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“And then you trash theirs?” Emery said.

“We have not. But the seniors are saying it’s time.” He shoved in another bite of pancake, followed by scrambled eggs. “The guys talked about the retaliation all morning. It’s going to be epic. Four-years-of-trashing-our-beach epic. You want trash, we’ll give you trash.”

“Don’t they get into trouble? I mean, if the principals or parents know their team is trashing the beach ... isn’t that public property?”

“Oh, they know. All we hear is ‘keep it civil.’”

“Ransom!” Jumbo stood at the front of the diner. “Sarah told me you were in here. Slacker. Let’s go.”

“Look who’s talking.” Caleb shoved in another mouthful of pancake. “Jumbo, Emery. Emery, Jumbo.” He tilted his head toward Jumbo with an “I told ya” smirk. Jumbo was six-four, two hundred and thirty pounds of muscle.

“Now, Ransom.” Jumbo and Kidwell yanked him out of the booth.

“See ya, Quinn,” he said with his best flirty wink as his teammates dragged him toward the door.

“Wait, you can’t go yet. Caleb, your breakfast ... who’s going to pay?”

EMERY

Now . . .

“I’ll handle the town council meeting tonight,” Emery said, checking off the items on her assignment board—which was a single document on her laptop screen.

At the Free Voice , Lou had a large whiteboard on the wall outside his office.

He assigned stories using color-coded magnets.

Checking that board was imperative for every reporter in Lou’s world.

Despite all the hats she wore as editor-in-chief, the small staff and simple production of the Gazette made it easy to feel like she was doing her job adequately. She didn’t have much to do with her first edition on Sunday, but she had a hand in Wednesday’s edition.

Elliot checked in Monday afternoon with a corporate-like pep talk, then confessed his sister Henrietta still made the case for selling. Dad called in the evening for a professor-like pep talk and update on the wedding planning.

“The Glidden House became available on May tenth.”

“May tenth. They ’re getting married May tenth?”

“Mark your calendar. And , Em , rock Sea Blue Beach with your editor skills.” Rock Sea Blue Beach? Dad was so cute when he tried to be hip.

“Jane, what are you working on?” Emery glanced at the woman across from her.

A graduate of the University of Florida, she was bound for a major news outlet until she met a fisherman during spring break.

Now she lived in one of the small cottages on Rein Boulevard, just north of the Original Homestead.

“My husband heard a developer is looking at the Org. Homestead. Since our neighborhood is adjacent, we could be impacted. I want to look into it. Besides, that’s the oldest part of town,” she said. “We’d lose a big chunk of history if those houses are destroyed.”

Emery liked it. Jane’s story had hard-news vibes.

Lou always paced, clicking his pen, when a reporter dropped a hint of something nefarious going on in Cleveland.

“See what you can dig up. Maybe I’ll hear something at the town council meeting.

Rex, anything more with the new sports facility at West End High? ”

Rex Smithfield covered sports and hospitality for the Gazette —or any other beat not covered by their very lean staff. “Nothing, other than it looks like a small college campus.”

“Where’d they get the money?”

“Town budget. It’s all above board. I checked.

” Rex was a thirty-something surfer-looking dude with blond curls and an in-depth knowledge of the Gazette’s inner workings and small-town Florida.

Rachel Kirby hired him five years ago, right before she got sick.

Emery loved that Rex, Junie, and Gayle were connected to Rachel, thus the paper’s past, present, and future.

“The West End rules the roost. Simon tries to fight them, but town council members who live on the East End are spineless.”

“There’s more to that story,” Emery said. “So what are you working on now?”

“There’s an amateur surfing competition in Melbourne Beach coming up. We’ve got a couple of surfers from Sea Blue Beach and Fort Walton entered. I think I’ll write a piece on it.”

Jane laughed. “You just want to surf with them.”

“Never claimed otherwise, Jane.”

Rex deserved a surfing break. He’d run this place until Emery was hired. He still ran the place as she was learning.

“Okay, we have some wire stories, a couple of fluff pieces banked from you two. I feel like I need another microlocal story to fill out the paper.” So far, there wasn’t much hard news in Sea Blue Beach. The police blotter looked like Mayberry, save for a few West End break-ins.

“You should look through the digital morgue,” Rex said. “Go over the old editions. Rachel kept everything.” He leaned forward. “Let me see your laptop.”

“Did he tell you he’s part-time IT when Ambrose isn’t available?” Jane said. Ambrose worked for the city and moonlighted for the Gazette . “Emery, if you don’t need me, I’ve got some research to do.”

“Yeah, go. Thanks Jane.”

When Rex turned Emery’s laptop around, he’d connected her to a server containing all of Rachel’s archives.

“There’s a physical morgue in the back of this place.

” He pointed at the wall behind him. “But Rachel had the foresight to store it all digitally. You have sixty years’ worth of Gazettes in the database as well as her own personal correspondence.

There’s some pretty cool stuff.” Rex clicked on the drive, then on a folder labeled Royals .

“In the late eighties, she became friendly with the future queen of Lauchtenland. You know the story of saving the Starlight rink from demolition, right?”

“I heard the story a long time ago.”

“Weren’t you here as a kid?”

“As a teen, yes.” Since running into Caleb her first day in town, she started sifting through her old, stored memories. “They tried to bulldoze the rink to start all the western development.”

“Right. But through a wild series of events, the town learned the land and the rink were owned by the Royal House of Blue in Lauchtenland. Prince Blue deeded the land to his home country. They couldn’t knock the rink down without offending the royals, so it was saved.

You can read the story and Rachel’s correspondence with the royal family, mainly the queen, in the morgue.

” Rex headed for the door. “The paper’s been put to bed, files zipped and ready to FTP to the press.

Unless you want the town council story in tomorrow’s edition, we’re good to go. ”

“Nothing seems to be that important. We can wait until Sunday. If we need to, we can update the online edition.” Which was even more anemic than the print version of the Gazette . Last month, they had thirty hits. Half of the stories were from last year.

“Then I’m out, heading to my folks’ in Chipley. Got a date with a girl I used to know.”

“Sounds promising,” Emery said, clicking through the morgue files.

“I hope so. We’ve known each other since middle school. So what’s up with you and Caleb Ransom?”

Emery laughed. “Where’d that come from? Nothing’s up. We hung out the summer I was here as a teen .”

“There’s nothing romantic going on?”

“Rex, I’ve been here seven days.”

“Is he the reason you took this job, moved to Sea Blue Beach?”

“Wow, this is really bringing out the reporter in you,” Emery said. “I needed a job. I liked the potential of this one. As for Caleb, we’ve not talked in sixteen years. Then I ran into him at Alderman’s.”

Rex made a face. “What were you doing at Alderman’s?”

“Same thing you’re doing now—snooping.”

He laughed. “Fair enough. I hear he’s a good guy.”

“He was when I knew him.”

She shooed Rex out of the office so she could dig into the morgue before the town council meeting—by way of Sweet Conversations for a sandwich.

Emery clicked on a folder marked Photos , then on the first .jpeg. A gorgeous photo of Rachel Kirby with Queen Catherine of Lauchtenland displayed on her screen. They were dressed in ball gowns and bedecked with jewels. Simply stunning.

“Hey, Rex.” Emery ducked into the newsroom, catching him as he packed up. “Have any of the Royal Blues ever visited Sea Blue Beach?”

“Not in this century, no.” He slipped his laptop and a battered notepad into a well-worn leather case. “Maybe not the last. The prince left in 1916 to fight in World War One.”

“Not even to see the Starlight? To see the place founded by one of their ancestors? Do any of the Nickle descendants visit?”

“I believe most of them grew up here but have since moved away. One dude owns a ranch in New Mexico, the other is a lawyer turned judge. There’s a sister who visits, but no details on when and why.

” Rex paused. “To be honest, I think the West End believes they founded Sea Blue Beach. The East End is like the old grandpa you lock in the back room when guests arrive.”

“I never figured you to be hyperbolic. Is it really that bad?”

“Wait until the town council meeting. You’d think Alfred Gallagher, the big Realtor on the West End, and Bobby Brockton, who maintains every piece of government-owned land and then some, and Mac Diamond, a golf course developer, invented dirt.”