"Kidnapped? Oh, God, the poor woman."

"Alicia had plans of visiting your store. She would have visited here sometime between August first and last Sunday. Do remember if she came in to your store?"

"She came in. It was a Saturday. Not the last one, but the one before it." Cecilia said it slowly, as if she wasn't sure. A leather-bound guest book sat open on one of the counters. She pulled it over to her and started to flip through it. "Yeah, here. Alicia Kraynak, University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, August fourteenth, 2004."

So it was. It was Alicia's handwriting, down to the circles over the I's which, in her teenage years, used to contain smiley faces. There were two other names after hers. One claiming to live in Portland, and the other said they were from Boise, Idaho.

"Was there anyone with her?"

"No." Cecilia squinted as she thought, as if peering back through time to see Alicia walk through the store. "She came in alone. She was my only customer for like an hour, so we talked a lot. She liked the CD I was playing, so I wrote down the name, but I forget which one it was now."

"What else did you talk about?"

"Beading. She bought mostly loose beads, wire, and some earring backs." Her eyes traveled about the room, watching that past Alicia. "She bought a strand of turquoise nuggets and all the wolf fetishes I had. She was going to make presents during the trip home. She liked the knives, everyone loves the knives,but she couldn't afford them."

"Did she mention anything about someone following her, watching her?"

"Nothing like that." Cecilia was startled out of her time seeing. "She asked about places to eat. She wanted information on the local tribes. I gave her one of the newspapers"-she pointed out a stack of papers beside Ukiah-"and I told her about Tamastslikt."

The newspaper was the Confederated Umatilla Journal, which was subtitled "The monthly newspaper of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation-Pendleton, Oregon."

"What's Tamastslikt?"

"It's the cultural institute for the tribes in the area. They're the Cayuse, Umatilla, and Walla Walla tribes. The reservation is just east of town."

He recalled now seeing signs for it while driving out to the casino. "Did she say why she wanted the information?"

"I took a phone call, so I was half-listening to her. She said something about Ukiah. The newspaper said she disappeared from a campground near there, so I guess that she was researching the town she was in."

"At the reservation?"

She shrugged. "The Indians have been here the longest. Hey, wait; didn't you say your name was Ukiah? That is so wild! Well, now I don't know. She might have been talking about the town, or maybe she was talking about you. Hell, she might have been talking about getting you a present. I really wasn't paying attention."

Ukiah found it disquieting. Since the insanity of June, he had barely thought of Alicia until her disappearance. It was disturbing to imagine her thinking of him right before she vanished. "Her uncle is my partner's best friend." Spoken aloud, the link seemed so tenuous. "I guess we're fairly good friends. We're thrown together a lot."

Cecilia grinned at him. "I wouldn't mind being thrown together with you."

"You say she was your only customer?" He angled for a second witness.

"I don't remember anyone else coming in while she was here. Mostly we just talked about beads.

Food and beads. She did ask what were good places to eat, other than the fast-food places."

"What places did you recommend to her?"

"Shari's is good and inexpensive. I told her that if she was out at the reservation to check out the Wildhorse Casino. The restaurant has a good buffet."

"Did she mention needing to meet someone? Or someone she would like to see?"

Cecilia shook her head, eyes looking back again, but seeing nothing. "I don't remember anything else."

He gave her a brief description of the kidnapper, tall and blond, remembering to hold back the blood type. She couldn't match it to anyone specific, certainly not anyone that would kidnap someone. He wrote down the mysterious number in Alicia's planner. She shook her head, bewildered as they were. The bell hung over the door twinkled as several, women entered. Ukiah took out his business card.

"Thank you. If you think of anything, you can reach me at the first number listed."

"Sure. No problem. I hope you find her. She was really nice."

Underground? was all Alicia wrote. Sam had expanded it to Pendleton Underground, cornerFirst and Emigrant. It was nearly impossible to miss with a huge wall painting of a hand pointing down Emigrant Street at the corner of Main Street. The door read TOURS AND GIFT SHOP and swung open on a room with two banklike teller windows. A mannequin of an Abraham Lincoln look-alike sat at one of the windows.

On the wall was a map of the world with thousands of bright colored pushpins. Visitors were invited to stick a pin at the place they were from. Alicia had stuck a yellow one into the mass surrounding Pittsburgh.

A woman came out of a side room, investigating the bell that jingled as he had entered. "Oh, I thought I heard that bell. I'm sorry, all the tours are sold out today and tomorrow. I can make you a reservation for Monday afternoon."

"I'm a private investigator looking into a kidnapping. Can I ask you a few questions?"

"A kidnapping?"

He produced Alicia's photo. "This is Alicia Kraynak. She was kidnapped earlier this week. I've been hired by her uncle to look for her."

She looked dutifully at the photo. "I don't recognize her, but we have lots of people in every day.

They mill around, maybe buy something in the gift shop, and then they leave. The tour guide spends ninety minutes with them. If she was on one of our tours, he'll probably remember her."

"Can I talk to him?"

"Them. There are several. It depends on which day she was in."

"It probably was a Saturday, sometime between August first and this Sunday."

"We have a guest book. Most people sign it. We can check that to see if she signed it." She led him into a small gift shop with an unusual range of gifts. Some were clearly Old West Cowboy. Others were Native American crafts. There were also a puzzling number of Chinese items.

At the center of it all was a stuffed grizzly bear inside a glass case. It stood on its back legs, mouth open in an unending roar. Like most things of his childhood, the grizzly seemed smaller than he remembered grizzly bears being, even while standing on a rock pedestal. The fur on its belly was sparse, the crudely stitched seam from its skinning zigzagging haphazardly through a rough tic-tac-toe pattern.

Its claws, the length of his fingers, however, remained impressive.

The ticket woman was beyond the bear, flipping through a book much like the one at the bead shop, chanting, "Alicia. Alicia. Alicia." She paused. "K-ray-nak. Was that the name? University of Pittsburgh?"

"That's her."

"She was here on August seventh." The woman handed him the book. "I'll see who was on duty."

That Saturday had been busy. Signatures representing nearly a hundred people had dates of August seventh. Rose had gone on the tour with Alicia, signing immediately below her. Most of the people, like the pins outside, came from the West Coast, but there was a married couple from Australia, and another from Boston. None of the people, however, were locals. That was, of course, if everyone signed the book.

"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 abrothel. 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 realizedbefore 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 carcasses 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?"