The waitress stopped by, pad in hand, and Edna smiled at her. "Just water, please."
"Sure thing," the girl said cheerfully.
"I'll leave a big tip," Edna promised.
The waitress laughed. "Don't worry about it."
"Anyway," Edna continued, "there were some beatings and a few scattered attacks. Tarring and feathering. An attempted lynching. Flagstaff was still considered the wild frontier back then, and lawlessness and vigilantism were not unknown in these parts. Some people could see the writing on the wall, and a few of the local businesses who relied heavily on cheap Chinese labor created 'safe rooms' just in case." She paused. "And tunnels."
"Is that-?" Angela began.
Edna nodded. "Yes. At least, that's what I was told. Eventually, there were riots, anti-Chinese riots. Stores and businesses that hired Chinese workers were looted; rooming houses and shacks where they boarded were burned. There was thousands of dollars' worth of damage, dozens of injuries, and several people died. None of them were Chinese, though. This part's documented. You can look it up in newspaper articles from that time in the university library. I have."
The waitress brought her water, and Edna thanked the girl, taking a long sip. "The Chinese workers and their families all seemed to have disappeared. No one knew what had happened to them. Eventually, after things had calmed down, a few were found working at the hotel or at the mill. Supposedly they'd hidden in the secret rooms and the tunnels while all the chaos was going on above. But many of the families never returned, and the story passed down to me was that
later, maybe at night when it was safe, they'd left the city. The rumor was that they'd ridden the rails east."
Angela suddenly understood. "But they didn't leave," she said, stunned. "They never left the tunnel. They died in there. That's what we saw."
Edna nodded soberly. "But there were tunnels" she said. "Plural. At least that's what I heard. So ..." She trailed off.
"So there could be more," Derek said.
"Yes."
He looked down at the floor. "There could be bodies under us right now."
"They were supposed to be somewhere in this downtown district," Edna agreed.
Angela suddenly felt a lot less secure. With all of the gangs and violence and big-city problems of Los Angeles, she thought she'd be living a peaceful bucolic little life here in northern Arizona. She never could have imagined something like this. "But-" Her voice came out thin and cracked, and she cleared her throat. "But they were moving," she said. "At least some of them were. That one hand grabbed me. And what's that black mold? We tried to have it tested, but it doesn't even show up. It's not there. So it has to be some kind of magic or something. Is there some sort of curse on those tunnels and the people who died there? Or is it ...? I don't know. What is it?"
"That I can't tell you," Edna said. "All I know is that the tunnels were supposed to be part of an underground railroad for Chinese immigrants to protect them from vigilante mobs. Beyond that, I'm as much in the dark as you. But I thought knowing about the history might help you somehow or at least give you a place to start."
"Thank you," Angela said. But she wasn't sure it did help.
Edna thought for a moment, then sighed. "Well, maybe there is something else. I don't know. But I'll tell you anyway." She took another long sip of water. "When I was a little girl, my uncle came to visit us from Missouri. He was very tall for someone who was Chinese, very charismatic. He had some kind of glamorous job, although I don't remember what it was* Anyway, he stayed for about a week and it was wonderful. But one day, my parents were out somewhere and my uncle asked me to show him where my grandfather was buried. It wasn't in a real cemetery, since Chinese weren't allowed to be buried with Caucasian^ at that time. It was a makeshift cemetery out on the north end of town that was shared with other outcasts^ Indians had their own burial grounds, but the rest of us, the other minority groups-and there were only a handful of families all total-made do with this little plot in the forest, a little clearing of unowned land. My uncle bought a chicken first and put it in this black bag. I thought that was very odd. I kept asking him what he was going to do with it. I was fascinated| really. But he wouldn't say. Then when I showed him my grandfather's grave, he knelt down before it and started doing some kind of ... ritual is the only word to describe it. He started whispering some sort of chant-I knew some of the words but not all of them-then he took out the chicken and slit its throat! He let the blood drip on the grave, then put his fingers in it. He wrote some Chinese characters on the gravestone-I couldn't read yet, so I don't know what he wrote-then he put some blood on his forehead! stood up and bowed. Two words I remember he did say were 'bo sau.' Revenge. He gave me a lecture and told me my mother and father should be doing this, loo. We all should. But I got scared and started crying, and then he picked me up and then we left.
"When I told my mother about it, I remember she seemed scared. I think she even shivered, although that may just be my memory. But what she said was, He's trying to raise the dead.' That was enough to scare me, and it's all we ever said about it. My uncle left the next day, and I never knew if that was why, if my parents kicked him out or he stormed off, but he never came back to visit.
"I know my parents were never involved in any such thing, and I've never heard of anything else like it since. But my uncle said all good Chinese should perform that ritual, and I've thought about that over the years, wondered if there were others. Now I'm wondering if it's not connected to those bodies in the tunnel."
They were silent, no one sure of what to say after that. Angela's head was spinning.
"More iced tea?" the waitress asked cheerily, stopping by.
They acquiesced, fooled around for a few moments putting sugar in their glasses, squeezing lemon, stirring. Edna sipped her water.
Trying to raise the dead
It had to be related.
Derek began updating Edna on the most recent events, including their aborted sojourn into Babbitt House, and the old woman, shocked and frightened, said they had to call the police. And tell the county health authorities. "This could be the beginning of an epidemic," she said.
Neither of them had thought of it that way, and they both realized Edna was right.
"You don't know anything about this mold or fungus or whatever it is, do you?" Angela asked.
Edna shook her head. "I'm sorry, no. I've told you everything I know that could possibly help. This I never heard of."
Angela thought about the riots. Mob violend spread through crowds much like a disease or viru infecting ordinarily rational people. Maybe this blad mold had been around back then, too. Maybe it had sparked the anti-Chinese sentiment that had led to these horrible consequences. Maybe Flagstaff had been built on ground saturated with this toxic spore, and unearthing the tunnel had once again released it into the general population.
She agreed with Edna that the authorities needed to be notified, but she had no confidence that the people sent out to investigate wouldn't be affected, too. She glanced suspiciously over at Derek. Had he been contaminated? He hadn't actually touched the mold And he looked okay. But ...
Perhaps the best thing to do would be to cut her losses and speed back to California as quickly as Greyhound bus could carry her.