Truly a brilliant question, I thought to myself a second later. What do you mean, disappeared? Maybe he meant during a magician’s stage show. You’re really at your best tonight, Guerrieri.
The father looked at me. There was an indescribable expression on his face; a few facial muscles twitched, as if he were about to speak, but he said nothing. I had the distinct impression that he was simply unable to speak. As I looked at him, the words of an old song by Francesco De Gregori floated into my mind: “Do you by any chance know a girl from Rome whose face looks like a collapsing dam?” The face of Signore Ferraro, furniture salesman and desperate father, looked like a collapsing dam.
It was the wife who finally spoke.
“Manuela disappeared in September. She’d spent the weekend with friends who have a group of trulli in the countryside between Cisternino and Ostuni. On Sunday afternoon, a young woman gave her a ride to the train station in Ostuni. No one’s heard from her or seen her since.”
I nodded. I didn’t know what to say. I ought to have expressed my sympathy, my understanding, but what do you say to two parents grieving over the disappearance of their daughter? Oh, I’m so sorry to hear that, but don’t get too upset, this sort of thing happens. You’ll see, before you know it, your daughter will show up, life will go on as before, and this will all seem like a bad dream.
A bad dream? I thought to myself that if a grownup has been missing for a long time-and six months is definitely a long time-either something bad has happened, or he or she has run away. Sure, it’s possible she’s lost her memory, maybe she’s wandering around confused and eventually will be found and brought home. Sometimes that happens to the elderly. Manuela, though, was not elderly. But why were they meeting with a lawyer? What did I have to do with this? Why had they come to see me? I wondered when I’d be able to ask that question without seeming callous.
“I imagine the police, or the Carabinieri, have questioned her friend, right?”
“Of course. The Carabinieri handled the investigation. We have copies of all the documents. I’ll bring them to your office,” Fornelli said.
Why would he need to bring me copies of the documents? I shifted in my chair the way I do when I don’t understand what’s going on and I feel uncomfortable.
“Anyway, here’s the story in brief. Manuela didn’t have a car; she went to the trulli with a group of friends. She was supposed to come home Sunday afternoon, but she hadn’t managed to find anyone who was coming back directly to Bari, so she accepted a ride to the station in Ostuni so she could take the train.”
“Do we know whether she got on a train?”
“We think so, but we don’t know for sure. We do know she bought a ticket.”
“How do you know she bought a ticket?”
“The Carabinieri talked to the ticket clerk. They showed him her photograph, and he remembered selling Manuela a ticket.”
That’s unusual, I thought to myself. Ticket clerks, like anyone else who works with the public, barely glance at their customers. They hardly see their faces, and if they do they forget them immediately. 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 Castellaneta Marina. 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’ trulli. 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 trulli and that she left on Sunday afternoon. 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 be dragged to safety in some other place that was less oppressive. As a result, I missed part of Fornelli’s account. I remember becoming aware of his voice again through my dazed fog when he was already halfway through the story he was telling.
“… and at that point they realized there was a serious problem, and they opened an investigation. They interviewed a lot of people. They requested Manuela’s cell phone records and her ATM transactions, and they examined her computer. They were thorough, but in all these months not a thing has turned up, and we don’t know any more today than we did the first day.”
Why were they telling me all this? Perhaps the time had come to ask.
“I’m very sorry. Is there some way I can be of help?”
The woman looked at my colleague. The husband also turned slowly and looked at him, with that devastated face that looked like it was about to fall apart. Fornelli looked at them for a few seconds, then turned to speak to me.
“A few days ago, I went in to talk to the assistant district attorney who has the case.”