Free The Cantaloupe Thief by Deb Richardson-Moore

thought morosely, than a newsroom.
    The Rambler had started in the early 1900s as a Monday-Wednesday-Friday newspaper, founded by Tanenbaum Grambling Sr. His son, Junior, added a Sunday edition. But Tanenbaum III didn’t want anything to do with the family business, so the newspaper fell to his younger brother, Josiah.
    Josiah turned out to be the savviest newspaperman of them all, taking the paper to a daily, and building a state-of-the-art printing press and offices to anchor the south end of Main Street. At every leap, there were discussions about whether to change the name Rambler to something more sophisticated. But the people of Grambling loved vestiges of their small-town roots even as they were outgrowing them. The name remained.
    In The Rambler ’s heyday, the newsroom had held sixty-five desks populated by editors, reporters, columnists, copyeditors, artists, designers, clerks, interns and secretaries. Now, under Tanenbaum IV, who’d taken on the dual roles of publisher and executive editor, the staff was down to a third of that number. No one blamed Tan-4. The whole industry was in seismic upheaval.
    Branigan slipped on the ugly maroon sweater she kept on her chair to ward off the chilly air conditioning, and opened her email. Not too bad. She worked through it for an hour, then stood, stretched and poured a cup of coffee from her Thermos. The few reporters around were busily working, heads down, so she didn’t interrupt.
    She sat again, and called the police for an update on the hit-and-run that killed Vesuvius Hightower. They had nothing. She pulled out her notebook, recorder and earphones. There were a few quotes from the Hightowers, Dontegan and other men at the shelter that she wanted verbatim. Rambler policy dictated that she clean up their pronunciation, but she wanted their verbiage intact.
    Fortunately, she had enough background from Liam on homelessness in Grambling that she was able to weave the narrative of the Hightowers’ deaths seamlessly into a larger fabric. She wrote about Vesuvius’s artistic talent and about how he and his father were inseparable, using quotes from the younger man’s siblings.
    By the time she had finished, it was 1:30, and her stomach was protesting the passing of the lunch hour. She saved the story to give it a final read-through before handing it over to Julie. When not up against a deadline, she liked to revisit a story after twenty-four hours and see what glaring holes or inappropriate wording struck her.
    She told Julie she was heading out for the afternoon for interviews on the Resnick story. Julie nodded distractedly, as she did when editing one of Gerald’s arts stories. If he turned in a story without at least four words an editor didn’t know, he considered it a personal failure. Branigan peeled off her sweater, glad to escape the building.
    Outside the sunshine and heat felt welcoming. She walked the six blocks up Main Street to Bea’s, passing black iron lampposts hung with baskets of geraniums and petunias. Grambling worked hard to retain its small-town flourishes while courting banking and industry headquarters. Cranky old-timers like Branigan worried that new money would eventually trump old charm.
    She ordered an uncut rye bagel and an iced tea, then took them to a sidewalk table. She opened the morning’s Rambler and for the next half-hour caught up on stories she’d missed. Harley had the annual preview of bathing suits, poor guy. Gerald had a yawner about an art exhibition in an obscure Atlanta gallery. Not sure how that got in. But Marjorie had an exceptional piece on a woman in nearby South Carolina who’d researched her family land, including a graveyard that was covered when the mountain lake Jocassee filled in those secluded valleys. The writing was sparse, and got across the point of terrible loss without being syrupy. Branigan silently applauded Marjorie.
    She chucked her trash into Bea’s bin, and