300 Days of Sun by Deborah Lawrenson Read Free Book Online Page A

and was now fully restored. But he was not there when we sat down for Caterina’s class, and he didn’t appear his usual ten minutes in.
    None of the other students had heard from him. They seemed to think that if any of us were to have done, I was the most likely—­which was true.
    â€œSenhora Davim?” I put my head round the office door on my way out. “Can I ask you—­is Nathan not well?”
    â€œWe think so, but we don’t know.” She shrugged, raising painted eyebrows. “I was going to ask you.”
    â€œI don’t suppose you have his mobile number?”
    â€œHe didn’t give it to you?”
    â€œIt didn’t seem necessary. We were here all day in person.”
    â€œWe are not permitted—­”
    â€œHave you tried it?”
    Senhora Davim pursed her lips. “I left a message. He has not returned my call.”
    What was she supposed to do? Not much, she implied with a drumroll of fingernails on the desk. He was a grown man, and it had only been two days. If he chose not to attend each session of a course he had paid for, that was his business. I didn’t disagree and exited graciously. If I left it there, she might change her mind about giving me his number if he failed to come in on Monday.
    I tried to recall the street Nathan’s lodgings were in but I’d never known exactly where he was staying. Neither could I remember any specific landmarks that might have narrowed it down, except a stork’s nest on a lamppost, and I wasn’t so desperate that I was willing to tramp all over town searching for that.
    But Nathan’s absence was all the more frustrating because I was eager to rake over my conversation with Ian Rylands. The way he had left the book for me in the café was odd, even faintly creepy. How did he even know I would return? And there was something else that bothered me, an anomaly that had taken a while to rise to the surface of my consciousness: how was it that Rylands remembered my old colleague Will Venning’s name from a one-­off approach by telephone—­he said they had spoken but not met—­yet he couldn’t recall the name of any reporters at a local newspaper?
    The other students filed out of the language centre in orderly fashion. Some of the women were meeting up later at O Castelo, and promised to look out for Nathan. I told Enzo my long-­standing boyfriend was coming for the weekend, and went back alone to my studio.
    L ater that evening, using the Wi-­Fi signal at the bar-­bakery in the Rua Dr. Francisco Gomes, I was idly checking my emails and various news sites when I had an idea. I pulled up Facebook and entered Nathan’s name in the search bar.
    He wasn’t on Facebook. Fair enough, it was worth a try. But I rarely give up when I want to know something, so I googled “Nathan Emberlin,” wondering whether he was on any other social media sites.
    It was a very uncommon name. Only four results came up, not one of them for a British man. The only Nathan Emberlins in the whole world were a ­couple of old men in the American Midwest, one of them allegedly a hundred and six years old, to be precise. I sat back, shocked. How did a young person, in these days of all-­pervasive social networking, not register anywhere online?
    I pressed search again, thinking there must have been a glitch. The result was the same.

 
    v
    T he temperature was climbing. The air was heavy with orange dust from the Sahara that fell like a sprinkling of paprika powder over the town’s white sills and ledges. I walked down to the ferry, needing to get out over water to catch some fresh wind. As the boat ploughed through green salt marshes, I did breathe more easily. Saturday morning, and the day was mine. But I was not feeling relaxed.
    Heading south to the narrow sand strip of the Ilha da
Culatra, where the outer rim of the marshes was exposed to the full strength of