Passage

He shook his head. “I started the screenings right away so I wouldn’t have to wait to begin the sessions. Why?”

There was a rapid knock on the door, and Amelia Tanaka swept in. “I am so sorry I’m late,” she said, dropping her backpack on the floor and yanking off her wool gloves. She jammed them in her pockets. “You got my message, didn’t you, that I was going to be?”

Her long, straight black hair was flecked with snow. She shook it out. “The anatomy exam was horrible,” she said, securing it with a clip. “I didn’t make it through half the questions.” She unzipped her coat. “Half the things he’d never even mentioned in class. ‘Where is the vestigial fold of Marshall?’ I don’t know. I said in the pericardium, but it could just as well be in the liver, for all I know.” She stripped off her coat, dumped it on top of the backpack, and came over to them. “And then it snowed the whole way over here—”

She seemed suddenly to become aware of Joanna. “Oh, hi,” she said, and looked questioningly at Richard.

“I want you to meet Dr. Lander, Ms. Tanaka,” he said.

“Amelia,” she corrected. “But it’s going to be mud if I did as bad as I think I did on that exam.”

“Hi, Amelia,” Joanna said.

“Dr. Lander’s going to be working with me on the project,” Richard said. “She’ll be conducting the interviews.”

“You’re not going to ask questions like ‘Where is the vestigial fold of Marshall?’, are you?” Amelia asked.

“No.” Joanna grinned. “I’m just going to ask you what you’ve seen and heard, and today I’d like to ask you a few questions about yourself, so I can get to know you.”

“Sure,” Amelia said. “Did you want to do that now or after I get ready for the session?”

“Why don’t you get ready first?” Joanna said, and Amelia turned expectantly to Richard. He opened the gunmetal supply cupboard and handed her a pile of folded clothing. She disappeared into a small room at the back.

Richard waited till she’d shut the door and then asked Joanna, “What were you going to say before Ms. Tanaka came in? About the screenings?”

“Can I see your list of volunteers?” she asked.

“Sure,” he said and rummaged through the papers on his desk again. “Here it is. They’ve all been approved, but I haven’t scheduled them all yet.”

He handed it to Joanna, and she sat down on the chair she’d stood on to put the “shoe” on top of the medicine cupboard and ran her finger down the names. “Well, at least this explains why Mr. Mandrake didn’t try to pump you about your project. He didn’t have to.”

“What do you mean?” Richard said. He came around behind her to look at the list.

“I mean, one of your volunteers is a subject of Mr. Mandrake’s, there’s another one I think probably is, and this one,” she said, pointing at Dvorjak, A., “has CAS, compulsive attention syndrome. It’s a form of incomplete personality disorder. They invent NDEs to get attention.”

“How do you invent an NDE?”

“Over half of the so-called NDEs in Mandrake’s book, which I see you have a copy of here, aren’t really NDEs at all. Visions during childbirth and surgery, blackouts, even fainting episodes qualify if the person experiences the standard tunnel, light, angels. Amy Dvorjak specializes in blackouts, which, conveniently, don’t have any external symptoms so you can’t prove they didn’t happen. She’s had twenty-three.”

“Twenty-three!”

Joanna nodded. “Even Mr. Mandrake doesn’t believe her anymore, and he believes everything anybody tells him.”

He grabbed the list away from her and crossed out “Dvorjak, A.” “Which ones are Mandrake’s subjects?”

She looked ruefully at him. “You’re not going to want to hear this. One of them’s May Bendix.”

“Mrs. Bendix!” he said. “Are you sure?”

Joanna nodded. “She’s one of Mandrake’s favorite subjects. She’s even in his book.”

“She said she didn’t even know what a near-death experience was,” he said, outraged. “I can’t believe this!”

“I think before we send anybody else under, I’d better check the rest of the names on this list,” Joanna said.

He glanced at the door of the dressing room. “I’ll tell Amelia the scan’s down and we can’t do a session today.”

Joanna nodded. “I’d also like to interview her, and the rest of the subjects, after I’ve checked to see whether they have any connections to Mr. Mandrake or the near-death community.”

“Right,” he said. “Wait, you said there was another one you thought might be connected to Mandrake. Which one?”

“This one,” she said, pointing at the name on the list. “Thomas Suarez. He called me last week and told me he’d had an NDE. I suggested he call Mr. Mandrake.”

“I thought you said you tried to get to subjects before Mandrake could corrupt them.”

“I do. Usually,” she said. “But Mr. Suarez is part of that fourteen percent who also believe they’ve been abducted by a UFO.”

6