where Eric was already setting up for his day.
    “Mornin’, Nell.”
    “Morning, Eric. Can we use the boardroom for maybe a half hour? There’s nothing scheduled
     in there, is there?”
    Eric flipped through his desk calendar. “No, ma’am, it’s clear. You need coffee?”
    I smiled at him. “Way ahead of you, Eric. But help yourself to what’s made.”
    Marty, Shelby, and I trooped down the hall to the boardroom, a windowless space that
     lacked charm but did have a door that closed, giving us some privacy.
    Once we were seated at one end of the large table, Marty turned to Shelby. “I’m no
     expert on spreadsheets, but you can sort them by whichever column you want, right?”
    “That’s right.” Shelby nodded, looking puzzled. “You want to sort them by something
     other than name?”
    “I do. I couldn’t do it at home, but when I started filling in some of the details
     that I knew off the top of my head, a couple of groups kept coming up over and over
     again.”
    “Such as?” I pressed.
    “Well, the Society, of course. We’ve got the most information on those people. There
     must have been at least ten names on the list who were once on the board here, who
     aren’t anymore. Then there’s the Art Museum, which has a
huge
board, and I’m sure you’d both recognize most of the names on that list. And there’s
     one real outlier: the Edwin Forrest Trust.”
    I stared at her and said slowly, “Edwin Forrest, as in the statue out by the elevator?
     I should know about that one, shouldn’t I?”
    “You should, because we have half of their artifact collection on indefinite loan.
     Plus a tidy endowment to care for it.”
    “Ah yes,
that
I remember,” I said.
    “So that whopping big statue downstairs near the elevator doesn’t really belong to
     us?” Shelby asked.
    “Nope,” Marty said.
    Shelby was looking back and forth at us. “Who’s Edwin Forrest?” she said plaintively.
    Marty and I exchanged a glance and grinned. Marty said to Shelby, “For shame! Of course,
     you’re not from around here, but that’s hardly an excuse to be ignorant of the first
     great American-born actor. He was the George Clooney of his day, and more. And he
     was born here in Philadelphia.”
    “Well, his publicist is doing a lousy job! So what’s this trust all about? I assume
     he’s been dead for a while?”
    “I don’t know the details of the trust,” I said, “apart from that nice line item on
     our budgets. Weren’t there strings attached, Marty?”
    “There were, and still are. The income from the trust’s endowment could be used only
     to preserve and make available to the public the items from the collection. The Society
     does have other papers and such that didn’t come through the estate, which complement
     the pieces nicely, but we’ve done bupkes about presenting them.”
    I had a small brainstorm—probably the caffeine kicking in. “Shelby, why don’t you
     pull together a brief summary of what we have on Forrest, and the details of the trust.
     That’s not under the table or anything—it should count as regular business, especially
     if we’ve been failing to live up to the terms of the agreement so far. It sounds as
     though we could all learn something about the trust.”
    “Yes, ma’am,” Shelby replied.
    I turned back to Marty. “So, what’s the connection between the names you’ve highlighted
     and our victims?”
    “All of them are, or were, current trustees either here or at the museum or on the
     trust. One or more of the three.”
    “Any overlaps with the Society, apart from Adeline?”
    “Sure. Just look at the museum list—it’s loaded with our board members, past and present.”
    “And you don’t think anyone