The wind was on his face as he crossed over to the roof of the adjacent building and climbed down a fire escape ladder, a remnant from the old days before Mallory’s building had been joined with this wall to create a common air shaft.

Now he was level with a window on the opposite wall and looking into Mallory’s front room. Her apartment was a fortress. Only this window was not barred, the only portal inaccessible from the outside of the building by fire escape or terrace. It was a great expanse of glass from ceiling to floor.

He pulled a chunk of concrete from the depths of his coat pocket and hurled it at the window with all his strength. The plate glass broke into a million tiny pieces. When the violence of shattering glass had dissipated into a tinkling rain, he was staring at an enormous, jagged hole-and he was quite proud of it. His eyes adjusted to the dark beyond the window frame. He could see his missile lying amid the wreckage of a glass coffee table.

Better and better.

The alarm went off in a shriek of outrage.

Better still.

And it shrieked after him as he ascended the ladder to the roof door and made his escape.

She would find his message among the shards of glass when she returned home. The rock had a bit of paper wrapped round it and tied securely with a shoelace. His note bore that simple timeworn thing which he had found no way to improve upon: I love you.

And then the gentle man, unaccustomed to violence, unlawful trespass and destruction of private property, was exhausted from having done all of this. He walked homeward, slowly, hands in his pockets. She had broken his heart; he had broken her window. It was a break-even day.

EPILOGUE

Mallory would never read Charles’s note. She was already miles gone.

The window of her compartment was one of a hundred points of light which trumped the stars in their brilliance and speed. She was running along the iron rails, propelled by a powerful engine with no mercy for anything in its path, cutting a swath through the dark with the blinding brightness of the train’s electric eye.

Staring into the window glass, she recognized another woman’s face in her own reflection, a gentle presence floating beside her. Two suitcases sat by Mallory’s feet, but she carried no stitch of formal identification that would tie her to a name or a place. This was the way she had come to New York as a child, with only her wits and a bit of a mother’s blood on her hands. And this was the way she voyaged out again, out of New York City and into the great sprawling landscape of America, which was another country.

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.