Framed and Burning (Dreamslippers Book 2) Page 3

  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.

  “The elephant set us down softly back on earth when we were ready, and then it presented us both with giant lollipops held out in its trunk, the old-fashioned candy that looks like a swirled ribbon shaped into a disk. Back then those were a rare treat. Oh, the dream was grand and beautiful, the kind of dream you think children should have.”

  “But how about now, Gran?”

  Mick walked in without a word to either of them and began rifling through the cupboards, looking for more liquor.

  “Maybe you should ask Great-Uncle Mick if I’ve picked up any of his dreams,” Granny Grace proposed, her voice a bit stern.

  He startled. “What’s this? Oh, the dream thing. Humph. No sister sightings in many a year, thank God.” He found the bottle he was looking for and practically cuddled it to his chest, as if it were an old friend.

  “Well, we’re all under one roof now,” Granny Grace cautioned. “So who knows what will happen.”

  That first night, what happened was this: Two of the three dreamslippers got very little sleep.

  Cat didn’t necessarily agree with Granny Grace’s rules, especially in this instance. Even though Mick refused to write down a timeline for the evening, Cat made a mental note of the whole evening, and she could not account for Mick’s whereabouts after they met him at seven p.m. for dinner at the Blue Pineapple.

  “Nobody eats dinner in Miami before eight,” Mick had complained. But he gave in, and they’d had the early dinner. The next time they saw him was at the hotel when the police came just before two a.m. That left nearly the whole evening unaccounted for.

  Cat tossed and turned before finally giving in to the temptation to open herself up to any dreams her uncle might be having. It was a skill she’d honed over the past year, thanks to her grandmother’s mentoring. Using their ability this way, they’d been able to catch two embezzlers and a woman cheating on her husband.

  As she drifted to sleep, she entered her uncle’s mind space by imagining one of his paintings, the big, abstract one that sort of resembled a seashell. She pictured him creating it in sweeping, broad strokes….

  There were no pirates, dinosaurs, or flying elephants in this one, but it did strike her right away as most likely Mick’s.

  She was in his art studio, before the fire. Donnie was there, painting, and Rose de la Crem clopped in on her heels and tossed a cup of coffee at the painting, mixing it in with the paint Donnie had applied to the canvas.

  “See?” she said, a hand on one hip. “Isn’t that better?”

  Cat heard herself say, “Yes, it is better” in Mick’s voice.

  Rose broke down crying and threw the cup to the floor. It shattered, the pieces flying. “Why can’t I do this with my own work?”

  Donnie hugged Rose till she calmed down while Cat-as-Mick knelt to pick up the pieces. The mug was one of Rose’s thrift-store finds. “Florida Quacker” was printed in bold pink on an image of a duck wearing a trucker cap that was more redneck than ironic. The duck was sitting in a beach chair, sipping a cocktail. Cat could tell this through the broken pieces, putting them back together as if they formed a puzzle.

  “C’mon,” Donnie coaxed Rose. “Let’s go take a look at what you’re working on.”

  He motioned for Mick to follow, and the three walked down the hallway to Rose’s studio. But when Rose opened the door, a swirl of black smoke blew out, swallowing them up. Cat couldn’t breathe. She coughed, choking on the smoke as she saw Rose drop to the floor, overcome by the fumes. Cat could feel herself about to go down next. But then the dream changed.

  They were in Mick’s studio. She caught a glimpse of Donnie, asleep on a cot behind a curtain, a bottle of Bushmill’s open on the floor next to him. Cat rode along in her uncle’s consciousness as Mick picked up pots of paint thinner and turpentine and began dumping them out around the room. He opened the curtain and poured the liquid onto Donnie, who woke in time to see Mick and yell out. But Mick lit a match and threw it onto him, everything going up in a burst of flame. Donnie screamed and screamed until he couldn’t scream anymore….

  And then Mick woke up, and Cat was forced out of the dream.

  She sat up, sweaty, her heart pounding. She heard Mick stumble to the bathroom, coughing and clearing his throat. Did he know she’d slipped into his dream? He hadn’t seemed to show it within the dream. She lay in bed for a long time, considering her uncle’s possible guilt and how she could tell this to Granny Grace.

  But then Cat fell into her own recurring nightmare, one that had plagued her for the past year, a dream within a dream.

  She is sleeping in bed with Lee and begins to dream. The killer, Anita, slips into Cat’s head. Anita was not a dreamslipper in real life, but in Cat’s dream-within-the dream, she has the ability. She fuses with Cat’s consciousness so that Cat can feel Anita in her head; she can hear Anita’s thoughts.

  Cut out the rot to make the wood strong. In Jesus’s name. You will be the Church’s salvation.

  Quickly, Anita overpowers Cat so that Cat becomes Anita. She gets up and looks in the mirror, and it’s Anita’s face staring back at her. The dream always ends the same way: Cat-as-Anita opens Lee’s dresser drawer, pulls out a gun, and shoots him there in the bed.

  Only this time, as Cat/Anita turns around with the gun, she finds there’s someone else there, sitting in a side chair, drinking whiskey.

  “Whatcha doin’ there, my mild-mannered grandniece?” Mick says, motioning with his drink at the gun in her hands.

  Cat hears herself as Anita answering him. “I’m going to shoot that man,” she says, pointing the gun at Lee, sleeping in the bed.

  “That’d be a waste of time,” Mick says, taking a drink. “Seeing as how he’s already dead.”

  Cat turns to the bed with a start and sees Lee as he looked that terrible day on Granny Grace’s front porch, after Anita shot him, with part of his head blown away and blood spilling out around him like a halo.

  “No!” she cries, and suddenly she’s Cat again. Anita is gone, and Cat crouches down to stop the blood.

  Cat awakened from the dream in a panic, and it took her a few moments to realize where she was. Then she heard the sound of her uncle, shuffling to t
he kitchen for another drink.

  So he had the ability to appear and talk to her in her dreams, as Granny Grace did.

  The next day, Cat tried to broach the subject of Mick’s possible guilt to her grandmother, but she couldn’t find the words. “I think your brother might be an arsonist or murderer” didn’t exactly roll off the tongue.

  Mick came out of his room only to piss or get more alcohol, helping himself to Ernesto’s ample stash. Cat was sure Alvarez and her posse would identify the hole in his alibi soon, if they hadn’t already. But they were probably waiting for the forensics reports. They’d want more evidence on Mick before interrogating him further. Granny Grace went to the precinct station but got no more information.

  When Granny Grace was out, Cat called her mother to let her know what was happening. Mercy was upset, and as always, worried about Cat’s safety. She was relieved to hear they weren’t staying at Mick’s beach house. Cat took the opportunity to ask her mother about her family history.

  “What do you know about your uncle, Mom? Why do Granny Grace and Mick live on opposite coasts?”

  “Oh, those two had some kind of falling-out in the Eighties.” Her mother clicked her tongue in judgment. “Tedious, if you ask me.”

  “Do you know what it was about?”

  “No idea. They used to be extremely close, and then… It probably has to do with you-know-what.”

  Cat’s mother didn’t like to talk about the dreamslipping thing. Up until Cat proved she could do it by relating the content of her mother’s dreams exactly, she had denied its existence. It apparently skipped a generation.

  As she said goodbye to her mother, Cat wondered if there wasn’t a personal reason Granny Grace had set up those rules.

  The next night, things were a bit better for Cat. Mick had had so much to drink his dreams were washy and disjointed, and that made it easy for Cat to pop out of them when she inadvertently slipped into them. And he didn’t slip into hers.

  And now after a couple of days, Mick was sprawled out on the lanai, which he was using as a sort of makeshift studio, a giant easel on two-by-fours set up in the middle. But not much painting was getting done, Cat noted. She took him some coffee and a sandwich, setting the plate on a side table next to where he was reclining on a vintage Sixties-era sofa. Ernesto was a collector of Mid-Century Modern furniture.

  “Uncle Mick,” she said sharply, “you’ve got to eat.”

  “Right.” He opened his eyes halfway. “Eat.” He slumped back down on the sofa.

  Cat snapped her fingers in front of his face. “Uncle Mick!”

  It startled him into opening one eye. “Whaaat?”

  “It’s lunchtime, a couple of days after your studio was torched. You’ve been wallowing in drink long enough. It’s time to get up.”

  He lifted himself up into a sitting position with great effort, placing his bare feet on the floor. He was wearing the same pajamas he’d put on two days ago. She could smell his sourness.

  She gestured to the food on the side table. “Eat.”

  He set the plate in his lap and then lifted the coffee to his lips.

  “This isn’t Cuban,” he said. “And it’s pretty weak, besides.”

  Cat resisted the urge to smack him.

  He put the cup down and took up the sandwich, grinning after the first bite. “Say, this is tasty, Cat. Thanks.”

  She smiled back. His bipolar nature caught her off guard.

  He polished it off handily. “Got another?”

  She stepped into the kitchen, made another sandwich, and returned. He was up and standing in front of a blank canvas on his easel, stabbing into the surface with charcoal. Cat watched as he worked.

  Slowly the image took shape, and she gasped: It was Donnie’s burnt body.

  “When I look at the canvas, that’s what I see.”

  He put the charcoal down, went to his bedroom, and came back dressed. “I’m heading out for some real coffee.”

  Before she could offer to tag along, the door slammed, and he was gone.

  Cat went back to work, shrugging off her great uncle’s loss-infused rudeness. She was researching every square inch of his storied art career to see if she could turn up anyone who hated him enough to torch his studio. There were plenty of jealous types, including a couple of suspicious ones from his grad-school days, but were they envious enough to try to kill him, especially after all these years? She’d have to find out.

  After an hour or two, Mick hadn’t returned, but Granny Grace swept in. “Still at the computer?” she asked, disapprovingly. “You know, Cat, in my day, we never used computers. We had to do our investigating on foot.”

  “On foot? I thought you went around on horseback.”

  “All right, Smarty Pants, we’ve got more interviewing to do. Here, I’ve marked a few we haven’t met.” She tossed Cat the Art Basel artists’ directory. “Today’s the last day of the show, so let’s vamoose before these artistes leave town.”

  Cat groaned. So far, talking to artists had turned up nothing other than a few choice anecdotes for future cocktail-party fodder. She and Granny Grace had tackled a few the day before, wanting to do something other than sit and wait for Alvarez’s team. Cat had her fill after meeting with the performance artist whose entire shtick involved making music with an electric razor as his instrument.

  Cat scoped the directory, finding the entry Granny Grace starred in a purple pen. “South Beach?” Cat questioned, her voice edged with sarcasm. “This requires travel. In a car. Across the causeway.”

  “Better wear sunscreen,” Granny Grace advised.

  What should have been a twenty-minute drive took them twice as long due to traffic, and they were nearly wiped out by a guy doing ninety and swerving from lane to lane while watching TV on a screen built into his driver’s-side visor. Even a short drive in Miami meant risking your life.

  But soon they were in the loft space belonging to the first artist on the list, Kazuo Noshihara. He’d rented the space for the show. It offered a commanding view of the beach from floor-to-ceiling windows. His work was scattered around, and he and his assistants were busy crating it for the return trip to Japan.

  From what Cat could tell, his work amounted to nothing more than white canvases with pieces of lint stuck to them. But Granny Grace gasped as if impressed when she saw them.

  “Brilliant,” her grandmother pronounced, and there came Noshihara, in his crisp white jeans and equally crisp white shirt, to greet her. Cat drifted away from them as they lapsed into a conversation about the artistic influence of Yoko Ono, whom Granny Grace said she’d once met in person, as had Noshihara. Cat wondered briefly if every artist in Miami had once met Yoko Ono.

  Walking the length of the paintings awaiting their crates, Cat kept expecting to see something more than simple white canvases with a single piece of lint stuck into the middle of each, but that’s all there was to see.

  As she returned to her grandmother and Noshihara, Cat watched as Granny Grace reached into the pocket of her linen trousers, grabbed what lint was there, and offered it to the artist.

  He accepted the gift with tears in his eyes. “You have a deep understanding of Minimalism, of the detritus of living, in a small way,” he said. “My English fails me. But I think you know.”

  “I think I do,” said Granny Grace, nodding.

  “I will title my next piece ‘The Gift of Grace,’ for you.” The artist bowed.

  Cat had to hand it to her grandmother. She really knew how to connect with people. But as for shedding insight on the case, Noshihara had not much more to offer than, well, pocket lint. He knew Mick only by reputation and had a solid alibi for the night of the fire, which had been verified already by Miami PD, which had been by for a chat.

  Cat felt the time was wasted, but she also knew from her criminal-justice classes that most of detective legwork wasn’t glamorous or even relevant. In the white elevator of Noshihara’s building, Granny Grace turned to Cat. “You know,
you should really take more of an interest in our potential suspects.”

  “Do you know how much his lint sells for?” Cat spat back. “Fifty thousand dollars! For the fuzz some hipster scraped out of his pockets, Gran! It’s ridiculous. The whole art world is a joke.”

  Her grandmother raised an eyebrow at her. Sizing Cat up and down, she asked, “Let me see your lint.”

  “What?”

  “Let’s see it. Whatever you’ve got in your pocket. I want to know.”

  The elevator chimed, and they stepped out into the white-and-turquoise building vestibule, To Cat, it felt like walking into an iPod. Granny Grace steered her over to a white leather bench perched on aluminum legs.

  “There,” she said, pointing to the bench surface. “Take it out and set it there.”

  “We have two more people to interview on South Beach,” Cat protested.

  “Humor me.”

  “Fine.” Cat reached into the right pocket of her slacks, not expecting to find much, as they were warm-weather slacks and not appropriate for Seattle most of the year. She’d hardly worn them before this trip.

  She turned out her pocket, and a scraggly array of fibers fell into her hand. She set them on the bench.

  Granny Grace knelt to look at them closely, taking her smartphone and flipping to a light-bulb app, which illuminated the pocket lint. “Let’s see…” Amidst gray fibers from Cat’s pants, there was what looked like the corner of a dollar bill. Cat had to admit it was visually sort of interesting, but not earth-shattering or surprising in any way.

  “A bit of money. Big deal.”

  Also caught up in the gray pants fibers was a crumb from the pastry they’d had that morning at the Cuban bakery on Calle Ocho. “Yeah, that’s a cool detail,” Cat conceded. “But art worth tens of thousands? Hardly.”