Lightning

year—"
    "Well, you know that didn't work out."
    "Nobody since?"
    "No. What do you think—I'm promiscuous?"
    "Sheesh! Kiddo, two lovers in twenty-two years would not make you promiscuous even by the pope's definition. Unbend a little. Relax. Stop being a worrier. Flow with this, see where it goes. He might just turn out to be Prince Charming."
    "Well… maybe I will. I guess you're right."
    "But, Shane?"
    "Yeah?"
    "Just for luck, from now on you better carry a .357 Magnum."
    "Very funny."
    "Funny is my business."

    During the following three days Laura received two more toads, and by Saturday morning, the twenty-second, she was equally confused, angry, and afraid. Surely no secret admirer would string the game out so long. Each new toad seemed to be mocking rather than honoring her. There was a quality of obsession in the giver's relentlessness.
    She spent much of Friday night in a chair by the big living-room window, sitting in the dark. Through the half-open drapes, she had a view of the apartment building's covered veranda and the area in front of her own door. If he came during the night, she intended to confront him in the act. By three-thirty in the morning he had not arrived, and she dozed off. When she woke in the morning, no package was on the doorstep.
    After she showered and ate a quick breakfast, she went down the outside stairs and around to the back of the building where she kept her car in the covered stall assigned to her. She intended to go to the library to do some research work, and it looked like a good day for being indoors. The winter sky was gray and low, and the air had a prestorm heaviness that filled her with foreboding—a feeling that intensified when she found another box on the dashboard of her locked Chevy. She wanted to scream in frustration.
    Instead she sat behind the wheel and opened the package. The other figurines had been inexpensive, no more than ten or fifteen dollars each, some probably as cheap as three bucks, but the newest was an exquisite miniature porcelain that surely cost at least fifty dollars. However she was less interested in the toad than in the box in which it had come. It was not plain, as before, but imprinted with the name of a gift shop—Collectibles—in the South Coast Plaza shopping mall.
    Laura drove directly to the mall, arrived fifteen minutes before Collectibles opened, waited on a bench in the promenade, and was first through the shop's door when it was unlocked. The store's owner and manager was a petite, gray-haired woman named Eugenia Farvor. "Yes, we handle this line," she said after listening to Laura's succinct explanation and examining the porcelain toad, "and in fact I sold it myself just yesterday to the young man."
    "Do you know his name?"
    "I'm sorry, no."
    "What did he look like?"
    "I remember him well because of his size. Very tall. Six five, I'd say. And very broad in the shoulders. He was quite well dressed. A gray pinstripe suit, blue and gray striped tie. I admired the suit, in fact, and he said it wasn't easy finding clothes to fit him."
    "Did he pay cash?"
    "Mmmmm… no, I believe he used a credit card."
    "Would you still have the charge slip?"
    "Oh, yes, we usually run a day or two behind in organizing them and transferring them to the master ticket for deposit." Mrs. Farvor led Laura past glass display cases filled with porcelains, Lalique and Waterford crystal, Wedgwood plates, Hummel figurines, and other expensive items, to the cramped office at the back of the store. Then she suddenly had second thoughts about sharing her customer's identity. "If his intentions are innocent, if he's just an admirer of yours—and I must say there seemed no harm in him; he seemed quite nice—then I'll be spoiling everything for him. He'll want to be revealing himself to you according to his own plan."
    Laura tried hard to charm the woman and win her sympathy. She could not recall ever having spoken more eloquently or with such feeling; usually she was not as good at vocalizing her feelings as she was at putting them down in print. Genuine tears sprang to her assistance, surprising her even more than they did Eugenia Farvor.
    From the MasterCard charge slip, she obtained his name— Daniel Packard—and his telephone number. She went directly from the gift shop to a public telephone in the mall and looked him up. There were two Daniel Packards in the book, but the one with that number lived on Newport Avenue in Tustin.
    When she returned to