Waiting To Be Heard - A Memoir Part 13

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 G.o.d. 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 compa.s.sionate, not pa.s.sionate-giving me the rea.s.surance 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 rea.s.sure 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 a.s.sortment 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 emba.s.sy 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 nave, 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 s.e.x? 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?

Chapter 10

November 5, 2007, Day Four

Police officer Rita Ficarra slapped her palm against the back of my head, but the shock of the blow, even more than the force, left me dazed. I hadn't expected to be slapped. I was turning around to yell, "Stop!"-my mouth halfway open-but before I even realized what had happened, I felt another whack, this one above my ear. She was right next to me, leaning over me, her voice as hard as her hand had been. "Stop lying, stop lying," she insisted.

Stunned, I cried out, "Why are you hitting me?"

"To get your attention," she said.

I have no idea how many cops were stuffed into the cramped, narrow room. Sometimes there were two, sometimes eight-police coming in and going out, always closing the door behind them. They loomed over me, each yelling the same thing: "You need to remember. You're lying. Stop lying!"

"I'm telling the truth," I insisted. "I'm not lying." I felt like I was suffocating. There was no way out. And still they kept yelling, insinuating.

The authorities I trusted thought I was a liar. But I wasn't lying. I was using the little energy I still had to show them I was telling the truth. Yet I couldn't get them to believe me.

We weren't even close to being on equal planes. I was twenty, and I barely spoke their language. Not only did they know the law, but it was their job to manipulate people, to get "criminals" to admit they'd done something wrong by bullying, by intimidation, by humiliation. They try to scare people, to coerce them, to make them frantic. That's what they do. I was in their interrogation room. I was surrounded by police officers. I was alone.

No one read me my rights. I had no idea that I could remain silent. I was sure you had to prove your innocence by talking. If you didn't, it must mean you were hiding something.

I began to trust them even more than I trusted myself. So much pressure was being exerted on me that I couldn't think through what was happening. I was losing my sense of reality. I would have believed, and said, anything to end the torment I was in.