Passage

anyone else who’d seen Joanna. “Nobody,” she said, bandaging a little girl’s elbow. “I talked to a taxi driver who picked up a woman without a coat, but he couldn’t remember what she looked like, so it may not have been Joanna.”

“Did he say where he took her?”

She shook her head. “They’re not supposed to give out that information except to the police. There’s a guy on the force I’m going to call to see if he can help.”

Richard went back upstairs through the main building, noting down the locations of the elevators and stairways as he did. When he got back to the lab, Kit was waiting outside the door. “What are you doing here?” he asked.

“I found something,” she said, “and I was going to call you, but the Eldercare person came—I forgot to call them back this morning and tell them not to come—so I thought it would be easier if I showed you.”

He unlocked the door, and they went inside.

“I found a couple of odd transcripts. Most of them are in a question-and-answer form,” she handed him three stapled sheets, “but this one’s a monologue, and the name on it, Joseph Leibrecht, isn’t on her interview list.”

Joseph Leibrecht. The name sounded familiar. He looked at the transcript. A whale, apple blossoms. “This isn’t an interview,” he said. “It’s an account of the NDE a crewman on the Hindenburg had.” He wondered what it was doing in with the transcripts. He thought she’d said it had been recorded too long after the fact to be useful, but she had highlighted the words sea and fire. The fire again.

“You said you found a couple of odd transcripts?” he asked Kit.

“Yes, I made a list of patients Joanna interviewed during the last few months, and there’s one who comes up several times.”

“What’s his name?” Richard asked, grabbing for a pencil.

“Well, that’s just it,” Kit said, taking a transcript out of her bag. “The name on the transcript is Carl, but I don’t know if that’s a first or a last name. All the other patients are listed by a first initial and a last name, and the transcripts are different from the others, too.” She pointed to a section. “The other ones are all in the form of questions and answers, but this one’s just phrases and single words, and it doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

Richard looked at the line she was pointing at. “Half?… red… patches…” it read. “When were these interviews, or whatever they were?” he asked.

Kit consulted her list. “The first one’s dated December fourth, and the last one’s the eighteenth of this month.”

“Then whoever he is, there’s a chance he was still in the hospital that day,” Richard said.

“Or she,” Kit said. “If Carl’s the last name, it might be a woman.”

“You’re right,” Richard said and picked up the phone. “Let’s see if Vielle knows who it is.” He dialed the ER, expecting he wouldn’t be able to get through and would have to page her, but a nurse’s aide answered and said she’d get her, and after a short interval, Vielle came on the line. “Did you ever hear Joanna mention a patient named Carl?” he asked her.

“Yes,” Vielle said, “but that can’t be who she went to see.”

“Why not?”

“Because he wasn’t in a position to tell her anything. He was in a coma.” A coma. “He muttered things sometimes,” Vielle explained, “and she had the nurses write down what he said.”

And that explained the disjointed words and phrases, the question marks after the words. They represented a nurse’s best guess at what Carl had mumbled. “Did you talk to your friend on the police force?”

“No,” she said, “but I talked to the crash team coordinator, and there were no codes that morning, so if she went to see an NDEer, it must have been one she’d interviewed befo—what?” she said to someone else, and then, “Shooting accident, gotta go.” She hung up.

“Dead end,” Richard said, putting down the receiver. “Carl’s in a coma.”

“Oh,” Kit said, disappointed. “Well, anyway, here are the names of the patients.” She started to hand the list to him and then took it back. “And one of them…” she ran her finger down the list, “mentioned fog. I thought that might be the source of her asking me if it had been foggy the night of the Titanic.” She found the name. “Maisie Nellis.”

Maisie.

“I think I know where Joanna went,” he said, starting for the door, and then stopped. He didn’t even know if Maisie was still in the hospital. “Hang on,” he said to Kit and picked up the phone and called the switchboard operator. “Do you have a Maisie Nellis listed as a patient?” he asked her.

“Yes—”

“Thanks,” he said and jammed the receiver down. “Come on, Kit,” he said.

He told her about Maisie on the way down to four-west. “She told me she’d seen fog in her NDE the first day I met her, and Joanna told me she saw fog in her second NDE, too.” They reached Peds.

The door to 422 was standing open. “Maisie?” he said, leaning in. The room was empty, the bed stripped, and folded sheets and a pillow at the foot of it. The tops of the nightstand and the bed table had been cleaned off, and the door to the closet stood open on emptiness.

She’s dead, he thought, and it was like Joanna all over again. Maisie’s dead, and I didn’t even know it was happening.

“Hi,” a woman’s voice said, and he turned around. It was Barbara. “I saw you go past and figured you were looking for Maisie,” she said. “She’s been moved. Up to CICU. She coded again, and this time there was quite a bit of damage. She’s been moved to the top of the transplant list.”

“The top of the list,” he said. “She gets the next available heart?”

“She gets the next available heart that’s the right size and the right blood type. Luckily Maisie’s Type A, so either a Type A or a Type O will work, but you know what a shortage of donors there is, particularly of children.”

“How long before a heart’s likely to become available?” Kit asked.

“There’s no way to tell,” Barbara said. “Hopefully, no more than a few weeks. Days would be better.”

“How’s her mother taking all this?” Richard asked.

Barbara stiffened. “Mrs. Nellis—” she started angrily and then stopped herself and said, “It’s possible to carry anything to extremes, even positive thinking.”

“Can Maisie have visitors?” Richard asked.

Barbara nodded. “She’s pretty weak, but I’m sure she’d love to see you. She asked about you the other day.”

“Do you know if Joanna was down here to see Maisie on the day she was killed?” he asked.

“I don’t know. I wasn’t on that day. I know she’d been down to see her or called her or something the day before because Maisie was all busy looking up something for her in her disaster books.”

“You don’t know what it was, do you?”

“No,” Barbara said. “Something about the Titanic. That was Maisie’s latest craze. Do you know how to get to CICU?” She gave them complicated instructions, which Richard jotted down for his map, and they started toward the elevator.

“Dr. Wright, wait,” Barbara said, hurrying after them. “There’s something you need to know. Maisie doesn’t—” she said, and then stopped.

“Maisie doesn’t what?”

She bit her lip. “Nothing. Forget it. I was just going to warn you she looks pretty bad. This last episode—” she stopped again.

“Then maybe I shouldn’t—”

“No. I think seeing you is just what she needs. She’ll be overjoyed.” But she wasn’t. Maisie lay wan and uninterested against her pillows, a daunting array of monitors and machines crowded around her, nearly filling the room. Her TV was on, and the remote lay on the bed close to her hand, but she wasn’t watching the screen, she was staring at the wall below it. Her breath came in short, shallow pants.

There were at least six bags hanging from the IV pole. The tubing ran down to her foot, and when he looked at her hand, he could see why. It looked like she had been in a fight, the whole back of it covered in overlapping purple and green and black bruises. A metal ID tag hung around her neck.