The Titanic. And he had called her an island of sanity. He had told Davis there was no way she would ever turn into R. John Foxx.
“It all fits,” she said eagerly. “The feeling I had in the walkway of being oblivious while something terrible was happening. That was the Californian. It turned its wireless off for the night five minutes before the Titanic sent its first SOS, and then sat there, fifteen miles away all night, completely unaware that the Titanic was sinking.”
Davis had said that everybody who studied NDEs went wacko sooner or later. Maybe he was right. Maybe it was some sort of infectious insanity. But surely not Joanna, who saw right through Mandrake and his manipulations, who knew the NDE was a physical process. There must be some mistake. “Let me get this straight,” he said. “You’re saying you were there? On board the Titanic!”
“Yes,” Joanna said eagerly. “In one of the stateroom passages. I don’t know which one. I think it may have been in second class because of the wooden floor—it was the curve of the deck that made the passage look longer than it was. First class would have been carpeted, but the people outside on the deck looked like first-class passengers, so it might have been in first class. The woman with the piled-up hair was wearing jewels, and white gloves. I wonder who she was,” she murmured. “She might have been Mrs. Allison.”
“And who were you?” Richard asked angrily. “Lady Astor?”
“What?” Joanna said blankly.
“Who exactly were you in this previous life?” Richard said. “The Unsinkable Molly Brown?”
“Previous life?” Joanna said as if she had no idea what he was talking about.
“Were you Shirley MacLaine? Wait, don’t tell me,” he said, holding up a warning hand. “You were Bridey Murphy, and she came over from Ireland on the Titanic.”
“Bridey Murphy?” Joanna said, and her chin went up defiantly. “You think I’m making this up?”
“I don’t know what you’re doing. You said you were on the Titanic.”
“I was.”
“Who else was on board? Harry Houdini? Elvis?”
She stared at him. “I can’t believe this—”
“You can’t believe this? I can’t believe that you’re sitting here telling me you had some past-life regression!”
“Past-life—”
“ ‘You should send me under,’ you said. ‘I’ll be an impartial scientific observer. I won’t fall prey to thinking I see Angels of Light.’ Oh, no, you saw something even better! Do you have any idea what Mandrake will do when he gets hold of this, not to mention the tabloids? I can see the headlines now.” He swept his hand across the air. “ ‘Near-Death Scientist Says She Went Down on Titanic.’ ”
“If you’d just listen—I didn’t say it was a past-life regression.”
“Oh? What was it?” he said nastily. “A time machine? Or were you teleported there by aliens? I believe that first day I met you, you said that fourteen percent of all NDEers also believed they’d been abducted by UFOs. What you should have told me was that you were part of that fourteen percent.”
“I don’t have to listen to this,” she said and flung herself off the examining table, clutching at the back of her hospital gown, and stomped, stocking-footed, over to the dressing room.
He started after her. “I should have stuck with Mr. Wojakowski, the compulsive liar,” he said. “At least the only ship he was on was the Yorktown.”
“Fine,” she said, and slammed the door in his face.
She opened it again immediately and came out, buttoning her blouse, yanking on her cardigan. “Mr. Mandrake’s the one you should have asked to be your partner,” she said, pushing past him. “You two would make a perfect couple. You both want to hear what fits your preconceived theories and nothing else.”
She halted at the door. “For your information, it wasn’t time travel or a past-life regression. It wasn’t the Titanic. It was—oh, what’s the use? You won’t listen anyway.” She yanked the door open. “I’ll tell Mr. Mandrake you’re looking for a new partner.”
It wasn’t the Titanic? “Wait—” he said, but the door had already slammed behind her.
He wrenched it open. She was already at the elevators. “Joanna, wait!” he shouted and sprinted down the hall after her.
The elevator dinged. “Wait!” he shouted. “Joanna!”
She didn’t so much as glance at him. The doors slid apart, and she stepped on. She must have pushed the “door close” button because the doors immediately began to slide shut.
“Joanna, wait!” He forced the doors apart and shoved onto the elevator. The doors closed behind him. “I want to talk to you.”
“Well, I don’t want to talk to you,” she said. She reached for the “door open” button.
He blocked her from reaching it. The elevator started down. “What did you mean, it wasn’t a past-life regression?”
“Why are you asking me? I’m Bridey Murphy, remember?” She made another try for the buttons, and he grabbed the red emergency button and turned it. An unbelievably loud alarm went off, and the elevator lurched to a stop.
Joanna looked at him disbelievingly. “You’re crazy, you know that?” she shouted over the alarm. “And you accuse me of being a nutcase!”
“I’m sorry,” he shouted back. “I jumped to conclusions, but what am I supposed to do when you tell me you’ve been on board the Titanic?”
“You’re supposed to let me at least finish my sentence,” she shouted. “Turn that off.”
“Will you come back to the lab with me?”
She glared at him. The alarm seemed to be getting louder by the minute. “I promise I won’t jump to conclusions,” he bellowed over it. “Please.”
She nodded reluctantly. “Just stop that thing!” she yelled, her hands over her ears.
He nodded and pushed the emergency button. It kept ringing. He pushed “door open.” Nothing. He twisted the emergency button again, and then the floor buttons, one after the other. Nothing. He tried turning the emergency button the other way, but that only seemed to make the alarm louder. If that were possible.
Joanna reached past him to press the “door open” button again, and the elevator moved upward, though the ringing still didn’t stop. Richard yanked at the emergency button again, and the noise abruptly shut off, leaving an echoing ringing in his ears.
“Whoa, was it a ringing or a buzzing?” he said, hoping she’d smile.
She didn’t. She pressed “six,” and the doors slid open. Richard had half-expected a crowd of anxious rescuers, or at least someone who’d come out to see what all the noise was, but the hall was empty. Joanna stalked off the elevator and down to the lab ahead of him, her chin in the air. Inside, she turned to face him, her arms folded across her chest.
“Do you realize we could have been trapped in there forever,” Richard said, trying to break the ice, “and nobody would ever have come to rescue us?”
Nothing.
“Look,” he said. “I’m sorry I flew off the handle like that. It’s just that—”
“—you thought I’d turned into one of Mr. Mandrake’s nutcases,” she said. “How could you think that?”
“Because people do it all the time. Perfectly rational people who suddenly announce they’ve seen the light and start spouting nonsense. Look at Seagal. Look at Foxx.”
“But you knew me,” she said.
“Like you knew Mr. Wojakowski?”