“Unless the kids get to them first,” she says, finishing up that cheery observation. “Yeah, I’ve wondered if that colored my thinking. It’s just that I can’t explain why he did what he did—not only banishing them, whatever you want to call it, but denying them. Sending that cruel telegram. Stranding them, after all they’d been through. I’ve tried to put myself in their shoes. What would I make of such a denial? Would I start to wonder if my survival was a disappointment?”

“Now that you’ve turned this into a kind of crime story, you need three things, y’know. Evidence and a motive and witnesses. Live witnesses, I mean witnesses who were alive then. Otherwise …”

One hand is raised, like the hand of the Virgin in the mosaic at my back.

“That’s one of the reasons I’ve tried to make these people come alive for you, and for myself, too,” she comments, and picks up her manuscript again. I notice that her handwriting resembles Nathaniel’s. A bit more decorative and feminine, but the letters have the same sharp forward slant, as if they are about to fall over.

Then, in a tone oh so lawyerly, she tells me that there are threads of evidence that can lead to establishing a probable motive. There also are three witnesses, and the first one she calls is Lockwood.

Lockwood’s Testimony

Begins with his birth …

Swinging her boots off the table to the tiled floor, spurs jinglejanglejingling, Sybil draws her chair up to the table and flips through an album with a black cover and stiff black pages upon which captions are written in white ink under antique photos. Sepia images of people, boats, houses, seascapes, and landscapes flicker past until she comes to a photograph of a man with a wide head, what appears to be sandy brown hair and beard, and a stare whose bright, fixed intensity is doubtlessly an effect of a box camera’s powder flash, but suggests fever or madness. He is wearing a suit, a high starched collar that looks a little too small for his athletic neck. The caption reads: “L. R. Braithwaite, 1899.”

“And this,” she says, turning more pages, “is a photo of the portrait that used to be in Myles’s house. Cyrus at about the same age.”

It is as she’s described: Lockwood could be the younger Cyrus reincarnated. The only noticeable differences are in the breadth of Lockwood’s head and the shade of his eyes: darker than his father’s.

“Lockwood’s exact age is one of the thousand little facts I couldn’t nail down. No birth certificate that I know of, no records of any kind of when or where he was born, and he’s not in there.”

Motioning at a green, cloth-bound book on the patio table, A Braithwaite Genealogy, she comments that in a family like hers, keeping the kinds of records it does, there could be only one reason for the omission of Lockwood’s name.