Connie Willis - Passage

“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.”

Richard 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.