drop the charge of assault on a child. And word it just that way. Then offer him a deal- one count of murder for hire. He'll grab it-even if you get him a dozen lawyers. But I don't think he'll lawyer up- not today. Dave's ready to talk, and he'll write it all down if you like. Today, a ten-year-old girl could get his confession.'
Any female would do.
Dubious, the CBI agent walked with him to the edge of the pit and called down to the man below. 'Dave Hardy? It's me, Sally Polk.' Now she remembered to speak her only line, one final lie. 'Hannah called me to come get you out of there.'
Down in the hole, a mumbling of nonsense words turned to convulsive sobbing. Dirt was piled up to the deputy's chest. Mud caked his face and covered his eyes. Despite his old hatred of all her kind, blindly, Dave reached up to her-like any crying child seeking comfort from a woman- like every man who believed, at core, that a woman could save him.
The CBI agent hefted the recording device in her hand.
Weighing its value?
'You'll get a
This past hour had cost him dearly. Hannah, too. The tiny woman sat on the ground, rocking her body, her head bowed low. She had played her part so well, and now she was spent and crying and sick at heart.
Sally Polk held up her tape recorder and pressed the erase button. 'I'll look after Hannah. You should be gone before the troopers get here.'
Oren obliged her and walked away.
On the far side of the meadow, he was swallowed up by dense woods. For the love of Josh, he was a staggering man, feeling every wound to a child's broken body. He traveled farther into the forest, only stopping when he was certain that no one would find him this time.
Birds flew up from the trees in a whirlwind of spread wings and songs of panic, as though they had heard the bang of a bullet. On the ground, other creatures gave a wide berth to the man with a lost look about him, who sat with a gun in his lap all that day.
Night fell.
33
A new Mercedes was parked in the driveway, but Henry Hobbs was on foot today. Striding across the meadow, he was heading for a promising trout stream with his rod and reel and a yellow dog.
The old man never walked in his sleep anymore. Oren was on his knees, cutting flowers from the judge's enduring garden. He was nearly done with his term as interim county sheriff. Would he run for election-or lay down his gun like his father before him? Did it matter?
He had once had a darker idea for that weapon, but he was now trapped in the inertia of life ongoing, one empty hour chaining into the next. Some days, he envied Dave Hardy, who had hung himself on the eve of sentencing.
Shading his eyes from the noon sun, Oren looked up at the tower of the Winston lodge. Birds on the wing circled their old sanctuary with gliding rises, dips and rolls, hungry for seed. After a year of abandonment, someone had begun to feed them again.
No birds sang in the cemetery. There was only the sound of footsteps crunching gravel on a path that wound around headstones and marble angels. Oren stopped before a fenced-in plot of ground where kith and kin were buried, and he laid a profusion of yellow blooms on Josh's grave.
In answer to an old question once posed by a Ouija board, he said, 'I still love you.'
Half his flowers were saved out for Hannah Rice. He placed them at the foot of a marble stone that dated her death to the previous summer, when every last question was answered.
Early on an August morning, he had found her on the porch, sitting in her rocking chair, eyes closed, but not in sleep. Pills had spilled across the floorboards, and the label on a fallen bottle had been his first clue to her cancer. More had been read into the smaller print, a date of origin for her prescription. It matched up with a postmark on an old letter, the first of many that Hannah had written to call him back to Coventry. She had seen death coming, onrushing-with only enough time left to bring him home.
That morning on the porch, Oren had sat down beside her for the last time, and they had passed a quiet hour, the living and the dead. Nothing could have stemmed the flow of his tears-easier to stop the rain.
Armed with an old photograph of her and a notion that she hailed from Tennessee, Oren had used all his skill to find a date of birth for her gravestone. He had located her only official document in the records office of a small town, where he came to understand why she had never cared two cents for proof of her identity: Originally, her name had been a plain one, given to her by the state-after being abandoned in a trash can on the day she was born.
She had renamed herself with no one's permission and vanished from the public record. A pilgrim without papers, all that Hannah had ever asked was to be taken on faith alone. Respectful of that, Oren had stolen the birth certificate and burned it. Now, her only proof of life on earth was this stone-these flowers-this man who kept her secret.
'Hannah, I'm lost,' he said, as if expecting one more parlor trick to fix him and make him whole.
Retrieving a yellow dahlia from her grave, Oren carried this flower to Miss Rice's good friend, Mr. Swahn. In the absence of farsighted generations and a family plot, the Winstons and William Swahn had been buried in the last available section of land, a far corner of the cemetery, and a triangle was played out in the position of these three monuments.
He laid Hannah's flower down.
A bouquet of common weeds sailed past his feet to smash into Ad Winston's headstone. Without turning around, Oren knew that Isabelle had returned to Coventry.
The pretty redhead showed more decorum when she placed red roses on her mother's grave, and she also gave flowers to Swahn, laying them down next to Hannah's yellow token.
Oren and Isabelle stood in silence, side by side. He had yet to hear the sound of her voice.
And then she said, 'Last summer, Hannah told me that we were always meant to get married and have four children.'
He might have known that this first conversation could not begin with a simple hello. At least, Isabelle had not tried to kill him. 'In all my life,' said Oren, 'I only loved one woman, and it wasn't you. But we could have dinner sometime.'
She kicked him in the shin-hard.
Isabelle walked away, pausing once on the gravel path to look back at him, just a brief taunt thrown over one shoulder, a smile for the damage she had done.
Oren's wounded shinbone hurt like mad, and he chased that redhead down with the ghost of a limp, running for his life. He grabbed her by the hand and held on tight, despite that gleam in her honey-brown eyes that promised him more pain. He held on.
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.
