Of course neither my talent nor interest in digging deeper had been particularly appreciated in my job. Still, that time had been invaluable. I’d realized I was a journalist at heart.

At the end of my course work, I had hoped for an internship at a big city paper and had received a few nods of interest, but when I learned my mother was going into the hospital for knee surgery, I’d queried the Free Press, so I could be in town to help while she recovered.

Even then newspapers had a host of problems, and a paper in a small Florida city with an economy fueled by winter residents had more than most. The Free Press had a tight budget, and the only reason they agreed to take me on was because they were planning a series of articles about a murder that had happened in Seabank when I was still in high school.

During my interview, I brought up the case and volunteered to help conduct research, pointing out that as a Seabank native and the daughter of Dale Gracey, who had been on the city council at the time, I had contacts that might be invaluable.

In a quiet well-heeled community like ours, the murder had been high profile. A tax accountant named Becky Drake had been murdered after leaving a local charity fund-raiser. At the event she’d been seen arguing with her longtime boyfriend, John Quayle, and the prosecutor claimed that he had followed and killed her later that night. Quayle had been found guilty.

Then two months before I needed an internship, in a stunning turnaround, Quayle had been released. The prosecution’s star witness, another fund-raiser guest who had overheard the quarrel, had recanted, claiming the police had threatened to arrest her unless she told her story their way. Then a friend of Quayle’s had stepped forward to claim that Quayle had spent the night in his apartment, but his statement had never been admitted into evidence. Quayle’s court-appointed attorney had discounted the alibi because the friend had a criminal record and was probably lying.

Based on that and more, Quayle’s new attorney won an appeal, and the appellate court ordered a second trial. In a decision that surprised everyone, the state of Florida had decided not to retry him, and Quayle was now a free man.

That summer Quayle had moved back to the county to live with his mother. The Free Press wanted to do a series about the murder and include interviews with Quayle and others involved in the case who were still living in town. Their own staff was taking advantage of the summer slowdown to use up vacation time, and the managing editor was afraid that vital information and persons of interest might disappear if the paper waited until fall, when everyone assembled again.

Maybe my hometown paper wasn’t the Washington Post or the New York Times, but I’d been thrilled. The Drake case had seared itself into the brain of a receptive high school junior.