Framed and Burning (Dreamslippers Book 2) (3 page)

“Cat’s right, Mickey. You need to be as specific as possible.”

“Not right now.” He put the pen down and stood up. “I want to see Donnie.”

“That’s not a good idea,” Cat protested. “You’ve been drinking.”

“Nonsense. I’ve had coffee.” He stood and made for the door.

Grace had no choice but to follow her brother. She grabbed the pad of paper with the contact information and ran after him. Cat followed.
 

By the time they got to the parking lot, they’d managed to talk him out of driving. He wasn’t in shape for it, and besides, Grace regarded his small brown Fiat convertible as a death trap. It was a ’78 and on its third clutch, which Mick had a tendency to ride hard. He’d acquired it in a trade for several of his paintings.

Grace knew the authorities wouldn’t be keen to let any of them into the crime scene until investigators were done, which might not be till the next day. By the way Alvarez and her crew were acting, they must already suspect arson.

But she couldn’t keep Mick away, and she owed it to him to find out whatever she could.

So Cat drove the rental car, with Mick riding shotgun and Grace in back. As they turned onto Coral Way, Grace smelled the smoke. Where Mick’s corner studio had been was a mass of charred beams and broken glass. Water left over from the firehoses pooled and dripped. Tendrils of smoke drifted up out of the sodden, burned mess. A palm tree that had filled the two-story bank of studio windows was nothing but a burned stump, its pot cracked and leaking water and soot.

As the three of them gaped at the wreckage, a woman in a pink peignoir clapped over to them in silver mules. Her unnaturally red hair was in curlers, a gauzy yellow scarf tied around them. Grace had met Rose de la Crem the night before; she was one of the artists with studio space in the same building as Mick. Her prominent brow ridge and masculine feet revealed the gender of her birth.
 
But other than that, the transformation to woman was a convincing one.
 

“Mick!” she exclaimed. “Oh, Mick.” She wrapped her arms around him.
 

The four of them gazed at the burned structure, one whole exterior wall now gone, the studio’s remnants exposed to the full moon’s judgment.

“I’m the one who called nine-one-one,” explained Rose. “I smelled the smoke. Oh, God, Mick. Donnie. I can’t believe it. At first the cops thought he was you—but I told them you were at the party. They found Donnie’s ID bracelet on him.”

Grace remembered that Donnie was diabetic. He wore a Medic Alert bracelet, which would have made his identification easy, no matter the condition of the body.

Sergeant Alvarez was on the scene, chatting with the fire marshal. Grace sidled toward them and stood within earshot. She heard the word “accelerant” several times. She waited for a break in their conversation and then moved in to talk with Alvarez when the fire marshal returned to the burnt studio.

“Do you suspect arson?”

“That’s police business.” Alvarez began to walk away.
 

Grace raised her voice to Alvarez’s departing back. “If you do, it won’t be a secret for long.”
 

The sergeant turned. “If we determine this was arson, your brother is a suspect. He arrived at the hotel after this fire was set. And he has no other alibi so far.”

Grace set her voice to calm. “I believe my brother was the intended victim. If it weren’t for our visit, he would have been working in his studio tonight. The only reason he went to the hotel is because I insisted.” Then Grace motioned toward her granddaughter, who was talking with Mick and Rose de la Crem. “I thought the party would cheer up Cat. She’s been depressed.”

“That’s very interesting.” Alvarez did not seem swayed.

A stretcher was wheeled into view, toward an ambulance. It held a body bag.

Mick went to it. “Can I see him?"

Alvarez blocked him. “I’m sorry, but it’s better if you visit him in the morgue.”

Wanting to leave with a gesture of cooperation, Grace drew the paper with the contact information for the Hineses out of her pocket and handed it to Alvarez.
 

“Here’s how to get in touch with Don Hines’s parents. Let Mick call them first, though. Please. Give him some time.”

Alvarez nodded and took the paper.

Cat stepped in then, speaking to Alvarez in an authoritative voice, the likes of which Grace hadn’t heard much since Lee’s death. Her granddaughter had been distant and cerebral ever since, and she’d shied away from any case that seemed the least bit exciting. They had yet to take a murder case, and it had been more than a year.

“We’d like to see the evidence reports,” Cat demanded. “We’ll need to see the lab and autopsy reports, too. We’re happy to comply with any further questioning you have for us.”

Alvarez surveyed the trio. “Don’t any of you leave town.”

Chapter Two

For the past year, and especially the past six months, Cat had consistently wished Granny Grace would leave her alone about Lee. Ever since he died, her grandmother had been trying to make sure Cat “healed properly,” which meant constant invitations to grief workshops and meditation events. Once Cat found a brochure on her bed for a four-day course on “healing with color therapy,” which would begin with a questionnaire meant to identify her “one true color” and end with an exercise that promised to “integrate her color’s vibrational harmony with the universal rainbow.”

The old Cat would have confronted her grandmother with such a ridiculous brochure, and the two would probably have joked about it. The new Cat tossed it in the trash without a word.

She didn’t need poking and prodding around the wall of sadness lodged in her chest. What she needed was work and time, and to get clear on her new life as a committed single person. For Cat had no intention of ever getting entangled again. As a dreamslipper, how could she? The people around her would only get hurt. Even friendships were off limits; her friendship with Wendy, made possible by Cat’s undercover work in the Plantation Church, had ended in pain and betrayal. No, it was her duty to focus on her purpose—her work—and leave relationships to normal people.

She kept this to herself, though. Everyone had so many expectations of her grief, as if she were supposed to follow a script. Even her Granny Grace was guilty, with her pressure on Cat to heal
correctly
.
 

Being in Miami had helped lift the persistent heaviness off her chest, even if she hadn’t shown it. Cat figured this was partly due to an infusion of vitamin D from the sunshine.
 

In drab Seattle, people tended to paint their houses in equally drab colors. But in Miami, a riot of tropical flowers and ostentatious birds, people drenched their homes in tangerine, aqua and pink. It made her wish her grandmother lived here, near Great-Uncle Mick, instead of in the Northwest. Why did the two siblings live on extreme opposite ends of the country, anyway?

The fire in his studio had pulled her out of a fog, though, that was for sure. She’d liked Donnie right off. He was intrigued by her name, and when she said it was short for “Cathedral,” he launched into a rambling account of the cathedrals he’d visited in Europe.

“By far, the most amazing cathedral in the entire world is the Sagrada Familia,” he’d pronounced. He retrieved his phone and showed her a slideshow of images. “Look, here we are creating monuments to God, and Gaudí instead found God down here on Earth, in nature. The columns are like trees!”
 

That was the first thing she’d thought of in the hotel room when Sergeant Alvarez said Donnie was dead. He was so gleeful about that church in Barcelona. He made her promise to visit it sometime, saying, “Cross my heart and hope to die.”

She wished he hadn’t made her say that. It was such a silly, girlish thing, and now….

She had to put on her PI hat to stop from thinking about what a schmuck God was to take people like Donnie and Lee. She focused on the puzzle of that night: Who set the fire? Did the arsonist mean to kill Donnie, or was that an accident? Then there was the worst question ever, the one she could not vocalize to her grandmother:
Could it have been Mick?
 

Cat didn’t know Mick very well. He’d visited her family in St. Louis only twice, and they were short visits. She remembered the watercolor set he gave her. And how, frowning at her drawing of him, he told her not to try to paint people the way they really looked.
 

“Paint the way they feel instead.” He had a bushy beard back then, and she saw him as a kind of magical creature in his paint-splattered clothes. But Cat had never been able to figure out how to paint people the way they feel. She still didn’t know what Mick meant by that.

The night of the fire, Granny Grace took Mick back to her hotel room. She hadn’t wanted to leave him alone. But it was clear neither of them got any sleep. “He went back to whiskey and then tried to sober up again with hits of coffee before our trip to the morgue,” her grandmother had told her.

Cat did not accompany the two of them to the morgue the next morning, but she understood that Mick needed to see Donnie to believe that he was gone. When Mick returned, he asked to be left alone to call Donnie’s parents.
 

Afterward, he promptly got drunk again and stayed that way. Cat counted five bottles of Bushmill’s in two days. And he still hadn’t written down a solid timeline for the evening or done anything to strengthen his alibi.

With his studio torched, the three of them had moved into a rental house, one in Coral Gables owned by Granny Grace’s friend Ernesto. Mick’s beach house was off limits since Granny Grace suspected Mick was the target of the fire, and that the killer would hit it next once he found out Mick hadn’t died in the studio fire. It was too small for the three of them anyway.

This put three dreamslippers together under one roof, which was a challenge.

“Mick’s in no condition to control his dreamslipping right now,” said Granny Grace their first night in the rental. They were in the kitchen cleaning up after a thrown-together meal of plantains and Cuban rice and beans. Cat knew her grandmother was warning about what she might find if she slipped into her great-uncle’s dream, or vice versa.

“And frankly, my dear,” her grandmother continued with an emphatic swipe of a rag across the countertop, “neither are you.”

“Thanks, Gran, for your confidence in me.”

“Oh, I didn’t mean it as a criticism. Just an observation. But no one is expecting you to have it under control. Nor Mick, for that matter. I know he cared a great deal about Donnie, and there’s almost nothing more upsetting than knowing someone wants you dead.”

“Well, unless you know of a tinfoil hat or something that keeps us from dreamslipping, Granny, I don’t know what we’re supposed to do.”

Her grandmother laughed. “Remember the rules.”

Cat nodded. In her apprenticeship with her grandmother, they’d established ground rules that governed their dreamslipping ability, giving it dimension but also keeping it in check. The first rule is not to
try
to dreamslip in your loved one’s dreams. This one was pretty challenging, as Granny Grace claimed to be able to keep herself from slipping into people’s dreams most of the time, but the more she loved them or the closer she felt to them, the harder it was for her to keep from picking up their dreams as if they were her own. Cat had not mastered this ability, and Granny Grace herself had trouble staying out of Cat’s dreams. Cat wondered if this was because it was easier to slip into another dreamslipper’s dream or if it was because of their emotional connection.

Thinking about rule numero uno made Cat realize how little she knew about Granny Grace’s relationship with her brother, especially where their dreamslipping was concerned.

“Gran?” she asked, “can you keep yourself from slipping into Mick’s dreams?”

Recognition seemed to flicker across her grandmother’s face. She smiled.
 

“Oh, such lovely dreams that man has, when they’re his own. I remember one from our childhood to this day. He must have been three or four at the time, as I’d just entered puberty, and my dreamslipping had recently started. We’d been given our own rooms by then, after having to share one for forever, or so it seemed to me at the time. But my room was still next to his, not that it mattered. I was regularly picking up my parents’ dreams, and they slept downstairs.
 

“Anyway,” she continued, “the dream was so lovely, so fanciful. The circus was in town, and little Mickey dreamed he was riding on the back of an elephant, which flew! I think he thought of it as Dumbo. We flew up above the clouds, looking down on our farm town, and a pretty accurate aerial depiction, I must say, especially considering his age. He got the Catholic church steeple right, and the dairy plant on the edge of town. I remember the feel of the elephant’s back under my hands, its hair bristly and its skin dry. I think they let Mick touch the elephant at the circus, so he got that detail right, too. We flew through the clouds, doing loop-de-loops! There were giant hot-air balloons going by us, and then things got really strange, as a World War II flying ace zoomed by, and then a pirate ship.
 

“The captain spotted us in his spyglass, and then his crew began to shoot at us with cannonballs! So Mick swerved to avoid being hit, and they missed us every time. Then a dinosaur so big it could reach into the sky tried to swipe at us, but again, Mick swerved to avoid him.