Passage

And four days later, excited and happy, she had run down to her death in her eagerness to tell him something.

“Are you finished with this?” a voice said. Richard turned around. The cafeteria lady was standing there, pointing grimly at his coffee.

He nodded, and she snatched it and the Coke cups off the table and wiped at the table with a gray rag. “You need to finish up. We close in ten minutes,” she said, and went over to stand pointedly by the door.

“We need more time,” Vielle said.

Richard shook his head. “What we need is more data. We need to find out where she went in the hospital.”

“And in that taxi,” Vielle said.

Richard nodded. “We need to find out what she was doing on three-west, what she was looking for in the transcripts—”

“And what happened between her and my uncle while I was upstairs,” Kit said.

“Will he remember?” Richard asked.

“I don’t know,” Kit said. “Sometimes a direct question, if it’s casual enough—I’ll try.”

“I want you to go through the textbook, too,” Richard said, “and see if you can find anything in it about the Titanic.”

“But she’d lost interest in the textbook,” Kit said.

“Maybe, or maybe she’d remembered what was in it and no longer needed it,” Richard said. “And see what else you can find out about a fire. The ship was listing. Maybe a candle in one of the cabins fell over and caught the curtains on fire.”

“I’ll talk to the staff,” Vielle said, “and see if anybody coded that day, and if anybody else saw Joanna. And I’ll try to find the driver of the taxi she took.”

“And I’ll go through the transcripts,” Richard said.

“No,” Kit said, and he looked at her in surprise. “I can go through the transcripts. You’ve got to keep working on your research.”

“Finding out what she said is more important—” Richard began.

She shook her head violently. “There’s only one thing Joanna could have had to tell you that was so important it couldn’t wait, and that was that she’d figured out what the NDE is, and how it works.”

“How it—?” Richard said. “But Joanna couldn’t read the scans or interpret the neurotransmitter data—”

Kit cut him off. “Maybe not the actual mechanics of the NDE, but the essence of it, the connection. She was determined to find out what my uncle said in class about the Titanic. She was convinced it was the key to the NDE, to how it worked. That was why she wanted the textbook, because she thought it might help her remember,” she said, and her earnestness reminded him of Joanna, saying, “The Titanic means something. I know it.” And he had said, “It’s a content-less feeling. It’s caused by the temporal lobe.”

“You think she discovered the connection?” Richard asked.

Kit nodded. “It’s the only thing that would have made her try so hard to tell you when she…” Kit faltered. “She has to have remembered the connection. Maybe she found something in the transcripts, or someone she talked to said something that clicked, but whatever it was, it had something to do with the NDEs and the scans, so you have to keep working on them.”

“All right,” he said. “And I’ll talk to Mrs. Davenport. What else?”

“You need to check her messages,” Vielle said. “Someone might have called her. People who’d had NDEs were always calling her.”

Richard wrote down “answering machine” and “switchboard.” “We’ll meet again—when?” he asked. “Friday? Does that give everybody time?”

Kit and Vielle both nodded. “Same time, same place?” Vielle asked.

“We’re closed on Fridays,” the cafeteria lady called over from the door. She tapped her watch. “Five minutes.”

“In the lab,” Richard said, pushing his chair under the table. “Or, if anybody finds out anything before then, we call and set up something sooner.”

The cafeteria lady was holding the door open. They filed through it under her disapproving eye. “Do you want to come up to Joanna’s office with me and get the transcripts now?” Richard asked Kit.

“I can’t,” she said with an anxious glance at her watch. “The Eldercare person can only stay until four. I’ll come get them tomorrow morning. Will ten work?”

“Sure,” he said.

“I’ll see you then,” she said and hurried toward the elevator.

“And I’ve got to get back to the ER,” Vielle said. “I’ll call you if I find anybody else who saw Joanna.”

She started for the stairs. Halfway there, she stopped, said, “Damn!” and came back toward Richard.

“What’s the matter?” he said.

“I keep forgetting I can’t get there from here,” she said, exasperated. “They’re painting the whole first floor. It’s completely blocked off.” She walked past him and headed for the elevator. “I’ve got to go up to second and take the service elevator down.”

And that was exactly the problem, he thought, looking after her. Half the hospital’s stairs and walkways were blocked off at any given time, and even when they weren’t, it was nearly impossible to get from one part of Mercy General to another. And Joanna had had Mandrake on her tail. She might have ducked into an elevator or down a hall to avoid him, or taken a shortcut to avoid a blocked-off walkway. Which meant her having been seen on three-west didn’t mean a thing. Unless we’ve got a map of Mercy General, and not just a map. A map of Mercy General that day. Which meant talking to Maintenance.

He went down to the basement and talked to a man named Podell, who clearly thought Richard was there to complain about something and who eventually reluctantly produced a work schedule. “They may not have been painting those when it says, though,” he said helpfully.

But it was a start. Richard copied the schedule down and stuck it in his pocket. “Do you have a map?”

Podell stared incredulously at him. “Of Mercy General?”

Richard settled for asking Podell the quickest way to get up to three-west, and carefully writing his instructions down, then going up to Medicine to see Mrs. Davenport. She wasn’t there—she was out having a CAT scan. Richard asked how long she would be and then how to get to eighth, writing those instructions down, too, and drawing the beginnings of a rudimentary map of the halls and elevators as he went.

He did the same thing on eighth, opening doors to various linen closets and storage rooms, and when he found a stairway, following it as far down as it would go. By the time he went back to the lab, the paper was a maze of crisscrossing lines and squares. He put them on the computer, sketching in floors and the walkways, marking the routes he’d taken and the ones he knew, and outlining the sections he needed to fill in.

All of which was an elaborate form of stalling, so he wouldn’t have to go into Joanna’s office and get the transcripts. But Kit would be there in the morning to pick them up, and it had to be done sooner or later. He got the keys, and went down to her office.

He hadn’t been in it since she died. He stood outside, bracing himself, for several minutes, before he unlocked the door and went in. Her computer was still on. Books and stacks of transcripts were heaped on either side of it, with a shoe box full of tumbled tapes on top. Joanna’s minirecorder lay next to it, the tape bay open as if she had just popped a tape out. The message light on her answering machine was flashing.

It was impossible not to imagine, looking at the office, that she had not simply stepped out for a second. That she would not be right back, appearing in the doorway, breathless, saying, “I’m sorry I’m late. Did you get my message?”

But the messages on the machine were a week old, the plant on top of the file cabinet was withered and brown, and he would have to figure out the message himself. Unless whomever she’d gone to see had called her, and she’d listened to the message and then not erased it. He went over to the answering machine and stood there, his finger poised above the “play” button, bracing himself for the sound of her voice. But her voice wouldn’t be on it, only the voices of the people leaving the messages and, he hoped, a clue. He hit “play.”

Mr. Mandrake with a long tirade about Joanna never returning his calls. Mr. Wojakowski. Mrs. Haighton’s housekeeper, relaying the message that Mrs. Haighton couldn’t come Wednesday, she had a PEO meeting and