Passage. Part 80

There was no need to. Whoever Joanna had been to see the day she died, it wasn't Maisie.

"When did you call her, Maisie?" Richard asked. "What time of day?"

"Right after my mom left to go see her lawyer. I think nine o'clock."

Nine o'clock, and she had told Maisie the same thing she'd told Kit, that she was busy, that she'd come see her later.

"Did she say when she was going to come see you?" Richard asked.

"She said right after lunch."

"And when is lunch?" Kit asked."Eleven-thirty."

Joanna had intended to go see Maisie and then hadn't. That confirmed that something had happened, but not what. "Did she say what she was busy working on?"

"I think the t.i.tanic wireless messages, 'cause she asked me to find out what ones they sent."

Richard and Kit looked at each other. "Did she say why she wanted to know that?"

Maisie shook her head. "She just said to write them down, so I did." She reached over to the nightstand, and the line on her heart monitor began to jump.

"Here, let me," Kit said hastily, coming around the bed. Maisie lay back against her pillow, and the line steadied. Kit opened the drawer. "I don't see it," she said.

"It's inside the Secret Garden box," Maisie said. Kit picked up the video, slid the tape out, looked in the box and then shook it. A tightly folded piece of paper fell out.

Kit handed it to Maisie, who unfolded it carefully. "Okay, the first one-I listed them by the times they sent them," she explained. "The first one was at five after twelve. The last one was at two-ten. It sank at two-twenty." She stopped to take a breath. "Okay, so the first one said, 'CQD,'

that means, 'all stations distress,' " another breath, " 'MGY,' that means the t.i.tanic," yet another breath, "and then where they are." She handed it to Richard.

He stared blankly at the first message on the page, printed in Maisie's childish hand. "CQD.

CQD. MGY 41.46N, 50.14W. CQD. MGY.".

"The t.i.tanic didn't use SOS as its distress signal?" he asked, hope roaring up in him.

"Joanna asked me that, too," Maisie said. "They did later on." She leaned forward to take the paper from him. "Here it is," she showed him the place," 'MGY SOS,' at twelve-fifteen."

SOS. Had Joanna seen the wireless operator tapping out one of those messages and wanted outside confirmation? Or was she trying to find out something else, and the clue was here, in Maisie's list? But it couldn't be, because Joanna had never seen it. "Maisie," he asked, "when you called Joanna, did you tell her about the messages you'd found?"

"No," Maisie said. "I just told her I'd found them out. I showed her two of them before."

"Which two?" Richard asked, handing her back the list.

"This one," she said, pointing, "and this one."

" 'Come quick. Our engine-room flooded up to the boilers.' And 'Sinking. Cannot hear for steam.' " Joanna had asked Kit about steam and fires on the t.i.tanic that might have caused smoke.

"Had she asked you other things about the t.i.tanic?" Kit asked.

"Yeah, she asked me did it have an elevator and a swimming pool. And about the Carpathia."An elderly nurse poked her head in the door. "It's been five minutes." Richard nodded. Kit stood up.

"No, you can't go yet," Maisie said and set the monitor zigzagging jerkily. "You haven't told me what you think she found out or how you're going to figure it out. Please, Nurse Lucille," she appealed to the nurse, "just two more minutes, and then I'll rest, I promise." She lay obediently back against the pillows as if to prove it. "I'll drink my Ensure."

"All right," Lucille said, defeated. "Two more minutes, and that's all." She went out.

As soon as she was gone, Maisie sat up. "Okay, tell me," she said. "You think she went to see somebody and they told her something, don't you? That's why you came to see me, because you thought it was me, right? But it wasn't. I bet it was one of her NDE people, so the first thing we've gotta do-"

"We?" Richard said. "You aren't doing anything except resting."

"But I could-" Maisie stopped short and slumped back against the pillows.

"Maisie?" he said, glancing anxiously at Kit, who had looked at the monitor and then back at Maisie. Maisie was watching the door.

Lucille came in with a small can with a straw in it. She set it on the tray across Maisie's bed. "All of it," she said.

"This is vanilla," Maisie said. "Don't you have any chocolate?"

"All of it," Lucille said and walked out.

"I hate vanilla," Maisie muttered, and pushed the can to one side. "I bet Mr. Mandrake knows who all the NDE people are. We could go ask-"

"You aren't going anywhere, Maisie. I mean it," Richard said, "you're not going to do anything except rest and get strong so you'll be ready for your new heart. Kit and I will find out who Joanna was talking to."

"I wouldn't be doing anything," Maisie said, appealing to Kit. "Just asking people when they come to do stuff if they saw her talking to anybody, the guy who empties the wastebasket and stuff. I wouldn't even get out of bed." She looked at Richard. "Please. Joanna said I was really good at finding stuff out."

And you fully intend to go ahead whether I give you permission or not, he thought. He wondered how Joanna would have handled her, and then realized he knew. She had put her to work looking up wireless messages and Pacific islands. "All right," he said, looking at Kit, who nodded, "you can help, but you have to promise you'll rest-"

"And do everything your nurses tell you," Kit said.

"I will," Maisie said meekly."We mean it," Richard said. "You're just to ask questions. You're not to do anything or go anywhere."

"They won't let me anyway," Maisie said disgustedly, and Richard wondered what the story behind that was. "I promise. I'll just ask questions."

"All right," Richard said. "The time we're looking for is after eleven and before twelve-fifteen."

Maisie started to reach over to the nightstand, and Kit leaped to get a pencil and tablet for her.

"Eleven and twelve-fifteen," Maisie said, writing them down. "Do you want me to page you when I find out?"

Richard smiled. "You can just call me," he said. He fished one of his cards out of the pocket of his lab coat.

"What if you're not there?"

"You can leave a message on my answering machine," he said, and, at her skeptical look, "I promise I'll come the minute I get the message." He looked at his watch.

"We'd better go," Kit said, standing up. "It's been two minutes."

"You can't go yet. I don't have your number," Maisie said. "In case Dr. Wright's answering machine doesn't work."

The master staller at work. She wrote down Kit's number and then Vielle's. "But you're not to call the ER," Richard said sternly. "They're very busy. You call me."

"I will," Maisie said meekly.

"Now, you drink your Ensure and rest," Richard said, and they started for the door.

"You know what this is just like?" Maisie said.

"What?"

"It's just like the t.i.tanic. They had to figure out what happened to the people, only they were dead, so they had to talk to other people and find out what they did and who saw them and stuff."

Piecing together the tragedy, bit by bit, conversations and glimpses and last words. "Joanna was crazy about you, you know," Richard said, and Maisie nodded solemnly.

"I knew she wouldn't just go off and leave me."

"Are you going to be all right, Maisie?" Kit asked.

"Uh-huh," Maisie said. "It's almost time for the magazine lady to come. She goes all over the hospital giving people magazines. I bet she might have seen Joanna. Kit, can you fluff up my pillows before you go?"It took them another five minutes and Lucille's finally coming in to get away. "You're right," Kit said as they waited for the elevator. "She's quite a kid."

"How did you know I should tell her about Joanna?" Richard asked her.

"She looked just like my uncle Pat the day he got the diagnosis," she said, staring at the closed elevator door. "There are worse things than death."

"Like letting someone down."

Kit looked up at him. "We're not going to let Joanna down. We're going to decipher her message."

But how exactly? By piecing together bits and pieces and conversations. Kit brought him the list of garden references she'd found in among the transcripts and another one headed "Abrupt NDE Returns."

"That's from several weeks ago. I've already seen it," he told Kit, but when he looked at it again, he noticed Amelia Tanaka's name on the list, and when he checked her account against that session's scans, he found she'd come out of the NDE-state on her own, and that theta-asparcine was present.

He went through all of her NDEs and then started on Mr, Sage's. Testimony was of no use with Mr. Sage, but when Richard checked the scans, he found that he'd gone straight from the NDE-state to waking twice. Both times theta-asparcine had been present. But it wasn't present in Mr. Pearsall's NDEs, or Mr. O'Reirdon's.

He worked on the scans until his eyes began to burn, and then walked over to the west wing and mapped the rest of the floors, asking a.s.sorted nurses and orderlies, "How can I get up to eight-east from here?" and, "What's the quickest way down to the ER?," jotting down the answers, and adding the routes to his map.

In between, he pored over Maisie's list of wireless messages. They were almost unbearable to read, a litany of increasing disaster and desperation: "We are on the ice." "We are putting the women off in boats." "Require immediate a.s.sistance." "Sinking fast." "SOS. SOS. SOS."

There was a clue here somewhere, a connection. Joanna had had a reason for asking Maisie to look them up, but he was as dense as the s.h.i.+ps replying to the t.i.tanic's SOSs had been. "What is the matter with you?" the Olympic had asked, and then unbelievably, "Are you steering south to meet us?" The Frankfurt had been so clueless that the wireless operator had snapped at him, "You fool, stand by and keep out!" and even the Carpathia's operator had asked, "Should I tell my captain?"

Thick-headed fools, all of them, unable to figure out a perfectly simple message. Like me, he thought.

Vielle called. "I found somebody else who saw Joanna. Wanda Rosso. She's a radiologist. She says she saw Joanna on four-west around eleven-thirty."

"Where on four-west?" Richard asked, calling up the map of Mercy General.

"She was getting into an elevator."There were two banks of patient elevators and two service elevators on four-west. "Which elevator?" he asked.

"She didn't say," Vielle said. "I a.s.sume the one by the walkway."

"Ask her," Richard said. "Did this Wanda know in which direction Joanna was going?"

"She couldn't remember," Vielle said. "She thinks she remembers the 'down' arrow being lit, but she's not sure. I asked her if Joanna looked excited or happy, and she said she didn't notice anything except that she seemed to be in a hurry because she kept looking up at the floor numbers and tapping her foot."

In a hurry, and going somewhere in the west wing. But where? Third was orthopedics, which didn't seem likely, and below that it was all administrative offices. And this Wanda had said she wasn't sure which arrow was lit. Fourth was Peds, and she hadn't gone to see Maisie. Sixth was cardiac care, a possibility as far as NDEers were concerned, but Joanna hadn't taken her minirecorder with her.

"Did she say if Joanna had a notebook with her?"

"No."

"Did you find out about the tape?" he asked. "Do the police have it?"

"No," Vielle said, and there was an odd change in her voice. "Her clothes were disposed of."

"Disposed of?" he said. "Are you sure? It was evidence."

"There's no case," Vielle said. "The suspect's dead, and there were eyewitnesses, so there was no reason to keep it."

"But they wouldn't have disposed of the things in her pockets," he said. "They'd have returned them to her next of kin. Maybe her sister has the tape. And listen, I've been thinking, there may be notes, too. Joanna always took notes when she did interviews, and we know she didn't have her recorder with her. There may be a notebook, or a piece of paper-"

"It was all disposed of," Vielle said, and her voice was clipped, definite. "In the contaminated-waste bin."

"The contaminated-waste bi-?" he said and then realized what Vielle had been trying to tell him without coming out and saying it. Joanna's clothes had been soaked in blood, and anything in her cardigan pockets would have been drenched, too. Ruined. Unreadable.

"I'm sorry," Vielle said. "I still haven't found the taxi driver, but I've got a couple of leads. I'll call you as soon as I've got anything."

"Yeah," he said, and went back to the t.i.tanic, looking up "A La Carte Restaurant,"

"gymnasium," "First-Cla.s.s Dining Saloon." Jim Farrell, a young Irish immigrant, had rounded up four young girls he'd promised to look after and led them all the way from steerage, through the First-Cla.s.sDining Saloon and a maze of pa.s.sages and decks and stairwells to the Boat Deck, and then stepped back, unable to go in the boat himself. He looked up "Boat Deck." Archibald b.u.t.t and Colonel Grade and a gambler named J. H. Rogers had loaded boat after boat, handing babies and children down as the boats were lowered along the side.

Maisie didn't call, which surprised him. He hadn't really thought she'd be able to find out what Vielle, with all her staff connections, couldn't, but he hadn't expected that to stop her from calling him.

But there were no messages on his answering machine, no urgent pages. He wondered if she was all right. She had seemed to take the news about Joanna's death in stride, but with kids, it was hard to tell, and it sometimes took bad news a while to sink in.

When she still hadn't called by the next afternoon, Richard ran over to see her. She wasn't there-she was out having an echocardiogram-but the nurse (not the one who'd shooed them out of the room) a.s.sured him she was doing fine. "She's cheered up a lot these last few days," she said, smiling. "We've really had to sit on her to see that she stays in bed."

"Tell her Dr. Wright said hi, okay? And that I'll come see her later," he said, took a few steps toward the elevator and then turned back, looking appropriately confused. "I need to get down to the ER," he said. "What's the easiest way to get there?"

He repeated the process with a nurse and two orderlies, getting three completely different answers, and went back to the lab to add them to the map. He had all of Main and the west wing done and the top four floors of the east wing, and the map was starting to look as complicated as his diagrams of the scans, and just as intelligible.

Joanna had left her office and gone down to two-west and then later had gone up to Dr.

Jamison's office, and, from there, down to the ER. And in between? He had no idea. All he could deduce for sure was that it hadn't been anything on four-west, since she had been heading down-or up-from there, and that she had probably come down to four-west from her office and taken the walkway across. If she had in fact been coming from her office, if she hadn't gone somewhere else first.

He worked on the map awhile and then listed the neurotransmitters present in the theta-asparcine scans, looking for commonalities. There weren't any. But there was a connection somewhere. Joanna had seen it, and the answer lay somewhere in the scans or the transcripts or her NDEs. Or Joseph Leibrecht's, he thought, and read the crewman's account that Kit had left. He had seen a whale and a bird in a cage and apple blossoms.

Richard went back to the scans, trying to determine if there was any similarity among the non-theta-asparcine scans. There wasn't. He fished the journal Dr. Jamison had left out of the mess on his desk and read the article on theta-asparcine. An artificial version had been produced and was being tested to determine its function, which was still not known.

It has something to do with NDEs, he thought. But what? Was it an inhibitor, after all? Or was its presence a side effect of the temporal-lobe stimulation or the acetylcholine?