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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 Sava

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'Co

Born in 1947, Carol O'Co

At the age of 46, Carol O'Co

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'Co