Passage

“ ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,’ ” she said ruefully, “but nothing about the Titanic.” She shut the trunk and came around to open the back door. She leaned in and came up with a stack of books. “Here’s the stuff on the Titanic,” she said, handing them to him. “I’ve got more if you need them.”

“These should keep me busy for a while,” he said, looking at the books.

“Ditto,” Kit said, gesturing toward the trunk. She got back in the car and started it. “I’ll call you if I find anything.”

“ ‘He holds him with his skinny hand,’ ” Mr. Briarley said. “ ‘ “There was a ship,” quoth he.’ ”

“A ship?” Richard said.

Kit switched off the ignition and turned to face Mr. Briarley. “Uncle Pat,” she said, “did you and Joanna talk about a ship?”

“Joanna?” he said vaguely.

“Joanna Lander,” Kit said gently. “She was a student of yours. She came to see you. She asked you what you said in class. About the Titanic? Do you remember?”

“Of course I remember,” Mr. Briarley said gruffly.

“What did you tell Joanna?” Kit asked, and Richard waited for his answer, afraid to move, afraid to breathe.

“Joanna,” he said, staring at the windshield. “ ‘Red as a rose was she.’ ” He turned and looked at Richard. “It’s a metaphor,” he said. “You need to know it for the final.”

And that was that. Dead end. Try something else, Richard thought, carrying the books back up to the lab. He started in on the scans, comparing the frontal-cortex patterns with the presence of different neurotransmitters and then with the core elements, looking for correspondences.

There weren’t any, but when he graphed the NDEs for length, he saw that Joanna had awakened spontaneously after her third session, and that was one in which theta-asparcine was present. I wonder if that’s the one where she turned and started back down the passageway, he thought.

It was. He checked the accounts of the other two with theta-asparcine. The one where she had kicked out and the one where she had stepped from the elevator into the passage. But not the one where she had run headlong down the stairs and into the passage. And she had been under for nearly four minutes in the one with the elevator.

He worked until twelve-thirty and then went down to the cafeteria, got a sandwich, and started through the books Kit had given him. He checked their indexes for the entry “elevator,” not really expecting to find it, and he didn’t. He was going to have to read the books.

He started with a coffee-table book called The Titanic in Color, with detailed drawings of the smoking lounge, the gymnasium, the Grand Staircase. “At the head of the William-and-Mary-style staircase was a large clock carved to represent Honour and Glory Crowning Time.” Glory, which Joanna had underlined. But no sign of an elevator.

The Untold Titanic didn’t mention one either. It concentrated on the area belowdecks and the crew, hardly any of whom had survived: the officers who’d loaded the boats, the wireless operator, the engineers who had stayed at their posts, working to keep the dynamos for the wireless and the lights going till the very end. Assistant Engineer Harvey, who’d gone back into a flooded boiler room to rescue a crewman with a broken leg. And all the firemen and trimmers and postal clerks who’d stayed at their posts long after they’d been released from duty.

Richard read till he couldn’t stand it anymore and then went down to the ER to see if Vielle had found anyone else who’d seen Joanna. “Nobody,” she said, bandaging a little girl’s elbow. “I talked to a taxi driver who picked up a woman without a coat, but he couldn’t remember what she looked like, so it may not have been Joanna.”

“Did he say where he took her?”

She shook her head. “They’re not supposed to give out that information except to the police. There’s a guy on the force I’m going to call to see if he can help.”

Richard went back upstairs through the main building, noting down the locations of the elevators and stairways as he did. When he got back to the lab, Kit was waiting outside the door. “What are you doing here?” he asked.

“I found something,” she said, “and I was going to call you, but the Eldercare person came — I forgot to call them back this morning and tell them not to come — so I thought it would be easier if I showed you.”

He unlocked the door, and they went inside.

“I found a couple of odd transcripts. Most of them are in a question-and-answer form,” she handed him three stapled sheets, “but this one’s a monologue, and the name on it, Joseph Leibrecht, isn’t on her interview list.”

Joseph Leibrecht. The name sounded familiar. He looked at the transcript. A whale, apple blossoms. “This isn’t an interview,” he said. “It’s an account of the NDE a crewman on the Hindenburg had.” He wondered what it was doing in with the transcripts. He thought she’d said it had been recorded too long after the fact to be useful, but she had highlighted the words sea and fire. The fire again.