Passage

As if he were getting farther and farther away, Joanna thought.

“By the time I sent you that message he’d pretty much stopped altogether, except for a few unintelligible words,” she said. “That’s really why I called you that day, to ask you if you wanted to call it off.”

Call it off. Joanna thought of the wireless operator in the Marconi shack, hunched over the telegraph key, tirelessly sending.

“He hasn’t said anything for nearly a week.”

“Can I see him?” Joanna asked. “Is his wife in with him?”

Guadalupe shook her head. “She went out to the airport. His brother’s coming in. Sure, go on in.”

There were three more bags hanging from the IV stand and two more monitors. The IV monitor began to beep, and a nurse Joanna didn’t know bustled in to check his IV lines. “You can talk to him,” she said to Joanna.

And say what? “My best friend was shot by a rogue-raver?” “This little girl I know is dying?” “The Titanic’s going down?”

Mrs. Aspinall came in, accompanied by a tall, bluff man. “Oh, hello, Dr. Lander,” she said and went over to the bed and took Carl’s bruised and battered hand. “Carl,” she said, “Martin’s here.”

“Hello, Carl,” Martin said, “I got here as soon as I could,” and Joanna almost expected Carl to stir, in spite of the mask and the feeding tube, and murmur, “Too far for him to come,” but he didn’t. He lay, gray and silent in the bed, and Joanna was suddenly too tired to do anything but go home and go to bed.

On the way there, it occurred to her with a kind of horror that she might be catching the flu. Richard won’t let me go under if I’m sick, she thought, but in the morning she felt much better, and when she got to work, there was a message from Betty Peterson on her answering machine. “I just realized I never told you the name of the book: Mazes and Mirrors.”

Mazes and Mirrors. Joanna could instantly see the title in her mind’s eye, lettered in gold across a blue cover, though oddly, the name didn’t conjure up the rest of the cover. Joanna squinted, trying to envision a ship under the title and then Queen Elizabeth with a mustache and glasses, but neither seemed right. It will probably turn out to be Windsor Castle, Joanna thought. But at least we know the title.

“I told you it began with an M,” Betty’s voice was saying. “And there it was, in the margin, next to Nadine’s picture. Just a minute, let me read it to you. I’ve got it right here.” There was a pause, and her voice continued, “ ‘Betty, just think, no more of Mr. Briarley’s boring stories about the Titanic and no more Mazes and Mirrors! Your pal in second period, Nadine.’ You still need to call me, though. I talked to my little sister and she told me this thing about Mr. Briarley. Oh, and I called Blake Dirkson. He was the year ahead of us. He couldn’t remember the name of the book either, but he said it had one of those quill pens and a bottle of ink on the cover. He smoked a lot of pot in high school, though, so I don’t know. Anyway, call me. ’Bye.”

A quill pen and a bottle of ink? Oddly, that seemed vaguely familiar, too. We’re all confabulating, she thought. She called Betty, but the line was busy again. Which isn’t a surprise, Joanna thought, considering how long she talks when she’s just leaving a message, and called Kit.

“Mazes and Mirrors,” Kit said. “Great. That’ll make it a lot easier.”

“She says she thinks she remembers a picture of Queen Elizabeth in a ruff on the cover, or a quill pen and a bottle of ink. I still think it’s a ship, but it could be one of the others.”

“I’ll get right on it,” Kit said. “I haven’t been able to find out anything on a post office, but I’m still looking.”

And if she couldn’t locate the post office, how else could Joanna find Mr. Briarley? He’d mentioned the Palm Court. She needed to ask Kit where it was and what deck it was on, although the easiest way to find him would probably be just to follow the steward when the bearded man asked him to go find Mr. Briarley.

Richard stuck his head in the door. “I just wondered if you’d finished typing up your account,” he said, “and if you were feeling better.”

“Yes,” she said, handing him the transcript and Mrs. Woollam’s. “Tish can come tomorrow at two. How are things coming with Mrs. Troudtheim?”

“We isolated three neurotransmitters that were present in both of your exit scans and all of Mrs. Troudtheim’s: LHRH, theta-asparcine, and DABA. LHRH was also present in the template scan, so it’s probably not the culprit, but the DABA may be a possibility. It’s an endorphin inhibitor, and Dr. Jamison thinks beta-endorphins, rather than being just a side effect, may be a factor in sustaining the NDE-state, and that the DABA may be inhibiting them.” He waved the transcripts at her. “Thanks. Tomorrow at two.”

The phone rang. Richard said, “I’ll talk to you later,” and Joanna picked it up, thinking, too late, It’s probably Mr. Mandrake.