The Singing of the Dead
called Walkaway Jane after the second time she wrecked a plane and walked away from it, who promptly died in her next crash two months after the wedding.
    The third Peter didn't marry again. He tended to his business, buried his father next to his brother when the second Peter died in 1994 (obituary, December 1994, Ahtna Tribune , Cordova Times, Valdez Star, Valdez Vanguard, Seward Phoenix-Log, Anchorage Daily News , the Times was out of business by then, Eagle River Star, Frontiersman, Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, Juneau Empire ), buried his mother next to his father when she died in 1995 (obituary, Ahtna Tribune, Anchorage Daily News , June 1995), and took over as the heir and sole proprietor of Heiman Transportation and Service Corporation, Inc.
    By then he was already a state senator, and from all indications (AP photos of the third Peter dining with the governor in Juneau, conferring with the senior U.S. senator in Washington, D.C., shooting grouse with Alaska's U.S. congressman in Oregon and, of much more interest to Paula Pawlowski, seen in the company of every mover and shaker of any importance in Alaskan politics for the previous ten years, some of whom were still out of jail) a successful one.
    She took many notes, followed by a lunch break.
    When she got back to the library, the greasy burger and fries from the Sourdough Cafe sitting uneasily between her chronic heartburn and her incipient ulcer, she went back through a lot of the same spools looking for the name Gordaoff. She was in Fairbanks in the first place because both the Heiman and the Gordaoff families had a lot of history there. Plus, she wasn't paying for it. She wasted a moment speculating as to where all the Gordaoff campaign funds were coming from, decided she didn't care so long as her checks cleared the bank, and got back to work.
    The Gordaoff family was no less distinguished than the Heiman family, and with a lineage that went a lot farther back. Anne Gordaoff's grandmother was a feisty little (four feet five, “The Little Lovelies Who Would Be Miss Fairbanks,” Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, 1910) Athabascan woman, who married an Irish con artist with fingers in every pie south of Livengood, and who when those pies began to burn started drinking and beating his wife. She made Alaskan history by being the first Native woman ever (and the only one for a long time afterward) to sue her husband for divorce, get it, get the kids (there were four, two adopted), and get all the property that hadn't been gambled away. There were a lot of photographs of her, a tiny woman with dark skin and straight black hair piled high on her head. By all accounts Lily Gordaoff MacGregor oversaw her husband's business interests with so attentive an eye and so firm a hand that she became something of a local real estate magnate.
    Paula did some more digging and her eyebrows rose a little. Lily Gordaoff MacGregor had been a landlady of some consequence, owning an office building on Cushman, two boarding houses, one in Livengood, one on Wickersham, and—this time Paula's eyebrows rose very high indeed. She grinned down at the Fairbanks tax rolls for 1915. Lily Gordaoff MacGregor had been the owner of record of two houses on Fourth Avenue between Barnett and Cushman Streets in Fairbanks, Alaska, also known as the Fairbanks Line. Men had been lining up at the Fairbanks Line from 1906, when the Fairbanks city fathers created it at the behest of Archdeacon Stuck. The Fairbanks Line was, in fact, the longest-running and certainly one of the most profitable red light districts in Alaska and possibly the entire American West until its closure in 1955.
    Paula toyed with the idea of selling this information to Peter Heiman, and then decided against it. When you offer yourself to the highest bidder, you ought to stay bought. She looked down at the tax rolls and grinned again. Any professional worthy of the name would say the same.
    In 1919 the influenza epidemic had carried off two of

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