Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder

quickly in denial.
    We think we know someone as well as we know ourselves.
    But we don’t.

One
Happy Ever After?
    Sue Harris and her sister, Carol, * who was seven years older, grew up in an upper-middle-class home in Lake Hills, the most popular subdivision in Bellevue, an eastern suburb of Seattle, in the 1950s. Bellevue was like Levittown or a thousand other towns that sprang up after World War II, fulfilling the demand for new homes for young families. Initially it seemed a long way from Seattle, but it really wasn’t, and when the first floating bridge across Lake Washington was built, Bellevue seemed only a hop, skip, and a jump away for the dads who continued to work every day. The moms mostly stayed home, waxed their floors once a week, and cooked meals from scratch, and if they had a career, it was probably selling Avon or Mary Kay products part-time.
    In many ways the 1950s were an easier time, or maybe it just seemed that way. Couples got married intending to stay together, and the divorce epidemic that lay ahead was only a distant threat.
    Along with most of the other fathers in the neighborhood, Sue and Carol’s father, Hermann, was an engineer for the Boeing Airplane Company. Sue was born in December 1955, and despite the difference in their ages, she and her sister were uncommonly close as children, and that would continue as they grew to adulthood. If they expected life to be happy ever after, so did other little girls in Bellevue. It was the era of Barbie and Ken and playing dolls while mothers lingered over coffee in somebody’s kitchen.
    In Lake Hills, the fifties were a halcyon time. In the early sixties, though, couples with young children came close to panic when the Cuban missile crisis loomed. World War II had been fought far away, across oceans, but the Cuban crisis threatened to bring war to America itself. With that menace and the simultaneous anxiety it provoked, a small army of salesmen swarmed over Bellevue offering bomb shelters on the installment plan.
    A model home in Lake Hills offered the latest upgrade in housing: a bomb shelter in the basement. And Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone featured a memorable episode about neighbors fighting one another to crowd into such a shelter. It was the end of a time when everyone felt safe. Most home owners opted to move forward without shelters, realizing that their consciences wouldn’t allow them to survive happily when most of their neighbors had perished.
    And then John F. Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963, and America changed forever.
    Hermann Harris had clipped articles on bomb shelters, but his daughters weren’t aware of that until after he died—much too young, at fifty-two—of a sudden heart attack. Their mother, Lorraine, was only forty-two when she was left to raise her two daughters: Sue was ten and Carol was eighteen. Fortunately, Hermann Harris had been wise in his investments and he left his family well provided for, and there were veteran’s benefits from his service in World War II that would pay for his two girls to go to college.
    Sue and Carol had seen a happy marriage, and although they missed their father a lot, their mother stepped up to take the reins of responsibility. She was a loving and brave woman and her girls adored her.
    When Sue was in the third grade, her parents had bought a house in Newport Hills, a new community where houses and streets blossomed up the hill above the 405 Freeway. It was more expensive than Lake Hills and there was more chance there for individuality and architect-designed homes. Home values in Newport Hills grew exponentially over the decades ahead. They shot up even faster than the giant sequoia sapling that Hermann had planted in the Harrises’ front yard when they first moved in.
    Just below Newport Hills, adventurous contractors came up with a plan to build another, even more posh community by filling in the shoreline on the eastern edge of Lake Washington. It was called Newport Shores, and Sue’s dad had scoffed at the idea, saying, “Who would ever want to live down in that swamp?” For once, he’d been wrong. Although the houses on the hills grew steadily in value, those on the shore tripled and retripled continually in listing prices over the next four decades.
    Sue watched her mother evolve from a stay-at-home housewife to a competent head of her household, and Sue admired her more all the time. Lorraine Harris vowed that her daughters would go to college.