newspaper employees

A novice newspaperwoman gains insight into the nature of mystery itself when her journalism mentors tell her about a 25-year-old unsolved investigation involving a man found dead on an island off the coast of Maine.

Newspaper copyboy Victor Vollmer sets out from Memphis to spread the ashes of Mr. Spiro, his friend and mentor, at the mouth of the Mississippi River, and with the help of new friend Philomene he may meet the challenge.

Beth Fremont and Jennifer Scribner-Snyder, coworkers at "The Courier," spend all day sending each other e-mail messages, sharing everything from office gossip to personal anxieties, and unknowingly entertaining Lincoln O'Neill, the newspaper's Internet security officer whose job it is to monitor other people's e-mail, and who does not realize until it is too late that he has fallen in love with Beth without ever having met her.

Beth and Jennifer know their company monitors their office email. But the women still spend all day sending each other messages, gossiping about their coworkers at the newspaper and baring their personal lives like an open book. When Lincoln applied to be an Internet security officer, he never imagined he'd be sifting through other people's inboxes like a peeping Tom. But he can't quite bear to crack down on Beth and Jennifer.