Passage

“But she didn’t say what?”

“Nope. So anyway, this Zero—”

Richard spotted Vielle, just inside the door. “Excuse me,” he said and edged his way through the crowd to her. “I’ve been looking for you,” he said.

“I was outside with Kit. She had to take her uncle home,” Vielle said. “He kept asking her who’d died, over and over.” She shook her head. “Poor man. Or maybe he’s the lucky one. At least he won’t remember this funeral.”

“I need to talk to you,” Richard said. “I need to know exactly what Joanna said to you in the ER.”

“If you’re worried about what Mandrake said, forget it. He’s lying,” Vielle said. “Joanna never voluntarily said two words to him in her life, let alone that NDEs were a message from the Other Side.”

“I know that,” he said impatiently. “I need to know what she said to you.”

“There’s no point in torturing yourself over—”

“The exact words. It’s important.”

She looked curiously at him. “Did something happen?”

“That’s what I’m trying to find out. What did she say? Exactly.”

“She said, ‘Tell Richard,’ ” Vielle said, squinting in her effort to remember. “ ‘It’s…’ The resident was trying to start an airway, and she waved him away. And then, ‘SOS. SOS.’ ”

He grabbed a pen out of his pocket and scribbled the words on the order of service. “ ‘Tell Richard… it’s… SOS, SOS,’ ” he said. “Is that all?”

“Yes. No. Just before that, she grabbed for my hand and said, ‘Important.’ ”

Important.

“Are you okay?” Vielle said.

“Yeah,” he said, staring at the order of service. Tell Richard it’s… what? What had she been trying to tell him when they interrupted her to put the airway in?

“Look, I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to be alone right now,” Vielle said, “especially after that travesty of a funeral.” She glared across the room at Mandrake and Joanna’s sister. “Some of us from the ER are going to go get something to eat. Why don’t you come with us?”

“No,” he said. “I’ve got to get back to the hospital.” He walked quickly out into the parking lot and caught a ride with Mrs. Dirksen from Personnel.

“Wasn’t that a beautiful sermon?” she asked him. “I loved the music.”

“Umm,” Richard said, not listening. Tell Richard it’s… Important. She had been trying to tell him something. Something important.

But what if he was confabulating? Manipulating her words so he didn’t have to face the fact that she had called out to him for help? “The problem with NDEs is, there’s no way to obtain outside confirmation,” Joanna had said.

“And Mr. Mandrake’s eulogy was just wonderful,” Mrs. Dirksen said. She pulled into the hospital parking lot. “Didn’t you think so?”

“Thanks for the ride,” Richard said and dashed up the shortcut to the lab.

He pushed a chair over against the cabinet, climbed up on it, and reached his arm over the edge, feeling far back. There was nothing there. He patted around the top of the cabinet with the flat of his hand and then reached all the way back to the wall and swept his hand along the edge.

It was a piece of cardboard. He scooted it forward with his fingers till he could pick it up. It was a postcard of a tropical sunset, garish pink and red and gold, with palm trees silhouetted against the bright orange ocean. He turned it over, half afraid of what it would say, but it wasn’t Joanna’s handwriting.

Up at the top someone had written in a clear, spiky hand, one under the other, “Pretty Woman, Remember the Titans, What Lies Beneath.” The other hand, not Joanna’s either, was a barely legible scrawl. He couldn’t read the signature, and he had a hard time reading the message. “Having a wonderful time,” it said. “Wish you were here.”

A message from the dead.

He got down off the chair, plugged in the phone, and found Kit Gardiner’s number. “Kit,” he said when she answered. “I need you to come to the hospital. And bring the book.”

46

“Tell me if anything was ever done.”

—Line repeated over and over in Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks

They met in the cafeteria. Richard had called Vielle as soon as he hung up with Kit, and she had suggested it as being closer to the ER in case she was paged. “If it’s open,” she had added. “Which I doubt.”

Amazingly, though, it was. Joanna would never believe this, Richard thought, and it was the first thought of her that didn’t feel like a punch in the stomach.

The cafeteria was nearly empty. Because everyone assumes it’s closed, Richard thought, going through the deserted line for his coffee, but Vielle said, filling a paper cup with Coke, “Everybody’s at the Coping with Post- Trauma Stress Workshop.” They paid a put-out-looking cashier in a pink uniform and sat down at the table in the far corner where Kit was already waiting.

“So,” Vielle said, setting her Coke down. “Where do we start?”

“We reconstruct Joanna’s movements that day,” Richard said. “The last time I saw her was in her office. She was transcribing interviews. I went to tell her I was going to meet with Dr. Jamison at one, but that I’d be back in time for Mrs. Troudtheim’s session. That was at eleven-thirty. At a little after one she told Mr. Wojakowski she had something important to tell me, so important it couldn’t wait till I got back to the lab, even though I’d told her I’d be back before two.”

“I talked to her on the phone around eleven-thirty, too,” Kit said. “It must have been either right before or right after you saw her. I called to tell her I’d found the book she asked me to look for.”

“And how did she seem?” Richard asked.

“Busy,” Kit said. “Distracted.”

“But not excited?” Vielle put in.

Kit shook her head.

“Mr. Wojakowski says that when he saw her she was in a hurry, very excited,” Richard said. “And Diane Tollafson saw her then, too, going down the stairs to the ER, which leaves us with an hour and a half.”

Vielle shook her head. “An hour. I talked to Susy Coplis. She says she saw Joanna getting into an elevator at ten to one, also in a hurry.”

“And excited?” Richard asked.

Vielle shook her head. “She only saw Joanna from the back, but Susy was headed for the same elevator, and she was in a hurry, too, because she was late getting back from lunch, but Joanna was in so much of a hurry that by the time Susy got to the elevator, the doors had already closed.”

“Did she see which floor Joanna was going to?”

“Yes,” Vielle said, pleased, “because she had to stand there and wait for it to come back. She said it went straight up to eight.”

“What’s on eight?” Kit asked.

“Dr. Jamison’s office,” Richard said. “She obviously went up there looking for me and found the note Dr. Jamison had left on her door, saying she’d gone down to the ER, and assumed I’d gone there, too.”

“So that she was on her way there when she ran into Mr. Wojakowski,” Kit put in.

“Yes,” Richard said. “What floor was Susy on when she saw her?”

“Three-west,” Vielle said.

“The ICU’s in the west wing, isn’t it?” Richard asked, and when Vielle nodded, “Did you call Joanna with any