Passage. Part 83

"Are you going to take Kit with you?" she asked.

"No. Why?"

"She's nice," Maisie said, looking up at the TV, where Captain von Trapp was singing to Maria.

"I just think she'd be good at asking questions. You have to come and tell me what he said right away."

"I will," he said and went back to the lab to call Carl Aspinall, but there was no number listed for the mountain cabin. They must have a cell phone, Richard thought, they surely wouldn't have taken off for the mountains a week after being released from the hospital without any way to get in touch, but the cell phone number was unlisted.

He would have to go there, which was just as well. If he called, he ran the risk of being told Aspinall was too ill to see him, of having Mrs. Aspinall say, "How would next week be?" He couldn't wait till next week or even till tomorrow, not when he was this close. He called Kit. He doubted if she'd be able to find someone to watch her uncle on such short notice so she could go with him, but he could at least get Carl's transcripts from her. He wanted to look at them before he interviewed Carl.

Kit's line was busy. He looked at his watch. It was after two, and Timberline was a good hour and a half into the mountains. He tried Kit's number again. Still busy. He'd have to go without the transcripts.He grabbed his keys and started out the door and then stopped. He was doing just what Joanna had done, taking off without telling anyone where he was going. He called the ER and asked to speak to Vielle. "She can't come to the phone," the intern or whoever it was said. "We've got a real mess down here. Twenty-car pileup on I-70. Fog."

You had to take I-70 west to get to Timberline. "Where?" Richard asked.

"Out east by Bennett," the intern said. "Can I give her a message?"

"Yes," Richard said. "Tell her I'm on my way to interview Carl Aspinall. Carl," Richard said. He spelled it and then Aspinall slowly. "Tell her I'll call her as soon as I get back."

"Sure thing," the intern said. "Drive carefully."

Richard hung up and tried Kit one more time. Mr. Briarley answered the phone. "Who's calling?" he demanded.

"Richard Wright," he said. "May I speak to Kit?"

"He's dead. He was stabbed to death in a tavern in Deptford."

"It's for me, Uncle Pat," Kit's voice said, and a woman's voice said, "I'm sorry. He asked me for a cup of tea, and-"

He didn't hear the rest of it. Kit came on the line and, amazingly, already had someone there to watch her uncle. "I was going to go to the library to see what I could find on a fire on the t.i.tanic,"

she said.

"What else would they see?" Richard could hear Mr. Briarley say in the background. "It is the very mirror image."

"How long can the caregiver stay?" Richard asked.

"Till six," Kit said. "You found the person Joanna went to see, didn't you?"

"Yes. I want you to go with me to see him. Can you?"

"Yes!"

"Good. Bring the Coma Carl transcripts."

"Metaphors are not just figures of speech," Mr. Briarley said.

"I'd better go," Kit said and told him her address. "I'll see you in a few minutes."

Mr. Briarley said, "They are the essence and pattern of our mind."

Richard hung up, stuck the cell phone in his pocket, and started for the parking lot. Almost to the elevators a young man in a suit intercepted him. "Dr. Wright?" he said, sticking out his hand. "I'mglad I caught you. I'm Hughes Dutton of Daniels, Dutton, and Walsh, Mrs. Nellis's lawyer."

I should have taken the stairs, Richard thought. "I really can't talk now," he said. "I'm going-"

"This will only take a minute," Mr. Dutton said, opening his jacket and pulling out a Palm Pilot.

"I'm negotiating approval of this coding treatment you've developed and I just need to clarify a few details. Is it cla.s.sified as a medical procedure or a drug?"

"Neither," Richard said. "There is no treatment. I tried to explain that to Mrs. Nellis but she wouldn't listen. My research into the near-death experience is in the very preliminary stages. It's purely theoretical."

The lawyer scribbled on his Palm Pilot. "Treatment in predevelopment phase."

He's as bad as Maisie's mother, Richard thought. "It's not in the predevelopment phase. There is no treatment, and even if there were, it would never be approved for experimental use on a child-"

"In ordinary circ.u.mstances, I'd agree with you, but where the treatment involved would be utilized in a postcode situation, there are several options, the least problematical of which is to cla.s.sify the treatment as a postmortem experimental procedure."

He's talking about Maisie, Richard thought, gritting his teeth. "I have to go," he said, going around the lawyer and toward the elevators. "I was supposed to meet someone-"

"I'll ride down with you," the lawyer said, leaning past him to press the "down" b.u.t.ton. "Since the patient is technically deceased, the same legal permissions as those required for organ harvesting could be used." The elevator arrived, and Richard and the lawyer stepped in. "What floor?"

"G," Richard said.

"Mercy General unfortunately has a policy forbidding experimentation on the just-deceased, though since it was intended to prevent interns practicing such procedures as femoral artery catheterizations, we can argue that your treatment doesn't fall under the ban. Our second option is an Extreme Measures order, which demands that every possible measure be taken to save the life of the patient."

The elevator opened on G. The lawyer followed Richard out. "An EM order is legally riskier, but it has the advantage of allowing the procedure to be done earlier than a postmortem would. At this point I'm pursuing all options," he said and stepped back inside as the door began to close.

Thank G.o.d, Richard thought, heading for his car at a lope. I thought he was going to go with me.

He debated calling Kit to tell her he'd be late, but he didn't want to take the time to find a phone, and if Mr. Briarley answered again, it would take longer than driving over there, especially if traffic cooperated.

It didn't. There was fog, just as the intern had said, and traffic had slowed to a crawl. It was three-twenty by the time he got there.

And it will take another half an hour to get away from Mr. Briarley, he thought, but Kit came outwith the transcripts as soon as he pulled up. "I brought my cell phone," she said as he pulled away from the curb. "So who is it?"

"You won't believe this," he said, turning onto Evans. He told her about Carl Aspinall as he drove down to Santa Fe and picked up I-25. "Aspinall must have told her what he'd experienced while in the coma, and something about it, or something combined with words he muttered while he was unconscious, provided the key."

"Do you think he'll know what that something was?" Kit asked.

"I don't know. I'm hoping Joanna said something, shouted 'Eureka!' and then explained why she was excited. If she didn't, we'll have to hope we see the connection, too. Why don't you read the transcripts out loud?"

Kit nodded and started through Joanna's notes. Richard turned onto I-70 and headed west. The fog thinned a little toward Golden and then closed in again as they began to climb into the foothills.

The cars ahead of them disappeared, and so did the rocky slopes on either side. Twenty-car pileup, Richard thought. He turned his headlights on and slowed down.

" '...half...' " Kit read " '...to... (unintelligible)... fire... make...' " She glanced up. "Where are we?"

she said, looking out at the shrouded landscape.

"I-70, going up toward Timberline," Richard said, handing her Maisie's page of directions.

"Aspinall and his wife are staying at their mountain cabin. Which exit do I take?"

She consulted the directions. "This one," she said, pointing at a green sign, barely visible through the fog. "And then north on 58." They both leaned forward, straining to see the signs and make the turn onto Highway 58, and then Kit went back to reading. " '...water... oh, grand (unintelligible)...

smoke-' " She stopped, staring out at the fog.

"Is that all?" Richard asked.

"No," she said, "I was just thinking, maybe the smoke is the clue."

"I thought you weren't able to find any fires on the t.i.tanic that night."

"I wasn't," she said, "but that's just it. Everything else Joanna saw-the mail clerks dragging sacks of mail up to the Boat Deck and the pa.s.sengers milling around on deck and the rockets-all really happened, and her descriptions of the gymnasium and the Grand Staircase and the writing room could have been taken straight from Uncle Pat's books."

"But not the smoke."

"No, not the smoke, or the fog, or whatever it was she saw. It doesn't fit, and maybe in trying to find out why it didn't, she found out the answer. In science, isn't it the piece that doesn't fit that leads to the breakthrough?"

"Yes," he said. "Or maybe she was trying to prove it didn't fit, because that would prove it wasn't really the t.i.tanic. Maybe that's why she asked you all those questions about the mail roomand the First-Cla.s.s Dining Saloon, because she was hoping her description wouldn't match."

"But then why didn't she write down what she saw? If she was trying to prove discrepancies, she'd have wanted to doc.u.ment them, but there's no mention of smoke or a fire or fog anywhere in her accounts, taped or written. And it's in Maisie's account, and Ms. Schuster's. I think it's the key."

"Well, we'll know in a few minutes," Richard said, pointing at a sign barely visible in the fog: "Timberline 8 mi."

The fog grew steadily thicker and the road twistier. Richard had to devote all his attention to seeing the center line. " '...water....' " Kit read, " '...no... blanked out...,' and then two words with question marks after them, 'cold? code?' "

"Tunnel," Richard said.

"Tunnel?" Kit said. "How do you get 'tunnel' out of 'cold' and 'code'?"

"Tunnel," he repeated, and pointed. The arched mouth of a tunnel loomed ahead, black in the formless fog.

"Oh, a tunnel," Kit said, and they drove into it.

It was dark, which meant it must be a short one. The longer tunnels, like the Eisenhower and the ones in Glenwood Canyon, were lit with gold sodium-vapor lights. This one was pitch-black beyond the range of their headlights, and foggy.

"Why would I have seen the t.i.tanic, of all things?" Joanna had said. "I live in Colorado. There are dozens of tunnels in the mountains."

And she was right, he thought. A tunnel like this was the obvious a.s.sociation. The narrow sides, the feeling of swift forward motion, the darkness. The tunnel must curve, because he couldn't see the end, couldn't see the light.

The light. There was no sensation of having driven around a curve, but he must have, because there was the mouth of the tunnel, blindingly bright and nearly upon them. Richard squinted against the sudden whiteness.

"A mountain tunnel would have been the logical a.s.sociation," Joanna had said. The feeling of opening out into light, into s.p.a.ce, the blinding brightness of eyes adjusting from blackness to daylight, no, brighter than that. Brilliant, dazzling. It's too bright, Richard thought and felt a stab of fear. Why is it so bright?

Beside him, Kit put up her hand to shade her eyes, and the movement looked defensive, as if she were s.h.i.+elding herself from a blow. Where are we? Richard thought, and was out of the tunnel and into another world. Blue sky and glittering snow and white, pine-covered slopes.

"What happened to the fog?" Kit asked wonderingly.

"We must have climbed above it," Richard said, though there had been no sensation of climbingeither, but at the next curve in the road, they could see the white layer of cloud below them, blanketing the canyon.

"Heaven," Kit murmured, and Richard knew she was thinking the same thing he was.

"Everything except the ringing or buzzing sound," he said, and Kit's cell phone rang.

"Mrs. Gray, is everything all right?" Kit said anxiously. It must be the Eldercare person. "Oh. In the cupboard above the sink, behind the oatmeal. I hope." Kit punched "end." "She couldn't find the sugar," she said to Richard, looking relieved. She picked up the transcripts. "I'd better finish reading these. We're almost there."

"Correction, we are there," Richard said, pointing at a sign that said Timberline. He turned onto a narrow, snowy road, and then a narrower, snowier one, and stopped in front of an elaborately rustic-looking chalet.

"I can't believe it," Kit said as they walked up to the door. "We're going to find out what Joanna was trying to tell us."

A woman met them at the door, looking surprised and a little wary.

"Mrs. Aspinall?" Richard said, wondering suddenly how to explain their mission here without sounding crazy. "I'm Dr. Wright. This is Ms. Gardiner. We're from Mercy General. We-"

"Oh, come in," she said, opening the door wide. "How nice of you to come all this way! Carl's in the family room. He'll be so pleased to see you." She took Richard's coat and hung it up. "Dr.

Cherikov was here yesterday." She took Kit's coat. "All his doctors have been so nice, coming to check on him."

"Mrs. Aspinall-" Richard began, but she was already leading them down a long, pine-paneled hall, telling them about Carl's condition.

"He's making wonderful progress, especially now that we're up here. He's stopped having the nightmares-"

"Mrs. Aspinall," Richard said uncomfortably. "I'm afraid there's been a misunderstanding. I'm not one of Mr. Aspinall's doctors."

Mrs. Aspinall stopped in midhall and turned to face them. "But you said you were from Mercy General."

"We are," Richard said. "We were friends of Joanna Lander's. She was my partner on a research project."

"Oh," Mrs. Aspinall said. She hesitated, as if she were going to show them the door, and then led them on down to the door at the end of the hall. It wasn't the family room. It was a decidedly unrustic kitchen. "Would you like some tea?"

"No, thanks," Richard said. "Mrs. Aspinall, the reason we came-""I was so sorry to hear of Dr. Lander's death," Mrs. Aspinall said. "She was so kind to Carl and to me. She used to come and sit with Carl so I could go get something to eat." She shook her head sadly. "Such a terrible tragedy! There's so much violence everywhere these days. It upset Carl terribly."

Good, at least he knows, Richard thought, and we won't walk into a hornet's nest the way we did with Maisie, but he asked, just in case. "You told your husband about her death?"

"I wasn't going to. He was still so fragile, and he didn't know her." She smiled apologetically.

"It's so hard for me to remember that all the people who cared for him all those weeks and who I know so well are total strangers to him."

Richard and Kit looked at each other across the table. "But Carl heard the nurses talking," Mrs.

Aspinall went on, "and when Guadalupe came into the room, he could see she'd been crying, and he knew something was wrong. He was convinced I was keeping something from him about his illness, so I ended up having to tell him."

"Mrs. Aspinall," Richard said, "the day Dr. Lander died, she was on the track of something important, something to do with the project we were working on. We're talking to everyone she saw that day, which is why we're here. We'd like-"

Mrs. Aspinall was shaking her head. "I didn't see her that day. The nurses told me she'd been in two days before to see him, but I wasn't there. The last time I saw her was at least a week before that, so I'm afraid I can't help you. I'm sorry."

"Actually, it's your husband we want to talk to," Richard said.