Free So sure of death by Dana Stabenow Page A

portions held in trust with Molly and Jonathan as trustees. No provision had been made for the simultaneous death of everyone named in the will. Molly Malone's given name had been Marybethia. Liam made a note of the lawyer's name and Anchorage address. It was a considerable estate. It would be interesting to discover who benefited.
    He sat for a moment, thinking. On an impulse he pushed back the chair to go upstairs and into the master bedroom.
    The picture ledges on the wall opposite the bed held fourteen three-by-five prints, their wooden frames painted in bright primary colors and arranged like a prism in two rows of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. There were two baby pictures, newborns with red, squinched-up faces and no hair, and the only way Liam could tell them apart was by the color of the blankets they were wrapped in. He remembered his first sight of Charlie, rosy and wrinkled and irate at being thrust from a warm, safe world into the glaring lights of the delivery room at Providence Hospital in Anchorage.
    The pictures featured the two children, alone or with one or the other of their parents. The eldest was the girl, Kerry, redheaded and freckle-faced and gap-toothed childhood growing into an auburn-haired adolescent with a thrust-out lower lip she obviously thought gave her mouth a sultry curl, but which only made her look like a ten-year-old who'd been told to go turn off the television and do her homework. Her cheeks were round and full, her chin soft, her nose a snub, her eyes a wide, innocent blue. Although there was no real physical similarity, she reminded Liam of early pictures of Marilyn Monroe, without the jaded knowledge that being Marilyn Monroe brought with it. If she'd survived, the young Malone girl might have lived into the promise of that pout.
    The youngest, Michael, had dark hair and eyes and an almost grave expression. He looked straight at the camera, a questioning lift to one dark brow. It seemed to Liam that he should be wearing glasses, or at the very least have Albert Einstein's afro, some outward, manifest indication of the intelligence contained behind that broad brow, some hint of the determination indicated by that strong chin.
    How could those two tiny scraps of humanity, brother and sister, both sprung from the same seed, nurtured in the same womb, have grown into two such different creatures? And then of course he thought of Wy, Wy with her Yupik grandparent and her blond hair. No matter what Mr. Kaufman had taught him in sixth-grade science, Mendel's beans made even less sense to him now than they had then.
    There was a flushed and excited Kerry in a cheerleader outfit (the Kulukak Kings, green and silver); Michael with a basketball; Kerry with one eye heavily mascaraed and the other eye not, trying to force the bathroom door closed; Michael, a grin splitting his face, standing in front of a blue Super Cub and displaying a hacked-off shirttail, the mark of a successful solo. There was one picture of both children on the deck of theMarybethiain jeans and sweatshirts and hip boots and monkey gloves, up to their knees in salmon, looking sweaty and tired and jubilant all at once.
    He came to the last picture on the second ledge, which included both parents and both children in the stern of a sailboat surrounded by blue, blue water. He picked it up and moved to a window, holding it up to the light. An island was in the background, and the tanned leg of someone he presumed was the skipper in the foreground. Molly, Kerry, Michael and David sat in a row against the starboard rail. All their feet were tangled together in the middle of the picture, the mystery ankle on top of Molly Malone's, Molly's on top of her daughter's, her daughter's on top of David's, David's on top of his son's. David was smiling at the camera, a quiet smile from a contained face of regular features, nothing too excessive or exuberant, a face that gave very little away. Liam could see his daughter in