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Frieda always listened to the preachers on Sunday morning, all morning, while she fixed a big breakfast for Hans. On weekdays she listened to the talk shows and then the soaps and then more talk shows. She would work, always busy, but she liked to hear the sounds of voices when Hans wasn't home. It made her feel safe. Frieda had moved here from East Germany and she liked to feel safe. She knew she had heard the yelling and the car pull away on a Sunday because the preacher was on and she'd been fixing bacon for Hans. She'd been listening to the singing part and thought she heard yelling or screaming from next door: not unusual as she often heard Suzanne and Ronnie fighting, but Suzanne had left him months ago and it had been quiet since then. Maybe he was fighting with Cindy, his daughter. She was a teen-ager and teen-agers were always getting into some kind of trouble. Of course Ronnie seemed like a teen-ager himself, to Frieda anyway. Old hippie she called him, him and Suzanne both: strange couple and something unsavory about them. But when she turned off the TV to see if she could hear better it was quiet again: her imagination maybe, maybe the singing was too loud, maybe the TV had static. Then she heard the engine turn and figured they were going somewhere. She took a shower and when she got out she saw out her bathroom window Ronnie's old truck backing out of the driveway: that struck her as odd because he didn't have time to have gone somewhere and come back, but why would he have left the truck running so long? Maybe forgot something in the house and had to go back for it. Frieda sometimes did that and had to turn the car off again to use the house key because she left her house key on the same ring as her car key. She kept thinking she should separate them and then she'd forget about it until the next time she forgot something in the house: always happened when she was late.
When she told the police they didn't appear to be all that interested. Maybe she talked too long without getting to the point, about the TV shows and forgetting her things in the house and the keys and all that. But she thought it might be important after they found Cindy dead near the bike path in a culvert under the highway. After a month of searching, talking to every kid that even exchanged two words with the victim, they arrested a boy she'd been seen smoking weed with at school. That boy was in one of the gangs so they were sure it was him, but Frieda had this feeling that it might be Ronnie, not that Ronnie would have done such a thing sober, but he did get awfully loud and violent when he was drunk: she had heard him beating up on Suzanne. Maybe he had started beating up on Cindy, maybe he was the one killed her and dumped her body in the culvert. She didn't get the feeling the police took her seriously. But she did her duty: she told them what she remembered. She believed you had to do that kind of thing. She asked Suzanne once if she should call the police when she heard her and Ronnie fighting: not to report the disturbance so much as to get protection for Suzanne, but Suzanne told her please not to, that she'd handle it and she seemed so embarrassed that Frieda decided not to interfere: there was the matter of a woman's pride of course, she understood that. Her husband in East Germany had been that kind and she had taken advantage of a visit to her sister in West Germany to leave him and eventually come to America where she married a nice dentist and when he died, she met Hans at a dance and he was the very soul of kindness himself. She considered herself a lucky woman. She worried that the police didn't take her seriously and asked Hans should she call them and try to talk to someone else? someone higher up? and he said no, she'd done enough and time to let them do their job.
"But if they aren't doing it, what will happen to that boy?"
"How do you know it wasn't the boy who did it?"
Frieda didn't want an argument so she kept it to herself.