Candles Burning

Sixty-four

THE waxing moon hung overhead like a scimitar raised high for the decisive blow. The night was too sultry to sleep inside. Even on the beach, I did not sleep, but sprawled on my blanket staring at the sky. Mrs. Mank’s Benz hummed in the distance along the road to Merrymeeting.

I sat up and hugged my knees and waited. I heard a mouse rolling grains of sand under its paws as it streaked from one sheltered place to another.

Mrs. Mank came over the dune and walked toward me down the beach.

“It’s time to go,” she said.

I nodded. “Before we do, I want to ask a question.”

Irritation sharpened her features.

“Why was Daddy murdered?”

“I have no idea,” she said. “What a peculiar thing to ask me.”

“You should have said because he had the bad luck to fall into the hands of two criminally insane women.”

She took a sharp breath.

“Are you accusing me of complicity?” Her voice rang with incredulity and anger.

I looked past her, at the Gulf waters sprinkled all over with moonlight. I didn’t answer her.

Instead, I asked, “Don’t you want to ask me a question?”

Her expression settled into passivity.

“I may have to wrack my brains,” she said sarcastically. “All right. What’s the latest word from the dead?”

I smiled at her. “Justice.”

She flinched as if I had slapped her.

“And who are you?” she asked. “Judge and jury?”

“No. I’m Calley Dakin, and my daddy was murdered in New Orleans in 1958.”

“That’s the past,” Mrs. Mank said. “His life ended. Yours did not. You have to live the rest of it.”

“Why in hell do you care?” I asked, in a near whisper.

She smiled crookedly. “I don’t care. I want to know what you hear.”

“Why?”

“Don’t act as if you were simpleminded, Calley Dakin. You hear what no one else does. It might have driven you insane. I’ve gone to a great deal of trouble to protect you while you were growing up. I’ll tell you a secret, shall I? But not until we’re in Brookline.”

This time I was not going to refuse, even if I had to go to Brookline, Massachusetts, first.

I rose slowly, gathering my blanket. I folded it with care. Mrs. Mank stood by, watching me.

Merry Verlow stood by the Benz. I walked passed her without a word and went into the house and up the backstairs. Mama’s door was closed, of course. I went into my crookedy-room.

From the shelf over my bed, I took the old bird guide. On the spine it read:

Just as it had when I took it out of my overalls pocket after listening to it on the beach. I was confident that the flyleaf was inscribed Bobby Carroll. I listened intently but the book was silent. Setting it aside, I stripped off a pillowcase and threw some clothes into it, and my lunar notebook, the old bird guide and Calliope’s locket. I looked out my little window, at the view that I had seen when I first came to Merrymeeting. Every drop of water in the Gulf, every grain of sand on the beach, every molecule of air, was different and yet, it was all the same. Things change, but only into themselves.

Downstairs, outside again, and I went to the passenger side of the Benz and opened the door. Miz Verlow and Mrs. Mank kissed each other on the cheek.

I tried to take in the house all at once. It was shabbier. It creaked more in the wind and the verandah floor was splintery.

Mrs. Mank slipped behind the wheel as I closed the door on the passenger side.

Miz Verlow bent to wave at me, a small wave, and the swiftest quirk of a smile. There was something embarrassed in that smile. Merry Verlow knew that the secret I was going to learn would change everything and would do her no credit. She nodded and stepped back from the car.

“Go to sleep,” said Mrs. Mank, “we’ve a long way to go.”

Sleep? Not hardly.

I settled back in the seat to watch the Gulf as we sped along. Just past midnight, the dark insubstantial as the shadow, it was the time of night that always has felt least like night to me: neither night nor day but a suspension of time altogether. Water and sky surged into one black liquid pulse, the glisten of the moon like the blink of a bird’s golden eye.

When the turn came, away from the Gulf and toward Pensacola, I looked back. The black water of the Gulf was already no more than a distant dark glimmering horizon.

Artificial light increased steadily as we left the island. Pensacola slept with open windows in the heat. Placid streetlight defined the leaves of trees and glistened on pavement. As the Scenic Highway climbed the western side of Escambia Bay, again, I looked back. The Causeway arched to the clot of darkness gridded with light that was Gulf Breeze, and the similar shape of Pensacola Beach beyond. Santa Rosa Island loomed as an uneven ghostly slash, pocked scarcely with lights and splotched with inky black vegetation, between the Gulf and the bay.

I didn’t know where I would be when the sun rose. I only knew where I wasn’t going to be. Nor did I know how long I might be away, but I did not expect to be very long. I would return; I had money to collect.

I felt stuck in the summer night like a bug in amber. In the silence between Mrs. Mank and myself, the clock in the dashboard of the Benz became notably loud.

Mrs. Mank shifted upward and the Benz surged. My stomach lurched and the forward motion pressed me back into the seat. The dashboard clock tsked loudly at me.

I opened my eyes into a dazzle of oncoming light. I was blinded. And I saw. The light passed through me and was all around with a great noise that pushed and pulled at every cell of my body, like the slipstream of the wings of an enormous bird passing by. There was no heat in the light, and no cold, only its vibration resonating in the small dark space where I bowed my head over my knees.

I woke again, with a small jolt and the sensation of falling. My mouth was open and dry as if I had eaten a ghost, and its corners were damp with spittle. Mrs. Mank was only inches from me across the gearbox. The headlights splashed enough light back off the tarmac to show her like a shadow.

I thought: I am a shadow to her too.

I said, “I know a secret too.”

Her gaze whipped right.

“Daddy told me, Daddy told me what you did, Daddy told me why!”

Mrs. Mank gasped as if she were running very hard. Her eyes were on the road again, her body crouched over the wheel as if to spring right through the windshield.

I closed my eyes.