Passage

Only because she can’t, Joanna thought, but that was a lie. Look at Mr. Mandrake and Mrs. Davenport. And Maisie’s own mother. And Amelia.

That’s why Amelia quit, Joanna thought, and it was like another revelation. She had thought at the time Amelia’s story of being worried about her grades wasn’t the whole truth, but she had assumed her quitting had had something to do with her crush on Richard. But it hadn’t. Amelia had recognized death, had murmured, “Oh, no, oh, no, oh, no,” and resigned from the project.

But Amelia was only twenty-two. She was only a volunteer, not a partner. She hadn’t signed on to try and find out what NDEs were, and then, when she found out, panicked, lost her nerve, bolted for the nearest lifeboat. “ ‘Where I come from, we’d string you up on the nearest pine tree,’ ” Joanna murmured.

But even if she stayed, even if she told Richard, what would that accomplish? Richard wouldn’t believe her. He’d think she’d turned into Bridey Murphy. He’d tell her she was having temporal-lobe delusions.

All right then, make him believe you, she thought, and went over to the door, cracking her knee on the file cabinet, and switched on the light. Prove your theory. Collect evidence. Get outside confirmation. Starting with Amelia Tanaka.

Joanna called Amelia that night and again the next morning, and asked her to come in. “I’m not in the project anymore,” she said, and Joanna thought she was going to hang up on her.

“I know you’re not,” Joanna said quickly. “I just have a few questions I need to ask you about your sessions for our records. It’ll only take a few minutes.”

“I’m really busy right now. I have three tests this week, and my biochem project’s due. I won’t have any time till after the end of the semester,” Amelia said, and this time did hang up.

And did Joanna really need any more proof than that? Fear and reluctance had been in every word. Joanna went and got Amelia’s file out of the cabinet. On the questionnaire, Joanna had made her list not only her address but her class schedule, complete with buildings and room numbers. She had biochem tomorrow afternoon from one to two-forty.

One o’clock tomorrow. And until then… Joanna stuck Amelia’s disk in the computer and started through her transcript, looking for clues. There weren’t any. Warmth, peace, a bright light, nothing at all about water or an up-curving floor or people standing out on the deck.

No, wait. She had said, when Joanna asked her if the light had been there all the time, “…not till after they opened the door.” Later, she had amended it to, “I just assumed somebody had opened a door because of the way the light spilled in,” but Joanna wondered if the first version was the true one.

She read the rest of it. When she had asked Amelia her feelings, she had said, “Calm, quiet,” which might be a reference to the engines stopping, and she had complained after each session of being cold. All of which proved exactly nothing, except that you could find anything you tried to look for in an NDE, just like Mr. Mandrake.

She took out Amelia’s disk, put in one of last year’s interviews, printed out half a dozen files, and started through them with a yellow marker, highlighting words and phrases. “I was lying in the ambulance, and all of a sudden I was out of my body. It was like there was a porthole in my body, and my soul just shot out of it.” Joanna highlighted the word porthole in yellow.

“I felt like I was going on a long voyage.”

“…light all around,” Kathie Holbeck had said, looking up at the ceiling, and spread her hands out like a flower opening. Or a rocket going off. Ms. Isakson had done that, too. Joanna looked up her file. “All spangled,” she’d said. Like the starburst of a rocket.

“My father was there, and I was so glad to see him. He was killed in the Solomons. On a PT boat.”

Joanna tapped her marker thoughtfully on that one, thinking about Mr. Wojakowski and all his Yorktown stories. Could he have been reminded of them because he’d been on a ship?

Mr. Wojakowski wasn’t reminded of anything, she thought. He made it all up. And even if he had been, it was hardly the sort of proof she could offer to Richard. She continued through the transcripts:

“I heard a sound, but it was funny, like not really a sound at all, you know what I mean?”

“It sounded exactly like something rolling over a whole bunch of marbles.” Marbles. She found Kit’s notes of the engines stopping. And there it was. “It was as if the ship had rolled over a thousand marbles,” passenger Ella White had said when asked what the iceberg sounded like.

Joanna started through the transcripts again. “I was traveling through the tunnel, very fast, but smooth, like being in an elevator.”

“I knew I was crossing the River Jordan.”

She hadn’t lied to Vielle when she’d said she wouldn’t get home before ten. At half-past nine she was still only halfway through the set of interviews. She shut the computer off, pulled on her coat, and then sat down, still in her coat, and switched it on again.