Approaching his thirty-ninth birthday, Snow had retained his youthful good looks and thus he was not greatly surprised when Luisa requested increasingly frequent parent-teacher conferences and that during these sessions they discussed Luisa’s personal life more than they did Onofrio’s scholastic failings. Luisa complained about her husband’s cavalier treatment of her, his mental abuses, his rudeness to her family, his lack of concern for her concerns, and hinted at more heinous offenses. Snow offered a sympathetic ear; he understood the implied invitation and was tempted to accept it – although she would soon fall prey to obesity, sublimating her womanly desires with sweets and starches and bi-monthly shopping trips to Miami, where she now (according to her) satisfied her every appetite, Luisa was still exceptionally attractive and her desperation to employ her physical charms before age and indulgence further eroded them was as palpable and alluring to Snow as an exotic perfume. But he held firm and, when one afternoon she flung herself at him, rather than rejecting her out of hand, an act that might have antagonized her and sent her running to Enrique, complaining that Snow had committed an impropriety . . . on that afternoon he told Luisa he was grieving for a lost love (only half a lie) and that she was the first woman in years to have pierced the shroud of his grief and touch his heart. He asked for time to clear his head, to adjust to this unexpected change – he did not want to come to her encumbered by any shred of the past, he said. She deserved better and if she could wait but a little while for him to purge himself of old feelings, then all things would be possible. Due to his experience with such women, knowing that what they wanted was something excessive in their lives, some form of drama to break the comfortable tyranny of their marriages, Snow anticipated that a make-believe drama would be enough to suit Luisa’s purposes and in this he proved correct. From that day forward their conferences were models of comportment, marred only by incidental brushes of skin against skin, as happened when he helped her on with her jacket or handed her paperwork, and smoldering looks redolent of their unrequited passion.
If you had asked Snow why he stayed on in Temalagua after learning what he could about Yara’s fate – that is to say, very little – he might have answered because the cost of living was cheap and the weather temperate, but in truth he remained obsessed and began to make discreet inquiries about Yara’s activities during the period leading up to her disappearance. Over the next two years his life acquired an unvarying routine, teaching by day and by night and on the weekends pursuing his investigation via the Internet and in the various establishments (offices, shops, bars) mentioned in passing by Yara as places where she had collected or delivered sums of money. Yet for all his efforts, the sole result of his investigation came to him by chance. Some twenty months after his return to Temalagua, while leafing through the Sunday newspaper, he ran across an article on page six of the front section concerning the murder (by terrorists, the paper suggested) of one Hernan Ortiz, an official of the PVO. Accompanying the article was a headshot of the victim that showed him to have been a lean, cadaverous fellow with a distinctive shock of white hair in his forelock. Further photographs found on the Internet depicted a lanky man dressed in army fatigues. Snow thought instantly of the electronics store clerk to whom Yara had given the envelope stuffed with currency. He hadn’t gotten a close look at the clerk’s face, but given the PVO’s interest in Yara’s cult, her statement that some of the men to whom she had given instructions and money were military, and now this photograph of a man with an identical streak of white in his hair . . . he refused to believe it could be a coincidence.
