“Home sick?” Vielle never went home sick, even when she was on her last legs. “Is she okay? Is it this flu that’s going around?”
“She said to tell you she’ll call you later.”
“Did she say anything about this message she left me?” Joanna asked, though it was unlikely she would have left a message about an NDE with Mr. Mandrake snooping around constantly.
And she hadn’t. “No, nothing about a message. Just that she’d call you,” the woman said and hung up.
Joanna hoped Vielle hadn’t tried to call her to see if she could give her a ride home while she was on the phone with Mrs. Haighton. She called her at home, but there was no answer. She’s got the phone turned down so it won’t disturb her, Joanna told herself, but it worried her. Vielle had to be practically at death’s door for her to have gone home, which meant she was probably too sick to drive.
Joanna called down to the ER again to find out if somebody had driven Vielle home and when she’d left, but no one answered. Joanna wished Mrs. Troudtheim wasn’t scheduled. She’d run over to Vielle’s to check on her. Hopefully, Mrs. Troudtheim’s session wouldn’t take long.
It didn’t. Mrs. Troudtheim kicked out after only one frame and remembered nothing. As soon as she left the lab with her crocheting, Joanna called Vielle again. This time the phone was busy. “She probably took the phone off the hook,” Tish said. “If it’s the same flu my roommate had, it hits you like a ton of bricks. It doesn’t last all that long, but, boy, while it does, you wish you were dead.”
Not exactly reassuring, Joanna thought, and tried again. This time Vielle answered. “Hi, it’s me,” Joanna said. “Spring has sprung, huh?”
“What?” Vielle said blankly.
“The ER told me you’d gone home with the flu. Did you call me to give you a ride home? If so, I am really sorry. I was on the phone, trying to schedule a subject interview.”
“No,” Vielle said. She sounded exhausted to the point of tears. “I didn’t call you.”
“How did you get home?” she asked, and when Vielle didn’t answer, “You didn’t drive yourself home, did you?”
“No. Somebody at the hospital gave me a ride.”
“Good. I’m going to come over,” she said. “Is there anything you want me to bring you? 7Up? Chicken noodle soup?”
“No,” Vielle said. “I don’t want you to come over. I’m fine.”
“Are you sure? I could at least fluff your pillows and make you some tea.”
“No. I don’t want you getting the flu, too. I’m fine. I just decided to stay home for once and get over it instead of ignoring it and ending up really sick. As soon as I hang up, I’m going straight to bed.”
“Good idea,” Joanna said. “Do you need me to do anything here at the hospital? Take any messages down to the ER for you?”
“No. They already know I’m going to be out for a few days.”
“Okay. I’ll stop by in the morning to see if you need anything.”
“No,” Vielle said adamantly. “I’m going to turn the doorbell and the phone off, and try to get some sleep.”
“Okay,” Joanna said doubtfully. “Call me if you need anything. I’ll have my pager on, I promise. And take care of yourself. This flu is supposed to be a real doozy. I don’t want you having a near-death experience.”
“No,” Vielle said, and the exhaustion was back in her voice.
“Okay, you get some rest. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
“I’ll call you,” Vielle said.
As soon as she hung up, Joanna realized she’d forgotten to ask Vielle about the you-know-what she’d originally called about. She considered calling her back, but the last thing Vielle needed to be worrying about was somebody else’s NDE, and anyway, several hours had passed. Mr. Mandrake had probably gotten to whoever it was by now. Joanna called Kit instead and told her she might have been exposed to the flu.
“If I was, it was still worth it. It was so great to get out for a little while,” Kit said. “I found out the answer to one of the questions you asked me last night. The dining room you described—light wood paneling, rose curtains, grand piano—is the A La Carte Restaurant. Here, let me read you the description. ‘In the sumptuous A La Carte Restaurant, pale walnut paneling contrasts beautifully with the rich Rose du Barry carpet. The chairs are covered in rose Aubusson tapestry.’ ”
“Where was it on the ship?”
“On the Promenade Deck, all the way aft,” Kit said. “That’s toward the back of the ship.”
“The stern,” Joanna could hear Mr. Briarley say in the background.
“Right, the stern,” Kit said. “It was next to the second-class stairway. There were definitely two staircases, and I think there may have been three, but I can’t tell for sure. One book mentions an aft stairway and another one a rear stairway. I can’t tell if they’re both referring to the same thing. I do know the Grand Staircase was in the middle of the ship.” And I intend to find it, Joanna thought.
She called Vielle in the morning, but Vielle had apparently taken the phone off the hook like she’d said she was going to. There was no answer, and no messages on her answering machine when she got to work. I should have swung by, she thought, getting dressed to go under. If there was still no message after the session, she would.
“The switchboard just called,” Richard said when she came out of the dressing room. “Tish is out. She went home yesterday afternoon with the flu.”
“Does this mean I can’t go under?” Joanna asked. Good. She’d be able to run over to Vielle’s and make sure she was all right.
“They’re sending a sub up,” Richard said, “as soon as they can find one. The switchboard says a ton of people are out. How do you feel?”
“Fine.”
“Good. I’m raising the dosage this time. That will increase the amount of stimulation in the temporal lobe and alter the endorphin levels. That will alter the stimuli, which should produce a different unifying image.”
It won’t, Joanna thought as the sub nurse, a stolid sixtyish woman, put the headphones on her and pulled the sleep mask down over her eyes without a word. It can’t, because it’s the Titanic, and I’m going to prove it. I’m going to find the Grand Staircase, she thought, and was in the passage, looking toward the door. It was half-shut, light coming from around the edges, and the voices from beyond it were muffled.
“ . . . noise . . . ” she heard a man’s voice say.
“What . . . sound . . . ?” a woman’s voice asked anxiously, and Joanna recognized it as that of the young woman in the nightgown. She pushed open the door.
The young woman was talking to the young man who’d come over to this side to investigate. “You said you heard a noise,” she said, clutching the white sleeve of his sweater. “Did it sound like something crashing down?”
“No,” the young man said. “It sounded like a child’s cry.”
Joanna looked over at the inside wall. There was a life preserver hanging next to the deck light, but she couldn’t read what it said. The stout man in tweeds was standing in the way. She started toward him.
The stout man said, turning to his friend, “What do they say is the trouble?”
Joanna strained to hear what his friend answered, but he spoke too softly, and he couldn’t have said, “We’ve struck an iceberg,” because the stout man sat down in a deck chair and opened his book, but at least he had moved from in front of the life preserver. She put up her hand, shielding her eyes from the glare, and tried to read the lettering.
She had been wrong. There was no lettering around the white ring of the life preserver, and no lettering on the backs of the deck chairs, or the metal lockers, or the doors. But one of them has to lead to the Grand Staircase, she thought, walking along the deck, trying each one.
The first two were locked. The third opened on a bare lightbulb and a metal stairway leading down. A crew stairway, Joanna thought, and tried the next one.
It was locked, too, but
the one after that opened onto a darkened wooden staircase. It was wider than the one she’d climbed up before. The railings and newel posts were more elaborately carved, and rose-colored carpeting covered the stairs.
But the stairs should be marble, she thought, and why is it dark? There were light sconces on the wall, but no switch that she could see. She walked over to the railing and looked up. Far above, several decks up, she thought she caught a glimpse of gray. The skylight? Or the steward’s white jacket? Or something else? There was only one way to find out. Joanna put her hand on the railing and started up the stairs.
It grew progressively darker as she climbed, so that she could barely see the steps in front of her, and nothing of what she was passing. The First-Class Dining Saloon should be here, she thought, rounding the landing. No, that was down on the saloon deck, but the cherub should be here, and the clock with Honour and Glory Crowning Time, and the skylight.
The skylight was there, a dark gray dome above her head as she started up the third flight. She could see its wrought-iron ribs, darker between the curves of darkened glass, but there was no cherub. The newel post was carved wood in the shape of a basket of fruit. There was a clock at the top of the stairs, but it was a square wooden one. Yet this had to be the Grand Staircase. There wouldn’t be two elaborate skylights on one ship. What if Richard’s right, and it is an amalgam? she thought, and opened the door at the head of the stairs.
She was back on the Boat Deck and it was still deserted and dark. There wasn’t even a light on the bridge. She peered toward the bow, trying to make out the flicker of the Morse lamp or catch the scrape of the lantern shutter, but the deck was utterly silent. The boats, off to her right, still hung in their davits, shrouded in canvas.
The boats should have the name of the ship on them, she thought, and tried to raise the canvas on the nearest one, but it was lashed down tightly, the ropes knotted into fist-sized bundles. She couldn’t budge the canvas at all.
She walked along the line of boats, trying to find one whose canvas was looser, but they were all as immovable as the first one. She crossed to the other side of the deck. There was a light on this side. From the bridge? No, closer than that. An open door in the near end of the building that housed the officers’ quarters. Joanna went over to it and looked in.
It was some sort of gymnasium. There were Indian clubs and medicine balls stacked against the inside wall and pieces of exercise equipment scattered around the red-and-white tile floor: a mechanical horse and a rowing machine and a tall black weight-lifting apparatus, the same shape and size as a guillotine. A punching bag hung from the ceiling.
Against the right-hand wall stood a line of stationary bicycles. A young man in a T-shirt and gray sweatpants was riding the middle bicycle, pedaling furiously. On the wall in front of him was a large clock face with numbers and red and blue arrows pointing to them.
The young man had pedaled till both arrows were on the final number. He gave a final burst of effort, bent forward over the handlebars. The red-and-blue numbers swung up to zero, and he stopped pedaling and raised his fists, like a runner after a race. He dismounted and bent to pick up a towel, and she saw his face. “Oh,” she said and sucked in her breath.
It was Greg Menotti.
“I am dying, but without expectation of a
speedy release. Is it not strange that very recently by-gone images, and scenes of early life, have stolen into my mind . . . ?”
—FROM A LETTER WRITTEN BY SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
I KNOW YOU,” Greg Menotti said, dabbing at his face with a towel. He walked over to where she was standing. “Don’t I?”
“I’m . . . ” Joanna said, and for one horrible moment could not think of her name, “ . . . Joanna Lander,” and then remembered he had known her as Dr. Lander. “Dr. Lander.”
“Dr. Lander?” he said, clearly still trying to place her. “You look so familiar . . . oh, wait, I remember you. You were the one who asked me all those questions that day I got hit on the head. You wouldn’t give me your phone number. So what are you doing here? Did you change your mind?”
“Hit on the head?”
“Yeah, by a piece of ice a semi threw off. I was shoveling my car out of a ditch, and it knocked me unconscious, and they took me to the ER, and then you came and asked me a lot of questions about tunnels and lights and angels,” he said. “Don’t tell me you don’t remember.”
“No,” Joanna said slowly. “I remember.”
“I kept trying to tell that to the ER people, but they insisted I’d had a heart attack.” He shook his head, amused. “So is that why you came back? You decided you’d give me your phone number after all?”
“No,” Joanna said, thinking, He doesn’t know he’s dead. “I came to find out the name of this ship.”
“Ship?” he said blankly. “What do you mean, ship? This is a health club. I work out here three times a week. Haven’t you been here before? Here, let me show you around.” He took her arm and led her over to the stationary bicycles. “See this dial? This blue arrow measures distance traveled and this red one measures your speed.”
He led her over to what looked like one of those mechanical bulls they had in bars, only with an uncomfortable-looking hump. “This is a mechanical camel, and over there’s the rowing machine. Excellent cardiovascular exercise. There’s also a squash court, a swimming pool, a massage room—”
Joanna was looking at the stack of Indian clubs and medicine balls. They should have “Property” of and the name of the ship on them. She disengaged her arm from Greg’s grip and went over to look at them. She picked up a medicine ball. It was almost too heavy to lift, but Greg took it easily out of her hands and tossed it against the wall. It rebounded with a loud thud.
Joanna bent and looked at the other medicine ball and then the Indian clubs, but there was no name on any of them. And Greg doesn’t even know he’s on a ship, let alone which ship, she thought. “Greg,” she said. “Have you heard anything?”
He tossed the medicine ball again. “Heard anything?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Like what?” Thud.
“Like engines stopping?” she said. “Or a collision?” Leading, she thought, waiting for his answer.
“A collision? No, thank goodness. Especially since it was one of those Ford Explorers. They’re huge.” He tossed the medicine ball again. “No, just a bump on the head, but it must have really knocked me out cold because the paramedics thought I’d had a heart attack. I told them, ‘I can’t have had a heart attack—’ ”
“I work out three times a week at my health club,” Joanna said and then was sorry because Greg stopped, clutching the heavy medicine ball to his chest, and looked at her fearfully. He went over to the rowing machine, sat down, and began pulling the oars toward him with strong, steady strokes.
“Greg—” Joanna said, and caught a flicker of movement in the corner of her eye. She ran over to the door. The steward. He was walking toward the bridge with a folded note in his hand.
Joanna hurried after him. He walked past the officers’ quarters and turned into an unlit corridor. Joanna followed him, around a corner, down a short, narrow passage, around another corner. Like a maze, Joanna thought. Down another passage, and out onto the other side of the deck. There were boats on this side, too. Was that where the officer was going, to uncover the boats?
No. He knocked on a door and opened it. Golden light spilled out onto the deck, and she could hear the murmur of voices. “You may never get another chance,” the officer said, and reemerged, laughing, and walked down the deck toward the stern, obviously headed for the stairs. Joanna followed him, stopping as she passed to look in the still-open door.
A blond man in a white shirt sat with his back to the door, hunched over a table, tapping steadily on a telegraph key. His coat was slung over the back of his chair and he was wearing headphones, old-fashioned ones with a band around the back of his head as well as over the top. Above his head, a
blue spark jumped the gap between two metal struts, flickering and snapping as he tapped the key.
This is the wireless room, Joanna thought, forgetting all about the officer. And the man was Jack Phillips, busily sending out messages. Not SOSs yet, Joanna thought, looking at the blue spark, dancing merrily above the wireless operator’s head, and remembering the officer’s laughter. And Jack wasn’t wearing his lifejacket yet.
These must be passenger messages he was sending, the backlog that had built up over the weekend. Joanna remembered Mr. Briarley telling the class that the wireless was such a novelty the passengers all wanted to send one, and Jack Phillips had been so busy the night of the collision that, when the Californian had tried to cut in with an ice message, he had cut them off, he had told them to shut up, that he was working the relay station, Cape Race.
And SOSs were simple. Three dots, three dashes, three dots. She remembered Mr. Briarley telling them that was why SOS had been chosen for the distress call, because it was so simple, anyone could send it. These messages weren’t simple. “Having wonderful time,” Joanna thought, listening to the complicated tapping. “Wish you were here.”
She leaned forward, trying to hear the pattern, trying to decipher the message, but he was tapping too fast for her to be able to separate out the dots from the dashes, and the buzzing from the spark overhead interrupted her concentration.
She walked up closer behind him, and as she did, she could hear a low murmur. He’s saying the letters as he taps them out, she thought. “C,” he said, making a rapid series of taps, “Q . . . D . . . C . . . Q . . . D.” Not a word. A code? The call letters of the Titanic?
There was a thud from somewhere out on deck. Greg Menotti, Joanna thought, throwing the medicine ball against the wall of the gymnasium, and glanced behind her. Jack Phillips didn’t look up or pause in his sending.
He can’t hear with his headphones on, Joanna thought, any more than I can hear Richard or Tish with my headphones on, and when the Titanic was sinking, he had been so intent on sending he hadn’t even noticed the stoker sneaking up behind him, attempting to steal his lifejacket. Joanna took another step closer, trying to hear his murmurings over the heavy thuds. “Q . . . D . . . ”
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