We went out to Stevens International and talked to the guys in the tower. (Really cool up there, lots going on, planes in the air everywhere you look, passenger 737s and cargo 747s almost nonstop in and out of Stevens International, F-22 squadrons training at Elmendorf, hunters coming and going from Lake Hood, not to mention all the wannabe pilots doing touch-and-goes at Merrill. (Here’s a story on AlaskaDispatch.com about somebody ground-looping a Super Cub on the Lake Hood strip yesterday. Like Jim says, that’s what happens when you learn on a tricycle and then buy a taildragger. Lucky nobody died.) They told me to come back in the summer to see it when it’s really hopping. Later Kate said they are always looking for new controllers, it’s a tough job and they burn out fast. I believe it.)
Anyway, the plane. Whoever was flying it didn’t file a flight plan (I know what Dad would have said about that) but the tower had the tail numbers. We tracked down the owner and he says he doesn’t know anything about the flight and that he was home asleep when it took off. Now his plane is gone. He sounded really pissed off, and said he was going to have a conversation with “those f****** airport rentacops.” He lives with his wife and two kids and everybody was home in bed at the time. Kate checked with Brendan, the guy’s had like one ticket for speeding in his whole life, so I think she kind of believes him. As much as Kate ever believes anybody.
2 P.M.—Got a text from Van, who got a text from Bobby, who heard from Auntie B on the marine band, who says there was a Myra Gordaoff born in Cordova nineteen years ago. I checked, she’s on Facebook. Her profile says she graduated from Cordova High, that she’s working for the AC, and that she’s in a relationship. One of her friends tagged her in a photo at a party, she’s sitting on some guy’s lap. He looks white, but you can’t see his face because he’s got a ball cap pulled down over his eyes.
The ball cap has an Anchorage Aces logo on it.
She hasn’t posted anything for a week and there are messages from three friends wondering where she disappeared to. I e-mailed all of them on Facebook.
7 P.M.—Heard back from one of Myra’s friends, a woman named Louise. She says Myra is engaged to be married to some guy named Chris, a cheechako who moved to Alaska last summer. He came to Cordova with a pal of his, an older man who is maybe a relative, she didn’t know for sure, both of them looking for jobs on a fishing boat.
Louise also says that Myra’s grandfather, Herman Gordaoff, is a big noise in the local Native community, one of the last surviving elders. Myra is his only grandchild, and besides both of them being shareholders in the local Native Association, Herman has a lot of money and property, including a twenty-eight-hundred-square-foot home on the slough, twenty-five acres out Hartney Bay road, a couple of gold mines, and a vacation cabin at Boswell Bay, not to mention a fifty-foot salmon seiner and a fishing permit whose area includes the Kanuyaq River flats, which even I know is probably the most lucrative permit a fisherman can own in the state. I asked Louise if Herman spoke English. She said yes. She was kind of mifty about it.
I told Kate. She looked grim. “I don’t know what’s worse,” she said, “living with ‘No dogs or Natives allowed’ signs in the store windows fifty years ago, or Native women being preyed on today because they’ve got a big fat quarterly shareholder dividend coming in.”
“You think this Chris guy wants to marry Myra so he can get his hands on her money?”
“I think he wants to marry Myra so he can get her hands on her grandfather’s money,” Kate said. “I’ll bet they came to Alaska with the intention of finding a female shareholder they could live off of. They nosed around, zeroed in on the Gordaoffs, and either followed Herman out to his cabin or kidnapped him and took him there. Herman was smart enough to play dumb, pretend he couldn’t speak English, figured to buy himself a little time so maybe he could make a break for it.
“So Chris and his buddy went to AFN looking for Eyak speakers, found Gilbert, kidnapped him, and took him to the cabin. When that didn’t work, they took him back to Anchorage and dumped him off.”
“What about Herman Gordaoff?”
Kate was already dialing her cell phone.
