Free Candles Burning by Tabitha King Page A

a cleaver also stolen from the hotel kitchen, they succeeded in squeezing most of Daddy into the footlocker. When she was arrested, Janice had Daddy’s left foot in her imitation alligator-skin purse. His head, left forearm and right foot would remain missing.
    Judy and Janice confessed immediately to the kidnapping, torture, murder and dismemberment of Joe Cane Dakin.
    Judy told the police that someone had broken into the apartment and stolen the missing parts. Janice’s baby brother, Jerome, wrote a letter to the Times-Picayune complaining that the police had done nothing at all to investigate the robbery next door.
    Not surprisingly, the details were kept from me at the time. I am not sure that even Mama knew them all. I have patched the story together from a crazy quilt of the contemporary newspapers and periodicals, from court records and the reports of private investigators. In the yellowed old newsprint, the pictures of Daddy, of Mama being taken into the police station for questioning, and of Judy DeLucca and Janice Hicks at the trial, they all look as if they are playing parts in a black-and-white James M. Cain film.
    In 1958, the world was still largely black-and-white, and not just racially. People still read newspapers and magazines and listened to the radio. Only a minority of people owned a television set, and those sets were mostly black-and-white. Since the triumph of living color, it is the past that is rendered in black-and-white, and olden times in sepia. Even if still living, a person photographed in black-and-white is now dead to the eye, as if film and print mirrored the ghost to be.
    I hardly know Mama. She is so young, too young to have been my mama, or Ford’s. In these photographs, she is a tabloid starlet. She brings to mind those early photographs of Marilyn, hardly out of her teens.
    Mamadee looks at Mama and sees herself thirty years younger. Hair in glassy waves, a fur tippet flashing a diamante fur clip around her shoulders, Mamadee is the ghost of Mama Future, if Mama lives so long, and allowing for changes in fashion. Mamadee’s upper lip is furrowed with bitterness, her spine stiff with resentment. There is a glint of something like panic in Mamadee’s eyes, as if she feels a heel wobbling under her. Perhaps it is only an accident of the photograph.
    Lawyer Weems, with his slicked-back hair and in his three-piece suit, seemingly made for a larger man, could be some congressman interrogating suspected Communists before the House Un-American Activities Committee.
    Most boys on the cusp of puberty are anything but beautiful. Ford was. I was too young to see it. And now I see the acute awareness of a feral creature, ready to bolt at the snap of a twig. The photographs cannot quite catch him; some part of him seems always surging into motion. The film is too slow, the flash too weak, the aperture too small to fix him, physically, as he was escaping the Ford of then, evolving into the new model Ford.
    I look into Daddy’s faded eyes in the formal headshots taken for business purposes, the snapshots from the convention or retrieved from Alabama newspaper archives. I see now that they are like my own. They are the eyes of a ghost, interrupted and restless. His dead lips tell me nothing.
    What the articles, the accounts, the chapters in the books, and the testimony at the trial did not reveal was the motive for the kidnapping.
    The million dollars would have been a motive, it’s true, but only if Janice and Judy had attempted to collect it. They knew Mama had it. Everybody in the hotel, and everybody in New Orleans, knew Mama had the money, in small bills, in a footlocker brought by Lawyer Weems on the Dixie Hummingbird from Montgomery.
    It is strange to me that no one then pointed out the coincidence that the footlocker that held the ransom money was identical to the footlocker into which Janice and Judy had worked so hard, so bloodily, so ineffectively, to cram