Framed and Burning (Dreamslippers Book 2) (14 page)

She made a run for it, out the back door, but he took off after her and grabbed her robe from behind, sending her sprawling to the floor. They struggled there on the floor of her kitchen, the linoleum sticky and laden with crumbs, till Mick gained the upper hand. He tied her to her kitchen table with the sash from her robe.

“You can’t do this to me!”

“Oh, yes I can.”

With that, Mick set out to find the shell. He swiped knickknacks off shelves, turned over unfinished paintings, and emptied the contents of every drawer.
 

As he rifled through her house, Candy screamed at him from the kitchen. “You don’t belong here, Mickey! I hate you! I wish you had died in that fire! You’re the biggest asshole that ever held a brush!”

He finally found it in the bottom of a hat box tucked away in the back of her closet. It was his shell, undeniably, with two white barnacles flanking one side and a chip out of one edge. It had been the subject of his Conch Series, which appeared in catalogs and magazines throughout the world. He’d recognize it on a beach littered with hundreds of shells.
 

He stomped back out to the kitchen and shoved the shell in her face. “Is this worth killing for, Candy? Eh?”

She broke into a laugh. “Is that what you think, Mick?”

He stood there, staring at her, listening to her infernal laughter.
 

“You think I wanted that shell?” she howled. “You can keep your damn shell.”

“Then what?” he asked, at a loss, his voice breaking. “What did you want?”

She looked at him, her face reverting to the face he knew years ago, open and full of a longing he could never fill.

“I wanted us, Mick. In that beach house. You promised me we’d stay there forever. But it was always your place. Yours alone. You filled it with your art till there wasn’t any room for me anymore, and you pushed me out. And now look at you. Your art’s so big, there’ll never be any room for anyone else.”

Mick felt tears drip out of his eyes. “But a fire, Candy?” he asked, his voice hoarse.

Candace’s voice came from far away. “I wanted to burn you down, Mick. That’s all. I didn’t want you to have everything anymore. You’ve had enough.”

Mick heard someone behind him, and he turned to see a police officer, someone he recognized. Santiago, the one who worked with Alvarez. They must have put a tail on him after he left the beach house.

“That’s a confession,” Santiago announced. “I’m calling it in.”

Mick slumped down next to Candace, buried his face in his hands, and wept. He watched through wet eyes as Santiago cuffed Candace and read her her rights.

>>>

When Donnie’s parents arrived from Ohio, Cat was off somewhere else, and Pris was at a Buddhist temple nearby, where she’d been spending a lot of time meditating since the first fire.
 

Which meant that Mick had to deal with the grieving parents on his own.

He picked them up from the airport in his Fiat, which was not ideal, but he put the top up so their hair wouldn’t get blown around, at least. He and Pris had helped them deal with the cremation and other details long-distance, for which Donald Sr. and Mary Ellen were grateful.

But other than grace and gratitude, what emanated from the elderly couple was deep, deep sadness, and it knocked Mick back with a force he hadn’t encountered in some time. He couldn’t let go of the overwhelming feeling that their son should be there instead of him. Small talk seemed like an insult, so on the drive from the Miami airport to the hotel where he was putting them up, he told them about Donnie’s recent success as an artist and tried to convey in a genuine way what a talented son they had.

“I always knew he had the gift,” said Mary Ellen. “Isn’t that right, Donald?”

“That’s right,” Donald concurred. “I tried to dissuade him from what seemed like a hard row to hoe, but his mother here, she wouldn’t stand for it.”

Mick searched his memory bank for anything Donnie might’ve said about his parents, but he didn’t come up with much. Then he remembered something.

“Donnie got an idea once he said came from watching you make bread.”

“Is that so? My bread?”

Mick looked at Mary Ellen in his rear view mirror. The couple had opted to sit together huddled in the tiny back seat, and they were holding each other’s hands.
 

“Yeah, it was the way you kneaded the dough. He traced the pattern out on canvas once. I don’t know if you ever saw it—a piece called
Dough Ties
.”

“Oh, I’d love to see it.”

But then Mick regretted mentioning it, as he realized the piece was lost in the fire. He decided to change the subject.

“I’m glad you’ll be here for the wake,” he said. He and a bunch of other artists, with the help of the gallery owner, who was a fan of Donnie’s art, were planning a sort of “celebration of life” event in honor of Donnie’s passing.
 

“Well, we’d have of course preferred a Christian burial in our home town,” Donald said. “I don’t quite know what to do with my son’s ashes—” At this, the old man choked up. Mary Ellen offered him a tissue from her purse and patted his arm.

Mick was silent. Sometimes you had to let a man grieve.
 

He drove up I-90, glad for their sake the traffic was light. There was a cool breeze blowing off the water. With Christmas around the corner, Miamians had decked out every spare corner of their domiciles with season-appropriate ephemera. Even after the twenty years he’d called South Florida home, Mick still thought the juxtaposition of snowmen and reindeer against a backdrop of tropical flowers and sunshine was odd. Seeing it through the eyes of Donnie’s parents, it seemed practically surreal. And South Floridians weren’t known for their restraint, either. He passed a gated compound where an inflatable Santa Claus wearing a Miami Heat jersey was posed in a jump shot, hanging from a basketball hoop over a three-car garage.

Mary Ellen cleared her throat. “They certainly have the Christmas spirit down here, don’t they?”

Mick was caught between the desire to laugh and weep. He bit his lip and nodded.

When they arrived at the hotel, he helped them check in at the front desk and then carried their bags to their room, which he’d arranged with the hotel staff to set up beforehand. He’d taken down the bland hotel art and put up three of Donnie’s paintings that had been on loan in a gallery on South Beach. Mick had retrieved them, hoping his parents would want to take them home. They were some of the man’s finest pieces, and looking at them now, Mick could see that his friend had hit his stride with the fractal imagery. These looked like delicate crystals that, given time and space, would grow into infinity.

“Please call me if you need anything,” he told them. “Have a rest, and when you’re ready, I’ll drive you to the mortuary.”

Surprisingly, it was Donnie’s father who recognized the work around the room.

“That’s his art,” he said, putting on his reading glasses and walking over for a closer look. “My, my.”

Mary Ellen followed her husband. She placed her hand on the painting, and then it was her turn to cry.

Mick closed the door, leaving them alone.

As he turned into the cottage driveway, there was Pris, walking back from the Buddhist temple, a serene smile on her face. She wore oversized Jackie O glasses and a wide-brimmed hat. His sister at seventy-eight still had flair.

“Hello, my dear,” she said, kissing him on the cheek.

“Did we achieve enlightenment?”
 

“Enlightenment is not to be achieved. It just is.”

He smiled, and then dropping the smile, he said, “Mr. and Mrs. Hines are here.”

Pris saw that his Fiat was the only car in the drive. “Oh, Mick. You didn’t make them ride in your little roadster, did you?”

“I had no choice. Cat took your rental god knows where.”

“Isn’t it time you traded up?”

Mick had an immediate reaction against that idea. The Fiat had been with him for decades. He’d nursed it through several clutches, a rebuilt engine, and a total body overhaul. He couldn’t get rid of it now. It was practically family.
 

He told this to Pris, who shook her head as if she pitied him.

“Well, for heaven’s sake, Mick. Did you at least offer them lunch? They must be famished.”

He hadn’t thought of that. “No.”

“Well, let’s give them a chance to regroup, and then we’ll head over to that café I like on Coral Way.”

They did just that, and Mick was relieved to have Pris’s energetic, skillfully conversational presence there as a buffer. The four of them made it through a meal without anyone crying, and by the time they walked back to the building, Donald turned to Mick and said, “Let’s visit the mortuary tomorrow, if you don’t mind, Mick. Mary Ellen and I—we need some time today.”

Mick was glad to give them space. He had a lot to do to get ready for Donnie’s celebration, and he was working on a new painting as well.
 

The next afternoon, he switched cars with Pris at her insistence and took Donnie’s parents to get the ashes. The mortuary was a large, clean, beautiful place, a bit of old Florida elegance, if you could forget that it was a house for dead people, that is. The attendant, a cute young thing in a skirt suit and actual pantyhose, something Mick hardly ever saw anymore, offered to show Donald and Mary Ellen the crematorium. They declined. “Only the, ah, ashes, please,” said Donald.

What was left of Donnie was presented in a white ceramic urn, as generic as they come. Mick was sure if he got the full tour, he’d find a whole rack of them in back.

As they drove, Donald held the urn in his hands. The couple were sitting in back again, and they whispered to each other for a while. Mick turned on the radio at a low volume to give them some privacy.

“Say, Mick,” Donald finally spoke up. “Is there somewhere here we could put some of these ashes? Somewhere Donnie liked to go.”

Mick didn’t even have to think about it. “I’ll take you there,” he said, pulling a u-turn.

As he drove, Mick remembered the first time he’d taken Donnie to this place. He’d promised him it was the most beautiful spot on earth, and Donnie was surprised to find they were heading into the belly of the Everglades and not to the beach or the Keys. Like a lot of people who were new to Florida, Donnie’s only association with the Everglades was its air boats.
 

The heat of the city gave way to a lush coolness as he made his way into the River of Grass, as some called it. Mick knew it was no longer a functioning ecosystem, as it had been damned to the north and blockaded on all sides by the modern engine of progress. The only reason it continued to exist at all was because it fed the Miami aquifer, which supplied South Florida with water. But it was still the largest stretch of wetlands left in the country, and the word “swamp” did not do it justice.

After a long stretch of quiet, he steered into a parking lot and motioned for Donald and Mary Ellen to follow him down a path over a hummock and then across a boardwalk that led to a platform high above the glades.

It was approaching dusk, just as it had been the first time Mick brought Donnie to that place. The sky looked as if an artist had rinsed out her pastels in a tray of water, with robin’s-egg blue mingling with bits of lavender and fiery orange and rose cast from the setting sun. It was quiet, so quiet, that Mick thought he could hear the river of grass sighing beneath their feet.

Here the largest birds in North America glided across the glades, their wings outstretched and casting strong shadows on the still blades of swamp grass: snowy egrets with bright yellow beaks, great blue herons, ibis with curved orange beaks, as if they’d stepped off an Egyptian hieroglyphic. Occasionally one cried out, its call echoing across the still river of grass.

For miles in every direction, that was all there was: slow-moving water, grass, birds, and sky. Mick had the sense here that nature would go on, that it was and always would be, and that it was he, a human being, who had a shelf life. Rather than feeling limited or depressed by this, he found it liberating.
 

When he and Donnie came here, they rarely talked. They’d bring sketchbooks, water, and snacks, and they’d sit for a long time, drawing, quietly working in each other’s company. Mick knew that Donnie came here by himself sometimes, too, and it made him glad to know he’d given the place to his friend like a gift.

Donald had the urn in his hands. He motioned to Mick to take some of Donnie’s ashes and spread them. “This is for you to do,” he said. “And you can have some of him to keep if you like. We’ll take the rest home to Ohio.”

Mick realized his face was wet where tears had slipped down his cheeks. He dried them on his shirt sleeve, lifted the lid on the urn, and scooped out some ashes. Leaning over the railing, he let what remained of his friend fall from his hand and become part of the wide river of grass.

Chapter Ten

Grace understood now why she’d been unable to get Candace Shreveport out of her mind. With her confession and the conch as evidence, Alvarez booked Candace for both fires. The woman had experienced some sort of psychic break after her confession and could only scream or cry or otherwise carry on about what a bastard Mick was, how he should have died in the fire. It could turn out that Candace took the murder rap but successfully plead insanity. She certainly was putting on a good show with it, if it wasn’t in fact genuine.