Laurie had studied many photographs of the Harrington twins, but she was nevertheless taken aback when Simon welcomed her into his office. He had thick dark brown hair, the same intense eyes she recognized from decade-old photographs, and an undeniable confidence, despite the fact she knew he was uncertain about meeting with her.
He wasted no time. “Ten years ago, I thought my entire life would be perfect. And after one night, I thought life wasn’t worth living. Now? Michelle and I are happy. We have our kids, Sophie and Daniel. Why shouldn’t I keep the status quo?”
His wife, Michelle, was sitting beside him on a leather sofa that matched the one downstairs in the lobby. Reaching for his hand, she began to speak but then looked to Laurie instead.
“That’s not for me to answer, Simon,” Laurie said. “My understanding is that Frankie and Michelle think your entire family might be better off knowing the truth.”
Simon’s jaw tightened, a flicker of tension in his eyes before his expression softened. “I know I can’t hide this from my children forever. My biggest fear is that they might somehow be tarnished by my family name. But what makes you think you can figure out what the police couldn’t? I don’t want to dredge this up again and put us in the spotlight unless we learn something new.”
It was the same concern his brother-in-law, Dennis, had expressed. You’re taking a huge risk of upending his entire life again, with very low odds of discovering anything new.
Laurie leaned forward in the wingback guest chair and held Simon’s gaze. “A fresh perspective can uncover new leads. And our show’s role isn’t to accuse anyone, Simon. We just want to hear your side of the story and then find the truth. Do you believe that’s how the Harbor Bay Police approached the investigation?”
“Absolutely not,” he said, a flash of anger revealing itself. “Understand, Harbor Bay isn’t a place with a lot of old money. It was a small, sleepy, unknown Cape town until people like my parents realized it was close to Boston with beautiful beaches. The locals would complain about getting run over by outsiders, and our family counted as such. When a double homicide hit their small town, it was easier for the police to blame the victims’ spoiled rich kids than do the actual work. They never even bothered to try to tell Ethan and me apart. As far as they were concerned, it’s like we were the same person.”
“When you first learned that your parents were killed, who did you think was responsible?” she asked.
“It looked like a robbery. Even the police seemed to believe that. Their bedroom, the living room, and the kitchen were ransacked.”
“Not the whole house?”
“Not really. Which was weird. You’d think a robber would have tossed my father’s home office first, but it was completely untouched.”
Laurie removed a legal pad from her backpack and scribbled her first note of the day.
“I also told them about a weird incident when we’d gone to Harbor Bay for a weekend in late April. Someone vandalized the sidewalk in front of the house. They spray-painted something like This Family is a Lie.”
Laurie had never read anything about the family being targeted this way, and she made another note.
“I thought it could be related,” Simon continued, “but the police never looked into it as far as I knew. We told them the camera by the gate was broken, but when they checked with our house manager, Peter, he got them the footage. Once the police saw the Range Rover, they narrowed in on us. In hindsight, I probably should have lawyered up, but I kept trying to get them to see the truth.”
Tunnel vision. Laurie had seen it before in a police investigation. Detectives become convinced a suspect is guilty and then focus on that suspect to the exclusion of other possibilities. It’s not as if they intentionally frame an innocent person, but they stop being objective, seeing only what they want to see and hearing what they want to hear. Add in a local population suspicious of newcomers, and she could see all the makings of a flawed investigation.
“Do you remember who the lead detectives were on the case?” Laurie had left a message with the Harbor Bay Police Department the previous day but hadn’t heard back from them yet.
“How could I ever forget? Chief Bruce Collins and his deputy, Roberta Hanson.”
“Are they still with the department?” she asked, jotting down the names.
“I have no idea,” he said. “Harbor Bay used to be my version of heaven. After my parents died? If I never saw either the Cape or the ocean again, I’d be fine.”
“When you learned the killer had used the car you and your brother had driven to the party, did you immediately suspect Ethan?”
“No. Of course not. I thought it might be this kid I went to college with named Tom Keenan. The police looked into him, but he had a rock-solid alibi. He and some friends were partying down in Nashville that weekend. He’d been to our beach house a bunch of times. Bacon probably would’ve remembered him, and he could have seen the gate code when he was in the car with me.”
“So he was your friend,” Laurie noted.
“Emphasis on was.”
“I’m sorry. Why would you suspect him of harming your parents?”
He paused, and Laurie saw him exchange a glance with his wife. “She can’t help us if she doesn’t know the whole story,” Michelle said.
“But Tom didn’t do it. The whole thing I went through with him is irrelevant. And it makes me look like an idiot.”
“Look,” Laurie said. “You haven’t even agreed to do the show yet. And if it’s not relevant, we won’t use it. But for all you know, it could end up being helpful information.”
He nodded reluctantly. “I paid him to write a paper for me in my history class. I had gotten a C on a midterm and my father was furious. He said he wasn’t paying all that tuition for me to goof off. I was terrified it was going to tank my GPA, and I panicked. I was taking too many demanding classes and felt like I couldn’t do my best in all of them. I knew Tom wrote papers for other students and always got high marks, so I took the easy way out. But after I got admitted into law school, I suddenly got an anonymous email threatening to report me to the dean if I didn’t leave twenty thousand dollars at a designated drop spot on campus. When I tried to talk to Tom in person, he denied sending the email, but it was obviously him. I hadn’t told anyone what I’d done.”
“Except me,” Michelle said. “Simon immediately felt guilty about what he’d done and when we were both home from college for spring break, he came over to talk. He felt so guilty but there was no way to undo it.”
“Did you pay him?” Laurie asked.
He shook his head. “I was a college student. I didn’t have twenty grand lying around. I broke down and went to my father to ask for it. I’ve never seen my father that angry. He just snapped. He grabbed my arms and was shaking me so hard my teeth rattled, and then he began hitting me. I wanted to fight back, but I froze. I couldn’t believe he was physically hurting me. He only stopped when my mother heard him screaming and came into the room. It was like a switch flipped inside of him. He was immediately back to his usual, unflappable self. I was in complete shock.”
In Laurie’s research of the case, she had never seen any mention that Richard Harrington could be physically abusive. “He had never been physical with you or your siblings before?”
“Angry, definitely—sometimes to the point of cruelty. He believed that pressuring us, insulting us, belittling us, would make us stronger. But he had never been violent before. He would have thought it beneath him, because of the loss of control. Even afterwards, he wouldn’t acknowledge what had happened. He tried to make it sound like I was blowing things out of proportion and admonished me never to mention it again.”
Simon was describing a very different man than the patriarch of the “perfect family” the media had described in the aftermath of the murders. “After the switch flipped, what happened?”
“He said Tom would own us forever if we paid him and that I’d have to work it out some other way, even if it meant Tom reported me to the school. I thought my mother might find a way to give me the money without him knowing, but she told me she couldn’t help. I still remember her crying over the decision. It burns to think about. I had never in my life felt such shame. I kept buying time with Tom, going back and forth by email. The emails suddenly stopped shortly before graduation, but when my parents were killed, I wondered if he had taken matters into his own hands and gone to them directly. He could have known about the party from our mutual friends and taken our car from the yacht club.”
“But then it turned out he had an alibi,” Laurie said.
“Correct. And then the whole thing backfired on me. When the police found out about the blackmail, they saw it as a motive for me to kill my father—so I could pay off Tom.”
“The police seemed convinced that you and your brother planned it together so you could get your inheritances,” Laurie said. “You had turned twenty-two six months earlier, the age at which you could retain full control over your trusts under the terms of your parents’ will.”
“Why in the world would I have done that? I had been admitted to a top law school and had every plan to go. I wanted to join a big law firm, where I would have earned far more than I inherited. If anything, we almost got cut out of the life insurance when the insurance company accused us of committing the murders. And the estate also could have taken us to court.”
“But you did eventually inherit?” she asked.
He nodded. “Only because Betsy agreed as the executor of the estate and as Frankie’s legal guardian to waive Frankie’s claim to our parts of the inheritance. If we had been cut out, it all would have gone to Frankie.”
“And if you don’t mind my asking, how much money was involved?”
“Slightly less than ten million dollars. Once it was clear Frankie wasn’t trying to get it all, the insurer and the probate court divided it all equally among the three of us.”
He did have a point. Three-plus million dollars was a lot of money, but it was less than he would have eventually been worth as a successful commercial lawyer at a large firm. A twenty-two-year-old with a controlling father may not have been willing to wait, however.
“How about Ethan?” Laurie asked. “Is it possible he was in a rush to get his inheritance?”
She noticed Simon look again to Michelle for guidance. Michelle gave his hand a quick squeeze. “Tell her,” she said. “It’s time for the entire truth to come out.”
“My father was threatening to cut off Ethan if he didn’t break up with his girlfriend, Annabeth. She was from a local working family. He was adamantly opposed. Dad had been riding him for months. He seemed convinced her family was after his money, because a chain hardware store had opened along the highway, and the little store in town owned by Annabeth’s father was rumored to be going under. But after my father found out about Tom extorting me, it’s like he got angry at both of us at the same time. He was threatening to cut us both off. Ethan told Dad it was none of his business who he dated. But I was so desperate to get back into my father’s good graces that I decided that I could be the hero if I could get Ethan and Annabeth to end things.”
Laurie could not write quickly enough to keep up with his narration. “And how did you go about playing hero?” she asked.
“Two nights before our graduation party, we went to a local pizza place together—Pizza Palace—me and Michelle, Ethan and Annabeth. Ethan and I picked up the girls in the Range Rover. As we were leaving, I pulled Annabeth aside. I told her that Dad was about to cut Ethan off financially because of her.”
Simon was staring at his knees, clearly unproud of his younger self’s decision. Michelle placed a comforting hand on his shoulder.
“Simon’s taking all the blame, but that was my idea. I told myself at the time that I was only trying to protect Simon’s relationship with his father, but I was being selfish. I had seen the way Richard treated Ethan and Annabeth, and I didn’t want him to turn on Simon and me, too. I told Simon that Annabeth should know the kind of tension she was creating for Ethan’s family.”
“And Ethan found out what you did?” Laurie asked.
Simon nodded. “To Ethan’s credit, he was willing to take his lumps as far as our father went. But I was afraid dad was going to stop supporting both of us given my situation with Tom. I was extremely unkind, telling her she wasn’t suitable for my brother, that he’d never marry her and she was wasting her time. It was like I was taking out my own shame on her. I thought if I was cruel enough, she might walk away voluntarily.”
As Simon spoke, Laurie could sense the weight of the past bearing down on him. “But she didn’t,” Laurie said.
“No. Instead, she told Ethan what I had said to her. He was, to put it lightly, extremely angry. That’s why we were fighting that night. He even threatened to boycott the party altogether, but my mother convinced him that he shouldn’t miss such an important night. I don’t want to speak ill of my parents, but they cared a lot about appearances. Ethan and I were both accustomed to putting on a happy face when necessary. We agreed to ride there together in the Range Rover. We picked up Michelle first, then Annabeth. When we picked up Annabeth, Ethan was the one to go to the door. Even so, her father made a point to come out to the car to say hello to Michelle and me.”
Michelle put her hands to her face. “That was so awful.”
“He was angry about what you’d said to his daughter?” Laurie asked.
“Honestly,” Simon said, “I would have preferred that. He was incredibly nice. So much so that I was certain he knew about it and wanted to make sure we felt ashamed.”
“And it worked,” Michelle said.
“Ethan was still furious,” Simon said. “Once we got to the yacht club, we were definitely trying to steer clear of each other. And then the police assumed it was all part of some ruse.” He placed his face in his hands and rubbed his eyes before looking up again. “Sorry. Almost a decade later, and it still feels like an impossible nightmare.”
“So whatever happened to that guy, Tom? Did you end up paying him off?”
For the first time since she’d met him, a sly smile broke out slowly across Simon’s face. “I did not. I told him I wouldn’t press charges against him for blackmail if he promised never to contact me again. Wrote up an agreement and everything.”
“You lawyered him,” she said.
“Indeed. He never did admit to it, but he signed the papers.”
“Simon,” she said, “I know your wife and your sister practically forced you to sit down with me today.”
He chuckled softly. “There was definitely some emotional arm-twisting involved.”
“I don’t want you to agree unless it’s truly your decision.” She reached into her backpack and slipped out copies of the legal agreement for her show’s participants, handing one to each of them. “I took the liberty of bringing the standard release we ask people to sign before we go into production.”
They accepted the documents from her and began perusing them.
“If I do the show,” Simon said, “I’m assuming the risk that all the family secrets come out? The purchased term paper. The horrible way I spoke to Annabeth. The pent-up resentments against my father. All on full display for a national television audience.”
Laurie did not want to mislead him. “Yes, those are the kinds of things we’d get into.”
“And your host—he’ll grill me like a suspect, right? Confront me with all the evidence pointing to me and my brother?”
She nodded. “He’s a very skilled cross-examiner, yes.”
He was nodding slowly as he scanned the pages. “And he’ll grill Ethan just as thoroughly?” he asked.
“Yes,” she confirmed. “If we can persuade Ethan to sign on.”
He rose from the sofa and went to his desk. “That’s all I needed to hear,” he said, signing the document and handing the pen to Michelle to do the same. “What time are you going back to New York?”
“I’m booked on the three p.m. flight but there are other options if I need to change. Why?”
“So you have time,” he said.
“For what?” she asked.
“To get Ethan’s signature, too.” Without saying anything else, he picked up the cell phone resting on his desk and pulled up a number.