Candles Burning by Tabitha King Page B

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.
    â€œYou 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 ?”
    â€œIt 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.”
    â€œWhat’s ‘French leave’?” I asked Ford later.
    â€œRunning 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.
    â€œYou snivel, I am not telling you anything else!” Ford threatened.
    â€œI am not sniveling! What else?”
    â€œThe 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,