Free Candles Burning by Tabitha King Page B

Daddy’s remains. Same size, same color, same manufacturer. The war was only over a few years, and given the number of troops under arms, I suppose there must have been hundreds of thousands of the things floating around the country.
    When asked why they had singled out Daddy for abduction, Janice said, “Because he was staying on the twelfth floor.”
    When asked the significance of the twelfth floor, Judy could provide no answer at all.
    When asked why they had not made any attempt to collect the ransom, Judy said, “We were waiting for the right time.”
    When asked what the right time would have been, Janice could only shrug.
    Why had they tortured Daddy?
    Why, when he was dead, had they mutilated and dismembered his corpse?
    Why, having gone to the trouble of hiding his torso in a footlocker too small to hold him, all of him, did they leave the footlocker at the foot of the bloodied bed? For lack of a colored man who needed fifteen cents to carry it down the stairs?
    In other states, in later years, Judy and Janice might have been judged insane. In Louisiana, in 1958, Judy and Janice were found guilty of kidnapping and first-degree murder. Janice and Judy admitted all the details of Daddy’s torture. If they had left anything out, nobody could imagine what it might be. But the two women died without anyone ever discovering why they had done what they’d done.
    What was the prompting? That was the great mystery, why the case is written about even now.
    But here is the truth of it: Janice and Judy had no idea why they had done what they had done. There had been a motive all right, but the motive was not theirs . It was someone else’s.
    In 1958, when I was only a seven-year-old, I was quite certain I knew why Daddy had died.
    He died because Mama and I went shopping.
    He died because we had gone into the shop that ticked.
    He died because Mama’s brown Hermès Kelly pocketbook had disappeared, to turn up later inside a locked filing cabinet.
    The very day we found the first note, I tried to explain all this to Mama, but she grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me hard, and cried, “What shop, Calley? What are you talking about pocketbooks for? Who in God’s Green Glory is Mr. Rideaux, and caint you see that your Mama has other things to think about?”

Eleven
    TWO days after the recovery of The Remains, we returned to Montgomery on the Dixie Hummingbird. It was my first train ride. There were still a lot of firsts in my life at age seven.
    The three of us sat by ourselves in the back of a coach, away from the few other passengers. They gawked at us and whispered to one another but left us alone once the train began to move:
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The footlocker of ransom money was in our coach. Mama made me sit with my feet up on it all the way back from New Orleans. Perhaps she thought no one would suspect that a stupid-looking little girl with overly large ears and clutching a Betsy McCall doll in one fist could possibly have a footlocker full of money under her Mary Janes, or the key to it on a red silk string around her neck. And I was indeed stupid, thanks to the hotel doctor’s tranquilizers still lingering in my small child’s body. Mama’s well-developed facility for believing what she wanted to believe allowed her to pretend that despite the weeklong coverage in newsprint and on the airwaves, the passengers sharing the car were totally unaware of the kidnapping and murder of Joe Cane Dakin. Murder was even then no rarity in New Orleans but the murder of a rich white man is always news anywhere.
    Mama had no appropriate widow’s weeds with her but while waiting for the coroner’s release of The Remains and the departure of the next available train, she had obtained an off-the-rack black suit, black pumps and a veiled hat. She had to lift the veil from time to time to have a cigarette. Her makeup only seemed to make her complexion more pale,