The Singing of the Dead Read Online Free PDF Page B

you're shoving,” Old Sam Dementieff growled.
    “Relax, jeeze, have a beer,” Mac Devlin said. “You busy tonight, honey?”
    “Ayah,” said Auntie Vi, “never mind these men, they just want to get you drunk and take advantage. Have some iced tea. We have lemon.”
    “I don't want any beer or any iced tea! I want my son! Now let me through!”
    Kate slipped outside, dodged the northwest leg of the antenna tower, and trotted through the vehicles parked in the yard, over the bridge and down the road to where her truck was parked. Johnny's face gleamed white in the shadows beneath the dashboard.
    Kate climbed in and started the engine. “You'll have to talk to her sometime, Johnny.”
    “Just get us out of here, okay?”
    Kate, in the full awareness that she was breaking half a dozen statutes and probably a couple of federal laws while she was at it, put the truck in gear and headed down the road to her homestead.

 
3
    P aula Pawlowski was a writer.
    She had been rewriting the first four chapters of her novel for going on eleven years now. When she got them perfect, she was going to send it to Simon and Schuster, whose address she had found in a copy of the 1987 edition of Writer's Market on the shelf at the Salvation Army.
    She'd recently given some thought to letting Hollywood have first crack. Steven Spielberg was an obvious first choice there, although she worried that he had a dangerous predilection toward the saccharine. He'd found ways to end movies on racism, the Holocaust, and World War II on an upbeat note, which said a lot for his abilities as a filmmaker but not much for the accuracy of his vision. Still, she owed him the right of first refusal for ET . Honor among artists, she thought, coining a phrase.
    She stretched and rolled her head back, left, forward, right. Microfilm was a wonderful invention, no doubt, but watching it spool past for more than two hours at a time tended to make her muscles cramp up. Not to mention making her seasick.
    Seated at a reader in the Fairbanks library, she compared the stack of microfilmed and microfiched issues of the Anchorage Daily News , the Anchorage Times , the Fairbanks Daily News- Miner, the Alaska Journal of Commerce , and various public records going back sixty years that she had skimmed through with the stack that she hadn't, and sighed.
    Her day job was also that of a writer, of technical reports, grant proposals, position papers for political candidates of any party, and press releases for corporations too small to have their own PR departments. She was a good writer and better still, she was fast, but even so, sometimes there just weren't enough writing jobs to make the payment on the Airstream trailer parked on a weedy five acres that was all her mother had left her when she died of smoke inhalation in another trailer parked on that same lot five years before. The Airstream had a built-in double bed, a tiny kitchen, and an even tinier bathroom, but it had running water, at least in the summertime, and in the Park, where homes, of any kind, from a one-room, two-by-four tar-paper shack to a split-level ranch brought in premium prices, she was lucky and she knew it. True, January's heating bill sometimes hit three hundred dollars, but at least it was better than her friend Lillian, who had moved in with a man she didn't even like that much just for a warm place to stay.
    She who moves fastest moves alone, Paula thought to herself, and bent back over the reader. Her job was to look at the incumbent's family history going back as far as there was any in Alaska. “Don't get ridiculous about it,” Darlene had said. “Don't go back to the Russians or anything, but take a look, see what pops up. If you spot anything with potential, let me know.”
    For “anything with potential,” read any nasty surprises Anne Gordaoff could attack Peter Heiman on, like a secret abortion, a messy divorce, an unacknowledged child, an indiscreet affair, a lie on a Permanent Fund