Temporary Perfections Read Online Free PDF

It’s understandable: They see so many faces every day that they can’t possibly remember them all, unless there’s something special about them. Fornelli sensed what I was thinking and provided the answer before I could even ask the question.
    “Manuela is a very pretty girl, and I believe that’s why the ticket clerk remembered her.”
    “And you said it was impossible to know whether she got on the train.”
    “They couldn’t establish that with any certainty. The Carabinieri talked to the conductors on all the afternoon trains. Only one thought he might have seen a young woman who resembled Manuela, but he was much less confident than the ticket clerk. Let’s say that it’s likely she got on a train—you’ll see the statements later—but we can’t be sure of it.”
    “When did they realize their daughter had disappeared?”
    “Tonino and Rosaria have a beach house at CastellanetaMarina. They were there with Nicola. Manuela spent a few days with them and then left. She said she was going to spend the weekend at her friends’
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. From there, she phoned them to say that she was leaving for Rome Sunday night by train, or by car if she managed to find a ride. The following week, she was supposed to go to the university, I believe either for a meeting with a professor or to go to the registrar’s office.”
    “She was supposed to meet with a professor,” the mother said.
    “Yes, that’s right. Anyway, they realized that she was missing on Monday. Tonino and Rosaria came home to Bari on Sunday night. She didn’t call the next morning, but that was pretty normal. Rosaria tried to call her in the afternoon, but got a recording saying Manuela’s cell phone was out of range.”
    The mother broke in again, while the father sat in silence.
    “I tried to call her two or three times, but the phone was still out of range. Then I sent her a text message, telling her to call me, but she didn’t. That’s when I started getting worried. I called her all afternoon, but her phone was turned off. So I called Nicoletta, the friend she lived with in Rome, and she told me that Manuela never showed up.”
    “Do you think she was ever home in Bari?”
    Fornelli answered me, because Rosaria was breathing hard, as if she’d climbed several flights of stairs.
    “The concierge lives in the building, and she keeps an eye on things even on Sundays; she never saw her. And there was no sign she’d been home.
    “After they talked to Nicoletta they called a few other friends of Manuela’s, but nobody knew anything. Only that she’d been at the
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and that she left on Sundayafternoon. At that point, they called the Carabinieri—it was nighttime by then—but they said there was nothing they could do. If Manuela had been a minor, then they could have started a search, but Manuela is an adult, so she’s free to come and go as she pleases, to turn off her cell phone if she wants to, and so on.”
    “And the Carabinieri told them to come in early the next day to make an official missing persons report.”
    “Yes. At that point, they tried calling the police, but the answer was more or less the same. So they called me. Tonino wanted to get in the car and drive to Rome, but I talked him out of it. What could he do in Rome? Where could he go? They’d already spoken to Manuela’s roommate, who told them that she hadn’t been there. And nothing proved she’d left for Rome anyway. The opposite, actually. So we spent the night calling every one of Manuela’s friends whose number we could find, but we turned up nothing.”
    For a few moments I had a clear, suffocating, intolerable perception of the anguish that must have saturated that night, with the frantic phone calls and the lurking, unnameable fear. I had an urge—absurd but powerful—to jump up and run away from my own office, just to get away from that sense of anguish. And I really did escape, for a few seconds: I was mentally gone, as if I’d allowed myself to