Emery:
Have a good day, Ava.
And with that, the sun had fully risen. She biked back to the Sands for a shower before the morning staff meeting.
“What’s everyone working on?” Emery sat on one of the empty desks in the bullpen and faced her small staff.
“Dr. Wheeler is retiring,” Rex said. “I’m working on a long piece about his years of medical practice and philanthropy in town. Junie, could you pull some stuff off the digital morgue for me? Like when he started his foundation? And I think his first office was above Alderman’s Pharmacy.”
Jane was digging into the West End notion of becoming their own municipality. “All my contacts have gone dark, Emery. The best I can do is write up a piece on what’s involved in a town splitting. I’ve called Congresswoman Abbot’s office. We’ll see if she responds.”
“Good, and how about a story on Diamond Dog Golf Courses? Where are they all located? How did Mac acquire the land? Cost of each course? Did the cities contribute at all? Anyone want this one?”
“I’ll take it,” Rex said. “I do most of the sports reporting. Emery, I just filed my piece on the Tanagers Country Club joining the national pickleball circuit.”
Gayle heard a rumor that a small contingency of health advocates were starting a petition to remove all food trucks from the beach.
“That’s sacrilege,” Junie said. “Sea Blue Beach is known for their amazing food trucks.”
Jane wanted that story since her West End investigation stalled.
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’” Emery said. “That the West End might be stirring up trouble?”
“Nothing will surprise me,” Jane said.
The meeting adjourned, and Emery donned her ad director hat to visit businesses on the West End. It seemed the East End was tapped out. Either they already advertised or couldn’t afford to advertise, even with theGazette’s cut rates.
By the time she returned to theGazettethat evening, she’d made fifteen sales calls, each one more exhausting than the last, and secured one small account. A maid service called Maid For You. The owner agreed to a quarter-page ad for the Sunday-only edition. Which Emery won by throwing in an eighth of a page in the Wednesday edition for free.
Setting her things on her desk, she retrieved a bottle of water from the kitchen fridge and headed through the solemn, quiet newsroom to her office. TheFree Voicehad been nothing like this. It was loud and busy, phones ringing, keyboards clacking, reporters hollering to one another.
“One day,Gazette. One day.”
She entered the ad details for Maid For You for Gayle to make up tomorrow. Then she closed her office door and returned to her brewing idea.
Was she going to do this ...thing? It had sat with her all day. Was it dumb? Yes. Would it produce anything good? Probably not. Yet she had to try. Logging into the email server, she searched Rachel Kirby’s archives forHouse of Blue.
Finding a private email address for the royal family, she read a couple dozen exchanges between Rachel, members of the Chamber Office, and the queen herself. If this idea had any chance of succeeding, Emery needed to use proper names and protocol.
The winter sun had tucked in for the night when she finally started an email from her editor-in-chief account. She had to be honest about her identity. Fingers crossed their royal system with their spam filters would recognize the domain. And not think Rachel Kirby emailed from the grave.
From: [email protected]
Subject: Greetings from Sea Blue Beach!
To the Lord Chamberlain, House of Blue
Dear Sir,
My name is Emery Quinn, editor-in-chief of theSea Blue Beach Gazette. I discovered this email address while going through the archives of Rachel Kirby, theGazette’s former owner and editor.
Sea Blue Beach has grown into a lovely town, if not a divided one. Something of a rivalry has developed between old and new, east and west.
The East End, founded by the House of Blue ancestor Prince Rein Titus Alexander, needs historic preservation as well as business revitalization. While some members of the town council are eager to allocate funds for projects, others are not. There has even been talk of razing the homes on the Original Homestead for a nine-hole golf course.
We love progress in Sea Blue Beach, but we also love history, especially one as rich as ours. Sea Blue Beach is still “the gem of the North Florida coast.”
