Death at the Door (29 page)

June 7—Edgewater Resort, Ephraim, Wisconsin

As the day wore on, more news about Simon Gradoute poured in. Joel, Lark, and the Door County Sheriff's Department were kept busy tracking down the many tips that came into the office. Simon was sighted in every major community in Door County, some of them several times. None of the tips panned out.

By noon they had gotten word that Camellia and Robert DuBois's boat,
Flower Power,
was gone. It had disappeared from the dock outside their summerhouse just up the road from the Gradoutes'. It had been replaced by an old fishing dinghy that one of the sheriff's deputies thought had come from Chambers Island. It was confirmed that Camellia and Robert were in Madison with Daisy. The Wisconsin State Police and the Coast Guard put out another APB to all towns and marinas on Lake Michigan.

At seven that night they got a report from a marina owner in Escanaba, Michigan, that the
Flower Power
was moored at his dock. It had pulled in at ten that morning. The operator was a middle-aged male sailing alone. He had put one month of berth rental on a Visa card and signed the papers under the name Robert DuBois, the name the boat was licensed under. He'd shown an Illinois driver's license under the same name. One of the marina workers had driven Mr. DuBois to a car rental agency. He had leased a Ford Explorer using the same ID. He had put it on a Visa under the name Robert DuBois.

The Wisconsin State Police questioned Robert DuBois about how Simon could have gotten his ID and credit card. Mr. DuBois had no idea as he was in possession of both. Forgery was added to Simon's growing list of crimes.

Everyone assumed that Gradoute was trying to get to Canada. With an eight-hour head start he could have gotten as far as International Falls, Minnesota, or Detroit, Michigan. An APB was sent out all along the border between Canada and the United States.

Despite vigorous protests from Celeste's attorney in New Orleans, the Louisiana courts agreed to extradite Celeste. The Canadians had no objections to her return to Wisconsin, so Joel flew out of Green Bay that night to escort her back to Door County for questioning.

June 8—Gradoute House, Ephraim, Wisconsin

“I'm telling you there's no barrel of glass on this floor and I wish you would forget about it and just move on,” John said as he followed Ann down the second-floor hallway of the Gradoute House. “You're driving me crazy with this obsession.”

Ann ignored him and walked into yet another of the twenty bedrooms. The walls were covered in cream-colored wallpaper strewn with yellow daffodils and pink tulips. The bed was dressed with a yellow chenille bedspread and piled with floral needlepoint pillows. She checked the adjoining bathroom and scrutinized the walls inside the closet as if a secret doorway were about to appear.

Ann wandered into the next bedroom. “I've been over and over my notes from Minevra's letters. That glass is either still here or someone sneaked it out right under the family's nose.” She threw up her hands in frustration. “What did they do with the barrel and the straw the glass was packed in? What did they do with the glass?”

“Who cares?” John asked as he followed her into another room.

“I do.” Ann whirled around and they bumped into each other.

John grabbed her arms to steady her. “Rose said we could go over the house while she's in Madison with Daisy. We'll go through the place from top to bottom.” He caught Ann's eye. “But, you have to promise me that if we don't find anything, you'll drop this and move on.”

“Deal.” Ann kissed him and then opened the closet door.

Five hours later they sat at the kitchen table, exhausted from searching every room from the basement to the belvedere. “I'm sorry we didn't find anything,” John said as he skimmed his ice tea glass across his forehead.

“Me too. It was worth a try.” Ann shoved herself up from the table and carried her ice tea glass to the sink. She bent down and kissed John on her way out of the kitchen. “I'm going back to the Edgewater to take a shower. Call me and let me know what you want to do for dinner.”

She walked out into the bright sunlight and got in her car thinking about how sad it was that they would never know what Thomas Lee had made for his sister. She started her car and backed out of the driveway thinking about the how hard he must have worked on that gift. She conjured up a picture of the hot area of the Fenton Glass Factory. Just the thought of all the heat coming off the furnaces made her adjust the air-conditioning. She glanced down at the dashboard and heard a god-awful screeching noise coming from outside the car. She slammed on the brakes and looked out her window to see a flock of turkeys dithering around her car.

“Shit, shit, shit!” she yelled as she put the car in park and un-buckled her seat belt. She found it hard to kill mice when they invaded her house, and she hated the thought of running over a turkey. She squared her shoulders, got out of the car, and stepped into a moving sea of turkeys. They ran in all directions cackling and screeching as they tried to get away from her. She walked around the car looking for a dead or injured bird. There wasn't one in sight. She planted her hands on her hips and shook her head as she watched the last of the birds fade into the undergrowth in the woods surrounding Larsen's gatehouse. She'd always heard that turkeys were so dumb that they'd hold their heads up and drown themselves in a rainstorm. Now she believed it.

A flash of sunlight nearly blinded her. She put her hand to her forehead to shade her eyes and tried to see what was creating the reflection. Sunrays danced through the trees and glinted off a window near the roof of Larsen's gatehouse. Ann walked back down the road, studying the building. From the front it looked like an old two-story house. The first floor was made of stone with the openings where the old garage doors had been filled in with wood siding. The second floor was all old wood siding. When Ann walked around to the side, she noted the windows in what must be the attic.

She had read Minevra's letters so many times that she easily conjured up the words:
I remember my uncle Ludwig helping Thomas roll the barrel up to the attic. It looked very heavy and they were groaning and laughing as they shoved it up step after step. Uncle Ludwig shook his finger at me and said it was a secret and not to ever tell anyone where it was.
Ann's mind raced. Minevra hadn't said it was the attic of Gradoute House. Everyone just assumed it was.

Rose had told John that Thomas Lee had joked about hiding the barrel well because he knew that Iris would get into it if she could find it. She would have found it for sure if he had hidden it in the main house attic. Ann smacked her head and ran to her car.

It was so simple, she thought as she raced the car back to the house. She ran inside looking for John. She found him studying a set of blueprints in the Thomas Lee room.

“Who has the keys to the gatehouse?” she yelled as she burst into the room.

“What's wrong?” he asked, seeing the excitement in her face.

“I know where the barrel is. Who has the keys to the gatehouse?” She was so excited she could hardly stand still.

“Ann, you promised you'd forget about the glass if we searched the house.”

Ann waved his comment away. “All bets are off now that I know where it is. Does Rose have keys to the gatehouse?”

“I think there's a front-door key on one of the hooks in the mudroom.” They went to the kitchen to look. “Now calm down and tell me what's going on.”

“I thought I ran over a turkey on my way home and I got out of the car to check it out. I saw some light glinting off a window on the side of the gatehouse and realized it has an attic.”

“You think the barrel is in the gatehouse attic?” John shook his head. “This is insane.”

“Think about it. Thomas Lee wanted to hide the glass in a place where his sister wouldn't find it. One of those big shipping barrels of glass would have stuck out like a sore thumb in this house. The gatehouse was perfect. Everyone says Iris and Hyacinth tore this house a part looking for the barrel. They didn't find it because it was somewhere else. The gatehouse.” Ann shook a fist in the air. “I know it's there. When Lark and the sheriff interviewed Minevra, she told them that most of the glass was still there a few years ago. She was retired then. How would she know where it was unless it was someplace where she could check up on it. It's in the gatehouse. It's in the damn gatehouse attic.”

“We're not going to break into the gatehouse just because there might be a barrel of old glass in the attic,” John said. “I'm not going to jail over something like that.”

“It's not breaking and entering if you have the key.”

“At minimum it's trespassing and it's illegal.”

“John, I know it's there. Please, please, let's go look.”

He rubbed his hands across his face. “The things you get me into.” He handed her a key ring labeled Gatehouse. He shook his head, a wry smile on his face. “You're probably going to get me fired, but what the hell, I'm tired of not being home with you in the evenings. Let's go check it out.”

They drove to the gatehouse and let themselves in. They went upstairs to the second floor and found the stairs to the attic behind a door by one of the bedrooms.

“No wonder they had a hard time getting the barrel up the stairs,” Ann said, looking at the steep wooden staircase.

“We don't know it's up here yet.” John turned on the flashlight he had taken out of the car's glove compartment and started up the stairs.

“I know it's here,” Ann whispered as she followed him.

They groaned when they got to the top of the stairs. The attic was crammed full of old furniture, old trunks, and boxes.

“Why isn't anything ever easy?” John asked as he began to pick his way through nearly a century of family detritus.

“Minevra must have kept everything she ever owned.”

“She was widowed during the Depression. She probably didn't throw anything away.”

They walked past a set of six chairs with faded needlepoint on the seats and moved dust-covered boxes labeled shoes, hats, and toys out of the way to get to a corner of the attic.

“Well, I'll be damned,” John said.

Ann watched his light play over the top of a large wooden barrel. Boxes were stacked on top of it and up high around the sides. John moved small tables and an old high chair to create a path to the barrel. He moved the boxes and found that the top had already been pried off.

“Should we open it?”

“Are you kidding me?” Ann said. “If I'm going to the big house for breaking and entering, I want it to be for a good cause. Let's see what's in there.”

John lifted the top off the barrel and pulled out a dinner-size plate. He held it up to the dingy window and shined his flashlight on it.

“Oh my God,” Ann said when she saw the center of the plate glow bright red. A deer with a large rack of antlers alternated with a sprig of leaves and berries around the underside of the plate.

“What is it?” John asked.

“Red Stag and Holly.” Ann was mesmerized by the plate. “I've never seen red Stag and Holly. Red carnival was thought to be made late in the production of carnival glass, in the mid 1920s. Rose said Thomas Lee brought this up with him in the summer of 1919.”

“Maybe it was an early Fenton experiment.” John carefully put the plate down on one of the boxes near the barrel. “How much is that plate worth?”

“I have no idea. I'd guess thousands of dollars.”

John pulled another plate out of the barrel and put it on top of the first one. An hour later they had the barrel unloaded. Nearly 150 pieces of red Stag and Holly carnival glass had been pulled out of the old crumbling straw it had been packed in for more than eighty years. Iris's brother had made her twelve red Stag and Holly dinner plates, and sixteen salad plates, cups, saucers, soup bowls, berry bowls, wine goblets, water goblets, and punch cups. A service for sixteen with the exception of the four missing dinner plates. Ann held the matching punch bowl against her chest, too stunned at what they'd found to put it down. The base for the punch bowl was sitting on the box beside her. A wine decanter and a large platter sat on another dusty old box. Two divided relish trays, two vegetable bowls, and a smaller platter sat atop each other on a long-ago-abandoned chest of drawers.

John looked around the attic in awe at what they'd discovered. “I can't even find words for this. Wonder why Fenton never made more of it?”

Ann held the punch bowl up to the light to look at the cherry red color for the umpteenth time. “Probably for the same reason they didn't make much red carnival period. It was too expensive because of the gold they had to use to make the color. Carnival glass was nearing the end of its popularity in the late twenties.”

Ann dusted off a chair seat and put the punch bowl down on it. She walked over to the stack of dinner plates and bent down to count them. “There are only twelve of these and sixteen of all the other dinner service pieces. Wonder what happened?”

“The barrel was open. Maybe Minevra sold some of them.”

Ann nodded. “What do we do with this stuff?”

John shrugged. “I guess we call the sheriff and tell him we have good news and bad news. The good news is we found the long-lost barrel of carnival glass. The bad news is we're headed for the gray bar motel for breaking and entering.”

They left the attic and went downstairs to find the phone.

The sheriff came to the gatehouse with Lark in tow. None of them had any idea what the glass was worth, but when Ann got finished talking with them, they understood they were dealing with something priceless and most likely one of a kind.

Sheriff Skewski got ahold of Paul Larsen's wife, who called her lawyer. He requested that the glass be packed and stored until he could sort out the ownership issues. His initial read on the situation was that since Rose's grandfather had told Paul's grandmother to keep the glass and it was in Minevra's home for eighty years, the glass belonged to whoever had inherited Minevra's estate. Ann doubted that the glass would ever see the light of day if Paul's wife and Rose got into a legal battle over it.