Passage (75 page)

“That wasn’t the reason—” Joanna said, but Kit wasn’t listening.

“It was an unbelievably stupid thing to do,” she said. “I mean, he’d hidden it once. He’d obviously try to hide it again. I don’t blame you for being mad.”

“I’m not mad—” Joanna said.

“Well, you should be,” Kit said. “I still haven’t found it, and I’ve looked absolutely everywhere. Down behind the radiators, inside—”

“Actually, I didn’t call about the textbook,” Joanna said.

“Oh, of course, you want to know about the questions you asked. There was no library as such, but there was a Reading and Writing Room on the Promenade Deck that had bookshelves and writing tables, and it was right next to the First-Class Lounge, which did have a bar. And, yes, Scotland Road was a crew passage on E Deck that ran nearly the whole length of the ship. It—”

“I need to know something else. Do you know if it was foggy that night?”

“No,” Kit said promptly. “It was perfectly clear. And very still. One of the survivors described the water as being like a lake. That’s why they didn’t see the waves hitting the iceberg.”

“And there couldn’t have been fog later on? After they hit?”

“I don’t think so,” she said just as promptly. “All the survivors said it was the clearest night they’d ever seen. It was so clear the stars came right down to the horizon. Do you want me to find out?”

“No, that’s okay. Thanks,” Joanna said. “You told me what I wanted to know.” What I already knew, she thought after she hung up, and that, combined with the frequent image of the garden, meant that Mr. Briarley was wrong.

No, not wrong about why she’d seen the
Titanic.
He was right, it was the mirror image of death. Wrong only in that everyone, thank God, was not doomed to see it, and maybe Kit was right, and Greg Menotti had been talking about something completely different from the
Carpathia.

I hope so, she thought, going up to her office the next morning. I hope so.

Her answering machine was blinking hysterically. She took
off her coat and hit “play.” Richard, saying, “Tish had a conflict at four. I’ve moved Mrs. Troudtheim up to two. Call me if that won’t work.”

Leonard Fanshawe. Mr. Mandrake. “I’ve just heard from a very reliable source that you are now a subject in Dr. Wright’s project.”

Oh, no, Joanna thought. That’s all I need.

“I am eager to discuss your experience with you to determine whether in fact it is an authentic NDE. I doubt whether it is.”

I hope you’re right, Joanna thought, deleting the rest of his message. The phone rang. And if you think I’m going to pick it up, Mr. Mandrake, you’re crazy, she thought.

The answering machine clicked on. “You need to come right away,” Maisie’s breathless voice said. “I need you to see something.”

Joanna picked up the phone. “I’m here, Maisie. What do you need me to come see?”

“I looked in the . . . 
Titanic Picture Book,”
she said and paused to take another breath, “and—”

“Are you still in A-fib?” Joanna demanded.

“Yes, but . . . I’m feeling lots better,” she said.

“I told you you weren’t supposed to look anything up till you were out of A-fib.”

“I only looked in one book,” she protested, “but I don’t know if it’s really . . . a garden, so you need to come.”

“If what isn’t a garden?”

“The Verandah Café,” Maisie said. “It’s got flowers and trees and vines on . . . these things I don’t know the name of, they’re white and they crisscross—”

Trellises, Joanna thought. “Tell me what the chairs look like,” she said, calling up Gladys Meers’s file.

“They’re white and made of little tiny . . . I don’t know,” Maisie said, frustrated. “You need to come look.”

“I can’t come right now,” Joanna said. “Little tiny what?”

“Long, round things. Like a basket.”

Wicker. The word was right there on the screen. “There were trees all around, and white trellises with vines growing up
on them. I sat down in a white wicker chair, the kind they have on patios.”

“Are there trees?” Joanna asked, calling up Mrs. Woollam’s file.

“Yes,” Maisie said, and Joanna already knew what she was going to say. “Palm trees, but you need to come
see
it.”

Not a heavenly garden. The Verandah Café. On the
Titanic.

“Can you come this morning?” Maisie was asking.

No, Mrs. Troudtheim’s coming at two. I have to find out for sure there wasn’t any fog. “I’m too busy to come this morning,” she said.

“You have to come right after lunch then. I found out all the wireless messages. You said to tell you when I had the whole list done, and you’d come.”

“I’ll come this afternoon.”

“Right after lunch?”

“Right after lunch.”

“You promise? Cross your heart?”

“Cross my heart,” Joanna said and hung up. She called up the list of fog references again, looking for clues. “I was up on the ceiling, looking down at the operating table, and I saw the doctor put these flat things on my chest, like Ping-Pong paddles, and then I couldn’t see more, because it got foggy,” Mr. James had reported, and Mrs. Katzenbaum had said, “The tunnel was dark, but at the end of it was this golden light, all fuzzy like there was smoke or fog or something in the way.”

Smoke. Coma Carl had said something about smoke, too. What if it wasn’t fog, but smoke? Or steam? The
Titanic
had been a steamship. “Sinking. Cannot hear for noise of steam,” the telegram Maisie had written down said.

But that steam would have gone up out of the funnels. It wouldn’t have been on the decks. What about smoke? Could fires have broken out on board as the ship tilted? Burning coal from the boilers sliding out onto the floor of the boiler room, or a candle toppling over onto a tablecloth in the First-Class Dining Saloon?

She called Kit, but the line was still busy. Maisie would
know if there’d been a fire, especially in light of her interest in the Hartford circus fire, and it wasn’t as if she were asking about fog. Who are you kidding? Joanna thought. She’ll see the connection instantly.

She tried Kit again. Mr. Briarley answered. “Mr. Briarley, I need to speak to Kit,” Joanna told him.

“She’s not here,” he said. “She’s at the church. They’re all over at the church. Except for Kevin. I don’t know where he is.”

This is what Kit meant when she said he said terrible things, Joanna thought. I thought she was talking about obscenities.

“ ‘All alone, so Heav’n has willed, we die,’ ” he said. “Kevin went to pick up film. Kit sent him. I don’t know why she didn’t think of it earlier.”

They are obscenities, Joanna thought, and then, Kit can’t hear this. “Tell her I called. Good-bye,” she said and started to hang up, but it was too late. Kit was already on the line.

“Hi. Who is this?” she said in her cheerful voice. “Oh, hi, Joanna, did you forget something?”

Maybe she didn’t hear him, Joanna thought, maybe she just came down the stairs and saw him holding the phone, and knew it wasn’t true, that she had heard every word. And how many times? Dozens? Hundreds?

“Joanna?” Kit said. “Was there something else you wanted to know about the
Titanic?”

“Yes,” Joanna said, trying to sound as calm as Kit. “Do you know if there were fires on board?”

“You mean accidental fires or regular fires?” Kit said.

“Regular fires?”

“I mean, like the fires in the boilers and the fireplaces.”

“There were fireplaces on the
Titanic?”
Joanna said and then remembered the woman with the piled-up hair saying, “We’ll ask the steward to light a fire.”

“Yeah,” Kit said, “in the smoking room, I think, and some of the first-class cabins.” Started because the passengers had gotten cold out on deck, Joanna thought, and then left burning when they went up to the Boat Deck, and, when the deck began to list, the wood and ashes sliding out onto the carpet, catching the curtains, filling the cabin with smoke.

“Is that the kind of fire you meant?” Kit was asking.

“I don’t know what I mean,” Joanna said. “I’m looking for any kind of fire that might have produced a lot of smoke. Or steam.”

“I remember Uncle Pat talking about a fire in one of the boiler rooms,” Kit said, “in the coal bin. It had been smoldering since they left port, but I don’t think there was any smoke. Or steam, you said?”

“Yes.”

“I was just thinking of that scene in the movie where there’s that deafening blast, and steam swirls around everybody on the Boat Deck. I’ll see what I can find. Did you call before and get a busy signal?”

“Yes,” Joanna admitted.

“I was afraid of that. Uncle Pat’s started taking the phone off the hook. I keep checking it, but—”

“ ‘ “Oh, father, I hear the sound of guns,” ’ ” she heard Mr. Briarley say.

“I’ll call you as soon as I find anything,” Kit said.

“I need the information as soon as—”

“ ‘ “Oh, say, what may it be?” ’ ” Mr. Briarley said.

“—as soon as possible,” Joanna finished, and Kit said okay, but Joanna wasn’t sure she’d really heard her because of Mr. Briarley, declaiming in the background, “ ‘ “Some ship in distress that cannot live.” ’ They
speak
to us!”

Joanna hung up the phone and then stared at it, thinking about the possibility of the fog being steam. But none of the NDEers had said anything about the fog swirling, or moving at all, and Maisie had said she’d been inside, not out on the Boat Deck.

Or had she? She called up the first interview she’d had with Maisie. “I was inside this place, I think it was a tunnel, only I couldn’t see ’cause it was dark and all foggy,” she’d said, and she’d talked about walls that went up on either side of her. “They were really tall. The top was so high I couldn’t see it.”

No room had high ceilings on a ship, even a luxurious one like the
Titanic.
She must have been out on the Boat Deck, and the noise she’d heard was the funnels letting off steam. She had said a roar. But there was nothing on the Boat Deck
that was narrow with high walls on either side. On the other hand, smoke had a distinctive smell. Steam didn’t.

Joanna typed in “steam” and “mist” and “swirling” and ran global searches on each of them, wishing Kit would call back. At eleven, she did. “Hi,” she said excitedly, “I’ve got it.”

Joanna gripped the phone. “There was a fire on the
Titanic?”

“A fire?” Kit said blankly. “Oh, no, I haven’t found anything yet. The only reference in any of the indexes was to the fires in the boilers and the stokers working to put them out before the water reached them and caused an explosion. Nothing about smoke either, but I’m still looking. That isn’t why I called. I found the book!”

Now it was Joanna’s turn to answer blankly. “The book?”

“Mirrors and Mazes!
Finally. I’ve been turning the house upside down. The kitchen looks as bad as it did when Uncle Pat dismantled it. You’ll never guess where it was. In the refrigerator. The crisper drawer, so it’s sort of damp and chilly, but at least I’ve got it, and I put it in a safe place, so Uncle Pat can’t hide it again. Can you come over? I can fix you lunch.”

“No, I’m busy. I . . . ” I already know what the
Titanic
is. I

don’t need the book anymore. I need proof.

“I’m not sure when I’ll be able to get over. Things are crazy around here.”

“I can bring it to the hospital,” Kit said. “Eldercare is supposed to come over this evening, but I could call and see if they can change to this afternoon.”

“No,” Joanna said, and tried to put more enthusiasm in her voice. “I’ll come get it.”

“Great,” Kit said. “I can’t wait for you to see if the connection’s in it. I’ll bake cookies.”

“Oh, don’t go to any trouble. I don’t know exactly when—”

“It’s no trouble. I’ve already got all the ingredients out anyway,” Kit said. “And the heat from the oven will help dry out the book. I’ll see you this afternoon,” she said, and hung up before Joanna could remind her to call her if she found any fires.

She won’t, Joanna thought, because there weren’t any. If there had been a fire, it would definitely have been in the
movie with Hollywood’s penchant for special effects, and the one she had envisioned, the burning logs sliding out of the fireplace as the ship tilted, catching the carpet on fire, would have been put out almost immediately by the encroaching water. It has to have been steam, she thought, but Mrs. Katzenbaum had said smoke, and so had Coma Carl.

The phone rang. It’s Kit calling back, Joanna thought. She reached for it and then pulled her hand back and let the answering machine click on. And a good thing, too. It was Mr. Mandrake.

“I cannot understand why I haven’t heard from you. I have paged you and been by your office numerous times,” he said, his voice vibrating with irritation. “I have evidence . . . ”

Evidence, Joanna thought contemptuously. What? Something else Mrs. Davenport’s remembered to order for you? Leading questions? Data twisted to fit your theory, with the facts that don’t fit left out?

And what do you call what you have? How is your evidence any different from Mr. Mandrake’s? So you’ve got dozens of references to the
Titanic.
It doesn’t prove anything except that you can find proof of anything you want if you look hard enough. Because it’s still all subjective, no matter what percent of the accounts are consistent. There isn’t any outside verification. I need a red tennis shoe, she thought, or a map of the South Pacific.

And how am I supposed to get that? Mr. Wojakowski’s a compulsive liar, Mr. Briarley can’t remember, Amelia Tanaka refuses to talk, Coma Carl—“Coma Carl,” she said out loud. She wasn’t the only one who had heard him. Guadalupe had, too, and his wife. If there was something in his ramblings that pointed clearly to the
Titanic-

She called up his file again. He had said, “smoke” and “ohhh . . . grand,” but neither were definitive. She scrolled down the screen. “Water . . . have to . . . ” Guadalupe had written, “ . . . gone . . . ” The boats are gone?

Someone knocked on the door. Mr. Mandrake, Joanna thought, and froze. “Joanna?” Richard called. “Are you in there?”