The Mask by Dean Koontz Page A

to the hospital in the ambulance with the injured girl, but she knew she would only be in the way. Besides, the first police officer on the scene, a curly-headed young man named Tom Weatherby,needed to get a statement from her.
    They sat in the front seat of the patrol car, which smelled like the peppermint lozenges on which Weatherby was sucking. The windows were made opaque by shimmering streams of rain. The police radio sputtered and crackled.
    Weatherby frowned. “You’re soaked to the skin. I’ve got a blanket in the trunk. I’ll get it for you.”
    “No, no,” she said. “I’ll be fine.” Her green knit suit had become saturated. Her rain-drenched hair was pasted to her head and hung slackly to her shoulders. At the moment, however, she didn’t care about her appearance or about the goosebumps that prickled her skin. “Let’s just get this over with.”
    “Well…if you’re sure you’re okay.”
    “I’m sure.”
    As he turned up the thermostat on the car heater, Weatherby said, “By any chance, do you know the kid who stepped in front of your car?”
    “Know her? No. Of course not.”
    “She didn’t have any ID on her. Did you notice if she was carrying a purse when she walked into the street?”
    “I can’t say for sure.”
    “Try to remember.”
    “I don’t think she was.”
    “Probably not,” he said. “After all, if she goes walking in a storm like this without a raincoat or an umbrella, why would she bother to take a purse? We’ll search the street anyway. Maybe she dropped it somewhere.”
    “What happens if you can’t find out who she is? How will you get in touch with her parents? I mean, she shouldn’t be alone at a time like this.”
    “No problem,” Weatherby said. “She’ll tell us her name when she regains consciousness.”
    “
If
she does.”
    “Hey, she will. There’s no need to be concerned about that. She didn’t seem seriously injured.”
    Carol worried about it nonetheless.
    For the next ten minutes, Weatherby asked questions, and she answered them. When he finished filling out the accident report, she quickly read over it, then signed at the bottom.
    “You’re in the clear,” Weatherby said. “You were driving under the speed limit, and three witnesses say the girl stepped out of a blind spot right in front of you, without bothering to look for traffic. It wasn’t your fault.”
    “I should have been more careful.”
    “I don’t see what else you could have done.”
    “Something. Surely I could have done something,” she said miserably.
    He shook his head. “No. Listen, Dr. Tracy, I’ve seen this sort of thing happen before. There’s an accident, and somebody’s hurt, and nobody’s really to blame—yet one of the people involved has a misplaced sense of responsibility and insists on feeling guilty. And in this case, if there
is
anybody to blame, it’s the kid herself, not you. According to the witnesses, she was behaving strangely just before you turned the corner, almost as if she
intended
to get herself run down.”
    “But why would such a pretty girl want to throw herself in front of a car?”
    Weatherby shrugged. “You told me you were a psychiatrist. You specialize in children and teenagers, right?”
    “Yes.”
    “So you must know all the answers better than I do. Why would she want to kill herself? Could be trouble at home—a father who drinks too much and makes heavy passes at his own little girl, a mother who doesn’t want to hear about it. Or maybe the kid was just jilted by her boyfriend and thinks the world is coming to an end. Or just discovered she was pregnant and decided she couldn’t face her folks with the news. There must be hundreds of reasons, and I’m sure you’ve heard most of them in your line of work.”
    What he said was true, but it didn’t make Carol feel better.
    If only I’d been driving slower, she thought. If only I’d been quicker to react, maybe that poor girl wouldn’t be in the hospital