Lightning

realized that he didn't know what had happened. She told him the name of the buyer and the figure.
    For a moment they stared at each other in silence.
    Then she said, "I think maybe now we can afford to have a baby."
8
    Stefan topped a hill and peered ahead at the half-mile stretch of snowswept road on which it would happen. On his left, beyond the southbound lane, the tree-covered mountainside sloped steeply down to the highway. On his right the northbound lane was edged by a soft shoulder only about four feet wide, beyond which the mountainside fell away again into a deep gorge. No guardrails protected travelers from that deadly drop-off.
    At the bottom of the slope, the road turned left, out of sight. Between that turn below and the crest of the hill, which he had just topped, the two-lane blacktop was deserted.
    According to his watch, Laura would be dead in a minute. Two minutes at most.
    He suddenly realized that he should never have tried to drive toward the Packards, not after he had arrived so late. Instead he should have given up the idea of stopping the Packards and should have tried instead to identify and stop the Robertsons' vehicle farther back on the road to Arrowhead. That would have worked just as well.
    Too late now.
    Stefan had no time to go back, nor could he risk driving farther north toward the Packards. He did not know the exact moment of their deaths, not to the second, but that catastrophe was now approaching swiftly. If he tried to go even another half mile and stop them before they arrived at this fateful incline, he might reach the bottom of the slope and, in taking the turn, pass them going the other way, at which point he would not be able to swing around and catch up with them and stop them before the Robertsons' truck hit them head-on.
    He braked gently and angled across the ascending southbound lane, stopping the Jeep on a wide portion of that shoulder of the road about halfway down the slope, so close to the embankment that he could not get out of the driver's door. His heart was thudding almost painfully as he shifted the Jeep into park, put on the emergency brake, cut the engine, slid across the seat, and got out the passenger-side door.
    The blowing snow and icy air stung his face, and all along the mountainside the wind shrieked and howled like many voices, perhaps the voices of the three sisters of Greek myth, the Fates, mocking him for his desperate attempt to prevent what they had ordained.
9
    After receiving editorial suggestions, Laura undertook an easy revision of
Shadrach
, delivering the final version of the script in mid-December 1979, and Simon & Schuster scheduled the book for publication in September 1980.
    It was such a busy year for Laura and Danny that she was only peripherally aware of the Iranian hostage crisis and presidential campaign, and even more vaguely cognizant of the countless fires, plane crashes, toxic spills, mass murders, floods, earthquakes, and other tragedies that constituted the news. That was the year the rabbit died. That was the year she and Danny bought their first house—a four-bedroom, two-and-a-half-bath, Spanish model in Orange Park Acres—and moved out of the apartment in Tustin. She started her third novel,
The Golden Eagle
, and one day when Danny asked her how it was going, she said, "Mule puke," and he said, "That's great!" The first of September, upon receipt of a substantial check for the film rights to
Shadrach
, which had sold to MGM, Danny quit his job at the brokerage house and became her full-time financial manager. On Sunday, September 21, three weeks after it arrived in the stores,
Shadrach
appeared on the
New York Times
bestseller list at number twelve. On October 5, 1980, when Laura gave birth to Christopher Robert Packard,
Shadrach
was in a third printing, sitting comfortably at number eight on the
Times
, and received what Spencer Keene called a "thunderously good" review on page five of that same book section.
    The boy entered the world at 2:23 p.m. in a greater rush of blood than that which usually carried babies out of their prenatal darkness. Pain-racked and hemorrhaging, Laura required three pints during the afternoon and evening. She spent a better night than expected, however, and by morning she was sore, weary, but well out of danger.
    The following day during visiting hours, Thelma Ackerson came to see the baby and the new mother. Still dressed punkish and ahead of her time—hair long on the left side of her