Tish stood up. She put the half-finished bottle of water on Stride’s desk and smoothed her clothes. Stiffly, she extended a hand for him to shake. Her grip was weak and unconvincing. “I’m sorry I lied to you,” she said.
She slipped out of the office and closed the door behind her.
Maggie looked at Stride. “What do you think?”
Stride frowned. “She’s still lying about something.”
38
Clark Biggs sat in a bar on the main street in Gary, with his big fingers laced around a bottle of beer. Donna nursed a Diet Coke beside him, but they had hardly talked. When she put her hand tentatively on his shoulder, he couldn’t even turn his head to look at her. She laid her head against his arm, and he knew she was crying, but he didn’t feel anything. He couldn’t comfort her when he was numb all over. He wanted to cry, and he couldn’t. He wanted to get angry, and he couldn’t. It was like being in a dream where you wanted to run and your legs wouldn’t go.
He knew what Donna wanted-to see if they could rebuild a life, to put their marriage back together after Mary had forced them apart. She wanted something to fill the emptiness, but it was never going to happen. Without Mary, he had no life and didn’t want one.
“I wish you’d let me in,” Donna murmured.
Clark didn’t reply. He drank his beer. The bar was crowded, but the cacophony of voices created a bubble of privacy around the two of them. He would have been happier being alone. He didn’t want Donna or anyone else to share his grief.
“Do you still blame me?” she asked.
Clark hesitated and then shook his head. He had given up the anger he felt for Donna. She had no way of knowing that a monster was in the woods. It was just that life was so damn fragile, and there were so many predators out there. A girl goes to a store to buy a graduation gift and winds up kidnapped and strangled. A girl goes to a Halloween party and gets beaten to death in the backyard. A girl goes to an island resort and disappears forever. Fragile. There and gone in the time it takes to cry. No one was ever to blame, and no one ever seemed to pay the price.
“It wasn’t you,” he told her. “It could just as easily have been me with her when it happened.”
“Thank you, Clark. I needed to hear that.”
Clark realized that his hands were wrapped so tightly around the bottle of beer that his knuckles were white. The truth was that he wasn’t numb at all. He was holding his emotions down like a bathtub toy under the water, because he was afraid of them popping up. Afraid that his grief and fury would be like a tidal wave washing him away if he stared them in the face. He didn’t know how to deal with any of it. He could be hollow and dead, or he could open the locked door in his heart and go insane.
Behind him, wind and heat blew through the smoky air as the door opened. He heard a chorus of teenage chatter, and both he and Donna turned around as the players from a girls’ softball team squeezed into the bar, dressed in white jerseys and shorts, their long hair tumbling and blowing as they peeled off their caps. Their faces glowed with pinkness and sweat. They laughed and shoved each other; it was a postgame victory celebration. They dropped bats, gloves, and balls in a corner near the door, and one of the softballs rolled across the wooden floor and wound up at Clark’s feet. He leaned down and scooped it up. It was dirty and solid. A girl about Mary’s age, stocky and strong, with chestnut hair, clapped her hands and waved at him. Clark tossed the ball to her underhanded. She caught it with a big grin and juggled it in her hands as she slouched into a chair.
“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.