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to build the main lodge, no expense had been spared. The architect ordered Otter Tail County fieldstone to craft the foundation, supporting pillars, and fireplaces. Mr. Addams sent for Brazilian mahogany beams all the way from South America. The porch window frames featured out-swinging sashes, grooved and cut for both screens and shutters with all the hardware concealed. The workers finished the outside with stained cedar shakes.
    Once the main structure was completed, the architect ordered hand-cut French stained glass to fill in the doors leading from the large living room to the wraparound porch. He also had a system of buzzers installed all around the interior that connected to the servants’ cabins and had a dumbwaiter set up so food could travel from the first-story kitchen to the second-story rooms without being seen.
    The Addamses hosted grand parties for their friends from the East once Shangri-La was completed. Randolph Addams’s associates would stay in the main lodge and be catered to by the servants, who resided in the cabins. Not all the workers were live-ins, though; Addams hired on Shirly to do lawn work and run odd errands for the household. He’d been on the beach the day the necklace was lost, working as a towel boy.
    “So you saw the woman lose the necklace?” I asked.
    “In a manner of speaking.” Shirly pulled his glasses off and rubbed his eyes. “I saw her go into the water with a diamond the size of a caramel around her neck. I saw her walk out of the water without it.”
    I smiled. “Are you being intentionally vague?”
    “Vague isn’t the word, Ms. James. Her necklace wasn’t the first piece of jewelry to disappear that summer, though that diamond necklace was the official end of the relaxed days at Shangri-La. She put up quite a stink when she lost it—made us workers search on hands and knees in two feet of water for three days. She swore she was going to make Mr. Addams replace the necklace if we didn’t find it.” Shirly studied the back of his veined hands. “Tell the truth, I don’t know if she didn’t plan to lose that necklace.”
    “Why would she do that?”
    “She came from an upper-class East Coast family. The Krupps, I believe, was the family name, from New York State. Back then, it took a lot longer to cross the country, so you remembered when someone came from New York or California.
    “She never seemed to have as much money as the other guests, and she seemed angry about it. One day, I caught her upstairs in Mr. and Mrs. Addams’s bedroom, over in their closet. She was scared, and then angry when she saw it was just me. I think she was hiding something back there, and she didn’t want anyone else to know about it.
    “Later that day, she loses her necklace, and it’s me who’s searching for it. When I couldn’t find it, she made Mr. Addams fire me and any leftover part-timers who had built the place. She said we were a bunch of lazy thieves.”
    “If she lost it herself, why would she accuse you guys of being thieves?”
    Shirly winked at me. “My guess is she had something to hide herself. Or maybe we reminded her too much of herself. Rumor had it that she was dirt poor until she married Mr. Krupps. It wasn’t but a couple months after she had us fired that Mr. and Mrs. Addams sold the property, only a handful of years after they built it. They were sick of dealing with all the thievery that was going on and all the police questioning that came with it. Shangri-La’s been a resort ever since.”
    “Was it a real diamond necklace that she lost?”
    “She claimed it was.”
    He clearly did not want to go on the record about that, but I got the impression the only real thing about that necklace was the bad luck it brought Shirly. I vowed to find out the whole story, even if I had to track down one of the original Addams family members. Ha. The Addams family. I leaned back in my chair, just now noticing that my butt was asleep. “That’s quite a story,