Passage

“And so you think that means he was seeing the Titanic in his NDE, too?”

“Yes. But why would he see the same imagery I saw?” Joanna asked. “The RIPT scans show that the NDEs get their imagery from long-term memory. Those memory patterns are different for every subject. So why would the two of us have identical NDEs? Why would he see the Titanic?”

“Are you sure he did?” Kit said. “I mean, fifty-eight could mean lots of different things. Addresses, PIN numbers — how old was he?”

“Thirty-four,” Joanna said. “It wasn’t his blood pressure or his cell phone number or his locker combination. It was miles. He said, ‘Too far for her to come.’ He was talking about the Carpathia. I’m sure of it. He was on board the Titanic, just like I was.”

“Or — there’s another possibility, you know,” Kit said thoughtfully. “You said he had the same NDE as you. Maybe that’s not right. Maybe it’s the other way around.”

“The other way around?” Joanna said. “What do you mean?”

“Remember how you told me everybody sees tunnels and lights and relatives because that’s what they’ve been programmed to expect? And how Mr. Mandrake influences all of his subjects to see the Angel of Light?”

Joanna nodded, unable to see where this was going.

“Well, what if, when you heard this patient say, ‘Fifty-eight,’ your subconscious connected it to the Titanic, because of all the stories Uncle Pat told you, and that was why when you went under, you saw the Titanic? Because he’d influenced you. He could have been talking about anything, but you connected it to the Carpathia.”

It made perfect sense. She had been steeled against seeing the relatives and angels and life reviews everyone else reported. But that didn’t mean she hadn’t had expectations. She’d spent the last two years watching her subjects’ expressions, and their body language, trying to find out what their near-death experiences were like. “Oh, no, oh, no, oh, no,” Amelia had said, and Mrs. Woollam had held her Bible to her frail chest and said, “How can it not be frightening?”

And during the period right before she’d gone under, she had been thinking about Greg Menotti, worrying over what he’d said, trying to make sense of it. She had thought “fifty-eight” sounded familiar. Her subconscious mind must have remembered that was how far away the Carpathia had been and triggered the other memories, triggered the NDE and the reference to Mr. Briarley, and it wasn’t the engines stopping that was the connection she’d been trying to remember, it was Mr. Briarley saying, “The Carpathia was fifty-eight miles away, too far for her to come in time.”

“That has to be it,” Joanna said. “It makes perfect sense.”

“But how does the book fit into it?” Kit asked. “I’ll bet it has a poem or something in it about the Carpathia and if it does, that will prove it,” she said excitedly. “This is just like a detective story.” She put down the book and began threading her way through the pans and groceries. “I’ll go get it.”

“I don’t want you to disturb Mr. Bri—”

“I’ll be quiet. Be right back,” she said and went down the hall.

Joanna picked up The Titanic: Symbol for Our Time and looked at the picture of the half-sinking ship with a rocket bursting above it. If Greg Menotti had been the influence for her NDE, then that would explain why he was in it. And Mr. Briarley—

“Oh, no!” Kit said from the study, and Joanna stood up quickly, knocking her knee against the table leg as she did. A stack of plates slid toward the edge, and a half-dozen dinner knives went onto the floor with a clatter.

Joanna dived for the plates and moved them back from the edge. “What’s wrong?” she called to Kit, maneuvering the maze of pans and salad-dressing bottles between her and the door.

There was no answer. “Kit! Are you okay?” Joanna called, pelting down the hall, thinking, Mr. Briarley’s dead. “What happened?”

Kit was standing arms akimbo over Mr. Briarley, and he wasn’t dead. He was awake and staring dully ahead, slumped in the dark red leather chair, his hands loosely folded in his lap. Joanna saw with a pang that his gray tweed vest was buttoned wrong. Looking at him, Joanna realized that this, and not the disaster in the kitchen, was what Kit had meant when she said he was having a bad day.

“It’s not there,” Kit said disgustedly.

“What isn’t?” Joanna said.

“Mazes and Mirrors,” Kit said. She knelt down in front of Mr. Briarley. “Uncle Pat, did you take the book?”

He didn’t answer, or even give any indication he’d heard her, or knew she was there. He stared dully at the opposite side of the room.

“Where did you put it, Uncle Pat?” Kit asked, and when there was no answer, she straightened. “He’s hidden it again. He can’t have been awake more than five minutes. He was still asleep when I brought the books about the Titanic down.”

“Where did you leave it?” Joanna asked.