The House of Thunder Read Online Free PDF Page B

ten years after Regina’s passing, the summer after Susan graduated from high school. And so she had entered adulthood even more alone than she had been before.
     
    Dr. McGee finished his chicken-salad sandwich, wiped his mouth with a paper napkin, and said, “No aunts, no uncles?”
     
    “One aunt, one uncle. But both of them were strangers to me. No living grandparents. But you know something—having such a lonely childhood wasn’t entirely a bad thing. I learned to be very self-reliant, and that’s paid off over the years.”
     
    As McGee ate his apple pie, and as Susan nibbled at her canned peaches, they talked about her university years. She had done her undergraduate work at Briarstead College in Pennsylvania, then had gone to California and had earned both her master’s and doctorate at UCLA. She recalled those years with perfect clarity, although she actually would have preferred to forget some of what had happened during her sophomore year at Briarstead.
     
    “Is something wrong?” McGee asked, putting down a forkful of apple pie that had been halfway to his mouth.
     
    She blinked. “Huh?”
     
    “Your expression...” He frowned. “For a moment there, you looked as if you’d seen a ghost.”
     
    “Yeah. In a way I did.” Suddenly she was not hungry any more. She put down her spoon and pushed the bed table aside.
     
    “Want to talk about it?”
     
    “It was just a bad memory,” she said. “Something I wish to God I could forget.”
     
    McGee put his own tray aside, leaving the pie unfinished. “Tell me about it.”
     
    “Oh, it’s nothing I should burden you with.”
     
    “Burden me.”
     
    “It’s a dreary story.”
     
    “If it’s bothering you, tell me about it. Now and then, I like a good, dreary story.”
     
    She didn’t smile. Not even McGee could make the House of Thunder amusing. “Well... in my sophomore year at Briarstead, I was dating a guy named Jerry Stein. He was sweet. I liked him. I liked him a lot. In fact, we were even beginning to talk about getting married after we graduated. Then he was killed.”
     
    “I’m sorry,” McGee said. “How did it happen?”
     
    “He was pledging a fraternity.”
     
    “Oh, Christ!” McGee said, anticipating her.
     
    “The hazing... got out of hand.”
     
    “That’s such a rotten, stupid way to die.”
     
    “Jerry had so much potential,” she said softly. “He was bright, sensitive, a hard worker...”
     
    “One night, when I was an intern on emergency-room duty, they brought in a kid who’d been severely burned in a college hazing ritual. They told us it was a test by fire, some macho thing like that, some childish damned thing like that, and it got out of hand. He was burned over eighty percent of his body. He died two days later.”
     
    “It wasn’t fire that killed Jerry Stein,” Susan said. “It was hate.”
     
    She shuddered, remembering.
     
    “Hate?” McGee asked. “What do you mean?”
     
    She was silent for a moment, her thoughts turning back thirteen years. Although the hospital room was comfortably warm, Susan felt cold, as bitterly cold as she had been in the House of Thunder.
     
    McGee waited patiently, leaning forward slightly in his chair.
     
    At last she shook her head and said, “I don’t feel like going into the details. It’s just too depressing.”
     
    “There were an unusual number of deaths in your life before you were even twenty-one.”
     
    “Yeah. At times it seemed as if I were cursed or something. Everyone I really cared about died on me.”
     
    “Your mother, your father, then your fiancé.”
     
    “Well, he wasn’t actually my fiancé. Not quite.”
     
    “But he was the next thing to it.”
     
    “Everything but the ring,” Susan said.
     
    “All right. So maybe you need to talk about his death in order to finally get it out of your system.”
     
    “No,” she said.
     
    “Don’t dismiss it so quickly. I mean, if he’s still haunting you