Passage

The elevator opened on G. The lawyer followed Richard out. “An EM order is legally riskier, but it has the advantage of allowing the procedure to be done earlier than a postmortem would. At this point I’m pursuing all options,” he said and stepped back inside as the door began to close.

Thank God, Richard thought, heading for his car at a lope. I thought he was going to go with me. He debated calling Kit to tell her he’d be late, but he didn’t want to take the time to find a phone, and if Mr. Briarley answered again, it would take longer than driving over there, especially if traffic cooperated.

It didn’t. There was fog, just as the intern had said, and traffic had slowed to a crawl. It was three-twenty by the time he got there.

And it will take another half an hour to get away from Mr. Briarley, he thought, but Kit came out with the transcripts as soon as he pulled up. “I brought my cell phone,” she said as he pulled away from the curb. “So who is it?”

“You won’t believe this,” he said, turning onto Evans. He told her about Carl Aspinall as he drove down to Santa Fe and picked up I-25. “Aspinall must have told her what he’d experienced while in the coma, and something about it, or something combined with words he muttered while he was unconscious, provided the key.”

“Do you think he’ll know what that something was?” Kit asked.

“I don’t know. I’m hoping Joanna said something, shouted ‘Eureka!’ and then explained why she was excited. If she didn’t, we’ll have to hope we see the connection, too. Why don’t you read the transcripts out loud?”

Kit nodded and started through Joanna’s notes. Richard turned onto I-70 and headed west. The fog thinned a little toward Golden and then closed in again as they began to climb into the foothills. The cars ahead of them disappeared, and so did the rocky slopes on either side. Twenty-car pileup, Richard thought. He turned his headlights on and slowed down.

“ ‘…half…’ ” Kit read “ ‘…to… (unintelligible)… fire… make…’ ” She glanced up. “Where are we?” she said, looking out at the shrouded landscape.

“I-70, going up toward Timberline,” Richard said, handing her Maisie’s page of directions. “Aspinall and his wife are staying at their mountain cabin. Which exit do I take?”

She consulted the directions. “This one,” she said, pointing at a green sign, barely visible through the fog. “And then north on 58.” They both leaned forward, straining to see the signs and make the turn onto Highway 58, and then Kit went back to reading. “ ‘…water… oh, grand (unintelligible)… smoke—’ ” She stopped, staring out at the fog.

“Is that all?” Richard asked.

“No,” she said, “I was just thinking, maybe the smoke is the clue.”

“I thought you weren’t able to find any fires on the Titanic that night.”

“I wasn’t,” she said, “but that’s just it. Everything else Joanna saw — the mail clerks dragging sacks of mail up to the Boat Deck and the passengers milling around on deck and the rockets — all really happened, and her descriptions of the gymnasium and the Grand Staircase and the writing room could have been taken straight from Uncle Pat’s books.”

“But not the smoke.”

“No, not the smoke, or the fog, or whatever it was she saw. It doesn’t fit, and maybe in trying to find out why it didn’t, she found out the answer. In science, isn’t it the piece that doesn’t fit that leads to the breakthrough?”

“Yes,” he said. “Or maybe she was trying to prove it didn’t fit, because that would prove it wasn’t really the Titanic. Maybe that’s why she asked you all those questions about the mail room and the First-Class Dining Saloon, because she was hoping her description wouldn’t match.”

“But then why didn’t she write down what she saw? If she was trying to prove discrepancies, she’d have wanted to document them, but there’s no mention of smoke or a fire or fog anywhere in her accounts, taped or written. And it’s in Maisie’s account, and Ms. Schuster’s. I think it’s the key.”

“Well, we’ll know in a few minutes,” Richard said, pointing at a sign barely visible in the fog: “Timberline 8 mi.”

The fog grew steadily thicker and the road twistier. Richard had to devote all his attention to seeing the center line. “ ‘…water…’ ” Kit read, “ ‘…no… blanked out…,’ and then two words with question marks after them, ‘cold? code?’ ”

“Tunnel,” Richard said.

“Tunnel?” Kit said. “How do you get ‘tunnel’ out of ‘cold’ and ‘code’?”

“Tunnel,” he repeated, and pointed. The arched mouth of a tunnel loomed ahead, black in the formless fog.

“Oh, a tunnel,” Kit said, and they drove into it.

It was dark, which meant it must be a short one. The longer tunnels, like the Eisenhower and the ones in Glenwood Canyon, were lit with gold sodium-vapor lights. This one was pitch-black beyond the range of their headlights, and foggy.

“Why would I have seen the Titanic, of all things?” Joanna had said. “I live in Colorado. There are dozens of tunnels in the mountains.”