The wooden clicking of Frau Edith Diomede’s heels resounded through the narrow halls of the village’s police station, extracting a sort of haunting music from the highly polished, deserted building.   Balanced between her two palms, Edith carried a covered basked containing one of her famous German pork pies, meticulously prepared hours before.
            The clicking stopped abruptly in front of a closed door, office four-six-seven, which she timidly knocked upon.
            Three minutes later, Edith’s pie was being devoured by two policemen wearing navy-colored uniforms, brass buttons gleaming in the dim light that came from a glowing gas lamp in the corner.  Crumbs from the flaky pastry dropped over the papers strewn about the worn desk as they ate.  Another officer, Sergeant Grynder, stood over the seated Edith, handing her a handkerchief.  He cleared his throat and began in a gruff voice.
            “We checked your husband’s usual stops, but out of them all, only the owner of Franz’s Tavern had seen him recently.  Said he was quite rowdy that day; yelling, making empty threats to the other customers.”
            Grynder’s eyes flashed to Edith’s hands as she daintily dabbed tears from her eyes with the hankie.  “Well,” she sniffed, ”that’s no surprise.” 
The eating officers exchanged pained, sympathetic glances as they thought, “poor woman, she’s much too young to experience such a loss.”   And then turned their attention back to the delicious pie.
            After a few more moments of polite interrogation, Seargeant Grynder sighed wearily.  “Thank you for all your time and, of course, the pie.  My colleagues enjoyed it very much.  And as always, we will be sure to inform you of any additional information we gain on the disappearance of your husband.”
            Edith stood, thanked the officers and left the room with the promise of more pies.   “I’m just so grateful for all you’re doing.”
            The moment the heavy office door scraped closed behind Frau Diomedes, Grynder turned to the two other policement in the room, who were wiping crumbs from their mouths.  “Her answers were contradictory.  One minute she had last seen her husband when he was going to run an errand, but when I tried to verify this information, he was at the tavern.  And another thing: Did you notice her hands?  Yesterday during interrogation they were quite soft, but today they had numerous abrasions.
            His listeners seemed shocked.  “Grynder, are you saying Frau’s a suspect?  Why would that sweet woman do anything?  Everyone knows she had a close relationship with her husband, despite his excessive drinking problem.  Besides, if my wife disappeared, I’d be rattled enough to make a few mistakes when questioned.”  Grynder grunted his disapproval as the officer continued. “Frau’s probably just been handling the family’s butcher shop now that he’s gone.  Hey, she’s gotta eat, even if it means getting a few scrapes.”
            Grynder shifted his weight.  “Still, you can never be too careful.  And even if she were cutting meat, whom would she sell it to?  No one’s going to buy from a widow, not just yet.  They know to give her some time to mourn first.”  The other two looked uneasily at each other.
            “You want it looked into?” one asked the sergeant.
            “Yeah,” was the reply, “check her usual shops.  You know, the feed store and such places.  Even though she’s not coming out of her house, those pigs for the pies have to be getting fed.”
            At the feed store, the young girl behind the counter informed them that Frau Edith Diomedes had not been making her usually weekly visits to her family’s store. “Jah!” the girl had exclaimed, “Frau did not come this week, or the one before that.  She often purchases sixty kilos of the feed, over there.” The girl raised a plump finger to a shelf in the back of the store which was lined with burlap sacks containing dry animal food.  “It was always a bar of soap, sixty kilos of pig feed and any home necessities… Oh, and cooking supplies.”  The girl twisted her wiry hair around a pinkie and stared at the high, dark oak ceiling beams in an attempt to recall her family’s weekly buyer.  A bell on the doorway jingled, alerting her of another customer.
            “Well, that’s all I can tell you, “ she continued, “I have customers to attend to.”
            Meanwhile, Edith was back at home, clearing out her husband’s many whiskey bottles.  The air still reeked of alcohol.  Edith gasped at the smell of it and clapped her hands to her nose.  She wanted to forget him.  Everything.  The way he would come home drunk every other night.  How he would hit her sometimes, when she didn’t hide in time.  And how she would pretend, day after day, that everything was fine, that she had a loving husband and the bruises she gained were from slipping, or banging a hand on the banister.   She hadn’t wanted to do it and the only way she could live with that sin was to keep repeating to herself, over and over that she had been defending herself, nothing more.
            A bottle crashed to the ground, its contents spewed out on the floor, glass pieces tinkling as they hit the surface.  Edith sighed.  Yet another thing to do.  And she had yet to slop the hogs.  It wasn’t a pleasant chore for her.  What she had been feeding the pigs was beginning to mold over and develop a horrid stench.  It always forced her to remember what she wanted to forget, just as making her pies did.  And the only thing that held her fast to making the pies was the fear of being caught.   Sighing, she took a long breath and held it to her as she bent to pick up the shining shards of glass.
            After Grynder’s coworkers had come back from the feed store and he had obtained all they had to tell him, Grynder became even more suspicious.  Where was the food coming from?  She couldn’t not be feeding her animals, or else the pies she was giving them wouldn’t have been so wonderful.  He would have to go to Frau’s house and look at the sows.
            They had turned the place upside down, not finding a trace of pig feed or a lue to the strange disappearance.   All the while, Edith had been standing, chafing her hands, looking wildly at the officers tear through her home.   At the end of the inspection, Grynder had asked her where she had been getting the means to feed her animals.   Her reply had been that “Times have been hard, now that it’s only me putting bread on the table.   I’ve taken to slopping them myself, you see, t-to save more.”
            That had ended it.  The Police had no evidence to present, nothing to say but that a local woman’s husband had gone missing.
            So Frau Diomedes was summoned to the station one last time, where she was inform ed“ …we may never know the location of Herr Diomedes.”  At this, the young widow lowered her head, eyes held in an unwavering gaze to the empty pie dish on the old desk.