The House of Thunder Read Online Free PDF Page B

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 thirteen years later—”
    She interrupted him. “But you see, no matter how much I talk about it, I’ll never get it out of my system. It was just too awful to be forgotten. Besides, you told me that a positive mental attitude will speed up the healing process. Remember?”
    He smiled. “I remember.”
    “So I shouldn’t talk about things that just depress me.”
    He stared at her for a long moment. His eyes were incredibly blue, and they were so expressive that she had no doubt about the depth of his concern for her well-being.
    He sighed and said, “Okay. Let’s get back to the matter at hand—your amnesia. It seems like you remember nearly everything. What holes haven’t filled in yet?”
    Before she answered him, she reached for the bed controls and raised the upper end of the mattress a bit more, forcing herself to sit straighter than she had been sitting. Her back ached dully, not from an injury but from being immobilized in bed for more than three weeks. When she felt more comfortable, she put down the controls and said, “I still can’t recall the accident. I remember driving along a twisty section of two-lane blacktop. I was about two miles south of the turnoff to the Viewtop Inn. I was looking forward to getting there and having dinner. Then, well, it’s as if somebody just turned the lights out.”
    “It wouldn’t be unusual if you never regained any memory of the accident itself,” McGee assured her. “In cases like this, even when the patient eventually recalls all the other