Framed and Burning (Dreamslippers Book 2) (28 page)

He was quiet, chewing on that. Then he thought of something else. “Maggie tried to tell me she wanted to quit dancing the last time she came to visit.”

“But you wouldn’t let her say it.”

“That’s right.”

“Would you love her any less if she gave up dancing?”

“Of course not.”

“Then tell her.”

Chester smiled. It was the first genuine smile she’d seen grace his face, not a hint of sarcasm about it. Then he became serious again. “It’s a funny coincidence, but I had a dream about Maggie last night. At the end of it, she told me she wanted to get married and have kids, like her mother did.”

Grace nodded. So that’s how the end of the dream had turned out, she thought. That’s what happened after she tore herself out of Chester and went to see Mick.

Chester was shaking his head. “You’re a hell of a woman, Amazing Grace.”

“So I’ve been told.”

He took her hand, which was still resting on the table near his. “If I weren’t already married, I’d haul you off and make a decent woman of you.”

Grace laughed, happy to see some of the old-school charm revive in this bitter old man. “Oh, I think I’m more than decent without your help,” she said playfully, unable to resist. She squeezed his hand and let go.

He nodded, smiling for the first time. “And so is Louise.”

Chapter Twenty

Cat was doing what she thought was an admirable job keeping this thing with Jacob casual. Which is not to say they didn’t treat each other with care and respect. After that first day spent in his hotel room, they’d gone to the beach together and to dinner, and they’d enjoyed each other’s bodies again and again. The difference for Cat this time was that she was enjoying her interactions with him in the present instead of having to figure out what their relationship meant for the future.

And even though he was only in town for a short time, she didn’t feel she should be with him every moment. In fact, she sensed that Jacob wanted this vacation for his own reasons, too, that he needed time to figure out something that had nothing to do with her. For that reason, she was glad again that she’d made the decision to keep their liaison casual, as he might have made the mistake of focusing on her instead of whatever it was he needed to figure out down there in Miami, away from his New York life.

It was during one of these moments of space between her and Jacob that Cat decided to pay a visit to her great-uncle Mick in his studio next door. Truth be told, she missed having him around now that they were in separate units. As unpredictable as he could be, she enjoyed his perspective on life, so different from her grandmother’s, or from her own parents’, for that matter. Getting to know him better here in Miami made her regret that her family was spread so far apart, with sparse visits in between. There was so much more you learned about people by being a part of their daily lives.

So she planned to bring him takeout from the Indian restaurant they both liked there in Hollywood. When she rang his bell, he opened his door still wiping paint off his hands with a rag.

“Come on in,” he said, leaving the door open for her and grabbing one of the bags of takeout.

They set up on his kitchen bar counter. She’d purchased two mango lassi drinks, as Mick said he was easing up on the bottle, and she didn’t much like to drink that early in the day anyway.

As they dug into the samosas and tandoori chicken, she asked, “How was it with Donnie’s parents, overall? I know you were kind of freaked out.”
 

“It was strange, for sure,” Mick admitted. “But better than I thought.” He told her about the day they spread the ashes, how perfect everything was.

Cat warmed to hear him talk about that place in the Everglades and how he and Donnie used to go there. Watching him there in the kitchen talking and sipping his lassi, Cat realized that Mick was doing much better these days. He still looked sad, and she could tell he was still grieving, but he seemed to be doing so now from a place of strength. She realized she and her grandmother were part of that, and she felt a pang of sorrow knowing that eventually, they would have to leave him. What would Mick do then? The only person in his life now was Rose de la Crem, and her life tended to be a bit transitory, her finances and her art career insecure, not to mention her romantic life.

As they finished up lunch, she asked to see what he was working on. He’d erected several giant easels in the middle of the room. All Cat had seen so far were the canvas backs of his new works in progress.

“Sure,” he said. “You might even recognize them.”

This further piqued her interest. He led her around the easels and lifted a drop cloth.

Cat gasped. Her uncle’s painting referenced in obvious ways the dream of hers that Mick had slipped into a few days after the fire. She recognized Anita’s face, albeit an abstracted version, but it was Lee’s killer nonetheless. And there was a lot of red in the painting, signifying the blood coming out of Lee’s head. Lee wasn’t identifiable, but the work was unfinished, with canvas showing through parts of it, the brushstrokes rough.

“Oh, my God.” She began to breathe heavily, remembering that terrible day.

“It’s upsetting you,” Mick said. “Sorry. I didn’t mean for that to happen.”

“It’s okay,” she said, calming down. She forced herself to look at Anita. “I’ve never”—she paused, looking for the right words—“I’ve never had anyone capture my innermost life like that. It’s startling.”

“I’m really sorry,” he said. “I can’t seem to get your dream out of my head. It wants to come out on the canvas.”

“Right,” Cat said. “I can understand that.”

“You okay?”

“Yeah,” Cat said. “But now I’m kind of wishing we’d had something stronger than mango lassis with lunch.”

They laughed a little. Then gazed at the painting in progress.

“Do you want me to paint over it?” Mick asked.

“No,” Cat said. “I don’t think so. But I’ll let you know if I change my mind.”

Something occurred to her at that moment, something so obvious she couldn’t believe none of them had considered it before. And there she’d been, circling around Mick’s destroyed paintings, but for the wrong reasons.

“Uncle Mick,” Cat said, placing her hand on his arm. “You’ve done this a lot, right? Painted what you’ve seen in people’s dreams?”

“Off and on, over the years, yeah. But most of the time, that’s not what I paint.”

Cat felt the case open up before her. “I need you to look at those paintings again, the ones destroyed in the fire, and tell me if any of them came from dreams.”

“Why, Cat? What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking you might have painted something that the arsonist didn’t want anyone else to see.”

They went through the list one by one, Cat marking anything that Mick said had a connection to a dream.

Out of the more than two hundred paintings destroyed in the fire, thirty-two had been inspired by dreamslipping. Mick had digital images for nineteen of those, which was lucky, Cat thought. But this still amounted to a search for a needle in a haystack.

“I think we need to get a projector and blow these up really big. We can go through them in detail,” Cat said. “But I want to wait for Granny Grace. She’ll notice things we won’t.”

“Yes, she will,” said Mick.

Cat peered at her uncle, wanting to ask him something but not quite sure how to phrase it.

“What?”

“Sorry. I…” Cat swallowed. “What’s the deal with you and my grandmother, anyway? You live on extreme opposite ends of the country.”

“I like Miami. She likes Seattle.”

“But is that it? I mean, you’re both dreamslippers. And you’re the only other dreamslippers I know.”

“Look, Cat.” Mick paused to sweep their takeout detritus into a large barrel he used as a trash can. “Your grandmother is my older sister. You wouldn’t know this, being an only child, but older sisters are as bossy as they come.”

“That sounds kind of childish.”

“Well, it is. I admit that. Which is why I invited the two of you out here for Art Basel.”

“Granny Grace was so excited to see you,” Cat said, feeling wistful about the days before the fire. “She went out and put together a whole wardrobe for the tropics. We wrapped up our cases and didn’t take on anything new. I’ve never seen her like that.”

Mick frowned. “I’m sorry the two of you got dragged into this mess instead.”

“Oh, it’s okay, Mick. I think it’s been good for us. Both.”

He smiled. “Your grandmother wasn’t always so enlightened, you know.”

“Really?”
“Yeah, she made some mistakes with her dreamslipping, early on. And one of them cost me a lot. But that’s all you need to know, Cathedral.”

Cat prodded him to tell her more, but he refused.

“I think I can get a projector from the gallery where we held the wake,” Mick said, changing the subject.

“Sounds good,” she said. “But you know, Uncle Mick, I’m a private investigator. I’ll find out your Granny Grace story eventually.”

She laughed with him as he shooed her out the front door.

Chapter Twenty-One

Mick set the projector up in his studio. The three of them examined each of the nineteen paintings for signs of anything their arsonist might not have wanted shown on one of Mick’s large, public canvases.

The collection spanned the many decades of his career, from one he painted in graduate school that contained fragmented images from a dream of Annie Lin’s to a stray cheerleading pom-pon that cropped up in a recent painting. That one came from a woman he’d slept with whose age was too embarrassing to admit to Cat and his sister. Suffice to say she was still young enough to be dreaming of her high-school glory days.

The three of them went through the paintings slowly, Cat and Pris quizzing him about each one. He racked his brain to remember the original dreams that had inspired the paintings. They analyzed every piece of imagery in every painting, Cat sitting with her laptop and searching for words and phrases online as they flipped through the slides.

There was a fire engine with the number five emblazoned on it in gold that Cat and Pris got excited about for a moment but then couldn’t take further.

Next was a trash can tucked into the corner of a painting. Cat fixated on it for a good hour or so, or at least it seemed that long to Mick. She could make out the name of the waste-management company on its side, Sauvey Systems. She searched the web for any crimes connected to that company but didn’t turn up anything significant. They moved on, but Cat made a note to have Alvarez check it against the police database in case any dead bodies had been found in a Sauvey Systems dumpster.

When they came to a painting of his titled
Red Shift Sunset
, Pris said, “That red…” and walked up closer to the projected image. “There’s a number here.”

“Yeah, I sometimes scrawl numbers into the top layer of paint. It’s kind of a thing I do.”

“Did the number come from a dream?” Cat asked.

Mick thought about it, hard. He barely remembered the dream that had inspired the painting, which he’d completed several years ago. At the Brickell Lofts, he rarely ever slipped into the other artists’ dreams. He wasn’t sure why; maybe it was because the walls in the old warehouse were so thick, or because he’d got better at shutting dreams out by that point in his life, with advice from Pris. But there was one that slipped through, and this was it. He was certain it belonged to one of the short-term residents, a young guy, fresh out of art school, who didn’t last long before he’d moved on to a regular day job. Harry, that was his name. He was from California, and the sunset in the dream looked to have been over the Mojave Desert. But the numbers, they were Mick’s.

“Nope,” he said. “That’s my locker number from high school.”

He hated to disappoint Pris and Cat, and even more than that, he hated that their art-review project wasn’t yielding anything worthwhile. What they had at the end of a long evening spent on those nineteen paintings was exactly nothing.

Pris paced the room, and Cat flipped over on Mick’s couch so that her feet dangled over the back of the couch and her head hung from the seat. She stared at painting number thirteen, still projected on the wall.

“Looking at it upside-down isn’t making this any better,” she said.

Mick felt frustrated and drained by the whole case. It had been such a roller coaster ride for him, first wanting to kill Candace, thinking she was responsible, and then having to dredge up those old feelings about Chester Canon. And it turned out that neither of them was guilty, at least not of killing his friend.

“I don’t see how this is getting us anywhere,” Mick said. “If you’re right, and the killer torched the studio to destroy one of these paintings, then he must have been paranoid. Because we’re looking at them, and nothing’s standing out.”

“These paintings have been a dead end since the beginning,” Cat said. Her face was turning red as the blood rushed to it.

“There must be something we’re missing…” said Pris.

Mick walked over to the painting on his easel, the one inspired by Cat’s dream. He lifted a lid off a can of paint sitting nearby, picked up a brush, dipped it once, curled the brush sidewise to catch the drip, and then began dabbing it onto the canvas. It was red paint, which was always thinner than other pigments. It went on bright, almost pink, but would dry much darker.