Tainted Trail (18 page)

“You're in luck.” The ticket woman returned. “Frank was on duty and he's here today. He's downstairs, replacing some lightbulbs for the next tour.”

“Can I talk to him?”

She gave him directions, starting with going back outside and around the corner. Outside he noticed the words
WEBB
and
GRANT
marked into the corner cement.
Those were the street names as Rennie remembered them!

There had been a card room at the foot of the steps, and the second floor of the building had been a brothel. He went down the steps to the old card room, wondering why the street names had been changed. He opened the door and found that the card room remained—sort of. Mannequins dressed in blue jeans and cowboy hats sat around battered tables. The room was as cold and dark as he remembered, but everything was off.

He heard a distant curse, and he wandered through a doorway into the next room. “Frank?”

“Who's there?”

He followed the voice through a maze of rooms, revealing a vast underground space with stone walls and rough-timbered ceilings. “Hello?”

“Next room,” came the call.

This was a large cellar, completely bare. A man stood on a ladder beneath a bare lightbulb in a ceramic base, lightbulb and flashlight in hand. On the floor were two four-packs of light bulbs.

“Are you Frank?”

“In the flesh!” Frank leaned down, offering out a gray lightbulb. “Can you hold this for me? I don't have enough hands.”

Ukiah took the lightbulb and the flashlight, freeing Frank to climb down the ladder unhindered. He was under six feet tall, compact, and dark-haired.

“I'm a private investigator,” Ukiah said. “My name is Ukiah Oregon.”

“Howdy!” Frank grinned as Ukiah tucked the flashlight under his arm in order to shake hands. “I can take those now. Thanks. This is really a two-person job, but no one was free to help. Ukiah? Like the town?”

“I was named after the town.” Ukiah tried to keep the conversation from veering off into that trap. He never had this problem in Pittsburgh. “I'm looking into the disappearance of Alicia Kraynak.”

“Who?” Frank slipped the burned-out lightbulb into an empty slot in one of the four packs.

Ukiah gave a few brief details, ending with, “It appears now that she was kidnapped. We're checking into places we know that she visited in Pendleton.”

“To see who she met who might have followed her back and kidnapped her.”

“Yes.” Ukiah shifted uneasily. “We don't have any leads at this time.”

“And in about three days, this town explodes. Anyone tell you about the roundup?”

Ukiah checked his memory. “The population triples.”

“Yup. We're already feeling the squeeze. Got a picture of the girl?”

Ukiah pulled Alicia's photograph out and showed it to him.

“I remember her. Don't think I have anything useful to tell you, but I remember her.”

“Tell me anyhow.”

“Mind if I finish doing lightbulbs as we talk? We had a whole series of them flash out on the morning tour, and the afternoon tour is due in about twenty minutes.”

“Okay.” Ukiah tucked away Alicia's photograph.

Frank folded the ladder, swung it into a carry position, then quirked an eyebrow as he looked at the four packs. “Can you grab those?”

“Sure.” Ukiah picked up the lightbulbs and followed Frank through a series of interlinked underground rooms. Without outside windows, he found it difficult to keep his bearings. He never realized before that usually he knew without thinking which ways were east and west, and how the rest of the world, inside and out, lay around him. If there was a place he could get fully lost, this was it. They cut through a mock-up of a Chinese laundry and an ice-cream shop. After the fourth oversized room, Ukiah realized that the area was huge; they seemed to be moving through the cellars of an entire city block.

“What is this place?” Ukiah asked.

“Pendleton Underground.” Frank opened a door into
cave blackness. He set down the ladder, took out his flashlight, and turned it on. Picking up the ladder, he continued forward, his light playing through another store mock-up. It seemed to be a butcher shop, complete with fake animal car-casses hanging from hooks. “When they built up the town, all the buildings were going up just about the same time, and they had cheap labor: the Chinese who worked on the intercontinental railroad. So they decided to build the cellars uniform and interconnected. They went a little mad with it, though. All told, there's like seventy miles of corridors.”

“All connected?”

“At one time. It's fairly chopped up now.”

The room dog-legged to the right after the door, so the light from the previous room barely leaked in. Ukiah waited for his eyes to adjust, then followed Frank.

The tour guide swept his light over the ceiling and picked out three burned-out lights. “These three always go at the same time. I'm going to come down and replace one of them in a week or two, so next time they're staggered.” Frank noticed then that Ukiah was in the room with him. “Careful, the floor isn't even over there.”

Frank indicated the area with a quick sketch of light on the far side of the room.

Ukiah had a sense of the room now, pieced together by the shifting column of light from Frank's flashlight. The uneven section was a large square on the floor, which at one time might have been a pit, but was now filled in with loose earth. Hooks hung on a ceiling track dangled over the square. “What was that?”

“It used to be a ten-foot pit, lined with cork and filled with salt water.” Frank lined up underneath one of the burned-out lights and set up his ladder. “They had coils running from a newfangled pneumatic compressor, through the salt water, which freezes at a lower temperature than plain water.”

“Why?” Ukiah steadied the ladder as Frank climbed it.

“It was the only way to make ice.” Frank flashed his light over a tall, narrow tin. “They filled those tins with spring-water, and lowered them into the salt water. The
spring-water freezes overnight, and makes a hundred-pound block of ice, which sold at a dollar per pound. New bulb?”

Ukiah handed the lightbulb up and took the dead bulb in its place. He studied the dirt while Frank screwed the new bulb in, wanting to spare his currently light-sensitive eyes.

The half-glimpsed pieces of the room connected with one of Rennie's buried memories. Curious, Ukiah summoned it to the surface, and discovered what a Pack member could do with a pit of freezing water and a half-dead Ontongard. The individual cells of the alien could choose to generate heat to keep from freezing, or heal. Without great quantities of food, they couldn't do both. Starving, they could do neither.

He recoiled from the memory, and found himself disoriented by the changes in the room. “There used to be windows with moonlight coming in.”

Frank came down the ladder, looking at him oddly. “Moonlight? Well, yeah. We had to change some things around.” He went and shut the steel door into the butcher shop. “Because of fire codes, we had to put in this door and keep it closed at all times.”

Frank crossed the dim room to where the window used to be and a door now stood. “We knocked out this window and put in this door. We don't have access to that area.” He waved at the wall to the right. “So we put this in to connect to the speakeasy.”

He opened the door into a small, triangular room. Sunlight spilled down through a grid-work skylight. “Basically they built the basements under the buildings, and out here were service tunnels or light wells, under the sidewalks.” He pointed to the skylight. “That's a ship's prism light. Normally it sets into the deck of a ship to let light into the hold. Here, the prism light is set into the sidewalk.”

“That's the sidewalk? Out on the street level?” Ukiah tried to reconstruct the turns he had taken in order to place which street was above them.

“Yeah. See, the ceiling is reinforced to take the poured concrete.” Frank turned to point out a second window beside the door. It looked like a normal window frame, plywood replacing the glass. “We boarded this one up to meet fire
code. In the old days, the sidewalks were wood, so the windows had glass to let in the light but keep out the cold.”

Across the light well was another door, apparently the way to the speakeasy.

Ukiah gazed at the far door. He
almost
remembered it, which was very strange for him. He usually either recalled something perfectly, or not at all. Perhaps it was one of Rennie's memories, refusing to surface because things had been too altered to recognize. “That was a window too?”

“Perhaps at one time. Things have changed a lot since the 1870s. When we started working on the tour, it was just a hole in the wall into the speakeasy. They used it as a secret passage during police raids.”

Frank opened the far door.

The smell of mothballs washed into the room. Ukiah glimpsed a tin ceiling in the room beyond. Utter terror hit him—then was gone. He stumbled backward, fighting the urge to bolt.
What was that? What happened to Rennie here?

No. Rennie never had been in this odd-shaped area beyond the butcher shop's windows.

I remember this. I was terrified here.
Ukiah walked forward, trembling with the recalled terror and the excitement of finally having discovered one of his own memories.

The room beyond was set up like the card room. The smell of mothballs came from cloth bags dangling from the tin ceiling. He gazed around, but nothing else came. He stepped back into the light well.

A sliver of memory. One brilliant, hard moment.

. . . the ground of the room had been up to the level of the window sill. He lay in the dirt, frightened beyond rational thoughts. He stared at the speakeasy's door, which then had been a much smaller hole in the wall, cut into the back of a cupboard . . .

And then the memory stopped.

“You okay?” Frank asked. “Some people get hit with claustrophobia. They don't expect it. It's just a basement, but after all the twists and turns, sometimes . . .”

“I was here, once, as a child,” Ukiah said. “Something bad happened. It frightened me.”

“What happened?”

“I don't remember. I don't have any memories of my childhood. It's a complete blank. I was a John Doe who my adoptive parents renamed.”

“So, Ukiah Oregon isn't your original name?”

“No.” The Kicking Deers, he realized, had only called him Uncle. What had been his name?

Frank looked like he was about to launch into more questions.

“Tell me about Alicia,” Ukiah detoured him.

Frank indicated Ukiah to follow him. He juggled the ladder through to the speakeasy, pausing to close doors behind him.

“She was one of twenty people that I took through, hmm, almost a month ago.” Frank continued. “She seemed to be with this little woman, Italian-looking. I don't think she said anything to me. She laughed at my jokes. She seemed to be a feminist. Now, the Chinese and the Indians really got a raw deal out of this town. All this land once belonged to the plateau Indians. When the white men came over the mountains, more times than not, they were starving. The Indians would greet them in peace and sell them food so they wouldn't die.”

“What does this have to do with Alicia?”

Frank stopped under another gray, burned-out lightbulb. On the wall was a map, showing the city street, bearing the names that Rennie remembered.

“Well, the first part of the tour I talk about how badly the Chinese and Indians were treated.” Frank set up the ladder. “The Chinese were indentured servants, which meant they were one step removed from slaves, and treated as such. The Indians were rounded up and confined to the reservation. All through this, Alicia is fine.

“Second part of the tour, though, we go up to the Cozy Rooms, a brothel, and suddenly you can see the hurt feelings all over her face. These were
white women
that suffered.”

Frank held out his hand for a new bulb.

Ukiah glared at him, angry that this stranger passed judgment on Alicia. “You're saying she's a bigot.”

“That's simplifying something that's a whole lot more complicated than that,” Frank said, folding his arms across the top of the ladder. “What's a Chinese man that lived a hundred years ago to an American woman of 2004? She feels sorry for him, but, hell, he's dead. This is America! We've pissed on everyone, at one point or another, but we're over all that, right? She hasn't seen the Chinese mistreated lately, so she assumes that all that badness is over. On the other hand, we've still got whores.”

“I suppose.” Ukiah's anger retreated into confusion. Indigo's family never spoke about discrimination, but did that mean that they faced none?

Frank reached out again for the new bulb, and Ukiah handed it to him. “She's a friend of yours?” Frank asked, his attention on the socket.