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  This brought a chorus of chuckles.

  “Flat,” Luke said. “And still the highest ratings of the network. And on all of prime-time news.”

  Graham opened his mouth in mock amazement. “Highest ratings of prime time? Really? No one in this room has heard this breaking news.”

  This brought more chuckles. Luke Barrington was a self-promoter of epic proportions, and modesty had never been a strong suit.

  “My ratings are flat, incidentally, because I was on vacation for ten days. And, as we all know, the network has yet to find a guest host that can hold my audience.”

  “It was a joke, Luke. We’re trying to set Sidney up here in prime time as well, since her previous documentaries have been so well received. We think there is opportunity here with this latest pitch. She has clearly generated a following.”

  “So let’s see it then,” Luke said. “The suspense is killing us.”

  Spoken, Sidney thought, like a true asshole.

  “Sidney?” Graham said.

  Sidney stood and took her place at the front of the media room. In addition to the packed audience inside the room, she noticed other staffers congregating in the hallway to get a sneak peek of her much-buzzed-about documentary.

  “True crime is popular,” Sidney said. “We all know this. And it’s getting hotter. We don’t have to look further than Making a Murderer and The Jinx to see the huge ratings potential for the networks. 48 Hours is a perennial ratings winner. Serial was one of the most downloaded podcasts in history. The public has an appetite for true-life crimes broken down into real-life thrillers told through documentaries.

  “As Graham pointed out, my previous three documentaries took unknown cases and unknown prisoners and brought to light their stories of wrongful conviction. We grew a larger audience with each doc, and we’ve developed a bit of a niche here—finding victims of wrongful conviction and bringing their stories of injustice to light. My pitch today for my new documentary is different in two ways from my previous films. It’s an ambitious pitch that is filled with potential. I hope you all agree.”

  Sidney noticed that additional network staff had filed into the back of the media room, making it a standing-room-only crowd. She also noticed that Graham Cromwell had given up his seat when Dante Campbell, the cohost of the network’s top-rated morning show, Wake Up America, snuck in. Sidney faltered for just a moment when she recognized all of the power that had assembled in the room: the queen of morning television, Luke Barrington, the suits in the front row. She was suddenly glad she had been running late so that the enormity of the moment hadn’t had a chance to crush her.

  “First,” Sidney continued, “instead of an unknown case, this time I’ll be highlighting a well-known individual.”

  “Who is it?” Luke Barrington asked in a bored voice.

  Sidney smiled, a veneer that suggested to all in the room that she was thrilled to be conversing with such an esteemed legend of prime time. In her own mind, though, her curved lips were the equivalent of raising her middle finger.

  “Grace Sebold.”

  There were some murmurs in the crowd, a quiet buzz of excitement at such a high-profile case.

  “That’s an old story,” Luke said.

  “Which is why it’s interesting,” Sidney said. “She’s been in jail for ten years and has clung to her innocence without falter.”

  “Let me interview a hundred inmates at Otisville and I’d hear the same thing a hundred times. All sob stories from felons who are guilty as sin.”

  “You run current-event stories, Luke,” Graham Cromwell said. “You’ve cornered the market on opinion news. This is a true-crime documentary. It won’t pull from your audience.”

  Now Luke was the one who offered a fake smile. “You think I’m worried about her taking my audience?”

  “Are you?” Sidney asked.

  Many in the room turned to stare at the Bear.

  He offered a small chuckle. Even this sound came with an annoying echo. “Certainly not.”

  “Then stop interrupting and listen to her pitch,” Graham said.

  Sidney glanced at Graham, then back to her audience. She caught a quick wink and a subtle head nod from Dante Campbell.

  “Grace Sebold is well-known, so I anticipate an early surge of interest to piggyback on my base viewership. My other docs started slowly and built a larger audience over time as the episodes got closer to the conclusion. Here, I’m hoping for a bigger initial audience.”

  Sidney cleared her throat. “The other difference is that The Girl of Sugar Beach will be produced as a real-time documentary. I’ll produce episodes as I investigate. I’ve cut the pilot and roughs of the opening couple of episodes, a summary of which we will screen this morning. It includes my interview with Inspector Pierre from St. Lucia, the evidence that convicted Grace Sebold, and the early love affair between Grace and Julian Crist. The episodes will be a retelling of events, as I understand them. A mix of reenactments as well as live footage of my investigation. The audience will discover what I discover as I discover it.”

  “There’s a lot of risk there,” Luke said.

  “I tend to agree with Luke on this,” Ray Sandberg said from the front row. Sandberg was the president of the network. He would have the final say in green-lighting Sidney’s project, or cutting its throat. “A problem with Serial was a very unsatisfying ending that left more questions than answers.”

  “So let’s learn from that,” Graham said. “We’ll build the suspense, and give them a satisfying ending. The payoff could be huge. We’re going to bring back Grace Sebold and Julian Crist. We’re not only going to dive into their love story and find out who they are, but we’re also going to find the truth. That will capture an audience.”

  “Capturing an audience is not what concerns me,” Ray said. “It’s capturing them with a grand promise and not delivering. Then we lose their trust. Has anyone seen the numbers for the second season of Serial? We don’t know the whole story about Grace Sebold. What happens if you come up with nothing revealing other than a young medical-school student who killed her boyfriend?”

  “That’s the lure,” Sidney said. “I don’t know what I’m going to find when I start digging, and neither does the audience. But there’s more to the Grace Sebold story than any of us know.”

  “Based on what?”

  “My trip to St. Lucia, where Grace Sebold has spent ten years in jail. I spoke with the detective who ran the case. The investigational capabilities down there are not the same as here in the States. Their economy hinges on tourism, and the entire police force was under pressure to solve this case. Wrap it up and make it go away so potential tourists weren’t deterred from visiting the island. I think, in order to close the investigation as quickly as possible, they made the evidence fit the narrative. I also spoke with Grace Sebold, as you’re about to see. We had a long discussion about her case and about the evidence that got her convicted a decade ago. She can convincingly poke holes in every bit of it.”

  “If she can so convincingly convey her innocence to you,” Luke Barrington said, “why could her attorney not convince a jury?”

  “She was forced to use local counsel. It’s law in St. Lucia that a local attorney needed to be part of her team. He was not a skilled defense attorney and made crucial errors during the trial. Of course, in the heat of the battle and after the shock of losing her boyfriend and being accused of his murder, Grace was unaware of these mistakes. Only with time did her attorney’s inadequacies become so glaring. And we all know that juries can be persuaded by theatrics as much as they are by facts. The day she walked into court, Grace Sebold was practically convicted by the news media and by the Internet.”

  “How many episodes?” Ray Sandberg asked.

  “I’ll need to map out my production plan and get a grip on the arc of the story. But my current proposal is for ten, with some leeway, obviously, based on my investigation. I’ve cut the pilot and have outlines for what I want to do
for the first four installments.”

  “Timing?”

  “Summer,” Graham said. “Three months in summer. June through August. Ten weeks to let Grace Sebold’s story unfold.”

  “Not just tell her story,” Dante Campbell said from the front row. “Sidney wants to give the audience the truth, which she thinks is different from what has been told to the world up to this point. I’m already a fan.”

  Sidney smiled at Dante, pinched her brows together in a silent nod of gratitude. The woman trumped even the great Luke Barrington in the network’s power rankings, her morning show bringing in hundreds of millions in yearly revenue.

  Without delay, and as Dante’s backing still hung in the air, Graham dimmed the lights and Sidney stepped to the side of the screen as the first cut of her pilot episode began to play.

  The Girl of Sugar Beach

  “Match Day” Part of Episode 1

  *Based on the interview with Grace Sebold

  On the third Friday of March, Grace Sebold joined 158 of her classmates as they all gathered in Hiebert Lounge on the campus of Boston University Medical College. Besides the occasional students who wore jeans and sport coats, or casual blouses and skirts, formal spring dresses and suits were the common attire. Coffee and breakfast pastries covered a long table, where students filled plates and talked the hour away. Grace woke with an upset stomach and couldn’t muster the thought of a jelly-filled doughnut, let alone the acidic burn of coffee. Instead, she paced the hallways in isolation, not interested in mingling with her classmates. She had this way about her, taking joyous moments and turning them into angst-clouded misery.

  There was a palpable buzz in the air. Today, every fourth year medical student would learn which residency program they had matched to. The ceiling of Hiebert Lounge was netted with balloons that would fall through the air and cascade off students as they opened their Match Day envelopes. The university had taken, during the last few years, to documenting the morning’s event through a professional videographer service that set up cameras in strategic positions to capture everything. Cameramen strolled the crowd of students and their families taking testimonials and ready for close-up shots when envelopes were opened.

  Grace had participated in the early-morning group photo as the fourth years gathered on the front steps of the medical-school building and made “Oh, my God” facial expressions so the university could upload the whole day onto their websites and attract future applicants. But now, after the initial photo shoot and as the envelope opening was nearing, she had no interest in making small talk as the cameras rolled. All she wanted was to open her letter and see if she matched to New York.

  She stood in front of the window and stared at the buildings of downtown Boston. She pulled her phone out and her thumbs moved like lightning as she texted Julian:

  Five more minutes.

  Yes! Everyone is nuts here.

  This is so stupid. Just let us open the cards. Such a stupid production.

  Relax! Have fun and stop stressing.

  A clinking and some whistling drew Grace’s attention.

  Gotta go. About to open our envelopes!

  Us too. Call you in a minute.

  Grace looked up from her phone and took a deep breath. She walked down the long flight of stairs, pushed through the glass doors and into the lounge.

  “We are very pleased to welcome all fourth-year students and their loved ones to Match Day at Boston University!” the program director said into a booming microphone. “We are proud of our students and the dedication they have shown in the past four years. We wish you the best of luck. And now, without further ado, we present your Match Day envelopes!”

  Placed neatly on a table were 159 white envelopes containing the names of each fourth-year student. Inside was a single piece of paper that told each where they had matched. Grace thought she heard a countdown, people around her chanting numbers in reverse. But the noise and voices were in the background. She was concentrating only on the table. She estimated where her envelope would be located in alphabetical order. The crowd began to cheer, the singsong countdown ended, and the herd moved toward the table. Grace moved with everyone else, weaving past students, and finally came to the table. The envelopes had been picked over, and the once-pristinely-organized rows of white rectangles were now scattered at odd angles. She found the S’s and scrolled down until she spotted her name. She snatched the envelope.

  Already students around her were cheering as they read their letters. She walked calmly through the crowd with her unopened envelope and exited Hiebert Lounge, took the elevator to the ground floor, and pushed through the front doors of the building and into the cool March morning. She stuck her finger into the flap of her envelope and tore it open, pulling the page from within and letting the remnants of the torn envelope drop to the ground. She skimmed past her name and ID number until she came to the middle of the page:

  Congratulations, you have matched!

  Program: Neurosurgery

  Location: The Hospital for Special Surgery

  Cornell University, New York

  Without allowing the feat to register, she dialed her phone.

  “Where?” Julian asked before the first ring had ended.

  “Cornell.”

  Silence.

  “Julian? Did you open your envelope?”

  There was a long pause.

  “Tell me!” she said.

  “Same.”

  Sidney’s face came onto the screen in the media room on the forty-fourth floor of the network’s headquarters building as she stared into the camera with Cornell University in the background. It was a bright morning and the rising sun highlighted the hospital’s glass lobby behind her.

  “On Match Day—March 17, 2007—Grace Sebold and Julian Crist, an all-American couple that had met during a medical-student program in Delhi, discovered their futures. They both placed into the highly competitive specialty of neurosurgery, and matched together at the same residency program at Cornell University. By any measure, these two accomplished and ambitious young adults were on their way to a storied future. But saving lives was not what waited for them. Tragically, less than two weeks after they opened their Match Day envelopes, Julian Crist was dead and Grace Sebold was on trial for his murder.”

  Sidney moved slowly down the campus walkway, never taking her gaze from the camera. “Over this summer, and through the next ten episodes, we will become intimate with this once-promising couple. We will learn the sad events that led to Julian Crist’s death on St. Lucia’s famed Sugar Beach, and we will meet the girl who loved him. We will work to understand her, to show you the events that molded Grace Sebold’s life and sent her on a quest to become a surgeon. We will also delve into the last decade of her life, which she has spent in a foreign correctional facility alongside other convicted murderers. We will learn her story. A story rife with baffling twists and bizarre revelations. A story told both from Grace’s perspective and from those responsible for convicting her. We will examine the evidence that put Grace behind bars, and determine if it was based on science or fiction. This summer, we will look into the soul of Grace Sebold and finally discover the truth.”

  Sidney stopped walking, the hospital and its brilliant glass façade shining in the background.

  “I’m Sidney Ryan, and this is The Girl of Sugar Beach.”

  The DVD projector died and the lights in the media room came back on. There were more murmurs from the audience, and Sidney noticed that a larger crowd had gathered in the hallway during the screening.

  “I love it!” Dante Campbell said. “It makes me want to know Grace’s story. Absolutely love it.”

  “Thanks, Dante,” Sidney said. She shared a moment of eye contact with the network’s biggest star.

  “Ray?” Graham said.

  Ray Sandberg stood from the front row. “Helluva pitch.” He looked at Sidney. “Let’s talk logistics this afternoon.”

  “Absolutely,” Sidney said.
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  The crowd thinned out as the audience shuffled for the doors.

  “I don’t think Luke is a fan,” Sidney said when she and Graham were alone.

  “Luke doesn’t sign the checks.”

  CHAPTER 12

  Tuesday, March 28, 2017

  A WEEK LATER, AFTER SCORES OF MEETINGS WITH NETWORK EXECUTIVES, Sidney had her project green-lit for summer. She sat at her desk and edited a clip from the opening episode. Over the past seven days, the pilot episode was polished and pitched to the suits who made programming decisions, and to sales managers who decided on potential advertisers. In house, there was a general sense of excitement about the documentary and for the real-time format. Sidney had screened and outlined the guts of the first few installments, and as those began to air, she would work to put together new episodes from revelations she hoped to discover as she dug into Grace Sebold, Julian Crist, their pasts, and the events at Sugar Beach.

  The anticipation over what she might turn up was the genesis of the buzz within the network, and the source of angst Sidney felt in her stomach. As she sat at her desk, she reminded herself again, as her heart rate began to rise and the voice in the back of her head whispered its doubts, she didn’t have to show the audience who killed Julian Crist. She just needed to present coherently the possibility that it wasn’t Grace Sebold.

  The edit suggestions Sidney was working on came from Ray Sandberg, who didn’t have a creative bone in his body, but who felt the need to tweak the pilot before he wrote a check. Before Sidney could disagree with Ray’s suggestions, Graham Cromwell had given Sidney a discouraging headshake during the meeting that told her everything she needed to know.

  Say yes to the edits in order to get the documentary off the ground.