“Do you ever wish that Mary had been like that?” Donna asked. “Just an ordinary girl?”

“She was who she was,” Clark said.

“Yes, but she missed so much. Getting crushes. Getting her first kiss. Having a best friend. It could have been her on that team, Clark. She could have been any one of those girls.”

“She was happy,” Clark insisted.

Donna stared wistfully at the girls on the other side of the bar. “She was only happy because she didn’t understand what she couldn’t have.”

“What are you saying?” Clark asked.

“I don’t know. We always said it was God’s will, but did God really want her to be like that? Did God want us to split up because we couldn’t handle it? I don’t think God was watching us at all when He let it happen.”

“Are you saying Mary is better off dead?”

“No.” Then she said, “I don’t know. I can hardly put it into words, but yes, on some level, don’t you think she’s better off?”

Clark swung back to the bar. He didn’t want to look at the girls’ team anymore. He couldn’t bear their sweetness and young noise. “Mary’s not better off,” he said. “I’m not better off. Maybe you are.”

“That’s not what I mean. You know it’s not. I just need to find some meaning in this. Some explanation. Some purpose.”

“There’s no purpose at all.” He waved at the bartender. “Another beer over here.”

“Getting drunk won’t bring her back,” Donna said.

“What do you care? I’m not your husband anymore, so just leave me alone.”

Donna sniffled and took a sip from her cola. Clark was impatient as the bartender poured his beer, and he drank a third of it in the first swallow when the man put it down in front of him. The more he drank, the more the wall began to crack. Emotions slipped out. He felt his eyes burning with tears.

“Oh, no,” Donna murmured.

“What?”

She pointed at the television screen over the bar. Clark saw a press conference under way live on the nine o’clock news. The St. Louis County attorney, Pat Burns, stood in front of a battery of microphones in the lobby of the courthouse. Behind her, he saw the two Minnesota detectives he knew. Maggie Bei and Jonathan Stride. He caught the last few words of a crawl on the bottom of the screen.

NO CHARGES TO BE FILED.

“Hey!” Clark shouted at the bartender. “Turn that up, okay?”

The bartender aimed a remote control at the television. Clark leaned forward, straining to hear. Some of the conversation in the bar dwindled as faces turned toward the screen. It was a small town. They all knew Clark and Donna.

“. . . substantial speculation about the murder of Laura Starr that occurred in Duluth in 1977,” Pat Burns said. “Recent reports in the media have suggested that we have a suspect in custody and that charges in that case are imminent. Unfortunately, these reports are not accurate. We have made no arrests to date, and we do not have sufficient evidence at this time to put before a grand jury. We will continue to investigate any leads that emerge in this terrible crime, but it isn’t appropriate to raise false hopes in a community that wants justice.”