Through breaks in the foliage, he could see a man walking down the driveway and carrying a mailbox attached to a sound new post. His hair had silvered in middle age, but Peyton Hale was not an altogether different creature. The boy of the photographs remained in his lined and sun-brown face. His shape was much the same and still clad in blue jeans and a T-shirt. The cords of his arms stood out in bold relief as he pulled the remains of the rotted post from the ground.
Charles rolled onto the side of the road and cut off the engine.
The broken wood was cradled in one arm when the man looked up, as people will do when a stranger comes calling. The vehicle surprised him, and his smile was wide.
Nostalgia?
Most likely, for this car was the image of Peyton’s o w n silver Volkswagen convertible, and he must have found it worthy of closer scrutiny. With his free hand, he reached into a breast pocket and pulled out a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles with thick lenses. He donned them in the moment that Mallory stepped out of the car to face him down on this road.
Her shoulders rolled back, and her feet were planted slightly apart in pugilist fashion. She would give him one more opportunity-only one- to know her by her mother’s face and his own green eyes staring back at him.
Charles remained behind the wheel. His heart ached for her; she had set the bar far too high. He whispered a litany, “Last chance… last chance…”
An answered prayer-Peyton Hale was turned to stone.
It was easy to follow the workings of the mind behind those bespectacled eyes so magnified and shocked wide-then shattered. Charles could virtually see Peyton’s b rain crashing with the overload of irony in memory and possibility-the hammer fall of Savannah ’s lies. Here before him was the living evidence that Cassandra had not died with his child still inside her.
Peyton’s mouth contorted in pain, as if his daughter had stabbed him in the heart-and, in a very Mallory way, she had. Now her father had no bones, legs failing him, arms dangling and helpless. The old mailbox post dropped to the earth, and Charles feared the man would also fall. Peyton’s eyes were fixed upon his daughter’s face, the image of her mother, and Charles Butler well understood the man’s new expression. He called it epiphany, the hallelujah of a father who has beheld his child for the first time-his perfect child. Still unsteady on his feet, he reached out for her, as if she could save him. “Our baby,” he said.
Charles closed his eyes. Of course-our baby. Peyton’s child had not yet been named when the man had begun his final road trip. The letters for O.B. had been written to Mallory before she was ever born. Her father’s passion for a vanishing highway was his present to welcome her into the world. He had wanted to give her his road before it was gone.
Upon opening his eyes again, Charles saw that it was Mallory who had fallen. She was on her knees, her face full of tears. Her head was thrown back, and she was laughing, laughing.
Charles was awed by this evidence that all her possibilities were intact, and he had no more fears for her. Joy augured well for a life worth living.
Not wanting to play the voyeur at this reunion of the lost father and the lost child, he turned the car around, steering it toward the hotel in town, and the silver convertible descended below the fog line. Charles Butler had completed his assignment per Riker’s request, though not in the anticipated order of things, not the specified destination or even the proper route; but he had seen the lady home.
And Mallory’s road was run.
Carol O'Connell
Born in 1947, Carol O'Connell studied at the California Institute or Arts/Chouinard and the Arizona State University. For many years she survived on occasional sales of her paintings as well as freelance proof-reading and copy-editing.
At the age of 46, Carol O'Connell sent the manuscript of Mallory's Oracle to Hutchinson, because she felt that a British publisher would be sympathetic to a first time novelist and because Hutchinson also publish Ruth Rendell. Having miraculously found the book on the 'slush pile', Hutchinson immediately came back with an offer for world rights, not just for, Mallory's Oracle but for the second book featuring the same captivating heroine.
At the Frankfurt Book Fair, Hutchinson sold the rights to Dutch, French and German publishers for six figure sums. Mallory's Oracle was then taken back to the States where it was sold, at auction, to Putnam for over $800,000.
Carol O'Connell is now writing full time.
***
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