Waiting To Be Heard - A Memoir Part 12

Later that afternoon, Mom asked, "Amanda, do you need me there?"

Although it had been only one day since Meredith's body had been discovered, I said, "I know I'll be okay, but I'd really appreciate it if you came."

My chest loosened when she called back again with her flight information. She was due to land in Rome on Tuesday morning, November 6. From there she'd take a train to Perugia, and I'd meet her at the station. She said she wanted to help me find a new place to live and buy me some clothes. I looked at her visit as a way to get my life back on track.

Sometime that afternoon the police drove me to the villa. Sitting in the backseat with an interpreter on the way there, I admitted, "I'm completely exhausted."

One of the officers in the front seat swung around and looked at me. Her reaction was harsh: "Do you think we're not tired? We're working twenty-four/seven to solve this crime, and you need to stop complaining. Do you just not care that someone murdered your friend?"

The police told me to cover myself in the car as we neared the villa, so that the satellite trucks and photographers who'd commandeered the parking lot above us, their cameras aimed right on our driveway, wouldn't see me. I ducked down, and the interpreter covered me with her coat. They left me hunched over like that while they got out.

As I sat there, I thought about Meredith. She was quiet and kept to herself at home, but she was smart, cheerful, generous. I still couldn't believe that she was gone. I was overwhelmed by the enormity, the finality of her death. I wondered how her family was coping with the news. Meredith had told me that her mother had health issues, and I hoped her daughter's sudden, shocking death hadn't triggered an episode. I felt sorry for Meredith's sister. What would I do if something were to happen to one of mine?

When the police finally came to get me, I saw that the entrance to our apartment was blocked off with yellow police tape. Instead of going in, the police had me show them from the outside what I'd noticed about Filomena's window, asking whether the shutters were opened or closed when Raffaele and I had come home. They wanted details about how we lived. Did we usually lock the gate to our driveway? What about the faulty lock on the front door? Did anyone else have a key? Were there outside lights on at night? Did Meredith often stay there alone? Did we have frequent visitors?

Then the police led me around back to the downstairs apartment. The gla.s.s in the guys' front door had been shattered and lay everywhere. I gasped, thinking someone had since broken in there, too. The police said, "No, no, no. We kicked it in ourselves." They handed me protective booties and gloves. After I slipped them on, I sang out, "Ta-dah," and thrust out my arms like the lead in a musical.

It was an odd setting for anything lighthearted, but having just been reprimanded for complaining, I wanted to be friendly and show that I was cooperating. I hoped to ease the tension for myself, because this was so surreal and terrifying. Instead of smiling, they looked at me with scorn. I kept trying to recalibrate my actions, my att.i.tude, my answers, to get along, but I couldn't seem to make things better no matter what I did. I wasn't sure why.

I followed behind them in silence. We stopped first at Stefano's room. The comforter on his bed was crumpled up and stained with blood. I took another sharp breath. They said, "Do you see anything not normal?"

It seemed a bizarre thing to ask. I said, "Yes, there are bloodstains." The sight of it made my heart and mind race. I was trying to piece together what I'd seen. The agonizing thought that maybe Meredith had been attacked downstairs and chased back into our apartment before she was killed struck me like a physical blow. I kept thinking about how utterly terrified she must have been. I wanted to know what she had been through in her final moments, but at the same time I couldn't bear to go there.

I didn't think I could take any more surprises, but they kept coming. Next, the police opened up a closet to reveal five thriving marijuana plants. "Does this look familiar?" they asked.

"No," I said. Despite my earlier lie about not smoking in our house, I was now telling the truth. I was stunned that the guys were growing a mini-plantation of pot. I couldn't believe I had talked to them every day since I'd moved in six weeks earlier and they'd never mentioned it. I said, "I don't really hang out down here a lot."

Next we went to the room that Marco and Giacomo shared. There was no blood-or contraband plants. While we stood there, the detectives started asking me pointed questions about Giacomo and Meredith. How long had they been together? Did she like a.n.a.l s.e.x? Did she use Vaseline?

"For her lips," I said. When I'd first gotten to town, Meredith and I had hunted around at different grocery stores until we found a tiny tub of Vaseline.

Giacomo and Meredith had definitely had s.e.x, but I certainly didn't know which positions they'd tried. Meredith didn't talk about her s.e.x life in detail. The most she'd done was ask me once if she could have a couple of the condoms I kept stashed with Brett's still-unused gift, the bunny vibrator, in my see-through beauty case in the bathroom Meredith and I shared.

I couldn't understand why the police were asking me about a.n.a.l s.e.x. It disturbed me. Were they hinting that Meredith had been raped? What other unthinkably hideous things had happened to her?

After that, I was taken back to the car and left alone. I felt as though I'd been emotionally thrashed, and I lay in the backseat staring blankly at the floor. The interpreter came up to the window and asked if I was all right.

"No," I said. "I'm confused and tired, and I can't help imagining all the horrible things Meredith must have gone through."

Back at the questura, I had to repeat for the record everything I'd been asked about at the villa. It was a tedious process at the end of a difficult day.

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 emba.s.sy to get a lawyer. Without a doubt the emba.s.sy will help you, Amanda."

As I walked outside the questura, I saw the guys from downstairs coming in. After we said h.e.l.lo, 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 s.e.x 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

If 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 a.s.suming 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 s.h.i.+fted 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."