Passage

by Connie Willis

  “What did she say?” Richard asked. “Her exact words?”

  “She said she was really busy, and she didn’t know when she’d be able to get over,” Kit said slowly, trying to remember. “She said, ‘Things are really crazy around here,’ but she didn’t sound like that, like she was harassed and busy.”

  “How did she sound?” Richard asked.

  “Distracted,” Kit said. “When I first told her about the book, I got the idea she didn’t know what I was talking about. She sounded . . . distant, worried. Definitely not excited or happy.”

  “And she didn’t say why she was busy or what she was working on?”

  “No,” Kit said, but she had hesitated before answering, she wasn’t looking at him.

  “She said something,” he said. “We have to hear it, even if it’s bad. What did she say?”

  Kit tamped down the straw in her Coke. “She asked me if I’d found out if there were any fires on the Titanic.”

  “Fires?” Vielle said incredulously. “The Titanic hit an iceberg, it didn’t burn down.”

  “I know,” Kit said, “but she wanted to know if there had been any fires on board after it hit the iceberg.”

  “Were there?” Richard asked curiously.

  “Yes and no,” Kit said. “There had been a fire smoldering in the coal in Boiler Room 6 since before the ship sailed, and there were fireplaces in the first-class lounge and the smoking room, but no other fires.”

  “You said she asked you if you’d found this out?” Richard said. “Had she asked you about a fire before?”

  Kit nodded. “The day I found the book,” she said. “The first time, I mean. I’d found the book four days before, but when she came over to get it, my uncle had hidden it again.”

  “And she asked you about the fires then?”

  “Yes.”

  And four days later she was still on the same track, Richard thought. Whatever it was.

  “That was the day I saw her getting into a taxi,” Vielle said. “She looked like she was in a desperate hurry, and she didn’t have her coat on or her purse. Kit, did she have a coat on when she came to see you?”

  “No, just a cardigan,” Kit said, “but she didn’t come in a taxi. She had her car.”

  “And she asked you about fires on the Titanic?” Richard asked.

  “Yes, and I said I didn’t know of any, but I said I’d check.”

  “And you’re sure she came in her own car and not a taxi?” Vielle said.

  “Yes, because she left in such a hurry. When I came downstairs from looking for the book, she said she had to go, and went out and got into her car without even saying good-bye. I thought she was upset because my uncle had said something to her-he does sometimes, he can’t help himself, it’s the illness-or because I couldn’t find the book—”

  Vielle was shaking her head. “She was already upset when I saw her,” she said. “I wonder where she was going in that taxi? What time did she come to your house?”

  “Two o’clock,” Kit said.

  “Are you sure?” Vielle asked, frowning.

  “Yes. I was surprised to see her. She’d said she didn’t think she’d be over till later on that afternoon. Why?”

  “Because it was a quarter after one when she got in the taxi,” Vielle said, “and she would have had to go wherever she went, come back, get her own car, and drive to your house, which is how far from the hospital?”

  “Twenty minutes,” Kit said.

  “Twenty minutes, by two o’clock,” Vielle finished her sentence. “Which means wherever she was going in that taxi could only have been a few blocks away. What’s a few blocks from the hospital?”

  “What are you getting at, Vielle?” Richard asked. “You think she found out whatever it was four days ago instead of the day she was killed?”

  “Or part of it,” Vielle said, “and then she spent the next three days trying to find out the other part, or trying to prove what she’d discovered. And it had something to do with a fire on the Titanic.”

  “But there wasn’t a fire on the Titanic,” Kit said, “at least not the kind she wanted. When I told her about Boiler Room 6, she asked me if it had caused a lot of smoke, and when I said no, she asked me if there had been any other fires. And she wasn’t excited. She seemed worried and upset. Was she excited when you saw her getting into the taxi, Vielle?”

  “No,” Vielle conceded. “I saw her that night after she got back, and she looked like she’d just had bad news. I was worried about her. I was afraid the project was making her sick.”

  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.”

  Rich
ard 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 would have to reschedule. Mr. Mandrake again, trying to convince her to go see Mrs. Davenport, who had “overwhelming proof of psychic powers she was granted by the Angel of—machine full. No more messages can be recorded.”

  He called the hospital switchboard. All pages were confidential, the operator told him, which under other circumstances would have struck him as funny, and, anyway, no permanent record was kept of the pages.

  He hung up and started through the transcripts piled on the desk.

  Phrases and words were highlighted in yellow. “I felt happy and peaceful,” a Mr. Sanderson had said, “as though I had come to the end of a long voyage and was finally home.” The word “voyage” was highlighted, and elsewhere in the transcript, “water” and “cold,” which both made sense, and “glory,” which didn’t. In the next transcript, “cold” was highlighted again, and “passage” and “a sound like something ripping.” In the next, “darkness” and “smoke” and one entire sentence: “I was standing at the bottom of a beautiful stairway going up as far as I could see, and I knew it led to heaven.”

  Or the Boat Deck, Richard thought. Joanna had clearly been pursuing a connection with the Titanic. Every word and phrase she’d marked, with the exception of “glory,” was Titanic-related. And “smoke.” No, “smoke” could relate to possible fires on the Titanic. Had she seen one? But she hadn’t mentioned a fire in any of her accounts. Or had she? The last two times she’d gone under he’d scarcely listened to her accounts, he’d been so wrapped up in why she’d kicked out. Could there be something in one of them that had triggered the discovery, whatever it was? And made her go tearing off in such a hurry that she’d left the computer on and forgotten her minirecorder?

  But she’d had her last session four days before she died. And gone tearing off somewhere in a taxi, looking upset, had showed up at Kit’s an hour later without her coat and then left abruptly.

  That’s it, he thought, there was something in that NDE, and began going through the stack of transcripts, looking for Joanna’s. They weren’t there, and when he called up her files, neither of her last two accounts were on it. They must still be on the tapes.

  He started sorting through them, but a third of them weren’t labeled, and those that were, were in some kind of code. He would have to take them home and play them. He dumped all the tapes back into the shoe box and carried them, Joanna’s minirecorder, and the computer disks down to the lab and then went back for the transcripts.

  It took him two trips. He debated taking the plant, but it looked too far gone to be saved. He shut and locked the door, carried the transcripts down to the lab, stacked them on the examining table, and started down to see Mrs. Davenport. Halfway to the elevator, he turned around, walked back to the lab for a beaker of water, and went back to Joanna’s office to water the plant.

  “Yes, lost.”

  —SHOLOM ALEICHEM, AFTER THE LAST CARD GAME HE PLAYED ON HIS DEATHBED, ON BEING TOLD HE LOST

  THE FIRST-CLASS SMOKING ROOM,” Mr. Briarley said and led Joanna into a wide, red-carpeted room. It was paneled in dark wood, with deep red leather chairs. At th
e far end, near a blazing fireplace, sat a group of people around a table, playing cards.

  Joanna could not make out who they were because of the bluish haze of smoke that hung in the room, but she could see that they were all adults. Maisie’s not here, she thought, relieved, and then, these must be the first-class passengers who sat playing bridge as the Titanic was going down, Colonel Butt and Arthur Ryerson and—

  But there were women at the table, too, and the people weren’t playing bridge. They were playing poker. She could see the red chips stacked in piles in front of the players and scattered in the middle. And the table wasn’t one of the oak ones of the smoking room. It was one of the cafeteria’s Formica-topped tables.

  Mr. Briarley led her across the oak-paneled room toward them. The players looked up and saw them, and one of them laid down his cards and came to meet them. It was Greg Menotti, dressed in sweatpants and a white nylon jacket. “Where have you been?” he demanded. “There weren’t any lifeboats on the other side. Are there some in second-class?”

  “You’ve met Mr. Menotti, of course,” Mr. Briarley said, leading Joanna past him and on over to the table.

  “I call,” a man in a white waistcoat said, fanning his cards out in front of him, and Joanna saw it was the mustached man who had given her the note. He began raking in a quantity of red chips.

  Mr. Briarley said, “Ms. Lander, may I introduce-,” and the man let go of the chips and stood up, pulling on a dinner jacket.

  “J. H. Rogers,” Joanna said. “I put your message in a bottle and threw it over the side.”

  He shook his head. He knows it didn’t reach his sister, she thought. “I’m sorry, Mr. Rogers,” she said, and he shook his head again.

  “Not J. H. Rogers,” Mr. Briarley whispered in her ear. “Jay Yates. Professional gambler working the White Star liners under a variety of aliases.”

  “You were the one who worked so hard loading the boats,” Joanna said. “You were a hero.”

  “Loading the boats?” Greg Menotti said, pushing himself between Joanna and Yates. “Where are the others?”