Framed and Burning (Dreamslippers Book 2)

by Lisa Brunette

  “Have you?” Cat prompted him. “Caught one of Mick Travers’s recent shows, that is.”

  “Nope,” he snapped. “Can’t say that I have.” He was bald, and he’d smartly chosen to shave most of his hair once the pattern baldness had carved a crescent onto his dome. Grace could see the beginning of a five o’clock head shadow over the tips of his ears.

  Not particularly forthcoming, Norris would need a bit more nudging if this thirty-minute window of his precious time weren’t to be wasted.

  “Tell us what you remember about Travers as a student,” Grace prodded.

  Norris blew out his breath and ran a hand over his nonexistent hair. “Not much, honestly. That’s ancient history now. Boy. I guess… I guess you could say he was overrated. He got a lot of attention, and some of us—many of us—including some of the professors—didn’t think it was deserved.”

  “Are you sure that wasn’t sour grapes?” Grace asked, trying not to sound defensive. “His talent was validated by independent judges back then. And it’s been validated many times by the entire art world since.”

  Norris chuckled. “Hey, sure, lady. I’m telling you what I remember. I’ve got no stake in it either way. I’m happy with my success. I’ve got a gorgeous wife—look, she used to model.” He turned around one of the photos perched on his desktop to reveal a woman twenty years Norris’s junior with the photogenic smile of a pro. “I’ve got a couple of bright kids, both on the honor roll. I’m a partner with the firm. I’ll be retiring soon. I bet that’s more than you can say for Mick Travers.”

  Grace laughed softly. “Well, an artist never really retires. But what of that? You’re not a real artist. I’m betting you don’t even have much of a hand in the actual art for any of these ads anymore.” She gestured to the framed advertisements for hair care products for men, which seemed screamingly ironic, considering Norris’s shining dome.

  “Oh, I steer the artists in the right direction,” Norris said with a smile. “And that’s okay by me. You see, years ago, I realized that I’m the idea man. I’m full of them. I let the grunts carry out my vision. But I’m the one with the vision. They couldn’t see past their own color choices.”

  Norris stood up and wandered to the window to take in his commanding view, which Grace realized they were supposed to admire—not for the view itself, but for the fact that he had one. “Yeah, that’s what most artists are these days anyway, this Travers fellow included. Grunts. They’re just copying each other.”

  Cat picked up on his tangent. “I thought you said you weren’t much interested in art, that you hadn’t seen any of Mick Travers’s shows.”

  He spun around on his heel. “Oh, I’m speaking in generalities. I do see a show every now and again, as part of this fundraiser or that. Hard to avoid when you’re someone like me.”

  “And what do you think of Travers’s work?” Cat asked.

  “His work?” Norris smiled. “I think it’s rather large, don’t you?”

  >>>

  The next two people on the list were still making art at least part of the time, but neither had the success that Grace’s brother enjoyed. Grace and Cat decided to tackle them together again.

  Norris had been an interesting pickle. Toward the end of the interview, he swore he had not written the letter that appeared in Art in Our Time, though he did cop to reading it and enjoying the problems it must have caused for Mick.

  Next up were two artists, both in their sixties and eking out moderate livings.

  The first was a woman named Annie Lin who painted haunting white horses in an abstract style that reminded Grace of Louise Bourgeois’s spiders. Lin’s work was quite possibly as good as the celebrated artist’s. Success in the marketplace had only marginally to do with talent. Grace had seen this to be true: So many forces out of the artist’s control could determine what society called “success,” which was, for an artist, recognition and sales.

  Annie Lin greeted them at the door of her studio with a wide, genuine smile, her chin smudged with white paint. Her hair must have been jet-black at one time but had gone white. She wore it in a tight bun at the back of her head.

  “Please come in,” she beckoned them, motioning toward a couch Grace recognized from an IKEA showroom. The loft had otherwise been taken over by houseplants, which had clearly been given free range to stretch and grow under the wide warehouse windows, past which Grace could see a billboard advertising Depends undergarments beside the railway for the El.

  Her paintings, in various states of completion, stood on easels distributed throughout the large live-work space. Grace was excited to see that one of Annie Lin’s newest horses did not have a head. She made a mental note to ask about it when the time was right.

  Grace approved of the woman instinctively and immediately, from her wide-legged trousers and boat neck, striped shirt to the Buddha statue perched high atop a shelf in the open loft. She was a bird of a woman, and she moved with deliberation, repositioning a pillow before settling herself on a chair opposite them, her legs tucked under her as if in preparation for lotus pose.

  Speaking of lotus, Grace noticed a yoga mat in a far corner of the loft, surrounded by candles, incense, and more plants.

  “You’re here to discuss Mick Travers,” the woman politely said. “I almost turned you down. I realize I don’t have to talk to you—you’re not the police, after all. But I have nothing to hide. And you’ve piqued my curiosity about Mick. He and I used to be…close.”

  “Yes,” said Cat, who was sitting on the edge of the IKEA couch, her legs crossed. Her green suit and heels had been visually more at home in Norris’s office, Grace noted.

  “We understand that you and Mr. Travers…” Cat continued, as if searching for the right words. “…used to date.”

  Annie laughed. “Sure, call it dating,” she said. “But that’s not what we did back in art school. Not really.”

  Grace liked this woman even more with every passing moment.

  “Such bohemians,” Grace put in.

  Annie’s facial expression seemed to give back the same sense of approval that Grace felt. Grace warmed to Annie’s gaze.

  “You know something about this?” Annie asked her. “Where were you in the Seventies? Mick and I were right here. This was the center of the universe back then.”

  Grace smiled. “Well, I’ve got about a decade on you, which doesn’t matter much now, and maybe it didn’t then, either.”

  Cat interrupted. “So tell us about you and Mick.”

  “We screwed pretty much constantly,” Annie replied, looking Cat straight in the eyes.

  Cat sputtered a bit with her response. “Th-that sounds kind of…intense.”

  “It was,” she said. Then she cocked her head at Cat, as if noticing something. “Wait a minute… You know Mick, don’t you? Personally? I hope you’re not doing him. You’re far too young, even considering Mick’s, ah, shall we say, maturity level?”

  Grace was impressed with Annie’s perceptiveness. “That would be rather taboo, since he’s her great-uncle. My brother.”

  Cat tossed Grace a surprised look. They had been keeping their relationship to the subject of the investigation a secret from their suspects. But Grace’s intuition told her to trust this Annie Lin. So she gave Cat a wink. Cat returned it with a dubious look.

  Annie raised an eyebrow. “Oh, I see…” she said. “I hope my frank assessment of my past relationship with your brother wasn’t too inappropriate.”

  Grace shook her head. “On the contrary. You exhibit an attitude I find refreshing.”

  Cat cleared her throat as if to say she wanted to get on with the questioning.

  “Annie,” Grace said, “were you and Mick ever at odds? I ask because he seems to think you despise him.”

  “I did,” Annie said, looking past the two women and out the window beyond. “For too long, I did. But then I realized it was a waste of my talent and energy to harbor so much resentment toward another human being. Mick wa
s terrifically flawed, and he made some bad calls where I was concerned. But I’ve let it go.”

  “Are you sure about that?” Cat asked. “Because Mick says you sent him…a strange package…last year.”

  “The broken record,” Annie admitted.

  “Yes.”

  Grace remembered her brother’s description of the package, which was a padded envelope filled with the broken pieces of a vinyl record. Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, she thought it was.

  “That was an artist’s joke,” Annie explained. “I used to tell Mick he sounded like a broken record, the way he’d go on about the primacy of art. And when I was painting back then, during MFA school, I used to glue pieces of broken records into my work. So it had two meanings. I guess both were lost on Mick if he took it the wrong way.”

  “Everything looks suspicious after a fire,” Grace said. “Mick lost his friend and studio assistant, Don Hines.”

  Annie frowned. “Mick must be devastated.”

  “Yes,” said Grace.

  “I wouldn’t mind seeing Mick,” Annie said suddenly. “It’s been… Gosh. I think it’s been thirty years. Maybe the next time he has an opening in New York, I’ll go.”

  “It’s been a long time,” Grace agreed.

  “Do you have an alibi for the night of the fire?” Cat asked.

  “I doubt it,” Annie said. “I’m usually here, painting.”

  “I see you’re losing your horses’ heads,” Grace said, gesturing to the painting that had caught her eye when they’d entered.

  “Yes,” said Annie, beaming. “It’s good of you to notice.”

  “A gorgeous movement,” Grace replied. “I think of the knight in a chess set. And Caligula. Not to mention the horse’s head in The Godfather.”

  “That’s imbedded in it for sure,” Annie beamed. “Pun intended.”

  Riding down in the freight elevator in Annie’s apartment building, Grace was taken aback when Cat accused her of flirting with their suspect.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You seem to be developing a girl-crush on Ms. Lin.”

  “I was merely bonding with our suspect,” Grace said. “It’s something you should try sometime.”

  “Bonding,” Cat replied. “Right.”

  Grace let the sarcasm go for now, though sometimes she had to resist the urge to take her granddaughter down a peg or two. Their next interview wasn’t till tomorrow, and in the meantime, they meant to visit some of the galleries in town showing Mick’s work to see what else they could find.

  Grace had always admired her brother’s talent, and it thrilled her to see his work in some of the top galleries in New York. Winston Price Gallery gave his Conch Series prime real estate in their main window, facing the vibrant Chelsea neighborhood. Its prominence was such an impressive sight that Grace stopped to take a photo with her phone. Mick complained that he wasn’t showing in as many galleries as he used to, but in every gallery that showed his work, it held a prominent position. Grace enjoyed her cachet as the older sister of a celebrated artist, and they tolerated her picture-taking. It seemed to rub off on Cat as well, who dropped her attitude toward modern art for the day, chatting up the gallery owners and uncovering a few anecdotes about what Mick had been like in his early days.

  “He used to have a beard,” said Greta Stein, who owned the Painted Stick Gallery in SoHo. Grace remembered her brother’s facial-hair period. “He would show up to an opening with food stuck in it. It was clear he hadn’t showered, and his clothes were a mess, full of paint. But New Yorkers embraced him. They thought he was delightfully eccentric, the unkempt artist. You could get away with that, back then. Now everything is business, business.”

  In Greta’s gallery, Cat paused longer than normal at a triptych on a back wall, not heavily trafficked and near where Greta kept her overflow stock. Grace noticed her lingering and came to find out what held her in sway.

  It was one of Mick’s vaguely representational pieces, and the subject was a young girl, likely no more than eleven or twelve. There were three images, joined together. The girl had long red hair and tanned skin and was sitting on the edge of an armchair. Her legs were open to the viewer’s gaze in a manner that forced a sort of visual invasion of the girl’s space in each image, though her body language was slightly different in each. She wore shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt, budding breasts visible beneath the shirt, and no bra underneath.

  The look on her face seemed to accuse the viewer of ill intent toward her and plead for help at the same time. And yet there was a resigned sexualized feel about the painting, as if the girl had given in to being used, and then merely discarded. The images disturbed Grace immediately. She heard Cat sniff, and turned to find her granddaughter getting choked up.

  “Are you all right, my dear?”

  “Her eyes,” Cat said, gesturing to the girl’s face, hidden in part shadow but her eyes staring blankly from each image. They were hazel eyes, washed out and sad, as if they’d seen far too much already.

  “Yes,” Grace remarked. “Haunting.”

  “I’ve seen a digital of this, in Mick’s database,” Cat explained. “He’s not the best recordkeeper, so it’s just this one.” She motioned to the first of the three images in the triptych. “But seeing it in person, especially three like this, is a lot more…evocative, I guess is the word.”

  Greta approached them delicately from behind. “Mick has forbidden me from selling this piece,” she said. “But everyone is affected by it. I get offers…maybe now he’ll be willing to part with it.”

  “Do you know when he painted it?” asked Grace.

  “Recently,” Greta said. “Within the past few years. It was in Mick’s studio, but I don’t think he’s shown it anywhere else. I saw it there when I came down over Thanksgiving and asked if I could try to sell it for him. He said it wasn’t for sale. But I convinced him to let me include it in his last show here.”

  With that, Greta turned to greet a well-heeled couple entering the gallery. Cat and Grace decided to get an early dinner at a Japanese restaurant and head back to their hotel.

  >>>

  That night Grace did not have any strength left to prepare her mind properly against slipping into Cat’s dreams, and slip she did.

  Grace at first was fused with Cat’s consciousness in the dream. As Cat she walked into a room where the girl from the painting they’d seen that afternoon sat on the arm of a chair, as she had been in the painting. A fire blazed behind her, crackling and spitting and threatening to engulf the girl, but she seemed unable to move. On the floor next to her was Donnie Hines’s burnt corpse. The girl stared at Cat and then began to mouth something, her lips moving but no sound coming out. Cat moved closer, and Grace let Cat break away from her so she could observe her granddaughter from outside. The girl’s lips kept moving, but what she said was unintelligible.

  “Tell me how to help you,” said Cat. “Say it. Out loud.”

  But the girl kept moving her lips soundlessly. The fire raged on, close but remaining in the background.

  “I want to help you,” Cat insisted.

  The girl shook her head as if in slow motion: No-o-o-o-o-o. Then the girl began to shiver as if suddenly chilled. Cat took off her jacket and went to the girl to put it over her shoulders.

  “They’re hurting me,” the girl whispered.

  “Who’s hurting you?” Cat said. “Tell me.”

  Then the girl’s voice sounded like a man’s. “You’re hurting me,” she said, and her eyes went black.

  “No,” Cat insisted. “I wouldn’t hurt you.”

  “You are,” the girl said.

  “No!” Cat screamed, stepping away from the girl.

  Grace couldn’t hang back any longer. She went to Cat and said, “It’s just a dream, Cat. And you didn’t hurt that girl.”

  “Granny Grace,” Cat said, grabbing onto her frantically. “I didn’t mean to hurt anyone. I’m dangerous. Cursed.”

  “You are not,” Grace said
. “Now wake up.”

  It must have worked, as Grace popped out of Cat’s dream. She drew on her robe and knocked on the door adjoining their hotel rooms. “Cat? You all right?”

  “Yes, Gran,” she heard Cat say, and then the door opened.

  They sat, and Cat began to talk about St. Louis, Cat’s first case, in a way they hadn’t before. Cat was upset about a girl named Wendy she’d met when undercover in the Plantation Church.

  “She felt so betrayed by me,” Cat explained. “And she didn’t even know the half of it. She had no idea I was using her dreams in my investigation.”

  Grace felt Cat’s pain acutely. “All you can do is try. You weren’t trying to hurt Wendy. You were trying to save that little girl. You were focused on Ruthie, Cat. So you missed what Wendy needed. You’re only human.”

  “But I’m afraid, Granny Grace. I’m afraid I’ll hurt someone again.”

  Grace chuckled softly. “Well, you probably will, Granddaughter. We all hurt each other some of the time. It’s unavoidable. Unless you want to live in a bubble.”

  Then she held Cat’s face in her chin. “And you’ll get hurt, too. That’s part of what you’re feeling here, isn’t it? Your own strength, yes, and you have to be responsible about it. But you’re feeling your own vulnerability, too. You’re still hurting because you miss Lee.”

  Cat began to cry, and Grace held her.

  >>>

  The next day, it took the entire morning for them to journey to the suburbs of New Jersey to find their last interviewee, who owned a small house out where, Grace was sure, there’d be no there there.

  And it took them forever and a day to arrive, too. They rode the subway to a bus station and took the bus into New Jersey, where they had to be picked up at a park-and-ride by the artist himself, who looked like the suburban grandfather he was.

  Clive Smith, Jr., drove them past the usual travesty of fast-food restaurants and chain stores in his Honda Civic, and Grace found him unusually reticent. It had taken every trick in the book to get him to agree to the interview at all. Grace had the sense that she had simply worn the man down over the course of several phone calls and emails, and that he only agreed to meet so she’d leave him alone.