Passage

But how exactly? By piecing together bits and pieces and conversations. Kit brought him the list of garden references she’d found in among the transcripts and another one headed “Abrupt NDE Returns.”

“That’s from several weeks ago. I’ve already seen it,” he told Kit, but when he looked at it again, he noticed Amelia Tanaka’s name on the list, and when he checked her account against that session’s scans, he found she’d come out of the NDE-state on her own, and that theta-asparcine was present.

He went through all of her NDEs and then started on Mr. Sage’s. Testimony was of no use with Mr. Sage, but when Richard checked the scans, he found that he’d gone straight from the NDE-state to waking twice. Both times theta-asparcine had been present. But it wasn’t present in Mr. Pearsall’s NDEs, or Mr. O’Reirdon’s.

He worked on the scans until his eyes began to burn, and then walked over to the west wing and mapped the rest of the floors, asking assorted nurses and orderlies, “How can I get up to eight-east from here?” and, “What’s the quickest way down to the ER?,” jotting down the answers, and adding the routes to his map.

In between, he pored over Maisie’s list of wireless messages. They were almost unbearable to read, a litany of increasing disaster and desperation: “We are on the ice.” “We are putting the women off in boats.” “Require immediate assistance.” “Sinking fast.” “SOS. SOS. SOS.”

There was a clue here somewhere, a connection. Joanna had had a reason for asking Maisie to look them up, but he was as dense as the ships replying to the Titanic’s SOSs had been. “What is the matter with you?” the Olympic had asked, and then unbelievably, “Are you steering south to meet us?” The Frankfurt had been so clueless that the wireless operator had snapped at him, “You fool, stand by and keep out!” and even the Carpathia’s operator had asked, “Should I tell my captain?” Thick-headed fools, all of them, unable to figure out a perfectly simple message. Like me, he thought.

Vielle called. “I found somebody else who saw Joanna. Wanda Rosso. She’s a radiologist. She says she saw Joanna on four-west around eleven-thirty.”

“Where on four-west?” Richard asked, calling up the map of Mercy General.

“She was getting into an elevator.”

There were two banks of patient elevators and two service elevators on four-west. “Which elevator?” he asked.

“She didn’t say,” Vielle said. “I assume the one by the walkway.”

“Ask her,” Richard said. “Did this Wanda know in which direction Joanna was going?”

“She couldn’t remember,” Vielle said. “She thinks she remembers the ‘down’ arrow being lit, but she’s not sure. I asked her if Joanna looked excited or happy, and she said she didn’t notice anything except that she seemed to be in a hurry because she kept looking up at the floor numbers and tapping her foot.”

In a hurry, and going somewhere in the west wing. But where? Third was orthopedics, which didn’t seem likely, and below that it was all administrative offices. And this Wanda had said she wasn’t sure which arrow was lit. Fourth was Peds, and she hadn’t gone to see Maisie. Sixth was cardiac care, a possibility as far as NDEers were concerned, but Joanna hadn’t taken her minirecorder with her.

“Did she say if Joanna had a notebook with her?”

“No.”

“Did you find out about the tape?” he asked. “Do the police have it?”

“No,” Vielle said, and there was an odd change in her voice. “Her clothes were disposed of.”

“Disposed of?” he said. “Are you sure? It was evidence.”

“There’s no case,” Vielle said. “The suspect’s dead, and there were eyewitnesses, so there was no reason to keep it.”

“But they wouldn’t have disposed of the things in her pockets,” he said. “They’d have returned them to her next of kin. Maybe her sister has the tape. And listen, I’ve been thinking, there may be notes, too. Joanna always took notes when she did interviews, and we know she didn’t have her recorder with her. There may be a notebook, or a piece of paper—”

“It was all disposed of,” Vielle said, and her voice was clipped, definite. “In the contaminated-waste bin.”

“The contaminated-waste bi—?” he said and then realized what Vielle had been trying to tell him without coming out and saying it. Joanna’s clothes had been soaked in blood, and anything in her cardigan pockets would have been drenched, too. Ruined. Unreadable.

“I’m sorry,” Vielle said. “I still haven’t found the taxi driver, but I’ve got a couple of leads. I’ll call you as soon as I’ve got anything.”

“Yeah,” he said, and went back to the Titanic, looking up “A La Carte Restaurant,” “gymnasium,” “First-Class Dining Saloon.” Jim Farrell, a young Irish immigrant, had rounded up four young girls he’d promised to look after and led them all the way from steerage, through the First-Class Dining Saloon and a maze of passages and decks and stairwells to the Boat Deck, and then stepped back, unable to go in the boat himself. He looked up “Boat Deck.” Archibald Butt and Colonel Grade and a gambler named J. H. Rogers had loaded boat after boat, handing babies and children down as the boats were lowered along the side.

Maisie didn’t call, which surprised him. He hadn’t really thought she’d be able to find out what Vielle, with all her staff connections, couldn’t, but he hadn’t expected that to stop her from calling him. But there were no messages on his answering machine, no urgent pages. He wondered if she was all right. She had seemed to take the news about Joanna’s death in stride, but with kids, it was hard to tell, and it sometimes took bad news a while to sink in.

When she still hadn’t called by the next afternoon, Richard ran over to see her. She wasn’t there—she was out having an echocardiogram—but the nurse (not the one who’d shooed them out of the room) assured him she was doing fine. “She’s cheered up a lot these last few days,” she said, smiling. “We’ve really had to sit on her to see that she stays in bed.”

“Tell her Dr. Wright said hi, okay? And that I’ll come see her later,” he said, took a few steps toward the elevator and then turned back, looking appropriately confused. “I need to get down to the ER,” he said. “What’s the easiest way to get there?”

He repeated the process with a nurse and two orderlies, getting three completely different answers, and went back to the lab to add them to the map. He had all of Main and the west wing done and the top four floors of the east wing, and the map was starting to look as complicated as his diagrams of the scans, and just as intelligible.

Joanna had left her office and gone down to two-west and then later had gone up to Dr. Jamison’s office, and, from there, down to the ER. And in between? He had no idea. All he could deduce for sure was that it hadn’t been anything on four-west, since she had been heading down—or up—from there, and that she had probably come down to four-west from her office and taken the walkway across. If she had in fact been coming from her office, if she hadn’t gone somewhere else first.

He worked on the map awhile and then listed the neurotransmitters present in the theta-asparcine scans, looking for commonalities. There weren’t any. But there was a connection somewhere. Joanna had seen it, and the answer lay somewhere in the scans or the transcripts or her NDEs. Or Joseph Leibrecht’s, he thought, and read the crewman’s account that Kit had left. He had seen a whale and a bird in a cage and apple blossoms.

Richard went back to the scans, trying to determine if there was any similarity among the non-theta- asparcine scans. There wasn’t. He fished the journal Dr. Jamison had left out of the mess on his desk and read the article on theta-asparcine. An artificial version had been produced and was being tested to determine its function, which was still not known.

It has something to do with NDEs, he thought. But what? Was it an inhibitor, after all? Or was its presence a side effect of the temporal-lobe stimulation or the acetylcholine?

He worked till he could justify going home, and then called Kit, who hadn’t found anything either. “It definitely has something to do with the Titanic, though,” she said, sounding tired. “All the words she’s highlighted relate to it.”

“Is that Ms. Lander?” Mr. Briarley said in the background. “This is the second time she’s been late for class.”

“It’s Dr. Wright, Uncle Pat,” Kit said patiently.

“Tell her the answer is C, the very mirror image.”

“I will,” Kit said, and to Richard, “I’m sorry. What I was saying was that everything she’s marked—‘elevator’