Duffy Wiltshire rocked back in his well-worn chair and held his newspaper's front page out at arm's length admiring the impact of the type size and the disturbing message. Duffy owned and produced the Thompson Bay Herald and had done for nearly forty years as a one-man operation, except for delivery. Maintaining his editorial privilege, he reported the facts in his articles as close to the truth as practical—sometimes at the expense of advertisers. With a dearth of journalistic opportunities, creative writing increased in importance. This capital crime story was his first test and he was trotting out all the tricks learned over his forty years of experience.

The body of the young woman had been found the previous morning by a couple of small kids paddling along the shore and who had endured the misfortune of trying to poke her awake, disturbing a sand crab banquet. Their parents rushed both children to the trauma center of the closest hospital seventy miles away.

She had been one of a number of students renting a cottage at the Bay for an end of year celebration. The rental cottage they used belonged to local residents, Roger and Stella O'Hare, who were away on a vacation of their own and had to cut it short to return for police interviews. Several residents had expressed concern with the number of young people occupying the cottage and the local police had made a visit to the party and issued some mild warnings regarding the alcohol and the tending of the fire; as far as they were concerned the number of people in the cottage was the owner's responsibility.

A grainy photograph of the section of beach where she was discovered, compliments of a witness's phone camera, ran alongside a graduation photo Duffy had scrounged from the university web site, showing the victim to have been a very pretty, twenty-three year old brunette with an open face and a genuine smile.

He had inserted a bold type caption under the pictures that read: Young, energetic, popular and a little on the wild side, the murdered student was finishing the summer after her final year of university, celebrating with friends at a rented cottage on Thompson Bay. It was a final tip of the hat to their halcyon years of youth before entering the drudgery of adult responsibility and it was being carried out, in spite of the police warnings, with the defiant behaviour of drinking, drugs and sex.

The article went on to give the victim's name as, Adelaide Balfour, residing in the city with her parents, Ethan and Hannah Balfour. Both parents gave small statements to Duffy when he called, citing how they had pleaded for her to come home and begin a serious hunt for employment, Adelaide was determined to have this one last blast and she was clever enough to know that it would be the turning of a page in her life, one she couldn't go back and re-read except in memory if she was to make something of her education and dreams—but nothing as dramatic as the subject of this latest edition.

The local police, after a quickly mounted investigation, arrested a young man who had been one of the party celebrants. It had been suggested that he'd been seen several times throughout the evening to be pressing unwanted attention upon the victim. During the interrogations the young man's behaviour rang alarm bells among the investigators, identifying him as being deliberately confrontational and unable to remember events or respond rationally to their questions, and therefore clinching him as highly suspect.

Russell Church appeared before the local judge and was directed to be held without bail until a petition to the provincial court for a trial could be heard. His protests were ignored and his actions merely stapled shut the court's mind. Naturally, Duffy had seen another possible story to exploit and wrote in damning prose that the young man had protested his arrest and screamed innocence to any who would listen—no one did and the articles became fodder for the town's derision.

One and a half years later, after the crown failed to present a strong enough case to take to trial, due to a vigorous defense council, Russell was released a free man and once again was spotlighted on the front page of the Bay Herald in a stinging reprise of the horrific event.

The same year Russell was released, Hannah Balfour passed away from stress induced heart troubles and a contributing cancer, saddling Russell Church with the stigma of suspicion he'd originally attracted and now stuck with him in spite of being exonerated. Once again connected with a Balfour death and unable to cope with the constant badgering by the press and public, he left the home of his parents and found anonymous accommodation under an alias where he could try to get work and continue his interrupted education.