Waiting to Be Heard: A Memoir (9 page)

Finally, at around 7
P.M.
, I was allowed to call Raffaele to pick me up. While I was waiting for him, Aunt Dolly phoned. “Did you ask the police if you can leave Perugia? If you can come to Germany?” she asked.

“Yeah, and they said no, that I’d have to wait until they heard from the magistrate in three days. Whatever that means.”

“If they really want to question you, they can do it from Germany,” Dolly said. “Maybe we should find a lawyer for you so they don’t say you have to stay there forever.”

“Yeah. I’ll wait to see what they say in three days.”

“Okay,” Dolly said. “Let’s wait for Tuesday. Then, if they don’t let you know when you can leave, tell them you have to contact the American embassy to get a lawyer. Without a doubt the embassy will help you, Amanda.”

As I walked outside the
questura
, I saw the guys from downstairs coming in. After we said hello, I wavered for a moment over the police’s order that I never talk about what I saw. “I was at your apartment today and you should know that your comforter was splotched with blood, Stefano. It made me wonder if Meredith was down there before she died. It was awful.”

“Yeah,” Stefano, said. “I hope that was from our cat and not Meredith.” Stefano, Giacomo, and Marco exchanged anxious looks.

Just then, Raffaele drove up and I said good-bye to the guys. Raffaele took me to a small boutique downtown called Bubble, next door to a luxury lingerie shop. Pulsating with music, Bubble catered to students, offering trendy, cheaply made clothing, the kind that’s not meant to outlast a season. I tried on a few things but decided to wait until my mom got to town to replace my staples, which were locked in the crime scene. I settled on one necessity, grabbing a pair of cotton bikini briefs in my size from a display rack near the cash register. In the long run it probably would have been better if I’d chosen a more sedate color than red. I didn’t give it another thought, but it turned out that what was insignificant to me was a big deal to other people. Standing at the cash register as he paid, Raffaele hugged me and gave me a few kisses—our lingua franca in a scary, sad time. A few weeks later, the press would report that I bought “a saucy G-string” and that Raffaele brazenly announced: “I’m going to take you home so we can have wild sex together.”

The main event of the night was getting together with Laura and Filomena. I was living inside a vacuum—I was staying with Raffaele, I’d spent the day with the police, and I was talking to the disembodied voices of my family. I needed the ballast I knew my flatmates would give me. We sat around their friend’s kitchen table and talked while Laura and Filomena chain-smoked. It was good to download with them. We were as close to normal as possible and wasted no time in speculating about what could possibly have happened at the villa. One scenario was that Meredith had come into the house, locked the front door behind her, and then the murderer broke in to find her there. After killing her, he stole her key to unlock the front door and ran, leaving the door swinging open in the frigid November breeze. Another was that Meredith had come home alone to find the killer biding his time, waiting inside for the first person through the door. I told them about the blood in the downstairs apartment and my worries that Meredith had been chased around there.

All these possibilities left me feeling chilled.

“It’s strange to me that whoever did this only wrecked one room and didn’t steal anything. Why do you think that was?” I asked.

Laura said, “I don’t know. We just have to let the police do their job. I’m sure they’ll figure it out.”

“The police are grilling me endlessly,” I said.

Filomena said, “I know it’s hard, Amanda. You’ve just got to be patient. They’re fixated on you because you knew Meredith better than we did.”

Laura and Filomena were each consulting a lawyer about how to get out of the lease. No doubt their lawyers were also counseling them on other things, such as how to deal with the police and on our pot-smoking habit, but they didn’t mention any of that.

“Are you okay living with Raffaele? How’s it going?” Laura asked. “Filomena and I are thinking about sharing another place.”

“Would you guys mind if I live with you again?”

Laura said, “Of course you can live with us.”

They both hugged me.

“Don’t worry. Everything will be okay,” Filomena said.

We’d heard that Meredith’s parents were coming to Perugia, and we decided to meet them together. “I’m sure they’d like to hear how kind Meredith was to us,” Filomena said.

It was after midnight when Raffaele and I finally went back to his apartment. I stayed up surfing the Internet on his computer, looking for articles about the case. As many answers as the police had demanded of me, they weren’t giving up much information. Then I wrote a long e-mail, which I sent to everyone at home, explaining what had happened since I’d gone back to the villa on Friday morning. I wrote it quickly, without a lot of thought, and sent it at 3:45
A.M
.

It was another night of fretful sleep.

Chapter 9

November 4, 2007, Day Three

I
f I’d thought about it at all in the days after Meredith’s body was discovered, I would have said that my innocence was so obvious no one could possibly miss it. By assuming that I didn’t need safeguards, I became vulnerable.

Had I seen a news item that morning in
The
Mail on Sunday
, a London tabloid, it might have shifted everything for me. The article said the Italian police were investigating the possibility that the murderer was a woman—someone whom Meredith had known well. “‘We are questioning her female housemates as well as her friends,’ a senior police detective said.”

Or I might simply have thought:
It’s not Laura, it’s not Filomena, it’s not me. Whom could they possibly be thinking of?

The first thing the police wanted at the
questura
that day was a list of every man who’d ever been inside our villa. Just as they’d done the day before, they prodded me with questions like “Who do you think would do this? Whom do you know who disliked Meredith? Was there anyone who might have had a motive?”

That afternoon, back in the waiting room by myself, I slouched down in one of the hard plastic chairs that had molded to my body over the past forty-eight hours. Exhaustion and emotion had overtaken me.

In quiet moments like this, as in the squad car the day before, my thoughts went straight to Meredith and the torture she’d been put through. I tried to imagine over and over how she might have died, what might have happened, and why. I replayed memories of our hours spent on the terrace talking, our walks around town, the people we’d met, the last time I’d seen her.

Either Meredith’s murder was completely arbitrary or, worse, irrationally committed by a psychopath who had targeted our villa as Chris had suggested. The hardest question I put to myself was:
What if I’d been home that night? Could I have saved Meredith? Would she somehow still be alive?

I was lost in these black thoughts when the interpreter walked by, looked at me, and said, “Oh my God. Are you okay?”

I thought,
I’m numb. I can’t sleep and I’ve just started my period. Every part of my brain is screaming to make sense of this.
But I said, “I’m just tired.”

“You’re pale,” she said. “Maybe a cappuccino would help. Come with me.”

When we got back upstairs from the vending machines, Raffaele was waiting for me. He’d stopped by to see if I could leave. The police said no, but they let us visit for a few minutes, in the same office where I’d been questioned the first night. I didn’t know that the room, like our cell phones, was bugged.

We stood together, talking quietly about nothing. I leaned against him, glad for his company. He kissed me.

Just then, Rita Ficarra, the police officer who’d said I couldn’t leave Perugia, walked by. She turned around and gave us a piercing stare. “What you’re doing is completely inappropriate,” she hissed. “You need to stop this instant.”

I was taken aback. It’s not like we were making out. What could she possibly think was improper about a few tender hugs and kisses? Raffaele was being compassionate, not passionate—giving me the reassurance I needed. But we were offending her.

Raffaele was the main reason I was able to keep myself somewhat together in those days. I’d known him for such a short time, and he had met Meredith just twice. Who would have blamed him if he hadn’t stuck around? Besides giving me a place to stay, he had been patient and kind. He’d dedicated himself to my safety and comfort—driving me to and from the police station, making sure I ate, curling around me at night so I’d feel protected. I had put him on the phone with Mom, Dad, Chris, and Dolly to reassure them. He made sure I was never alone.

I was in touch with Laura and Filomena, but they were busy trying to patch their own lives back together. They had their own friends, and their families were close by. Until my mom arrived on Tuesday morning, Raffaele was all I had.

But as much as he was helping me, we were careening to a bad end together. Whether it was kissing outside the house while Meredith lay inside dead, or whispering, joking, and making faces in the
questura
, our behavior had aroused suspicion. I was oblivious to it, but apparently once the police thought we were guilty, it colored everything.

At Ficarra’s insistence, Raffaele and I stepped apart. I stayed in that office after he left, and I was still sitting there when Laura and Filomena were brought in. We kissed on both cheeks and sat down. “They’re treating me like a criminal,” I said melodramatically. “They keep asking the same questions over and over, like I’m not telling the truth. I don’t know why. I’m not lying.”

The police took all three of us back to the villa, with Laura and Filomena riding in the backseat of one squad car and the interpreter and me in another.

We ducked under the yellow police tape that blocked off the front door and put on protective blue shoe covers. I hadn’t been back in our apartment since Meredith’s body was discovered and the Postal Police had ordered us outside. Tingling with fear, I never thought to reprise my “ta-dah” from the day before. My heart was bolting out of my chest as I walked inside, where it seemed as if every inanimate household object—the bowl on the kitchen counter, the couch in the living room—were witnesses to Meredith’s death. I tried not to touch anything.

The police told me to go into my room, and they watched while I did. “Is anything missing?” they asked.

“Everything looks okay,” I said, my voice small and quavering. I felt like a kid who’s terrified to go down the hall in the dark. Distraught, I forgot to check if my own rent money was still in the drawer of my desk.

“Now come back to the kitchen.”

I did.

“Open the bottom drawer and look through the knives. Do you see any missing?”

This is where we kept our overflow utensils, the ones we almost never needed. When I pulled open the drawer, stainless steel gleamed up at me. “I don’t know if there’s one missing or not,” I said, trembling. “We don’t really use these.”

I reached in, pushed a few knives around, and then stood up helplessly. I knew the assortment in the drawer might include the murder weapon—that they were asking me to pick out what might have been used to slash Meredith’s throat. Panic engulfed me.

I don’t know how long I stood there, arms limp at my sides. I started crying. Someone led me to the couch. “Do you need a doctor?” the interpreter asked.

“No,” I whimpered, my chest heaving. I couldn’t speak coherently enough between the sobs to explain. I could only think,
I need to get away from here.
I felt the way Filomena must have felt when she looked into Meredith’s room two days before. I didn’t have to see the blood, the body, the naked foot, to fully imagine the horror.

I sat there hyperventilating, gulping in air until my panic finally ebbed.

Before we left, they took me to Filomena’s room to see if I thought it looked the same as when I’d discovered the break-in. It was hard to tell. It had been a mess then and it was still a mess—and I knew that people, including Filomena, had been through it.

“What did you mean on Friday when you said there were feces in the toilet the first time you looked and that they were gone the next?” they asked.

I told them what I’d seen.

I shuddered when I saw that Meredith’s closed door was barricaded behind police tape.
Meredith
, I thought.

When we got back to the
questura
, just before 7
P.M.,
Raffaele was waiting for me with a pizza. I was wolfing it down, sitting in the same office as before, when my phone rang. Mom was leaving in the morning to start hopscotching her way from Seattle to Rome. There were no direct flights. Even though I’d first told her not to come, now I couldn’t wait for her to wrap her arms around me at the train station on Tuesday morning.

The next phone call was from Dolly, the family member closest to me by several thousand miles and my de facto emergency contact. Six months ago, my parents’ biggest worry about my year abroad was that I might get sick. We didn’t have a plan to cover what I should do if my housemate was murdered. Dolly had a newborn and couldn’t easily travel to Perugia, but she was checking in with me regularly. Just before we hung up, she gave me a second warning that I should by then have realized myself. “Amanda,” she said, “you should call the American embassy in Rome. Just fill them in on what’s been happening. It would be a good idea to have it on the record, you know, just in case.”

I didn’t understand what she was getting at. I thought,
Just in case what?

I was naïve, in over my head, and with an innate stubborn tendency to see only what I wanted. Above all, I was innocent. There were so many what-ifs that I never even began to contemplate. What if I hadn’t thrown the bunny vibrator in my clear makeup case for anyone to see? What if I hadn’t gone on a campaign to have casual sex? What if Raffaele and I hadn’t been so immature? What if I’d flown home to Seattle right after the murder, or to Hamburg? What if I’d asked my mom to come immediately to help me? What if I had taken Dolly’s advice? What if I’d gotten a lawyer?