Passage

Joanna rode down to the parking lot. Fifty-eight. A safety deposit box number? A date? No, he was too young to have been born in 1958. She got in her car. Fifty-eight wasn’t the number of anything famous, like thirteen or 666. She drove out of the parking lot and down Colorado Boulevard. The car ahead of her had a purple neon light around the license plate. “WV-58.” Joanna glanced at the gas station on the right. “Unleaded,” the sign read. “1.58.⁹⁹.”

A frisson of superstitious fear passed up Joanna’s spine and raised the hairs on the back of her neck. It’s that movie Vielle and I rented, the one about the plane crash with all the omens in it. Final Destination.

She grinned. What it really was was a heightened awareness of something that had been present in her surroundings all along. The number fifty-eight had always been there, just like every other number, but her brain had been put on alert to look for it, like a hiker cautioned to watch for snakes. That was what superstition was, an attempt to make sense of random data and random events — stars and bumps on the head and numbers.

It doesn’t mean anything, she told herself. You’re assigning meaning where there isn’t any. But when she got home, she got on the Net and ran a search engine on the number fifty-eight. It turned up several obituaries — “Elbert Hodgins, aged fifty-eight” — one U.S. highway and fourteen state highways, and three books on Amazon.com: Russian-American Cold War Policy from 1946-1958, Adrift on the Fifty-eighth Parallel, and Better in Bed: 58 Ways to Improve Your Sex Life.

Which doesn’t exactly add up to The Twilight Zone, Joanna thought, amused, and started through the Paranormal Society membership list. Amelia wasn’t a member, and neither were any of the other volunteers, but when she went through the ISAS list, she found the name of a volunteer, and when she checked the NDE Web site the next morning, she found two more, which left them with eight subjects. Before she’d even interviewed anyone.

“I am so sorry,” she told Richard. “My goal was to make sure you didn’t get any ringers, not to decimate your project.”

“I’ll tell you what would have decimated my project, to have one of my subjects show up in Mandrake’s book. Or on the cover of the Star,” he said. “You were right. I shouldn’t report Mandrake to the board. I should punch him out.”

“We don’t have time,” Joanna said. “We’ve got to screen the subjects we’ve got left and line up additional ones. How long will the approval process take?”

“Four to six weeks to get clearance from the board and the projects committee. It took five and a half weeks for the paperwork on this group to go through.”

“Then we’d better put out another call immediately,” Joanna said, “and I’ll get started on these interviews. I’m about ready to talk to Amelia Tanaka. She looks good. I haven’t found anything questionable except maybe the fact that she says she’s twenty-four and she’s still a premed student, but my gut instincts say she’s not a nutcase.”

“Gut instincts,” Richard said. He grinned at her. “I didn’t think scientists had gut instincts.”

“Sure they do. They just don’t rely on them. Evidence,” she said, waving the ISAS membership list, “that’s the ticket. Outside confirmation. Which is why I’m calling her references and why I want to interview her. But if it goes okay, I don’t see any reason why you shouldn’t go ahead as planned with her.”

She went back to her office and called Amelia’s references and then Amelia and set up an interview. It took some doing. Amelia had classes and labs, and she really needed to study for this biochem exam she had coming up. Joanna finally got her to agree to one o’clock the next day.

She was pleased that rescheduling her had been so difficult. Her very lack of eagerness was evidence that she wasn’t a True Believer. Joanna checked her name against the Theosophical Society’s membership list and then started through the files of the other seven volunteers.

They looked promising. Ms. Coffey was a data systems manager, Mr. Sage a welder, Mrs. Haighton a community volunteer, Mr. Pearsall an insurance agent. None of their names, nor Ronald Kelso’s or Edward Wojakowski’s, showed up on any of the NDE sites. The only one she was worried about was Mrs. Troudtheim, who didn’t live in Denver.

“She lives out on the eastern plains,” she told Richard the next day, “near Deer Trail. The fact that she’d drive all that way — how far is it? sixty miles? — to be in a research project is a bit suspicious, but everything else about her checks out, and all the others look fine.” She looked at the clock. It said a quarter to one. “Amelia Tanaka should be here in a few minutes.”

“Good,” he said. “If you don’t turn up anything negative, I’d like to proceed with a session. I told the nurse to be on standby.”