Honor Bound: My Journey to Hell and Back With Amanda Knox Read Online Free PDF

the parking lot captured a trace of someone walking across the street toward the house on Via della Pergola—exactly the hour that, the prosecution and defense would later agree, Meredith crossed her threshold for the last time.
    *  *  *
    When Amélie ended, I went into the kitchen to take care of some dishes left over from breakfast before we started making dinner. I soon realized that water was leaking out of the pipe under the sink, and I cursed under my breath. I’d had a plumber come and fix the sink just a week earlier, and he had made me buy all sorts of replacement parts that clearly were not put together properly. I suspected he had left them loose on purpose to force me to pay for another visit. As Amanda and I threw kitchen towels onto the puddle on the tile floor, I decided I was going to let my landlady deal with it from now on.
    “Don’t you have a mop?” Amanda asked. I did not. She offered to pick one up from Via della Pergola the next morning and bring it round.
    We cooked a fish dinner, did our best to wash the dishes again, and tumbled gratefully into bed in each other’s arms. Only later, when I lay in the dark, unable to sleep, did it dawn on me that Papà had broken his usual habit of calling to wish me good night.
    It turned out he did so out of consideration. He had been about to pick up the phone when my stepmother talked him out of it. “Stop bothering him,” Mara said, as they got ready for bed around eleven o’clock. “He’s with Amanda, and they want to be alone. Why don’t you send a text instead?”
    My father took her advice, but because my cell phone was turned off, I didn’t receive the message until six the next morning.
    It was a desperately unlucky combination of circumstances. If my father had tried my cell and then called me on the home line—which he would have done, because he’s persistent that way—I would have had incontrovertible proof from the phone records that I was home that night. And the nightmare that was about to engulf me might never have begun.
    *  *  *
    My father called my landline a little before nine thirty the next morning to make sure we would be ready for our day trip to Gubbio. I was too groggy to talk. I’d been up several times in the night—listening to music, answering e-mail, making love—and wanted only to go back to sleep. Amanda got out of bed and said she was going home to shower and change her clothes, so I walked her to the front door, gave her a kiss, and crawled back under the covers.
    By the time she returned, I was up and in the kitchen making coffee. I could tell something was bothering her, but she didn’t say what it was. She’d brought the mop, so I spent some time wiping up while she poured our coffee. Then we sat down to breakfast.
    Only when we were close to finishing our cereal did she finally tell me what was on her mind. “I saw some strange things over at the house.”
    “Strange how?” I asked.
    “Well, the front door was open when I arrived, but nobody seemed to be home. At first, I just assumed someone had taken out the garbage or gone to the corner store.”
    Amanda looked increasingly worried as she began detailing the things she’d found out of place. The open front door was concerning, but not alarming—the latch was broken and the only way to keep it shut was to lock it. But Amanda also found Meredith’s door closed, which was unusual. She knocked, but nobody answered. Was she asleep? Or away? Amanda didn’t quite know what to think.
    Amanda went ahead with her shower, only to notice a small bloodstain on one of the washbasin taps. It looked like menstrual blood. Was Meredith, who shared the bathroom with her, having some sort of problem? It was unlike her to leave things less than immaculate. Maybe she’d run out to a pharmacy. Then again, it was just one small stain; perhaps she missed it.
    After she came out of the shower, Amanda went to the other bathroom, the one shared by Filomena and