In the late afternoon—or at least she thought it was late afternoon; when she glanced at her watch, it was nearly six—someone knocked on her door. Mr. Mandrake, she thought, and glanced at the bottom of the door to see if the light showed under it.
The knock came again. “It’s Ed Wojakowski, Doc. I got your dog tags for ya.” She opened the door. “They’re not the real thing,” he said, handing her a chain with a metal tag. Maisie’s name was engraved on it in neat letters. “It’s really one of those medical alert things, but you said metal and a neck chain, and it’s got those.”
“It’s perfect,” Joanna said, turning the tag over, expecting to see the red medical alert symbol, but it was plain silver.
“I filed the medical stuff off,” he said, looking very pleased with himself. “I asked around like I told you I would, but nobody’d seen one of them dog tag machines in years, and then I went to get a prescription filled and there this was. Tags made while you wait.”
“Thank you,” Joanna said. “How much do I owe you?”
He looked insulted. “Glad to do it,” he said. “Reminds me of the time when I was on the Yorktown and me and Bucky Parteri needed to get us a couple of leave passes so we could go see these WACs on Lanai. Well, we asked around, but the captain and the shore patrol were really cracking down, so then we thought, What about getting somebody to make us a couple, and…”
It was a long story, some of it no doubt derived from real events and some symbolic. Joanna didn’t try to sort out which. She waited for something resembling a break in the action and said, “I’d love to hear the rest of this, but I really should take this to Maisie.”
He agreed. “Tell her hi for me. I wish they were the real thing, like the ones I had in the navy. Did I ever tell you how I fell overboard and lost ’em? We were on our way back to Pearl—”
It was after eight by the time Joanna got away from Mr. Wojakowski, and Maisie was asleep. “I’ll bring them by in the morning,” she told Barbara. “How’s she doing?”
“They had to take her off the amiodipril.”
“I know. Maisie told me they’d put her back on nadolal.”
Barbara nodded. “They’re out of new drugs to try. That’s why her mother fought so hard to get her into the clinical trials of amiodipril. They’re talking about putting her on a new ACE-blocker, but it has really severe side effects, and she’s already pretty weakened.”
“And a heart?”
“Pray for a school bus accident,” she said. “Sorry. It’s been a long day, and I think I’m getting the flu. She’s doing fine right now, and who knows, maybe there’ll be a miracle.”
“Maybe,” Joanna said and went back upstairs to go over her NDEs with a fine-tooth comb, looking for clues, till after eleven.
She didn’t find any, and in the morning when she went back to see her, Maisie was down having a heart cath. “She’s staying out of A-fib so far,” Barbara reported. “She said if you came by, to give you this.” She handed Joanna a sheet of paper from a tablet repeatedly folded into a tight packet.
Joanna waited to unfold it till she was back in her office. Written on it in pencil was a list of ships: Carpathia, Burma, Olympic, Frankfurt, Mount Temple, Baltic. I must really have paid attention in class, she thought, though, even hearing the names, she had no memory of Mr. Briarley having talked about them in class.
Which doesn’t mean he didn’t, she thought. And there were examples of people recalling books and movies almost verbatim. The phenomenon was called cryptomnesia. Which was what it had been determined Bridey Murphy had, Joanna thought wryly.
“We’ve got a problem,” Richard said as soon as she walked in.
“Tish is still out?”
“No, she’s back, but Mr. Sage just called to cancel.”
“Has he got the flu, too?”
“This is Mr. Sage,” Richard said irritably. “It took me ten minutes to get the fact that he was canceling out of him. So, can I send you under?”
“Sure,” Joanna said. “What time?”
“I told Tish eleven.”
She nodded and went back to her office. Kit had called. “The gymnasium was on the Boat Deck,” her message said, “on the starboard side just aft of the officers’ quarters. The Marconi shack was on the port side even with the officers’ quarters.”
Everything Mr. Briarley had ever said. Did that include his showing them a map of the Boat Deck? She couldn’t remember, but he might have. Maisie’s disaster books were full of maps and diagrams: the route Amelia Earhart’s plane had taken, the ruins of Pompeii, the layout of the Hindenburg’s gondola.
Joanna called Kit. The line was busy. She called Maisie. “Maisie, you said MGY were the call letters for the Titanic, and then you started to say something else. What was it?”
“You said I wasn’t supposed to talk about anything except what you asked.”
“I know. That still goes, except for this one thing. What were you going to say?”
“That I knew it was MGY because of the message the Titanic sent. ‘MGY CQD PB. Come at once. We have struck a berg.’ CQD means ‘help,’ ” Maisie explained.
“I thought the Titanic sent SOSs.”
“It did, but—are you sure it’s okay to tell you this?”
“I’m sure,” Joanna said.
“Well, first it sent CQDs, and then Harold Bride, that was the other wireless guy, said, kind of laughing, ‘Let’s send SOS. That’s the new distress code, and it may be your last chance to send it.’ ”
31
“Well, it can’t be helped.”
The entire time they were prepping Joanna, Tish chattered about how sick she’d been. “I thought I was going to die,” she said, sounding not at all unhappy about it. “I ached all over, and I was so dizzy.” She attached the electrodes to Joanna’s chest. “I practically passed out on the way down to my car,” she said, fitting the sleep mask over Joanna’s eyes, “and this doctor who was in the elevator with me had to drive me home. His name’s Ted.”
Well, no wonder she’s so chipper, Joanna thought, wishing Tish would hurry up and put the headphones on. She wanted to focus on what she was going to do and where she was going to go when she got on board.
If she got on board. Richard had announced he was decreasing the dosage, “which will decrease the amount of temporal-lobe stimulation. That should lessen the intensity of the sense of significance, which should allow a different unifying image.”
No, it won’t, Joanna thought, because that’s not what it is. There’s a connection, and I’m going to find out what. But first I have to make sure it’s not an amalgam.
“Ted insisted on going inside with me and getting me settled before he left,” Tish was saying, holding the headphones, ready to put them on. “He’s new here. He’s an obstetrician, and,” she bent over Joanna and whispered, “he’s really cute, his hair’s a little darker blond than Dr. Wright’s, and he has gray—”
“Tish, is Joanna ready?” Richard called from the console.
“Just about.” She dropped her voice again, “Gray eyes and no scans,” and blessedly, put on the headphones.
All right, Joanna thought, I’m going to try to find the Grand Staircase, and if that fails, the First-Class Dining Saloon. The green velvet fleur-de-lis’d chairs would prove it was the Titanic, and there might also be menus or a bill-of-fare with RMS Titanic on it. But the A La Carte Restaurant was locked, she thought. What if the dining saloon is, too? And she was in the passage.