Candles Burning

by Tabitha King

  I yanked my hand from his clasp. “Creep! My letters are perfect!”

  My writing was—and is—extremely neat, each small letter carefully spaced and equal in size. It looks typed, as well it might, since I learned myself when I was five by tracing the letters Ida Mae Oakes typed on an old Corona. Ida Mae said that I could do it if I concentrated and that I had to concentrate. Learning to concentrate was more important even than learning to write.

  My first-grade teacher, Miz Dunlap, wanted me to learn to connect up the letters. Script, she called it. I pretended to be too stupid to get the hang of it. Stupid is something else I learned from Ida Mae Oakes, who told me if a person just stands there silent, paying attention but not reacting, a lot of folks, the rackety kind, would jump to the conclusion that the person was stupid, which was sometimes a very useful thing to be. A person might get yelled at or punished or even fired, but if a person didn’t want to do something, being stupid might be the way not to do it. Or maybe a person would get the time to figure out what to do next, just by being stupid.

  Ford had one hand fisted, ready to punch me. “Liar!”

  “Jerk!”

  “If it turns out you did this, I am gone drown you head first in the toilet!”

  Then he came to a sudden halt. His anger wavered. For once he seemed unsure of himself.

  “What do we do now?” His whisper revealed a degree of shock and fear that, like a pebble making rings in water, acted to enlarge my own emotions.

  After bringing Mama more of whatever it was from the decanter, from which he took a good knock on the way, Ford persuaded her to summon Mr. Richard, the hotel manager. While we were waiting, Ford ordered breakfast.

  I finished dressing. I remember that I hurried, because it seemed suddenly important that I be dressed and not just because mere underpants made me vulnerable to slaps or suspicions. I felt as if I had been caught unprepared by some great emergency, like a fire, a flood, a tornado.

  Mr. Richard emerged from the Penthouse B elevator in a high state of managerial calm, exuding reassurance and confidence that all would be well. He announced himself, as if we had never met him before, in order to remind us that his name was said the French way: Ree-shard.

  Mama stubbed out her Kool. She picked up the note from the dining table and thrust it at him as if it were on fire. Mr. Ree-shard examined it, before replacing it carefully on the table. Ford stood a little behind Mama’s chair, with one hand on her shoulder, that now and again she would cover briefly with her left hand.

  I hung about the periphery, trying to be invisible—easy enough, given Mama and Ford ignored me. Only Mr. Ree-shard ever glanced at me and that uneasily. He tried not to look again but could not help himself. A certain fear was in his eyes, and pity too. His reaction to me was not particularly unusual, so I was unperturbed. I had other causes for anxiety.

  Mama assured Mr. Ree-shard that Ford and I were not a couple of kids playing a silly game. He in turn reassured Mama that he was totally at her service. Then Mr. Ree-shard made some calls to other people attending the convention—high pooh-bahs in the dealers’ association—and, having determined that Daddy was not drunk on the floor behind the sofa in somebody else’s room or suite, he called the police. By then he was somewhat chagrined—for Mama, I think, and only a little for himself, given his standard procedure had so far proved fruitless.

  The chambermaid brought our full breakfast, which none of us ate. A number of folks came and went. Most of the visitors were Daddy’s fellow automobile dealers. Some had a wife in tow and all were worried, solemn, consoling.

  On the arrival of the police, Mr. Ree-shard herded all the concerned callers into the elevator so that a New Orleans police detective could interview Mama in relative privacy.

  The detective told Mama that kidnappers never signed their real names to a ransom note. What could be stupider than that? So there was no point in looking for a couple of female criminals named Janice and Judy. His immediate opinion was that Ford and I were playing a rotten prank and needed a good whipping. When neither of us burst into tears and confessed, Mama shooed us out of the room.

  Ford conjectured to me that the detective was working on convincing Mama that the two of us could have made the whole thing up and that Daddy was in all probability drunk somewhere outside the hotel, or maybe in a whorehouse.

  “What’s a whorehouse?” I asked.

  “Where the floozies are.” Ford used the tone he employed to imply that I was mentally enfeebled.

  I was not in fact very clear what floozies were, other than potential mothers of Daddy’s other children, or possibly the sort of woman who smoked cigarettes on the street. The word “whore” I heard as h-o-a-r, as in “Hoar-frost twinkles on the trees,” from a poem by Winnie-the-Pooh that Ida Mae Oakes had read to me when I was littler. Ida Mae told me that hoar-frost was ice. A hoarhouse must be something like an ice palace to me, where an Ice Queen might reign. I could make no connection between floozies and ice palaces. The big word Mama used so often when Daddy was late—philandering—I had been unable to find in the dictionary due to the fact that I was misspelling it as filandering. My best guess was that philandering meant inexcusably late.

  Somebody’s wife—the name is long forgotten, if I ever knew it—looked in on us. She advised us that our mama was prostrate and that in this trying moment, we must be very, very good children. She told us that Mama had sent for Mamadee. The Dixie Hummingbird was making a special stop at Tallassee for her. Likely she would take us home. Then she had us kneel down and pray for Mama and for Daddy’s safe return.

  It was a prayer about me, not Daddy. Prayer, as I understood it, was in the same class of mundane magic as spells and step-on-a-crack-break-your-mama’s-back and tossing a pinch of spilled salt over my shoulder. For all the churchgoing we did, I only knew the Lord’s Prayer and the bedtime prayer by heart. I thought of the bedtime prayer as the One Long Word Prayer and said it as fast as possible to annoy Mama:

  Now-I-lay-me-down-to-sleep-

  I-pray-the-Lord-my-soul-to-keep-

  If-I-should-die-before-I-wake-

  I-pray-the-Lord-my-soul-to-take.

  Lacking a more specific hocus-pocus, I shut my eyes tightly and tried to say the Lord’s Prayer as I had it memorized, adapting the beginning to apply to Daddy.

  My Daddy, witch art in heaven

  Halloween be thy name

  thy king dumb come

  thy will be done

  asset issin heavn

  giveusthisday hourdailybred

  and forgiveus ourdetz

  aswe forgive our deaders

  and lead us snot into temtayshun but

  deliverus fromevil

  forthineistheking dumb

  and thepowr and thegory

  forever

  amen.

  I mumbled so that Miz Someone would not notice any errors on my part.

  Ford hid his disgust until Miz Someone went away again and then muttered, “Goddamn it, I am not going home until Daddy comes back.”

  I did not need to tell him that I did not want to go home to Montgomery, and not with Mamadee, and not to her big house, Ramparts, in Tallassee.

  Ford tried to give me orders. “Dumbo, you have to be invisible. You have to keep your mouth shut. If Mamadee decides she’s got to run the show here, she’ll ignore us.”

  I knew sense when I heard it, even if it came out of Ford’s usually lying trap.

  Ford had his own strategy for himself. He stayed at Mama’s side, holding her hand, or fetching her cooling drinks, cool cloths for her brow, dry handkerchiefs when she wept, BC or Goody’s when she had a headache. She ate it up.

  Eight

  MAMADEE did not arrive alone. With her was Daddy’s lawyer, Winston Weems. Lawyer Weems was even older than Mamadee, who had once in my hearing pronounced him the soul of rectitude. He certainly looked it. He was a grey man, all the way through. For no reason I have ever understood, people associate the dour, the humorless, the
anemic and the old with rectitude.

  Mamadee tried grimly to take the situation in hand. Her first demand was that we be sent home. She would have Tansy, her housekeeper, come for us.

  Mama recovered enough to spar with her. “I will not send my children away, Mama.” She pulled Ford close and he let her, something he would normally never permit. “Ford has been my little man!”

  What with Ford being so much more Carroll than Dakin, Mamadee could hardly disagree.

  “Well, Calley’s just underfoot. Surely you do not want the nuisance of her, do you?”

  Mama had to think about it. Ford said nothing, provoking me out of my discretion.

  I laid out what I felt was compelling evidence of how utterly unjust it would be send me away before we got Daddy back.

  “I am not underfoot! I am not a nuisance! I found the ransom note!”

  Lawyer Weems fixed me in his toadish glare.

  “You see?” Mamadee asked Mama. Then she frowned. “Did you say it was on Calley’s bed?”

  The four of them looked at me. Mamadee’s eyes got cold and scary. I backed away.

  “Stop that ridiculous cringing, Calley!” Mama said sharply. And then to Mamadee, “Mama, you know that Calley prints like a little typewriter. And where would she get that horrible paper and a green ink pen?”

  Mamadee pointed out that anyone, even a child, could obtain such items at the nearest dime store. As always, she was more than willing to credit my intelligence for no-good.

  The house phone rang, saving me from incipient conviction of all charges against me. Ford answered. Uncle Billy Cane Dakin and Aunt Jude were in the lobby of the Hotel Pontchartrain.

  Mamadee and Ford and Mama couldn’t figure out how they had learned that Daddy was missing, as there had been no reports on the radio or in the papers.

  Later, Mamadee would discover in the hotel bill the record of a call made from Penthouse B to Uncle Billy Cane’s home number. She accused me of making it but I never owned up.

  If anybody was to try shipping me anywhere, I was not gone just go along with it. If I had had a phone number for Ida Mae Oakes, I would have called her too. I needed somebody—if not Ida Mae, then Uncle Billy and Aunt Jude. The three of us cared more about Daddy than anybody else did. In my heart, I was convinced that the combined strength of our desire for his return would somehow make that wish come true. I cannot remember now if I had seen Peter Pan or not at that time, or even if Disney had released it yet, but to a certainty I had lived my going-on seven years among people who believed as a matter of faith beyond religion that if they wished or willed anything hard enough, it would have to be so.

  Mamadee ordered Uncle Billy and Aunt Jude to go home and stay out of the way.

  Much to Mamadee’s shock, Aunt Jude planted her splayed and knobby feet. Uncle Billy settled his shoulders and looked grim and immovable.

  Lawyer Weems tried to bully them away too but he was no more successful than Mamadee.

  “You stay,” Mama said abruptly to Uncle Billy and Aunt Jude.

  I do not know if she really wanted them but maybe she thought she might need some allies against Mamadee and Lawyer Weems too. Maybe she just wanted to be contrary. She had Mr. Ree-shard find a cheap room for them and after that largely ignored them, except to send them on errands.

  On the second day of Daddy’s disappearance, when the New Orleans police had been unable to find him in bar, brothel, hospital or morgue, Mama and Mamadee and Lawyer Weems agreed with the police that they must act as if the ransom note were real. Mr. Weems departed for Montgomery, to fetch the million dollars. He would return late on Monday with the cash, in small bills.

  That was the day the FBI came into the case. By then I had determined the best listening post. The agents told Mama and Mamadee and Lawyer Weems, and Uncle Billy and Aunt Jude, that the signing of the note by “Judy” and “Janice” was just a subterfuge to make everybody think there were two female kidnappers. In the vast experience of the FBI, women occasionally kidnapped infants or small children, but they never, never kidnapped grown men. The agents assured Mama and Mamadee and the New Orleans police detectives (who seemed less than grateful for the vast expertise of the FBI) that, very definitely, the kidnappers, if there were kidnappers, were male. And just because two names were signed to the ransom note, the vast expertise of the FBI could assure all parties that that didn’t mean that there were two kidnappers—a gang of five had been operating in St. Louis the year before, for instance, or it might just be one man.

  Mamadee had one question of the vastly expert FBI agents. “What do you mean, if?”

  “It may yet prove to be a hoax, ma’am,” said one agent. While another cleared his throat and added, “And sometimes what looks like a kidnapping is French leave.”

  “What’s ‘French leave’?” I asked Ford later.

  “Running away to Rio de Janeiro to start a new life, without getting a divorce or anything. Usually the person that leaves takes all the money, and maybe his secretary.”

  The thought that Daddy might leave us willingly was more than I could imagine. The idea that he would take his secretary, Miz Twilley, with him, was incomprehensible. Why his secretary? Would she place the long-distance phone calls home to us for him? Take down the letters that he would write to us on her steno pad in the shorthanded, secret code she used? And why was it French leave? French was a busy word, attached to a number of oddly assorted objects and processes. For instance, I could throw a spitball to the French Quarter from the balcony of Penthouse B.

  Something was making my eyes sting and water.

  “You snivel, I am not telling you anything else!” Ford threatened.

  “I am not sniveling! What else?”

  “The other thing is, sometimes kidnapping is a disguise for murdering somebody.”

  My throat tightened; my stomach felt kicked back to my backbone. Murder was a common enough threat in our house, but as on television, it was bloodlessly make-believe. True Sex Crimes and its kindred were as sub rosa as girly magazines. The idea that anybody real would kill some other real person was a genuine shock to me. At that moment, I felt foolish and, worse, that my foolishness might be lethal. I was old enough to grasp at least some of the wickedness of human beings. And it was my daddy who was at stake. I have never told anyone before, but I peed myself. It ran down my legs into my socks. My overalls hid it just long enough for me to escape Ford.

  But first he asked a superior rhetorical question to which he, of course, did know the answer. “You know who the first suspect always is?”

  I shook my head.

  “The wife. Or the husband, if the wife is missing.”

  “Mama?” I whispered.

  Ford nodded. Something about the idea pleased him, or else he was just enjoying scaring me.

  I gave him a violent shove and ran for my room.

  In the meantime, Janice Hicks baked brioche in the hotel kitchen, and Judy DeLucca brought them up to our room every morning with Mama’s coffee.

  Nine

  JUDY DeLucca and Janice Hicks both got off work at two o’clock in the afternoon, when they went home and tortured Daddy.

  Janice lived with her baby brother, Jerome, who also weighed more than three hundred pounds, in a house owned by an aunt and uncle no one had seen in years. Judy rented a room in the house next door to the Hicks. Judy’s landlady was eighty-two years and deaf, so she never heard Daddy’s screams.

  Nobody knows why the two women were in the hotel at night, when Daddy was last seen, or how they got him out of the hotel without being noticed. Judy’s testimony was at best sketchy.

  Judy said, “I hit him over the head and I pushed him into a taxi and I told the driver that he was my uncle who had a plate in his head since the war and sometimes he got dizzy and to take us to my house.”

  Janice only said, “It was Judy got him to her house. I hardly had a thing to do with that part. I was out buying stuff.”

  The stuff Janice Hicks boug
ht was a sturdy metal footlocker, two bottles of rubbing alcohol, five rolls of bandages, a pair of cuticle scissors, and a new broom. She gave a colored man fifteen cents to carry the bulky footlocker to Judy’s.

  The two women cut off all Daddy’s clothes. He must have been unconscious, because Judy patiently used the cuticle scissors—though there were other, much larger pairs of scissors in the house—and that must have taken a long time. With strips of the cloth of his trousers, jacket, and shirt—and employing intact his belt and his tie—they tied him to Judy’s bed.

  “I poured the rubbing alcohol in his eyes,” Janice said, “but it didn’t make him blind.”

  That was the first day.

  The second day, when Judy and Janice came home from work, Judy’s landlady complained about a smell.

  The smell was from Daddy, who had been tied to the bed all night and morning long with no provision for his bodily functions.

  “I cleaned it up that time,” Judy said in court, “but Janice said to me, ‘Judy, we caint have no more of this,’ and I went downstairs and got the new broom and we pushed it up his”—Judy blushed with embarrassment—“his bottom,” she finally said. “And then we tied a string around his”—Judy paused again. “Prepuce,” the district attorney prompted, and Judy went on: “Peep ruse? My daddy called it his”—she told the district attorney in a stage whisper—“his Pope’s hat. Anyway, I wasn’t having that man pee-pee in the bed again.”

  On the third day, the force of Daddy’s bowels expelled the broom handle. His prepuce had ruptured with the pressure of urine. Because he called Judy and Janice very bad names—they never revealed what those names were—Judy stuck two fingers into Daddy’s mouth, grasped his tongue and pulled it out beyond his lips. Janice thrust a knife blade through his tongue perpendicularly, and left it there—Daddy’s pierced tongue protruding, and the blade and handle of the knife pressed against his face.

  The fourth day was Mardi Gras, Fat Tuesday. On their return from work, Janice and Judy discovered that Daddy had managed to free his tongue of the knife—by the simple expedient of pulling his tongue into his mouth, allowing the knife to sever it. He had spat blood over his chest and abdomen for hours. Judy sprayed Daddy’s face with D-Con bug killer until he was blinded. Then she cut five notches in his right ear with her cuticle scissors.