The Snow Girl by Javier Castillo

Author:Javier Castillo
Language: spa
Format: epub
ISBN: 9788412141818
Publisher: Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial España
Published: 2023-03-23T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 34

November 30, 2003

Five years since Kiera’s disappearance

People read the papers to

find answers and not questions,

and perhaps that’s the problem.

Miren Triggs’ article was a media bomb across the country. Although other papers had covered Kiera’s disappearance during Thanksgiving with short articles a few paragraphs long, nobody had been expecting anything like this. All the news channels tried to get hold of a copy of the tape during the morning it was published in an attempt to jump on the media bandwagon that this unknown journalist had set in motion.

Kiera’s face on the cover of the Manhattan Press had caused a huge reaction five years earlier, but at the end of the day, people were used to the idea of a child disappearing. It was a sad fact, but it had been just an initial frenzy which had calmed down before the end of the year. The country had got used to seeing the faces of missing children on milk cartons, enriching the breakfast cereal of the United States with desperation throughout the eighties and the early nineties. This system of adverts on milk cartons had been superseded by the introduction of AMBER alerts, but was so embedded in America’s subconscious that everyone knew about it, even though few people had actually seen one of those milk cartons displaying a black and white photo of a child’s face.

When a paper like the Press adopted the polar opposite of its previous stance, asking for help and publishing several key pieces of a seemingly unsolvable puzzle, people were taken aback. The world reads the papers to find answers, not questions, and perhaps that was the problem. Maybe that was the reason the entire country was stunned by the article.

When Miren reached the office that morning, she found the smiling secretary at the front desk listening to a call with her headphones on.

“Is Phil in?”

“One second,” she said, addressing the person on the other end of the line. “He’s already in and he’s asked for you three times. He wants to see you. I took the kids to your desk. They’re waiting for you there.”

“How many have come?”

“Two.”

“Just two?”

The secretary nodded with a smile. Miren looked up and saw a girl and a boy slightly younger than she was in the distance, waiting by her desk.

“Is Phil angry, Eli?”

“Oh, who knows. He always seems to be.”

“When were you planning on leaving?” Miren asked as she took off her gray coat, trying to buy herself some time.

“Before Christmas. We’ll see how it goes.”

“I’m sure it will be fine. You’ll be missed.”

“Humph, I don’t think so, not so much. They hardly look up to say hi when I arrive.”

“It’s…. it’s a pretty tense job. But don’t worry. Once you’re famous I’m sure they’ll call and request an interview. Then you can wait for them with your biggest smile, and they’ll have to come and see you wearing their most forced smiles. I’d love to be a fly on that wall.”

Elizabeth smiled and looked down.

“Is he in his office?”

The secretary raised her hand, gesturing to the side, and nodded.

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