Passage

gathered up the files. “I’ll be in my office if you need me. Otherwise, I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?” he said, surprised.

“Yes. Why? Was there something else you needed me for this afternoon?”

“No,” he said, frowning. “No. I’m going to look at the receptor sites and then check Amelia’s readouts to see what endorphins were present.”

Joanna went back to her office to transcribe the interview, but first she needed to call the rest of the volunteers. She set up interviews with Mr. Sage, Ms. Coffey, and Mrs. Troudtheim, calling Mrs. Haighton, who was apparently never home, in between. Vielle called at four. “Can you come over early?” she asked. “Say, at six- thirty?”

“I guess,” Joanna said. “Look, if you want to get to bed early, we can make this another night.”

“No,” Vielle said. “I just want to talk to you about something.”

“What?” Joanna said suspiciously. “That nail-gunner didn’t show up and shoot somebody, did he?”

“No. The nail-gunnee showed up, though, and you should have seen the police officer they sent over to arrest him. Gorgeous! Six foot three, and looks just like Denzel Washington. Unfortunately, I was cleaning pus out of an infected toe and didn’t get to meet him.”

“Is Denzel what you wanted to talk to me about?” Joanna asked, amused.

“Oops, gotta go. Van rollover. Wouldn’t you know it? Right as I’m supposed to get off.”

“If you’re going to be late,” Joanna began, “we could—”

“Six-thirty. And can you pick up some cream cheese?” she said and hung up.

And what was that all about? Dish Night was completely informal. Half the time they didn’t start the movies till halfway through the evening, so if Vielle wanted to talk, they could do it anytime. And earlier she’d done everything she could to avoid talking.

She’s found out what Greg Menotti was talking about, and it’s something terrible, Joanna thought, so terrible she couldn’t tell me in the ER.

But when she’d asked her, she’d genuinely seemed to have forgotten about him. She’s transferring out of the ER, Joanna thought. Oh, now she was letting her imagination completely run away from her.

She typed up Amelia’s account of her NDE with annotations. When she got to the “oh, no’s” on the tape, she stopped, rewound, and listened to it two more times. Fear, and despair, and something else. Joanna rewound again, and pressed “play.” “Oh, no, oh, no, oh, no.” Knowledge, Joanna thought, like someone has just told her something she can’t bear to hear.

She went back to the lab, got Mr. Wojakowski’s file from Richard, and looked up the name of the nurse who’d assisted at Mr. Wojakowski’s session. Ann Collins. It wasn’t anybody Joanna knew. She called the hospital operator and found out what floor she was subbing on, but she’d gone off-shift at three. “You have several messages,” the operator said sternly.

“Sorry,” Joanna said. “What are they? I think there’s something wrong with my pager.” The operator told her. Mr. Mandrake, of course, and Mrs. Davenport, and Maisie. “She said to tell you she’d found out something important about…” she hesitated, “the Hildebrand?”

“The Hindenburg,” Joanna said. She looked at her watch. It was after five. If she went to see Maisie now, she was likely to get caught, and she still hadn’t transcribed her conclusions. She’d better finish the account first, and run by Maisie’s room on her way out.

Just before she left, she tried Mrs. Haighton one more time, and, amazingly, got an answer. “This is her housekeeper. Mrs. Haighton’s at her Symphony Guild board. Is this Victoria? She said to tell you she’ll be late to the meeting tomorrow because she has an Opera Colorado meeting.”

“I’m not Victoria,” Joanna said, and asked her to tell Mrs. Haighton to please call her tomorrow, gathered up her coat and bag, and started down to see Maisie. As she got out of the elevator next to the walkway on fifth, she saw Mr. Mandrake down the hall, expounding on the afterlife to a patient in a wheelchair. She stepped hastily back in the elevator, punched three, and took the third-floor walkway instead, cutting through Medicine and the Burn Unit, and up the service stairs to fourth.

Maisie was lying back against her pillows, reading Peter Pan. All very innocent, but there was an air of secretiveness, of hurried movement about the scene, as if she would have caught Maisie turning somersaults or swinging from the traction bars above her bed if she’d gotten there a moment earlier. “You rang, kiddo?” Joanna said, and Maisie instantly shut the book and sat up.

“Hi,” she said happily. “I knew you’d come. Nurse Barbara didn’t want to page you, but I told her you’d want to know this right away. You know the guy on the Hindenburg who had the NDE?”

“Yes. Did you find out his name?”

“Not yet,” Maisie said, “but I figured out a way to. The librarian at my school, Ms. Sutterly, always brings me books to read, so the next time she comes I’m going to ask her if she can look it up. She’s really good at finding things out.”

And you’re really good at thinking up reasons to get me down here, Joanna thought.

“Wasn’t that a good idea?” Maisie said.

“Yes. When you find out from her, you can have me paged.” And not before, she added silently. She started for the door.

“Wait, you can’t go yet,” Maisie said. “You just got here. I’ve got a whole bunch of stuff to tell you.”

“Two minutes,” Joanna said, “and then I have to go.”

“Are you going out on a date?”

“No, I’m going to Dish Night.”

“Dish Night? What’s that?”

Joanna explained how she and Vielle got together to eat popcorn and watch movies. “So I’ve really got to go,” she said, patting Maisie’s feet through the covers. “Bye, kiddo. I’ll come see you tomorrow, and you can tell me all about the Hindenburg.”

“Not the Hindenburg,” Maisie said. “I don’t like it anymore.”

Joanna looked at her, surprised. “How come?” Was it possible a disaster had gotten too grisly even for her?

“It was boring.”

“So what are you reading now?” Joanna asked, leaning over to pick up Maisie’s discarded book. “Peter Pan. Good book, huh?”

Maisie shrugged. “I think the part where Tinkerbell almost dies and they save her just by everybody believing in fairies is stupid.”

I can imagine, Joanna thought.

“I like the part where Peter Pan says to die would be an awfully big adventure, though,” she said. “Did you know there were a whole bunch of babies on the Lusitania?”

“The Lusitania? You mean the ship that got torpedoed by the Germans in World War I?”

“Yes,” Maisie said happily. She reached under the covers and pulled out an enormous book with a tornado on the cover. Which explained the sensation of abruptly checked movement Joanna had felt when she walked in. “There were all these babies on the ship,” Maisie said, opening the book. “They tied lifejackets to their bassinets, but it didn’t do any good. The babies still all drowned.”

Well, so much for the “too grisly” theory. “This is Dean and Willie,” Maisie said, showing Joanna a picture of two little boys in white sailor suits. “They drowned, too. And here’s the funerals.” Joanna looked dutifully at the photo of a phalanx of priests in white surplices officiating over rows of coffins.

“One of the Lusitania stewards kept saying everything was all right, that they weren’t sinking, and there was nothing to worry about,” Maisie said. “He shouldn’t have done that, should he?”

“No, not if the ship was sinking.”

“I hate when people lie. You know that dog named Ulla on the Hindenburg?”

“The German shepherd?”

Maisie nodded. “He didn’t get saved. The mom and dad just said he did. He got burned up, and the mom and dad got another German shepherd and told their kids it was Ulla. So they