FORT YATES - On St. Patrick's Day 2003, a Chicago career girl who grew up in North Dakota, spontaneous, loving, extrovert Lynn Weis, was murdered.

Sloane Floberg and Lynn Weis grew up together in Valley City, soul-friends since kindergarten. They had talked about going on a cruise some day as old women, "dressed in purple and wearing a red hat," like in the poem, Floberg said.

After March 17, 2003, those particular hopes, tethered to Weis' life, floated away. Nailed to the earth, however, the iron anguish of her family and friends stands fast.

Yet in the past year, other, different tendrils of hope have begun to form.

One year to the day after Weis was murdered in her home near Chicago, her mother, Donna Weis, rode from Valley City to Fort Yates with Floberg's mother, Pat Fearing, with a van-load of prom dresses.

The prom dresses are destined for a thrift store set up in a garage behind the red-and-gold St. Luke's Episcopal Church in Fort Yates, where Floberg's husband is the pastor. On the one-year anniversary of Lynn Weis' death, Donna Weis came to the grand reopening of the thrift store that Floberg has started in the memory of her friend, who loved thrift stores.

Floberg hopes that Lynn's Closet, started with memorial money from her family, will say that not every person in need is like the woman charged with Lynn Weis' murder, a 38-year-old homeless woman she had given a ride to.

Authorities say that during that ride, Weis had pointed out her house to the woman, who they say later returned to stab Weis to death, steal a credit card and set fire to her house. Authorities say Vivian Mitchell confessed to the murder and has been charged with 21 felonies, including seven counts of murder. She has pleaded innocent.

Mitchell's trial date is tentatively set for April 26, pending results of psychologists' reports, said Jody Gleason, chief of the criminal division of the Kane County, Ill., state's attorney's office.

The state is seeking the death penalty in the case, Gleason said.

Though Floberg does not support the death penalty, she will go to Illinois for Mitchell's trial. It's one of those last fulfillments, she said, "what friends do for each other. She would have done it for me."

"What's done is done and you can't go back," Floberg said, of the death penalty. "I don't think it heals anybody. Not if another person dies over it.

"Just for the record, everybody should be given a shot at forgiveness. People say murder is the ultimate sin. But there are nine other commandments just as heavy in God's eyes."

Meanwhile, a long, long way from Chicago, on a mild and cloudy midday at the edge of Fort Yates, Donna Weis said that she and her husband and son stay away from turmoil of the prosecution.

That's for them, she said, meaning the authorities.

Does it ever get easier? Her head shakes "no" before the last word of the question is even out. Every single day is pain, and sometimes it's about getting through the next five minutes, she said.

The "whys" she asks in anguish are as big as the universe. She will sometimes find herself picking up the phone to dial her daughter's number, only to hear that it's been disconnected.

During a community lunch, the exquisitely mannered women of Fort Yates ask to be introduced to Weis, to thank her for coming, to say they are sorry for her loss. When she is hugged, tears trembling just near the surface emerge, like sodden spring ground weeping around the press of a footstep.

Lynn Weis's picture is on the thrift store sign; other photos of her are on the lunch tables. Volunteers serve guests tender roast pork, soup, mashed potatoes and gravy from the church kitchen. A photo of Lynn Weis, beautiful skin, dark hair, smiles from behind the cake cut and served for her.

At dedication time, Floberg takes Donna Weis out St. Luke's back door and introduces her to the people who have filled Lynn's Closet. Eventually, women file out, mostly, in singles and doubles, with their plastic bags of necessities. They stop to shake hands with Weis as they leave. They say in soft voices, "thank you" and "I'm sorry."

One white-haired woman looks at her and murmurs, "It's hard." And glances toward the ground. "Hard." From her, it's not a cliche. People of Fort Yates know about hard.

How Donna Weis gets through this day is impossible to imagine. But she matches the graciousness of Lynn's Closet shoppers with her own.

When everyone's gone, Donna Weis steps away from the big silence toward the sliver of relief in distraction - she starts taking prom dresses from the van.

These dresses will go to schoolgirls who want to have a prom but don't have hundreds of dollars to buy a prom dress.

During the lunch and the dedication, Sloane and John Floberg's 3-month-old son is passed from one set of arms to another. Smiling or sleeping, the baby gathers fans who coo and smile and love him.

"What is it about babies?" asks Pat Fearing, his grandmother, rhetorically.

"They're so pure and innocent," says Donna Weis, looking at the contented baby. "They don't have a worry in the world." Clear as if it were spoken, the contrast with her life hovers in the air.

The two mothers, Lynn Weis' and Sloane Floberg's, talk about the girls' adventures growing up, how each mother feels the other's daughter is like her own. How Lynn was a shy child who blossomed into an outgoing person, who wanted career and big city but stayed close with Floberg, who is an Episcopal deacon and a mom to three little boys.

What gives Floberg peace now is that she and Lynn Weis had a deep conversation about death shortly before Lynn Weis died.

"We said everything to each other" that needed saying, she said. Weis was concerned that somebody should watch out for her parents if something happened to her.

"I promised that if anything happened to her, I would pick that up," Floberg said. "I just didn't think it would be so soon."

Down here, Floberg said, after a person has been gone for a year, there is the ceremonial "Wiping of the Tears." You are through with your mourning and may pick up your life.

"I have incorporated that (ceremony) in my life," she said.

And it helps, doing this ministry in memory of a woman who loved thrift shops.

Floberg hopes to be in "the ministry of what people ask for," formula, diapers, furniture. Clothes for the homeless guys, who have nowhere to live and nowhere to wash their clothes.

"God makes good out of every bad situation," Floberg said. "I thoroughly believe that.

"My eyes have been opened to what God can do through a horrible tragedy.

"People ask, 'why did God make this happen?' " Floberg said. "He didn't. There's something called sin in the world.

"He provides the wherewithal to go on."

(Reach Karen Herzog at 250-8267 or krherzog@ndonline.com.)