Passage

Because if she’d been there, even though she was dead, she would never have lain there passively on the shirred satin, eyes closed, hands composed, with Mandrake coming. She would have been out of the casket and sprinting for the choir loft, making a dash for the side door, saying the way she had that first day, “If I talk to him I’m liable to kill him.”

She didn’t move. Mandrake went up to the casket, looked down at her, still with that disgusting smile, and bent to kiss her forehead. Richard must have made a sound, must have made a move to stand up, because Eileen reached over and put a hand on his arm, grasping it firmly, holding him down.

Mandrake walked to the pulpit and then stood there, his hands on the sides of the pulpit, smiling oilily at the congregation. “I was Joanna Lander’s friend,” he said, “perhaps her best friend.”

Richard looked ahead at Vielle. Kit had her hand clasped firmly in Vielle’s.

“I say that,” Mandrake said, “because I not only worked with her, as many of you did, but because I shared a common goal with her, a common passion. Both of us had devoted our lives to discovering the mystery of Death, a mystery that is a mystery to her no longer.” He smiled gently in the direction of the casket. “Of course we all have our faults. Joanna was always in a hurry.”

Yeah, trying to get away from you.

“She was also sometimes too skeptical,” he said, and chuckled as if it were an amusing shortcoming. “Skepticism is an excellent quality…”

How would you know?

“But Joanna often carried it to extremes and refused to believe the evidence that was so plainly before her, evidence that Death was not the end.” He smiled at the congregation. “You may have read my book, The Light at the End of the Tunnel.”

“I don’t believe it,” Eileen muttered next to him. “He’s plugging his book at a funeral.”

“If you’ve read it, you know that Death need hold no fears, that even though dying may seem painful, terrifying, to those of us left behind, it is not. For our loved ones await us, and an Angel of Light. We know that from the mouths of those who have seen that light, seen those loved ones, from the message they have brought back from the Other Side.”

He cast a sickly smile in the direction of the casket. “Joanna didn’t believe that. She was a skeptic—she believed near-death experiences were hallucinations, caused by endorphins or lack of oxygen,” he waved them away with his hand. “Which is why her testimony, the testimony of a skeptic, is so compelling.”

He paused dramatically. “I heard Joanna’s last words. She spoke them to me only moments before her death, as she was on her way down to that fateful encounter. Joanna was heading down a hallway to the elevator that would take her down to the emergency room. And do you know what she did?” He paused expectantly.

She looked frantically around for a stairway, Richard thought, for a way out.

“I’ll tell you what she did,” Mandrake said. “She stopped me and said, ‘Mr. Mandrake, I wanted to tell you, you were right about the near-death experience. It was a message from the Other Side.’ ”

“ ‘You have seen what lies on the Other Side then?’ I asked her, and I could see the answer in her face, radiant with joy. She was a skeptic no longer. ‘You were right, Mr. Mandrake,’ she said. ‘It was a message from the Other Side.’ What more proof do we need of the afterlife that awaits us? Joanna herself has told us, with her last breath, her last words.”

Her last words, Richard thought. “Why do people in movies always say things like ‘The murderer is… Bang!’ ” Joanna had said at Dish Night. “You’d think, if they had something that important to communicate, they’d say it first.”

“Joanna used her last words to send a message from the Other Side,” Mr. Mandrake said. “How can we fail to heed that message? I for one intend to as I complete my new book, Messages from the Other Side.”

“ ‘You’re doing it wrong,’ ” she had said. “ ‘Important words first.’ ” “ ‘Tell Richard… SOS.’ ”

“Joanna had only a few minutes to live,” Mandrake said, “and how did she choose to spend it?

By sharing her vision of the afterlife with us.”

“She didn’t think it was the Titanic,” Kit had said. “She said she wished she could die saving somebody’s life.”

Mandrake must have finished. The organ was playing “Shall We Gather at the River?” and people were starting to file out. Richard followed them into the aisle, and then stood there, staring at Joanna’s casket.

“I don’t think that was what she was trying to tell you,” Vielle had said. “I think she was trying to tell you something good.”

People filed out past him, talking about the flowers, the solo, the casket. “She can’t be gone,” Nina sobbed to a gangly resident, “I can’t believe it.”

“I can’t believe it about fox, can you?” Davis’s message on the answering machine had said. “Warn me before it hits the star,” and Richard hadn’t understood the message at all. “She kept saying, ‘Water,’ ” Vielle had said. “She was really saying, ‘Walter.’ ”

The minister laid a hand on his arm. “Do you wish to say good-bye to the departed?” he whispered. “They’re about to close the casket.” Richard looked up the aisle. Two men in black suits stood by the casket, hands folded in front of them.

“There’ll be a luncheon in the fellowship hall downstairs,” the minister said. “We hope you’ll stay.” He gave Richard’s arm a gentle squeeze and walked up the aisle, nodding to the men as he went. They began moving the spray of flowers.

“The best plan would be to decide in advance what you wanted your last words to be and then memorize them, so you’d be ready,” Joanna had said.

The two men lowered the casket lid.

“Whatever it was must’ve been important,” Mr. Wojakowski had said. “She was in such a hurry to tell you, she almost ran me down.”

“Are you all right?” Eileen said, coming rapidly up the aisle to him.

The men fastened the casket lid shut and began shifting the blanket of flowers so it lay in the center.

“Look, we’re all going to go over to Santeramo’s and get a pizza,” Eileen said, taking his arm and leading him out of the sanctuary and over to the other two nurses. “Why don’t you come with us?”

“No,” he said, looking around for Kit and Vielle. He couldn’t see them.

“It’d do you good,” the nurse who had given him the pamphlet said. “It’d get your mind off it.”

“You need to eat something,” the other nurse said.

“I need to get back to the hospital. Vielle’s giving me a ride back,” he said firmly and set out through the crowd to find her and Kit.

The minister and Joanna’s sister were standing with Mandrake. “—just acknowledging there’s an afterlife isn’t enough,” Joanna’s sister was saying stubbornly to Mandrake. “You have to confess your sins before you can be saved.”

He couldn’t see Vielle anywhere, or Kit. They must have left, or else gone downstairs to the fellowship hall. He started across to the basement steps and ran into Mr. Wojakowski, holding forth to a circle of elderly ladies. “Hiya, Doc,” he said. “Sad, sad thing. I’ve seen a lot of funerals. On the Yorktown, they —”

“When you saw Joanna, that last day,” Richard said, “did she say what she wanted to tell me?”

“Nope. She was in too big a hurry. She didn’t even hear me the first coupla times I yelled at her. ‘Did somebody call battle stations?’ I asked her. At Midway, they’d call battle stations, and boy, did everybody scramble for their tin hats, ’cause they knew in about five minutes all hell’d be breaking loose. They’d run up those gangways so fast they didn’t even take time to put on their pants, scared as rabbits—”

“Joanna was scared?” Richard asked. “She seemed frightened, upset?”

“Joanna? Hell, no. She looked like my bunkmate Frankie Cocelli used to look during a battle. Little skinny guy, looked like you could snap him in two, but not afraid of anything. ‘Let me at ’em!’ he’d shout when the sirens went, and go tearing off like he couldn’t wait to get shot at. Did, too. Did I ever tell you how he got it? This Jap Zero —?”

“And that’s how Joanna looked?” Richard persisted. “Eager? Excited?”

“Yeah. She said she had to go find you, that she had something important to tell you.”