Now You See Her

Chapter 2

CHAPTER TWO

‘How are those calls going?’ Cory asked, taking the final sip of his cold coffee. He was half asleep, having just typed up an uninspiring news story about a plant pot that had been pushed off the wall at the town’s bus station, smashing the clay container and damaging the plants. It was the third time that month, and it was getting a bit wearing trying to find a new angle on an item whose presence on the front page had been hard enough to justify the first time around. But that’s how things were at The Shallow Falls Tribune these days.

‘All three dogs have been reunited with their owners,’ Bianca announced. ‘One of the owners even picked up a new cat, as well.’

She smiled at Cory with the youthful enthusiasm of a first-day intern. At least she spoke to him. The previous intern had barely uttered a full sentence to him all week. And his application letter had claimed that he coveted a career in the communications industry. Cory had chuckled at the irony.

He was grateful for the distraction that Bianca had created in the office. Before she’d arrived, Mitchell Kane, the paper’s owner and patriarch, had called them all into the main office to deliver the bad news.

It was straightforward and simple: the population of Shallow Falls had gotten web-savvy. Even the older population were permanently connected to their mobile devices these days. That meant a plummeting circulation for the local paper, as their readership turned in droves to the online world. And although the paper was available online, it simply couldn’t pay the bills. The writing was on the wall; Mitchell would have to stop the press and downscale the entire operation to run on a shoestring if something didn’t change soon.

It was a glum start to a quiet day. The distraction of having to meet and greet Bianca Williams was a welcome one, discouraging Cory from dwelling too much on how things might pan out if he were to lose his job. In the hierarchy of attractive salaries, local newspaper hack was somewhere between supervisor at the local fast food outlet and clerk for a medium-sized builder’s store. It was still a respected job, but it didn’t pay very much, in spite of the training it required, along with the skill and legal knowledge to keep the publication out of the courts.

It was the only job Cory had ever wanted to do. Even though he could make no promises to Bianca of worldwide fame or industrywide respect, he could still guarantee her a challenging job which would take her to the heartbeat of the community and allow the sharing of essential news and information. It was satisfying, even if you occasionally had to deploy your considerable writing talent on a story about a vandalized plant pot in a dramatic style which wouldn’t be out of place if Godzilla had arrived in Shallow Falls and trampled it underfoot.

He’d warmed to Bianca immediately. She was eighteen or nineteen—old enough not to be a kid and sensible enough to be able to hold a conversation which did not, by default, include the words Fortnite, Love Island or whatevs. That seemed to Cory like a great start, bearing in mind the previous candidates from the local high school. Some of them had made him shudder.

Bianca seemed genuinely interested in how things worked around Shallow Falls. She understood how the town council operated, and even grasped how that all related to the wider influence of national government. She had a firm grip on the local issues in the town: threats to the few manufacturing plants that still remained, the pressures on farmers, the crumbling infrastructure, and the relentless march of progress. And, even better, she understood that reuniting lost dogs with their owners was as important to the people of Shallow Falls as the quality of their drinking water, the safety of their roads, and the price of parking in the town center.

He looked at the list he’d made on his notepad. Officially, Bianca was entitled to the same induction process as any other employee. But it was a long time since someone new had joined the ranks of The Shallow Falls Tribune. It was mostly an exit-only establishment these days. As staff retired or left, they weren’t replaced.

The paper had been reduced from a broadsheet to a tabloid, the fonts changed to jazz them up and make the paper more edgy, as Mitchell had explained it. The number of pages had been reduced to a level which could be sustained week-in, week-out by a small team of three reporters, two freelance photographers, one sports writer, two ads reps and a receptionist. Such was the diminished importance of a journal which had once won awards for its coverage of a huge political scandal in the sixties and had been bought religiously by readers within a radius of thirty miles of Shallow Falls.

Cory took the job as seriously as if he was still working in those halcyon days—lost dogs, broken plant pots, and all.

Bianca had been particularly impressed by the printing press.

‘You still print on the premises?’ she’d asked.

It was a pertinent question. Most printing was now outsourced, and traditional printing presses were in greater demand in countries like India. Mitchell Kane was old-school enough to want to hang onto the press, in case they might generate more income by printing third-party publications.

He’d separated the press from the newspaper, to make it easier to sell off, should the need arise. The need had arisen, sooner than he’d expected. The press was up for sale; it had received interest from around the world, and the staff who operated it knew they were on borrowed time. Not only were their jobs at threat, they had no transferable skills to take into the modern world.

‘If worse comes to the worst, I’ll start a blog,’ Cory would joke with the other reporters. ‘Or maybe even a YouTube channel.’

‘I can just see you as the next Zoella,’ Oliver Vasey quipped.

Oliver Vasey was the man who’d published Vasey’s People column in Shallow Falls for nearly thirty years. When he retired, he’d take the Tribune’s history with him. After Mitchell, he was the longest remaining member of staff.

It was four o’ clock; not much more was likely to happen that day. For a moment, Cory wondered if he should send Bianca home. She’d had the grand tour—that had used up ten minutes of the day. She’d been introduced to the other staff—that was another five minutes. The press had burned up almost half an hour and the canine population at Shallow Falls was all present and accounted for, in readiness for that week’s Missing Mutts column. He ticked off the items on his list. That was it—nothing else to show her.

‘Anything else you want to ask me, Bianca?’ Cory said. ‘Or have I covered all the basics now? Hopefully I’ll be able to take you out on a story tomorrow.’

The phone began to ring in the office. Cory looked over to see that Oliver was picking it up, so he carried on his conversation with Bianca.

‘I think that’s pretty well it.’ She smiled, still looking as fresh as she did when she’d walked through the door at ten o’clock that morning. ‘I can’t wait to do some reporting, and I’ll read these style guide documents when I get home tonight.’

‘Cory.’

Oliver Vasey called across the office.

‘One moment, Oliver, I just need to finish up here with Bianca…’

‘It won’t wait,’ Vasey replied.

Cory stopped, raising his eyebrows at Bianca to convey as much of a sense of intrigue as he could muster. He suspected he’d just made himself look constipated, but hopefully Bianca would get the gist of what he was trying to achieve.

‘There's a big story kicking off in town. You’ll want to take this—what extension do you want it on?’

‘Put it through to 205,’ Cory replied. ‘This is promising,’ he said to Bianca.

The phone rang at his side and he picked it up.

‘Got it,’ he said, initiating the baton transfer in the daily version of a phone call relay that punctuated office life. The calls never seemed to come to the right person.

‘Hello, Cory Miles speaking. How can I help?’

He noticed how Bianca was watching him, sensing that something important was about to kick off.

‘Uh-huh, yes, where? Shallow Falls Elementary. What time? Over an hour now? Poppy, age four. Damn, that’s not good. Hearing impaired. Damn, that’s really not good. Okay, got it. Thanks for the tip—I’ll be over right away.’

Cory replaced the receiver and took a beat to gather his thoughts.

‘What is it?’ Bianca asked. ‘A news story?’

‘Yes, it’s what we call a breaking story in the reporting business,’ Cory replied. ‘We’ve got a missing child at the elementary school. The police are already there. They think she might have been snatched. I hope you weren’t in a rush to get home. It looks like it’s going to be a long evening.’