14
In Kennebunkport, Sybil Pritchard lived in a small house with an oblique view of the water. She had shoulder- length gray hair and bare feet and wore a floral-patterned blue-and-yellow ankle-length dress.
'Well,' she said when she answered the door. 'You're a big strapping boy, aren't you.'
'I am,' I said. 'Could we talk for a bit? About your sister's murder?'
'My sister was murdered thirty years ago,' she said.
'Twenty-eight,' I said. 'Can we talk?'
'Are you a policeman?' she said.
'I'm a private detective, working for your niece.'
'Daryl?' she said. 'Come in. Sit down. Tell me what you want.'
Her house was coastal cute, with a hemp rug, lobster pot coffee tables, steering-wheel mirrors, ship's captain lamps, and big scallop-shell ashtrays. There were a lot of butts in the ashtrays, and when we sat in her front room, Sybil immediately lit another cigarette and didn't apologize. There was a big Shaker table in front of a bay window where you could see a scrap of the ocean. On it were several spiral-bound notebooks and a blue champagne flute with pencils in it. She saw me look.
'I write poetry,' she said. 'By hand. The tactile sensation of actual transcription seems vital to the creative process.'
I nodded.
'What can you tell me about your sister's death?' I said.
'Nothing. She was in a bank. Some radicals held it up. One of them shot her.'
'Where were you at the time.'
'Movies. I took Daryl to see Harry and Tonto.'
'Your sister was in Boston to visit you,' I said.
'She was crashing with me,' Sybil said. 'She was in Boston chasing some guy.'
Sybil's face was dark from sun and tough from wind and deeply lined from maybe too many cigarettes. She was about sixty, and she sat with her legs apart, one arm tucking the slack dress between her legs.
'Who?' I said.
'Don't know. She was always chasing some guy, dragging the damn kid along,' Sybil said.
She took in smoke and exhaled slowly. I quit smoking in 1963. The smell no longer pleased me.
'How about her husband?'
'Poor Barry,' Sybil said. 'He married her, when she got pregnant with Daryl, you know, sort of do the right thing?'
'Were they married long?'
'Hell, I don't really know who married them. You know? They may have just sworn an oath of flower power.'
'They were hippies?'
'Sure. Me too.'
'Drugs?'
'You better believe it,' Sybil said.
'Pot?'
'Everything,' she said. 'If I could light it on fire I'd smoke it.'
'Been off for awhile?'
'I quit in March of 1978,' she said.
She snuffed out her cigarette butt, took a fresh one from its pack and lit it, and took a long drag.
'Except for these,' she said. 'I coulda lit this one from the other one. But I hate the chain-smoke image. So I always put one out before I light another one.'
'I admire self-control,' I told her.
'You probably quit years ago.'
'I did.'
'You don't have any of that sunken-cheeks look,' she said. 'Like me.'
I had nothing to say about that, so I cleverly looked around the room. There were some genuinely awful seascapes framed on the walls.
'Were they together long?' I said. 'After Daryl was born?'
'Emily and Barry? Depends what you mean by together. You know how we all were then?'
'I recall the period,' I said.
'Yes, of course you do. You were probably off somewhere doing push-ups. A lot of us were crazy to be
