The Singing of the Dead by Dana Stabenow Read Free Book Online

Lily's children, which two were not called by name in that issue of the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner. All the June 12th article said, and on the front page, too, was that Lily Gordaoff MacGregor was moving her family to Cordova, where she had relatives, and that she would be sorely missed by all who remained behind.
    Quite a tribute for a white-run newspaper of the time to pay to a Native woman. Paula was impressed. She ran the spool backwards, and her attention was caught by a headline datelined Niniltna, a village in the Park that comprised the greater part of Anne Gordaoff's chosen district. She had to rewind to find it again. Someone had been killed, murdered, a woman, in the spring of 1915.
    It had nothing to do with Anne Gordaoff, of course, but the circumstances listed in the paper were such that Paula might be able to work them into her novel. The third chapter could use a little spicing up, and what better for spice than a discretionary helping of blood and guts? After all, everyone loves a murder.
    She glanced at her watch. Three-forty-five. Her time was bought and paid for until five. She wondered what Anne Gordaoff's stand was on subsidizing the arts.
    She decided Anne was for it.
     
    Rampart
    January 14, 1899
     
    The man died at five minutes past two o'clock in the morning. The boy was born at three.
    They had moved to Rampart from Dawson the previous spring along with fifteen hundred other stampeders. At first it was the same there as it had been in Dawson, a lot of people who would speak to Sam Halvorsen but none who would deign to notice the Dawson Darling, no matter how respectably married she could now claim to be. Sam Halvorsen was the scion of a wealthy and respected Minneapolis family who had made money in lumber, and Rampart, for all its small size and remote location, was like many of the gold towns of the north filled with people of similar backgrounds, people who, if they didn't know Sam's family, had at least heard of it, and displayed their disapproval of his marrying so far out of his class by soundly snubbing his wife.
    “What do we care?” he said, tumbling her into the bed of the tiny bedroom at the back of the tiny cabin on the bank of the Yukon River. “I've got you, what the hell do I want with a bunch of snobs hanging around getting in the way?”
    But she thought he did want them, and it worried at her.
    She was, in fact, his lawful wife. They had married in March, three months to the day from when he had snatched her from the Double Eagle stage in Dawson.
    He had enough of his father in him that the cabin, built of logs and insulated with sod, was solid and as air-tight as anything in the Arctic was at fifty-two below. The post took up most of the space, with a tiny bedroom in one corner, just wide enough for the bed, which was a big one to accommodate the length of Sam's legs. “And yours,” he had said before investigating their cumulative length in painstaking detail.
    Ah, she loved him, how she loved him. She now thought she had loved him from the first moment she had seen him, standing so tall and so angry next to the door he had just come through, fresh from the claim on Orogrande Creek he had sold the month before, looking for nothing more than a cold beer and an honest game of poker.
    Instead he found her, prancing around nearly naked in front of a lot of drooling idiots with more gold than sense, for sale to the highest bidder. “I knew you were my wife,” he told her later, “and I sure as hell didn't know what my wife was doing up on that stage.”
    It was a week before they got out of bed, a month before they'd left his cabin, two months before they realized that her auction had made even wide-open Dawson City too hot to hold them. They hadn't been able to find a minister to marry them, and had had to fall back on an itinerant preacher headed for Nome, riding a bicycle down the frozen Yukon River. They followed him as far as Rampart, where Sam built their post and she