Waiting To Be Heard - A Memoir Part 9

"Please come in before you get hurt!"

As soon as we got inside, we went back to Meredith's closed door. "I can try to kick it down," Raffaele offered.

"Try it!"

He rammed the door with his shoulder, hard. Nothing. He kicked next to the handle. It didn't budge.

I called my mom again. "Mom," I said. "Someone broke into our house, and we can't find Meredith. What should we do?"

"Amanda, call the police," she said.

My stepfather, Chris, yelled into the speakerphone, "Amanda, get the h.e.l.l out of the house, this instant!"

While I was talking to them, Raffaele called his sister to see what she thought. She was a police officer in Rome.

Raffaele dialed 112-Italy's 911-for the Carabinieri, which was separate from-and more professional than-the Perugian town police.

As soon as he hung up, I said, "Let's wait for them outside." Even without Chris's insistence, I was too spooked to be in the house. On the way out I glanced from the kitchen into the larger bathroom. The toilet had been flushed. "Oh my G.o.d!" I said to Raffaele. "Someone must have been hiding inside when I was here the first time-or they came back while I was gone!"

We ran out and waited on a gra.s.sy bank beside the driveway. I was shivering from nerves and cold, and Raffaele was hugging me to calm me down and keep me warm, when a man in jeans and a brown jacket walked up. As he approached us he said he was from the police. I thought, That was fast.

Another officer joined him. I tried to explain in Italian that there had been a break-in and that we hadn't been able to find one of our roommates, Meredith. With Raffaele translating both sides, I gradually understood that these officers were just Postal Police, the squad that deals with tech crimes.

"Two cell phones were turned in to us this morning," one said. "One is registered to Filomena Romanelli. Do you know her?"

"Yes, she's my housemate," I said. "It can't be Filomena's, because I just talked to her. But I've been trying to reach my other roommate, Meredith, all morning. She doesn't answer. Who turned these in? Where did they find them?"

Later I found out that a neighbor had heard the phones ringing in her garden when I'd tried to call Meredith. They'd been tossed over the high wall that protected the neighbor's house from the street-and from intruders. But the Postal Police wouldn't explain or answer my questions.

We went inside, and I wrote out Meredith's phone numbers on a Post-it Note for them. While we were talking, we heard a car drive up. It was Filomena's boyfriend, Marco Z., and his friend Luca. Two minutes later, another car screeched into the driveway-it was Filomena and her friend Paola, Luca's girlfriend. They jumped out, and Filomena stormed into the house to scavenge through her room. When she came out, she said, "My room is a disaster. There's gla.s.s everywhere and a rock underneath the desk, but it seems like everything is there."

The Postal Police showed her the cell phones. "This one is Meredith's British phone," Filomena said. "She uses it to call her mother. And I lent her the SIM card to the other one to make local calls."

The men seemed satisfied; their work was done. They said, "We can make a report that there's been a break-in. Are you sure nothing was stolen?"

"Not as far as we can tell," I said. "But Meredith's door is locked. I'm really worried."

"Well, is that unusual?" they asked.

I tried to explain that she locked it sometimes, when she was changing clothes or was leaving town for the weekend, but Filomena wheeled around and shouted, "She never locks her door!" I stepped back and let her take over the conversation, Italian to Italian. The rapid-fire exchange stretched way past my skills. Filomena shouted at the Postal Police officers, "Break down the door!"

"We can't do that; it's not in our authority," one said.

Six people were now crammed into the tiny hallway outside Meredith's bedroom, all talking at once in loud Italian. Then I heard Luca's foot deliver a thundering blow. He kicked the door once, twice, a third time. Finally the impact dislodged the lock, and the door flew open. Filomena screamed, "Un piede! Un piede!"-"A foot! A foot!"

A foot? I thought. I craned my neck, but because there were so many people crowding around the door, I couldn't see into Meredith's room at all. "Raffaele," I said. He was standing beside me. "What's going on? What's going on?"

One of the guys shouted, "Sangue! Dio mio!"-"Blood! My G.o.d!"

Filomena was crying, hysterical. Her screams sounded wild, animal-like.

The police boomed, "Everyone out of the house. Now!" They called for reinforcements from the Perugian town police.

Raffaele grabbed my hands and pulled me toward the front door.

Sitting outside on the front stoop, I heard someone exclaim, "Armadio"-"armoire." They found a foot in the closet, I thought. Then, "Corpo!"-"A body!" A body inside the wardrobe with a foot sticking out? I couldn't make the words make sense. Filomena was wailing, "Meredith! Meredith! Oh, G.o.d!" Over and over, "Meredith! Oh, G.o.d!"

My mind worked in slow motion. I could not scream or speak. I just kept saying in my head, What's happening? What's happening?

It was only over the course of the next several days that I was able to piece together what Filomena and the others in the doorway had seen: a naked, blue-tinged foot poking out from beneath Meredith's comforter, blood splattered over the walls and streaked across the floor.

But at that moment, sitting outside my villa, the image I had was of a faceless body stuffed in the armoire, a foot sticking out.

Maybe that's why Filomena cried, and I didn't. In that instant, she'd seen enough to grasp the terrible scope of what had happened. All I got was confusion and words and, later, question after question about Meredith and her life in Perugia. There was nothing I could say about what her body was like in its devastation.

But even with all these blanks, I was still shaken-in shock, I'd guess. Waiting in the driveway, while two policemen guarded the front door, I clung to Raffaele. My legs wobbled. The weather was sunny, but it was still a cold November day, and suddenly I was freezing. Since I'd left the house without my jacket, Raffaele took off his gray one with faux-fur lining and put it on me.

Paramedics, investigators, and white-suited forensic scientists arrived in waves. The police wouldn't tell us anything, but Luca and Paola stayed close, trying to read lips and overhear. At one point, Luca told Raffaele what the police had said: "The victim's throat has been slashed."

I didn't find out until the months leading up to my trial-and during the trial itself-how s.a.d.i.s.tic her killer had been. When the police lifted up the corner of Meredith's beige duvet they found her lying on the floor, stripped naked from the waist down. Her arms and neck were bruised. She had struggled to remain alive. Her bra had been sliced off and left next to her body. Her cotton T-shirt, yanked up to expose her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, was saturated with blood. The worst report was that Meredith, stabbed multiple times in the neck, had choked to death on her own blood and was found lying in a pool of it, her head turned toward the window, eyes open.

In the first hours after the police came, standing outside the villa that had been the happy center of my life in Perugia-my refuge thousands of miles from home-I mercifully didn't know any of this. I was slowly absorbing and rejecting the fractured news that Meredith was dead.

I felt as if I were underwater. Each movement-my own and everyone else's-seemed thick, slow, surreal. I willed the police to be wrong. I wanted Meredith to walk down the driveway, to be alive. What if she'd spent the night with one of her British girlfriends? Or gotten up early to meet friends? I held the near-impossible idea that somehow the person in Meredith's room was a stranger.

Nothing felt real except Raffaele's arms, holding me, keeping me from collapsing. I clung to him. Unable to understand most of what was being said, I felt cast adrift. My grasp of Italian lessened under the extraordinary stress. Catching words and translating in my head felt like clawing through insulation.

I was flattened. I was in despair. I cried weakly on and off into Raffaele's sweater. I never sobbed openly. I'd never cried publicly. Perhaps like my mom and my Oma, who had taught me to cry when I was alone, I bottled up my feelings. It was an unfortunate trait in a country where emotion is not just commonplace but expected.

Raffaele's voice was calm and rea.s.suring. "Andra tutto bene"-"It's going to be okay," he said. He pulled me closer, stroked my hair, patted my arm. He looked at me and kissed me, and I kissed him back. These kisses were consoling. Raffaele let me know that I wasn't alone. It reminded me of when I was young and had nightmares. My mom would hold me and smooth my hair and let me know that I was safe. Somehow Raffaele managed to do the same thing.

Later, people would say that our kisses were flirtatious-evidence of our guilt. They described the times I pressed my face to Raffaele's chest as snuggling. Innocent people, the prosecutor and media said, would have been so devastated they'd have been unable to stop weeping.

Watching a clip of it now, my stomach seizes. I'm gripped by the same awful feelings I had that afternoon. I can only see myself as I was: young and scared, in need of comfort. I see Raffaele trying to cope with his own feelings while trying to help me.

We waited in the driveway for what seemed like forever. The police officers would come out, ask us questions, go in, come out, and ask more questions. I always told them the same thing: "I came home. I found the door open. Filomena's room was ransacked, but nothing seems to have been stolen. Meredith's door was locked."

It seemed like the words came from somewhere else, not from my throat.

In the middle of my muddy thoughts I had one that was simple and clear: "We have to tell the police that the p.o.o.p was in Filomena and Laura's bathroom when I put the hair dryer away and was gone when we came back," I told Raffaele. The p.o.o.p must have belonged to the killer. Was he there when I took my shower? Would he have killed me, too?

We walked up to a female officer with long black hair and long nails-Monica Napoleoni, head of homicide, I later found out. Raffaele described in Italian what I'd seen. She glared at me. "You know we're going to check this out, right?" she said.

I said, "That's why I'm telling you."

She disappeared into the villa, only to return moments later. "The feces is still there. What are you talking about?" she spat.

This confused me, but I continued to tell her what happened anyway. I told her I'd taken the mop with me in the morning but had brought it back when Raffaele and I came to see if the house had been robbed.