Connie Willis - Passage

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’ and ‘glory’ and ‘stairway’—are things she described seeing on the Titanic during her NDEs.”

“Are there any highlighted references to wireless messages?” he asked.

“No,” she said, “even though the word message is in nearly every transcript. I’ve gotta go. Have you heard from Maisie?”

“Not yet,” he said, and started in on the Titanic again, looking for clues. But all he found were more horror stories: the postal clerks going down for more sacks of mail and being trapped by water belowdecks; the steerage passengers being kept in the hold while two crew members led small groups up the second-class staircase to C Deck, through the third-class lounge, across the well deck, into the passage that led to first class and up the Grand Staircase to the Boat Deck; Captain Smith swimming toward one of the boats with a baby in his arms and then disappearing.

Richard didn’t hear from Maisie the next day either, or the next. Vielle called to say that she’d checked with Wanda Rosso, and it had been the patient elevators next to the walkway. “And she says, now that she’s had a chance to think about it, she definitely remembers seeing Joanna press the ‘down’ button.”

I’ll bet, he thought, shaking his head. A classic case of confabulation, of filling in a memory that wasn’t there with images of other times, other elevators, and of no use at all. “And you haven’t found anybody else in the west wing who saw her?” he asked.

“I haven’t had a chance to talk to them. I’m still working on the taxicab thing,” she said and hung up.

All right then, he’d go ask. But nobody else on four-west, or third, or sixth, remembered seeing her. He did find out something. Fifth was completely blocked off for renovation and had been since January. A sign just outside the elevator said the arthritis clinic had been temporarily moved to the second floor of the Brightman Building.