The House of Thunder Read Free Page A

to have, considering what he was saying. It was almost as flat and monotonous as the voice of a machine.
    Or is it just me? she wondered. Is it just that my perceptions are out of whack?
    In spite of her weariness and in spite of the hammering that had just started up again inside her skull, she raised her head from the pillow and said, “Doctor, why am I here? What happened to me?”
    “You don’t recall anything about the accident?”
    “No.”
    “Your car’s brakes failed. It was on an extremely twisty stretch of road, two miles south of the Viewtop turnoff.”
    “Viewtop?”
    “That’s where you were headed. You had a confirmation of your reservation in your purse.”
    “It’s a hotel?”
    “Yes. The Viewtop Inn. A resort. A big, rambling old place. It was built fifty or sixty years ago, and I’d guess it’s more popular now than it was then. A real get-away-from-it-all hotel.”
    As Dr. Viteski spoke, Susan slowly remembered. She closed her eyes and could see the resort in a series of colorful photographs that had illustrated an article in Travel magazine last February. She’d booked a room for part of her vacation as soon as she’d read about the place, for she had been charmed by the pictures of the inn’s wide verandas, many-gabled roofline, pillared lobby, and extensive gardens.
    “Anyway,” Viteski said, “your brakes failed, and you lost control of your car. You went over the edge of a steep embankment, rolled twice, and slammed up against a couple of trees.”
    “Good God!”
    “Your car was a mess.” He shook his head. “It’s a miracle you weren’t killed.”
    She gingerly touched the bandage that covered half her forehead. “How bad is this?”
    Viteski’s thick, dark eyebrows drew together again, and it suddenly seemed to Susan that his expression was theatrical, not genuine.
    “It isn’t too serious,” he said. “A wide gash. You bled heavily, and it healed rather slowly at first. But the stitches are scheduled to come out tomorrow or the day after, and I really don’t believe there’ll be any permanent scarring. We took considerable care to make sure the wound was neatly sewn.”
    “Concussion?” she asked.
    “Yes. But only a mild one, certainly nothing severe enough to explain why you were in a coma.”
    She had been growing more tired and headachy by the minute. Now she was abruptly alert again. “Coma?”
    Viteski nodded. “We did a brain scan, of course, but we didn’t find any indication of an embolism. There wasn’t any swelling of brain tissue, either. And there was no buildup of fluid in the skull, no signs whatsoever of cranial pressure. You did take a hard knock on the head, which surely had something to do with the coma, but we can’t be much more specific than that, I’m afraid. Contrary to what the television medical dramas would have you believe, modern medicine doesn’t always have an answer for everything. What’s important is that you’ve come out of the coma with no apparent long-term effects. I know those holes in your memory are frustrating, even frightening, but I’m confident that, given sufficient time, they’ll heal over, too.”
    He still sounds as if he’s reciting well-rehearsed lines from a script, Susan thought uneasily.
    But she didn’t dwell on that thought, for this time Viteski’s odd manner of speech was less interesting than what he had said. Coma. That word chilled her. Coma.
    “How long was I unconscious?” she asked.
    “Twenty-two days.”
    She stared at him, gaped at him in disbelief.
    “It’s true,” he said.
    She shook her head. “No. It can’t be true.”
    She had always been firmly in control of her life. She was a meticulous planner who tried to prepare for every eventuality. Her private life was conducted with much the same scientific methodology that had made it possible for her to earn her doctorate in particle physics more than a year ahead of other students who were her age. She disliked surprises, and