The House of Thunder (11 page)
She had half expected to encounter Bill Richmond, the Harch look-alike, somewhere in the halls. She had prepared herself for that, had steeled herself for it. But she hadn’t expected this.
The man was Randy Lee Quince.
Another of the four fraternity men.
She stared at him in shock, in disbelief, in fear, willing him to vanish, praying that he was nothing more than an apparition or a figment of her fevered imagination. But he refused to do the gentlemanly thing and disappear; he remained—unwavering, solid, real.
As she was deciding whether to confront him or flee, he left the nurses’ station, turning his back on Susan without glancing at her. He walked away and entered the fifth room past the elevators, on the left side of the hall.
Susan realized she’d been holding her breath. She gasped, and the air she drew into her lungs seemed as sharp and cold as a February night in the High Sierras, where she sometimes went skiing.
For a moment she didn’t think she’d ever move again. She felt brittle, icy, as if she had crystallized.
A nurse walked by, her rubber-soled shoes squeaking slightly on the highly polished floor.
The squeak made Susan think of bats.
Her skin broke out in gooseflesh.
There had been bats in the House of Thunder. Bats rustling secretly, disturbed by the flashlights and the candles. Bats chittering nervously during the beating that the fraternity men had administered to poor Jerry. Bats cartwheeling through the pitch blackness, fluttering frantically against her as she doused her stolen flashlight and fled from Harch and the others.
The nurse at the counter, the one to whom Quince had been talking, noticed Susan and must have seen the fright in her face. “Are you all right?”
Susan breathed out. The expelled air was warm on her teeth and lips. Thawed, she nodded at the nurse.
The sound of squealing bats became distant, then swooped away into silence.
She rolled her wheelchair to the counter and looked up at the nurse, a thin brunette whose name she didn’t know. “The man you were just talking to ...”
The nurse leaned over the counter, looked down at her, and said, “The fellow who went into two-sixteen?”
“Yes, him.”
“What about him?”
“I think I know him. Or knew him. A long time ago.” She glanced nervously toward the room into which Quince had gone, then back at the nurse again. “But if he isn’t who I think he is, I don’t want to burst in on him and make a fool of myself. Do you know his name?”
“Yes, of course. He’s Peter Johnson. Nice enough guy, if a little bit on the talky side. He’s always coming out here to chat, and I’m beginning to fall behind on my record-keeping because of it.”
Susan blinked. “Peter Johnson? Are you sure of that? Are you sure his name’s not Randy Lee Quince?”
The nurse frowned. “Quince? No. It’s Peter Johnson, all right. I’m sure of that.”
Talking to herself as much as to the nurse, Susan said, “Thirteen years ago ... back in Pennsylvania ... I knew a young man who looked exactly like that.”
“Thirteen years ago?” the nurse said. “Well, then for sure it wasn’t this guy. Peter’s only nineteen or twenty. Thirteen years ago, he’d have been a little boy.”
Startled, but only for a moment, Susan quickly realized that this man had been young. Hardly more than a kid. He looked just like Randy Quince had looked, but not as Quince would look today. The only way he could be Randy Lee Quince was if Quince had spent the past thirteen years in suspended animation.
For lunch, she was given fewer soft foods than before, more solid fare. It was a welcome change of diet, and she cleaned her plate. She was eager to regain her strength and get out of the hospital.
To please Mrs. Baker, Susan lowered her bed, curled on her side, and pretended to nap. Of course, sleep was impossible. She couldn’t stop thinking about Bill Richmond and Peter Johnson.
Two look-alikes? Dead ringers, both showing up in the same place, within one day of each other?
What were the odds on that? Astronomical. It wasn’t merely unlikely; it was impossible.
Yet not impossible. Because they were here, dammit. She had seen them.
Rather than the chance arrival of two dead ringers, it seemed at least marginally more likely that the real Harch and the real Quince had, by chance, checked into the same hospital that she had checked into. She spent some time considering the possibility that they weren’t merely look-alikes, that they were the genuine articles, but she couldn’t make much of a case for that notion. They might both have changed their names and assumed entirely new identities after their individual periods of probation had expired, after they could quietly slip away without alerting probation officers. They might have stayed in touch during the years Harch was in prison, and later on they might have moved together to the same town in Oregon. There wasn’t really any coincidence involved in that part of the scenario; after all, they had been close friends. They might even both have become ill at the same time and might have gone to the hospital on the same day; that would be a coincidence, all right, but not a particularly incredible one. Where it didn’t hold up, where the whole house of cards collapsed, was when you considered their miraculously youthful appearance. Perhaps one of them might have passed thirteen years without noticeably aging; perhaps one of them might have been fortunate enough to inherit Methuselah’s genes. But surely both men wouldn’t have remained utterly untouched by the passing of so many years. No, that was simply too much to accept.
So where does that leave me? she wondered. With two look-alikes? The old doppelgänger theory again? If they are just a couple of doubles for Harch and Quince, were they cast up here by chance? Or is there a purpose to their arrival in this place, at this particular time? What sort of purpose? Is someone out to get me? And isn’t that a crazy thought, for God’s sake!
She opened her eyes and stared through the bed railing, across the adjacent bed, at the iron-gray sky beyond the window. Chilled, she pulled the covers tighter around her.
She considered other explanations.
Maybe they didn’t look as much like Harch and Quince as she thought they did. McGee had suggested that her memory-pictures of their faces were certain to have grown cloudy over the years, whether or not she recognized that fact. He could be right. If you rounded up the real Harch and the real Quince, and if you stood them beside Richmond and Johnson, there might be only a mild resemblance. This dead ringer stuff could be mostly in her head.
But she didn’t think so.
Was there a chance that the two men here in the hospital were the sons of Harch and Quince? No. That was a ridiculous theory. While they were too young to be Harch and Quince, these look-alikes were too old to be the children of those men. Neither Harch nor Quince would even have reached puberty by the year in which Richmond and Johnson were born; they couldn’t possibly have sired children that long ago.
But now that the concept of blood relationships had arisen, she wondered if these two might be brothers of Harch and Quince. She didn’t know if Harch had a brother or not. At the trial, his family had been there to offer him their support. However, there had only been his parents and a younger sister, no brother. Susan vaguely recalled that Randy Quince’s brother had shown up at the trial. In fact, now that she thought hard about it, she remembered that the two Quince brothers had looked somewhat alike. But not exactly alike. Besides, the brother had been several years older than Randy. Of course, there might have been a younger Quince brother at home, one who had been too young to come to the trial. Brothers ... She couldn’t rule it out altogether. These men could conceivably be brothers to those who had terrorized her in the House of Thunder.
But, again, she didn’t think so.
That left only one explanation: insanity. Maybe she was losing her mind. Suffering from delusions. Hallucinations. Perhaps she was taking the most innocent ingredients and cooking up bizarre paranoid fantasies.
No. She refused to give much consideration to that possibility. Oh, maybe she was too serious about life; that was an accusation she would be willing to consider. Sometimes she thought that she was almost too well balanced, too much in control of herself; she envied other people the ability to do silly, spur-of-the-moment, irrational, exciting things. If she were more able to let herself go now and then, more able to let her hair down, she wouldn’t have missed out on quite so much fun over the years. Too sober, too serious, too much of an ant and not enough of a grasshopper? Yes. But insane, out of her mind? Definitely not.
And now she had run out of answers to the doppelgänger puzzle. Those were the only solutions that had thus far presented themselves, but none of them satisfied her.
She decided not to mention Peter Johnson to either Mrs. Baker or Dr. McGee. She was afraid she’d sound ... flighty.
She huddled under the covers, watching the churning, sooty sky, wondering if she should simply shrug off the look-alikes, just forget all about them. Wondering if she should merely be amazed by them—or frightened of them. Wondering ...
That afternoon, without asking for help, she got out of bed and into the wheelchair. Her legs almost failed to support her even for the two or three seconds she needed to stand on them; they felt as if the bones had been extracted from them. She became dizzy, and sweat popped out on her brow, but she made it into the chair all by herself.
Mrs. Baker entered the room only a moment later and scowled at her. “Did you get out of bed alone?”
“Yep. I told you I was stronger than you thought.”
“That was a reckless thing to do.”
“Oh, no. It was easy.”
“Is that so?”
“Easy as cake.”
“Then why did you break out in a sweat?”
Susan sheepishly wiped a hand across her damp brow. “I must be going through the change of life.”
“Now don’t you try to make me laugh,” Mrs. Baker said. “You deserve to be scolded, and I’m just the grouch to do it. You’re a stubborn one, aren’t you?”
“Me? Stubborn?” Susan asked, pretending to be amazed by the very notion. “Not at all. I just know my own mind, if that’s what you mean.”
Mrs. Baker grimaced. “Stubborn is what I said, and stubborn is what I mean. Why, for heaven’s sake, you might have slipped and fallen.”
“But I didn’t.”
“You might have broken an arm or fractured a hip or something, and that would’ve set your recovery back weeks! I swear, if you were twenty years younger, I’d turn you over my knee and give you a good spanking.”
Susan burst out laughing.
After a moment in which she was startled by her own statement, Mrs. Baker laughed, too. She leaned against the foot of the bed, shaking with laughter.
Just when Susan thought she had control of herself, her eyes met the nurse’s eyes, and they grinned at each other, and then the laughter started all over again.
At last, as her laughing subsided to giggling, Mrs. Baker wiped tears from her eyes and said, “I can’t believe I really said that!”
“Turn me over your knee, would you?”
“I guess you must bring out the mothering instincts in me.”
“Well, it sure doesn’t sound like standard nursing procedure,” Susan said.
“I’m just glad you weren’t insulted.”
“And I’m just glad I’m not twenty years younger,” Susan said, and they both started laughing again.
A couple of minutes later, when Susan wheeled herself into the hall to get some exercise, she felt in better spirits than she had been at any time since waking from the coma. The spontaneous, uncontrollable fit of laughter with Mrs. Baker had been wonderfully therapeutic. That shared moment, that unexpected but welcome intimacy, made Susan feel less alone and made the hospital seem considerably less cold and less gloomy than it had seemed only a short while ago.
Her arms still ached from the morning’s tour in the wheelchair, but in spite of the soreness in her muscles, she was determined to make at least one more circuit of the second floor.
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