Candles Burning

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.