He nodded and, as soon as she was out of the room, asked again, “Were you afraid during your NDE?”
“Why?” Joanna asked. “Did I sound frightened when I said ‘elevator’?”
“No, but your scans showed an extremely high level of cortisol. What happened during your NDE?”
“I saw Mr. Briarley again.” She told him about the trip to the mail room, the rockets, the elevator. “And when he opened the door I stepped through it before I realized it was the passage,” she said. “That’s why I was afraid I’d kicked out, because it felt the same as last time.”
“And you didn’t feel any fear?”
“I did when I saw the water in Scotland Road and when I saw the mail room was awash,” she said, trying to remember. She had been so intent on finding Mr. Briarley and asking him what the NDE meant, she hadn’t felt much fear, certainly not when compared to what she’d felt when she’d looked at the stain from the mailbag, when she’d looked over the side of the ship down into nothingness.
“Was my cortisol higher than the last two times?” she asked.
“I haven’t looked at the neurotransmitter analysis yet, but going by the scans, yes. You were more frightened those times?”
She thought of her panicked flight down the stairs, along the deck, into the passage. “Yes.”
“I was afraid of that,” he said and went over to the console.
Joanna dressed quickly. “I’m going to go record my account,” she said, “I’ll be back at three,” and hurried down to her office before he could ask her anything else. She needed to think about the NDE before she lost the feeling of almost, almost knowing the answer. It was something about the rockets, and Mr. Briarley setting them off.
She went through the scene again, trying to remember Mr. Briarley’s exact words. “Step back,” he had said, and the rocket had shot up and burst into white stars—
She recorded the scene and then went back to the beginning and did the whole NDE, trying to hold on to the feeling. Something about the rockets, though they weren’t a discrepancy, unless the ones she’d seen were different from the ones on the Titanic.
She called Kit and asked her what the emergency rockets had looked like. “White fireworks,” Kit said. “I remember Uncle Pat saying white was the color of the international distress signal, and there was a scene of them being fired in the movie.”
Of course. She remembered it. The officer had leaned the cylinder against the railing. “Anything else?” Kit asked.
“Yes. I want to know if there was something called Scotland Road on the ship. It would have been a long passage down on”—she tried to think which deck it was on—“E or F Deck. And also whether there was a library on board. It would have been on the Promenade Deck, next to a bar. And anything about what the rockets looked like and where they were kept.”
“Scotland Road, library, rockets. Okay,” Kit said. “Oh, and if you have a minute, I’ve got a list of Ediths who were on board. I’ve found four. I’m not sure that’s all. The crew are only listed by an initial and a last name, and some of the passengers are only down as Mrs. Somebody.”
“How many were lost? Of the four?”
“Only Edith Evans.”
Joanna went back to the NDE. Not the rockets, but something in that part of the NDE. The elevator? That was definitely a discrepancy. They hadn’t had elevators in 1912, and even if they had, they wouldn’t have had one on board a ship. And she had murmured, “Elevator,” when she was coming out.
She called Kit again. The phone was busy. She glanced at her watch. A quarter past two. Not enough time to run over there before Mr. Sage’s session. But she needed to know now, before she lost the feeling. It would have to be Maisie.
She ran upstairs, hoping Maisie wasn’t down for tests. She was lying in bed, listlessly watching Winnie the Pooh. As soon as she saw Joanna, she pushed herself up higher against the pillows and said, “I found out about the Carpathia.”
“Good,” Joanna said. “I need to ask you something. Did the Titanic have an elevator?”
“Yeah,” Maisie said. “Don’t you remember, in the movie, they were running away from the bad guy and they got in the elevator and went down?”
“I thought your mother hadn’t let you see Titanic.”
“I didn’t. My friend that I told you about that saw it, she told me about that part,” she said, and it was a very convincing story, even though Joanna didn’t believe it for a minute.
“Did your friend tell you what the elevator looked like?”
“Yeah,” Maisie said. “It had one of those accordion things across it that you pull.” She demonstrated.
The grille. So the Titanic had had an elevator, and it wasn’t a discrepancy. She could imagine what Richard would say when he found out. She’d have to hope when she did her account, there was some other discrepancy in her NDE, and she’d better go do that now, before she forgot what Mr. Briarley said. “I gotta go, kiddo,” she said, patting the covers over Maisie’s knees.
“You can’t,” Maisie said. “I haven’t told you about the Carpathia yet. And I have to ask you a question. How fast do ships go?”
“How fast?” The Titanic had been going much too fast for the ice warnings, she knew that, but how fast was that? “I don’t know.”
“ ’Cause in my book it said the Carpathia came really fast, but this other book said it was fifty-eight miles away—”
“Fifty-eight?” Joanna said. “The Carpathia was fifty-eight miles away?”
“Yeah,” Maisie said. “And it took her three hours to get there. The Titanic had already sunk ages before. So I don’t think it could’ve been very fast ’cause fifty-eight miles isn’t very far to come.”
35
“I believe it’s death.”
“What’s wrong?” Maisie asked, looking at Joanna alertly. “Are you okay?”
“Nothing’s wrong,” Joanna said. “You’re right. Fifty-eight miles doesn’t sound all that far. How far away was the Californian?” Fifty-eight miles. That day in the ER, he was talking about the Carpathia.
“You looked really funny when I told you how far away it was,” Maisie said. “Did one of your near-death people see the Carpathia?”
“No. How far away was the Californian?”
“It was really close,” she said, still looking suspicious. “It saw their rockets and everything, it could have saved them probably, only it turned off its wireless, so it didn’t hear any of their SOSs, and it didn’t even know what happened till the next morning.”
Joanna wasn’t listening. He was trying to tell me the Carpathia was too far away, that it would never get there in time.
“I don’t think they should’ve done that,” Maisie said. “Turned off their wireless. Do you?”
“No,” Joanna said. That’s why Greg’s words haunted me so, why I kept feeling I knew what they meant. They meant he was on the Titanic.
“It was really close,” Maisie said. “I mean, the people on the Titanic saw its lights. They told the lifeboats to try to row to it.”