Fire Engine Dead Read Online Free PDF Page A

our aging building.
    “He’s come by a few times,” Felicity said primly. “He certainly is enthusiastic.”
    “I’m glad to hear that. Well, I’ll let you get back to your desk. Let me know what you find.”
    We departed and went our separate ways. Upstairs I debated about my next step. I should probably talk with Latoya, although I didn’t relish the prospect. Latoya, a tall, stately black woman close to my age, had been with the Society for several years, although not as long as I had; she had been hired by my predecessor. She was extremely well qualified for her position as vice president of collections for the Society, but she had never quite bonded with most of the staff, and I knew little about her other than her professional credentials. For most of her tenure she had seemingly considered herself higher up the administrative chart than I, although we had both been nominal department heads. My sudden and unexpected elevation to the presidency had unsettled her a bit, and we were still negotiating our new working relationship. Still, protocol dictated that I should consult her about this problem, and there was a good chance that she would have some relevant information about the Fireman’s Museum. So I marched down the hall to her office.
    “Do you have a minute, Latoya?”
    She looked up from whatever she was working on at her scrupulously neat desk and said, without smiling, “Ofcourse. Please come in.” A faint startled expression crossed her face as I pulled shut the door behind me, and when I took a chair, she asked warily, “What can I do for you?”
    “Did you hear about that warehouse fire yesterday?”
    She shook her head slightly. “I don’t pay a lot of attention to local news. What about it?”
    I filled her in on the news about the warehouse fire and the Fireman’s Museum, and Peter Ingersoll’s request. Latoya appeared appropriately distressed at learning of their loss. “What an awful thing. Were they insured?”
    “Peter was kind of vague about that, but probably not fully. After all, it’s a small place, and I think their budget is pretty slim. He implied that they had skimped a bit on the insurance coverage, particularly since most of the items in their collection aren’t intrinsically valuable.”
    I reluctantly acknowledged to myself that I should take a look at our own insurance situation. I’d had little to do with that when I was director of development—after all, nobody offered grants to pay for insurance. I knew the broad outlines of our coverage, but that was all. As a public institution, we had to maintain liability and property coverage, and for all I knew, coverage for floods, earthquakes, and sewer backups, but collections were another matter. Since it was hard to get a handle on collections that had been accruing for over a hundred years, and harder still to assign a dollar value to them, I could well imagine that my predecessors had stuck with the most vanilla—and least expensive—options in that area.
    Latoya agreed to see what she could find for me, and I felt more hopeful now that I had both Felicity and Latoya, with their varying expertise, working on this. Latoya could give me any information we had on the lost collections,although I didn’t expect her to find a lot; on the other hand, Felicity could ferret out the entire history of the institution and the people involved. As I stood to leave, I asked, “By the way, any progress on hiring a new registrar?” We had lost our long-term registrar last year, and whoever filled the position would report to Latoya. But between the internal changes in administration, the holidays, and the ridiculously low salary we had originally offered, we hadn’t seen a lot of applications, even in the current lousy economy.
    “I’m interviewing several qualified candidates this week. Please thank Marty again for finding a way to enhance the salary.”
    “Will do—and I’ll be happy to talk with anyone you think is