Passage

If they were symbols. There was no point in trying to decipher them if in fact they were something that had come from her memories of the Titanic. She needed to have Kit find out. She made a list of things she needed to know and then called Kit. Mr. Briarley answered. “Do you have a hall pass?” he demanded, and when she told him she needed to speak to Kit, “ ‘He cut a rope from a broken spar and bound her to the mast.’ ”

Kit came on the line. “Sorry,” she said. “He’s been doing ‘The Wreck of the Hesperus’ all morning. I thought it might be a clue, but it’s Longfellow, so he would have taught it in junior English, not senior.”

“ ‘ “Oh, father! I hear the church-bells ring, oh, say, what may it be?” ’ ” Mr. Briarley said in the background. “ ‘ “ ’Tis a fog-bell on a rock-bound coast!” and he steered for the open sea.’ ”

“I need you to look up some things,” Joanna said. “If it’s not too much trouble.”

“I told you,” Kit said. “I want to help.” Joanna read her the list. When she got to the mechanical camel, Kit said, “I know that one. Yes, there’s a photo of it in one of the books.”

“Do you know what deck the gymnasium was on?”

“Yes, the—”

“They say the dead can’t speak,” Mr. Briarley said, “but they can!”

“It was on the Boat Deck,” Kit said. “I found that when I was looking for the Morse lamp.”

All right, scratch the gymnasium. She read her the rest of the list. “I’ll work on these tonight,” Kit said. “Oh, and I found out about the staircases. There were three of them. The rear one was the second-class stairway. It was all the way in the stern, next to the A La Carte Restaurant. The aft stairway was midway between it and the Grand Staircase. It’s described as a less elegant version of the Grand Staircase, with its own skylight and the same gold-and-wrought-iron balustrades.”

And scratch the stairway, Joanna thought, going back to the transcript after they hung up. She must have stored every single thing Mr. Briarley had ever said about the Titanic in long-term memory. Who says we don’t remember what we learned in high school?

She transcribed Mr. Ortiz’s NDE and then called Vielle, but the line was busy. She called her again when she got home and managed to wake her up. “I’m sorry,” Joanna said. “You sound like you’re feeling better.”

“I am,” Vielle said.

“Will you be back at work tomorrow?”

“No,” Vielle said. “I’m still pretty wobbly.” And she must be, Joanna thought after she hung up. Or groggy, because she hadn’t said a word about the dangers of going under.

Tish was still out the next day, too, and nursing subs were impossible to get. “Do you know what they said when I called and asked for a sub?” Richard said when Joanna got to work. “ ‘Spring has sprung.’ So I rescheduled Mr. Sage for tomorrow. It’s supposed to be a twenty-four-hour bug, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know. Vielle’s already been out a couple of days,” Joanna said, thinking it was just as well they’d had to cancel. She needed to finish the list of people who’d had more than one NDE, and she wanted to go over her earlier NDEs and analyze them for possible clues.

She spent all morning in the office doing just that and ignoring the blinking light on her answering machine. At lunchtime she went down to the lab and foraged some lunch from the lab coat pockets of Richard, who had spent the morning like she had, staring at a computer screen. “How’s it going?” she asked him, taking the Butterfinger he gave her.

“Terrible,” he said, leaning back from the screen. “I still haven’t found anything to explain why Mrs. Troudtheim keeps kicking out. Or why you felt the fear you describe. Only a few cortisol receptors were activated.”

“I felt the fear I describe because I was on the Titanic and D Deck was underwater, and I was afraid I couldn’t get back.”

“You’re still having the feeling that what you’re seeing is the Titanic, huh?”

“Yes, and it’s not just a feeling,” she said. “The places I described to you were on the Titanic, and the reason the stairway didn’t have marble steps and a cherub was because it wasn’t the Grand Staircase. It was the second-class staircase, and it was right where it was supposed to be, next to the A La Carte Restaurant. That’s the dining room I saw, and it did have walnut paneling and rose-colored chairs and—”

“How do you know this?” Richard said, sitting forward, and then, accusingly, “Have you been reading about the Titanic? No wonder you keep seeing it.”

“No, of course I haven’t been reading about it,” she said. “I know that would contaminate the NDE. I asked someone—”

“Asked someone?” he said, coming up out of his chair. “At Mercy General? My God, if Mandrake—”

“It’s no one who works here,” Joanna said hastily. “I asked a friend with no connection to the hospital, and I specifically asked her not to volunteer any information, just to confirm whether the things I’ve seen were on the Titanic. And they were, the gymnasium with the mechanical camel and the wireless room and—”