haven’t actually talked to her since that night.”
“You haven’t called her?” Em’s eyebrows drew down. “You’d better not be dicking over my friend. That’s an unforgivable offense. Even if you do have the best coffee in town.”
“I called her,” Levi protested. “But she didn’t pick up, and hasn’t called back. Or responded to any of my texts.”
“Oof.” Tate gave him a sympathetic look.
Em pursed his lips. “She’s probably just busy. She gets like that, when she’s working on a story that she really cares about.”
“Isn’t that a bit of a double standard?” Tate asked, pulling Em back a bit as a new couple walked up to the register. “Levi has to call her or he gets excommunicated, but she’s allowed to ignore him?”
“She’s got an important job,” Em protested.
“Caffeine is important too.”
None of this was important, as far as I was concerned. What I wanted to know was—
“Em? Connor? Oh thank God, you guys are here.”
Em, Tate, and I turned as one to see Nora rush in the door. The little coffee shop was starting to burst at the seams, and she had to dodge around a cluster of early-season tourists clutching sun hats and birding books as they stared up at the menu.
“Is Deacon here too?” Nora asked as she reached us. “I went to the Wisteria, and Mal said you were all here.”
“Someone say my name?” Deacon came out from the back hall, hefting a bulk order of coffee beans. He smiled at her when he reached our group. “Hey, Nora. Did Connor ask you about the paper? It never came to the Wisteria this morning, so we thought we’d check here.”
“It didn’t come here either,” Nora said, “because it didn’t come anywhere. We had to delay printing. There were some legal issues we had to work through, and a couple final verifications, but—” a grin spread across her face as she unfolded a copy of the Gazette that I’d just noticed had been under her arm the whole time “—Say hello to your Saturday paper, which is being rush-delivered across the island as we speak.”
My jaw went slack at the headline, splashed in huge letters across the front page. Adair Councilman Implicated in Beach Bribery Scandal. A black and white photo of Scott Nash took up a quarter of the page.
“Holy shit,” I said, not bothering to lower my voice.
“It was a close thing,” Nora said, still grinning. “We’ve been chasing down Scott’s office, and Lyles & Blackstone, for quotes, looking into Scott’s work history, checking out some other development deals in Palmetto. If we’d held off until Monday, we could have run a story twice as long. But I knew you wanted it out there before the council voted, and we can always run follow-ups.”
I took the paper from her and scanned the story. It was all there—the vandalism at McIntyre Beach and the Slagle property, Lyles & Blackstone’s history of development on the island. Multiple people who’d been pressured by the company into selling their homes below market value, boxed into shady contracts of questionable legality. The bank statements and the emails, all courtesy of anonymous sources, all raising questions about the integrity of the McIntyre Beach project, as well as everything else Scott or Lyles & Blackstone had touched.
“This is amazing.”
“Even better?” Nora added. “My friend at the Atlanta Record is going to run a story on it on Monday.”
“Atlanta? But they’re hours away.”
“This is big news. Corruption, bribery, the rich getting richer. People want to see justice done.” She laughed. “Or, more cynically, people know this stuff sells papers. Either way, it’s gonna get more coverage.”
She turned and looked at Levi as he handed off some more coffee to customers.
“Hi, by the way,” she said with a sheepish smile. “I know I owe you like, ten phone calls and a million texts. Sorry for going MIA.”
“It’s okay,” Levi said, clearly striving for casual. I wondered if he knew a flush was creeping up his neck.
“Things should calm down now that the first story’s done,” Nora said. “My work is mostly done, anyway. Everyone should receive their copies within the next few hours, and by the end of the day, the whole town will be talking about it.”
The upside to living in a tiny town, I thought as I looked around the coffee shop, was that they were already talking about it. I caught snatches of conversation like, ‘I think they said Scott Nash,’ and, ‘Did you know something was going on?’ without even