And then she was going away from him again, moving swiftly to the door, saying, “Goodbye, Charles.”
He sat very still, listening to the sound of the door closing behind her.
Goodbye? Not good night?
She was precise with her words, not liking to waste them.
Goodbye?
He left his chair and walked to the window. He parted the curtains and watched the dark street below until she appeared there, crossing the paving stones, making a long shadow by lamplight. He leaned his forehead against the cool glass as he watched her enter the small tan car and drive off down the street. Behind his back, he heard slippered footsteps and the sound of a cup settling to the coffee table. Without turning, he said to Henrietta, “She won’t be back. It’s over.”
“What’s over, Charles? You never told her what was going on.”
“Well, how could I? She thinks of me as an old friend of the family. It would put her in an awkward situation. Don’t you see? It would be an imposition.”
“That’s not a word in Mallory’s vocabulary. I wouldn’t worry about good manners, Charles.”
“I can’t. I’m afraid she’d-”
“Now there’s the key word. That young woman walks around in bloodstains, and look at you-you’re afraid of an imposition. I think civilized behavior is overrated.”
The only one to see her enter the church was a cat which had crept in with another parishioner and hidden itself away in the alcove, resting on the vaulted relic of a saint. Now the cat, in haste to hide itself a little better, knocked over a candlestick and startled a man in the pews.
His lined, pale face, roused from prayers, turned round. The old priest rose from the pew and stood in silence by a column, covertly watching a young woman with lustrous golden hair and a dark stain on her hand. She lit a candle to the patron saint of lost causes.
The lamb had come back.
With a shuffle of slippers on stone, he walked around the column and into the light. “Kathy?”
“Father, you’re up late.” She never turned away from the candles, lighting one after another.
“There’s something I have to know. About your mother-”
“I made it up.” She raised her eyes to the statue above the flames.
“I don’t believe you.” He reached out and touched her shoulder.
Now she did turn to face him, to shake off his hand. “It was another woman who was murdered. So what? It was a beautiful mass. My compliments, Father.”
“You lied?” He shook his head in disbelief. “You could lie about a thing like that? So your own mother-”
“Who knows? I don’t remember her.”
She averted her eyes and moved away from him. He walked toward her, and quickly, to close the space between them. “Are you lying to me now?”
Mallory turned her cold eyes on the priest, and then turned her back. As she was walking toward the great doors and the night, the old man called after her, “Where are you going?”
“I’m going home.”
“Did you pay for those candles?” One white, gnarled hand emerged from the folds of his black woolen shawl and pointed at Mallory’s retreating back. “You haven’t forgotten the poor box, have you, Kathy?”
“That’s Mallory to you.” She kept walking, saying, “And no, I didn’t forget to pay the poor box. Now I suppose you’ll want to check the serial numbers on my bills.” With that, she was gone through the studded oak doors, her form fading into shadow, all but the gleam of bright hair, and then that gleam winked out in the dark.
Father Brenner’s hand hung in the air for a moment, and then quickly delved back into the folds of his shawl as though he were pocketing a soul.
Charles cased Mallory’s apartment house with the eye of a burglar-in-training. He approached the doorman with a twenty-dollar bill and a story about leaving an envelope under her door. He rode the elevator to the roof and exited by the fire door, coming out onto a clear night of shimmering city lights and the moon-bright slick of the Hudson River. He could smell the salt air, and he felt exhilarated.
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.
