Framed and Burning (Dreamslippers Book 2) (6 page)

“A riveting commentary on the nature of racial complexion,” said the judges. That had taken the wind out of Canon’s sails, for sure, since Mick’s talent had been vindicated by an independent panel of judges whose opinion he had to accept, even if he vehemently disagreed.
 

Mick ran down the list of hating grad students in his head, wondering if any of them still bore a grudge. It was possible. A year after grad school,
Art in Our Time
published a Letter to the Editor that bad-mouthed the work of one of Mick’s professors, making it sound as if the letter had been written by Mick. It was signed
Mick in Miami
, which is where he’d fled after graduate school. He was the only “Mick” in the Miami art world.
 
Coupled with the letter’s references to the professor’s work and the classes Mick took, it was easy to assume that Mick had written the letter. That professor had been one of Mick’s staunchest allies, and it pained Mick to think the professor believed he’d written it. Mick tried to get the magazine to print a retraction, but it refused. And the professor refused to take Mick’s calls.

The worst part was, Mick
had
criticized some aspects of that professor’s work, over beers with the other students, in confidence, but never to the professor’s face. Whoever wrote the letter cribbed some of Mick’s details from those conversations. So the letter had an air of authenticity to it, and Mick knew whoever betrayed him had been close enough to be involved in the regular round of criticism most art students doled out against their professors, especially when drinking.
 

The pastry was a delicious concoction of orange guava jelly between layers of buttery, flaky crust. Mick wolfed it down and gulped his coffee. Then he took his flip sketchbook out of his back pocket and began to jot down some names. It was something Priscilla and Cat had been asking for since the night of the fire. It was a humiliating task, compiling a list of people who might want him dead for no other reason than jealousy over his knack for putting lines and colors together on canvas. And he was alarmed to find that it was a rather long list, one that had grown through the years.

When he was finished, he sat there staring at the ring of milky brown coffee left in the bottom of his cup. He could give this list to the police, but they would still think of him as a suspect unless he coughed up his alibi.
 

But he feared his alibi would make him look guiltier.

He flipped the cover closed on his sketchbook and decided to talk to the one person who could verify he hadn’t set the fire that night: A goth chick named Jenny Baines.

Chapter Four

Grace was sitting in the cottage in Ernesto’s living room listening to her granddaughter complain about Mick when the man himself burst into the house. He tossed a crumpled sheet of notebook paper at Grace, said, “Here’s your damn list,” and announced that he was leaving again.
Grace smoothed out the paper. He’d done a good job, at least, with names, dates, and details. In the silence after he slammed the door, Grace read the list aloud to Cat.

“Let’s split up this time,” Grace said. “These first two are here in South Florida, but after that, it looks like we’re going to the Big Apple.” She gave Cat the task of interviewing one of Mick’s former professors up in Fort Lauderdale and took it upon herself to interview the number-one hater on Mick’s list.
 

This happened to be a woman.
 

With whom her brother had once slept. There it was in Mick’s chicken-scratch handwriting: Candace Shreveport, ex-lover. Grace remembered meeting Candace, but only briefly. Back then—more than thirty years ago—she’d been a young beachcomber with stars in her eyes about Mick. When Grace called to set up the appointment, the woman sounded surprised, then suspicious.
 

“It would be great to talk to someone who’s practically an expert on Mick Travers,” Grace said. There was no response, so she added, “And his art.” The woman agreed to meet.

Candace lived on Sanibel Island, on the Gulf side of the Florida peninsula, but Grace was keen for the drive. It took her across the Everglades along Alligator Alley, a straight shot she’d traveled many times during her visits to see Mick. The name was not a misnomer, as Grace spotted several alligators without leaving her air-conditioned car. She gave herself the luxury of a stop at Shark Valley, which
was
a misnomer, since there were obviously no sharks slogging through the swampy glades. But a long, paved path led to a hummock, an area of solid ground where a few slash pines bravely fought for their existence.
 

The alligators lining the pavement seemed fat and happy, lazing in the sun without much care for how close she and the other tourists approached. The gators yawned, wide-jawed, and looked away. She was mercifully glad when she reached a shaded kiosk at the end of the paved trail. A clever crow lifted a silver-sheathed energy bar out of her backpack, making off with the treat before she realized it.

Without the energy bar, she was famished by the time she arrived in Sanibel. A restaurant on the edge of the shell-lined beach called to her, but she was to meet Candace Shreveport at her beach bungalow. Perhaps she could entice the woman into an early dinner.

The bungalow was a delight from the outside, reminiscent of the gingerbread Victorians of Key West, and painted in pale pink with aqua trim.
“What a lovely home,” Grace remarked when Candace greeted her. The woman was holding a black-and-white cat balanced on her ample middle when she came to answer the door. Her hair had gone gray some time ago but was dyed black; Grace could see it was time for a root touch-up.

“Well, Mick would hate it,” Candace said, gesturing to the outside of the house. “All that decorative busyness. He’d say it was too folksy.”

“You’re probably right about that,” Grace said.
 

“Come on in,” Candace said, without warmth, shifting the cat to one hip and propping the screen door open for Grace.

“Thank you so much for meeting with me.” Grace followed the woman inside.
 

Candace gestured to a set of white wicker furniture that creaked loudly when Grace sat down. On the walls were, presumably, Ms. Shreveport’s own creations: a row of Impressionistic paintings of none other than the cat she was holding at the door.

“Those are mine.” Candace noticed Grace’s gaze. She pointed to the signature in the bottom corner of one. “I sign my works
Candy Port
.”

Grace cringed but tried not to show it. What on earth had her brother Mick ever seen in this woman?

“Mick and I met at a bar,” the woman announced, as if she sensed Grace’s bewilderment. “The Conch. Down in Key Largo. To this day, I don’t know what he was doing down there, but I’d just run off from my husband.”

“I see,” said Grace, though she didn’t really.

“I was drunk off my ass, and Mick danced with me. It was fun. He’s loads of fun to drink with. Of course, we ended up in bed, at the Largo Lodge. Cute place—I’ve gone back a few times with my girlfriends.”

“My brother says you drunk-dial him every couple of years,” Grace broke in. “And as recently as this past spring.”

“Yeah, he’s not exactly on my speed-dial, if you know what I mean, but when you get to thinking hard about where your life went wrong, you know, he’s one of the first people I think of.”

“But you’ve done well for yourself.” Grace couldn’t help herself.
 

“Oh, I do fine. I’m in a few crafty galleries here in town, right there with the mosquito huts and the yard art. But I’ll never be a real artist. I’ll never be recognized. That’s Mick. He took it from me.”

Grace felt her temperature rising and worked to control her response. “And how did he do that?”

Candace laughed haughtily. “I can see Mick’s his usual uncommunicative self. He hasn’t told you a damn thing, has he? Listen, you want something to drink? It’s a long story, and you’ve had a long drive.”

As much as Grace wanted this woman to spill whatever sordid story she had roiling around inside her, the thought of liquor on her empty stomach made her blanche.
 

“I’ll do you one better,” Grace said. “I’ll take you to dinner. Earn your story that way.”

Candace was delighted. She popped to her feet. “Let’s go to the Orange Spot. It just opened up. They have a vintage Wurlitzer. You’ll love it.”

The Orange Spot indeed featured a vintage Wurlitzer in its dining room, along with a collection of other old-fashioned musical machines, including a group of mechanized monkey musicians. Grace polished off her halibut, which had been cooked in a brown paper bag with shallots and hazelnuts, and let Candace do the talking.

The woman’s list of grievances against Mick was long. According to Candace, it was she, and not Mick, who first had the idea for Mick’s now legendary Sea Series, inspired by the turquoise waters in the Florida Keys. Grace let Candace prattle on about this even though it was fairly obvious that Mick had in fact been down in Key Largo searching for inspiration. He’d clearly found it, but he’d also picked up this leg biter and brought her home as well.
 

“I’m also the one who introduced Mick to the New York art scene,” Candace informed Grace, emphasizing the point by shoving an olive from her martini into her purple-lipstick-ringed mouth.

“Come again?” Grace countered. “Mick met the gallery owner Peter Swanson at an opening, and the man loved his work. Everyone knows that story.”

“I introduced him to Peter! You know how shy Mick can be. A real introvert, that one. He wouldn’t have approached Peter on his own!”

The woman did have a point, but the facts flew in the face of things. “But Mick had already established himself in New York well before you say the two of you met.”

“I did it!” Candace insisted. “Mick owes his success to me.”

Grace switched gears, sensing an alcohol-fueled opportunity. “That must make you really angry, Candace,” she said. “If someone I cared about used me like that, I’d want to kill him.”

Candace downshifted her anger. “But I didn’t torch his studio, if that’s what you’re driving at.”

“Oh, a little fire…happens all the time!” Grace said. “Maybe you only wanted to destroy his art. Maybe you didn’t think anyone would be there. How would you know that? You haven’t seen Mick in years!”

“Oh, I’ve seen him….”

“You have?”

“He didn’t even recognize me! At his showing in West Palm Beach. I drove over there to get a look at those big monstrosities he’s making now. And there he was. Bastard didn’t even recognize me.”

“Well, did you talk to him?”

“No. He didn’t recognize me….”

Candace sort of shut down after that. She quit talking and eating, though she continued to drink. Grace paid the exorbitant bill and helped the woman home. As she tucked her into a living-room chair, Grace turned around and said, “Candace, you live in paradise. A lot of people would be jealous of
you
, but you waste your energy being jealous of my brother. Why don’t you let that go? Enjoy life. Collect a few seashells.”

Grace thought she heard Candace call her a bitch once she shut the door.

Grace spent the night in a simple but clean motel, thinking it best to drive fresh in the morning. She’d prefer a nice B&B on the beach, but after the splurge on dinner with Candace, she needed to reel in the spending.
 

The next morning she stopped into one of the galleries in Sanibel and found a whole section of paintings signed
Candy Port
. She perused them with a cold eye, looking for Mick’s influence and not finding it. The woman’s work showed marginal skill, but it had a certain “outsider art” appeal, as she roughed in her subjects’ eyes, making them seem more childlike and lost than they would be had she stuck to the representational. There was certainly something there, that spark of intuition, perhaps, a way of seeing the world. But it was held back; something kept it restrained even here on the canvas. The woman’s own limitations were omnipresent.
 

Still, Grace found herself especially captivated by the images of children and animals, which lost the sinister feel of the other depictions and seemed to reveal the artist’s lingering sense of wonder. Grace remembered Candace had a cage of parakeets just beyond the front room of her house, and of course there was that cat, who was clearly her closest friend. But the children? She had not seemed to be a woman who would admit children into her life. But in a painting that gave her pause, there were two imps staring over a fence that Grace recognized as the one framing the artist’s yard. The kids must be her neighbors, Grace surmised.

The painting was priced at three hundred and fifty dollars. The frame alone was worth that, as it was vintage wood and customized to echo the fence in the painting. It set the painting off nicely. Obeying some instinct she couldn’t even name if she tried, Grace bought the painting.

On her way back to Miami, she decided that Candace was indeed capable of having set that fire, even if her intention had been to destroy the art instead of kill Mick.

Chapter Five

Suspect number two was right up the coast in Fort Lauderdale, so Cat didn’t have to travel far to interview him. This was a man Mick referred to as “Chester the Molester,” but Cat planned to address him as “Dr. Canon.”