“It’s not the hand of a master. But there’s a levity here, a lightness of being. It’s these children. They inspired her.” He dropped his gaze to the artist’s signature. “Candy Port, eh? I do not know this artist.”
“Well,” said Granny Grace, “let’s just say she’s germane to the case.”
“As an art investor, I would not have advised you to purchase this,” he admonished with a smile. “But I understand the impulse to see value where there isn’t any, speaking strictly in terms of the market.”
Cat flinched a bit at Ernesto’s response. She cast a glance at Granny Grace, who didn’t seem at all put out by his criticism.
“I will always think of you when I see it,” he continued. “Let’s hang it. It suits the living room, don’t you think? The beach poster I have there is dated now. I haven’t changed the décor in here since the Nineties.”
Cat drifted off to her room to do more research, letting them hang the painting together. Her grandmother’s flirtatious laughter carried down the hallway to her room. Cat felt a pang of loneliness. She remembered Lee making her breakfast the first morning they were together after she’d moved to Seattle. When she dressed and joined him at the dinner table, breakfast was already made, and there was a daisy in a vase in the middle of the table.
“Where’d you get that?” she asked. “You don’t have a single plant in here, let alone a garden.”
Lee grinned at her. “No, but my neighbors do.”
“You stole it?”
“Borrowed.”
“It’s not like you’re going to give it back…”
Granny Grace appeared in the doorway, breaking Cat’s reverie. “Ernesto wants to take us to dinner. You game?”
Cat stretched. “Oh, I think I’ll let you two have a date without your third wheel.”
“You sure?”
Cat could tell her grandmother was still reluctant to leave her alone. But she really didn’t want to be a tagalong. “I want to get a jump on this research.”
“Have it your way, stickin-the-mud.” Granny Grace looked beautiful in a shift dress and colorful wrap, for covering her shoulders when the trade winds kicked up in the evening. “Ernesto’s moving us to his Brickell place tomorrow,” she added.
In the quiet of the cottage after they left, Cat booted up her laptop and went to work studying the paintings that had been destroyed during the fire. If they held any clues, she did not uncover them. Part of the problem was that it seemed incomplete—some of the paintings weren’t accounted for, and not all the ones that were had digital images. But by the time she fell asleep, still fully clothed, she felt she was becoming an expert on his work.
Chapter Nine
Mick drove hard, praying that his Fiat would make it across Alligator Alley without any issues. All he could think about was that if Candace Shreveport killed Donnie, he’d wring her pudgy neck.
He’d been too angry to say anything to his sister and niece. He could barely think straight, and he thought of that saying, “seeing red.” It had never happened to him before, but now he understood that the saying was literally true. As soon as he noticed that the conch shell was gone and put together what that meant, he saw red.
The shell came from Bahia Honda, where he and Candy once spent a rum-soaked afternoon. Swimming just off shore, she’d stepped on something jagged, dived down to retrieve it, and come back with the shell. It was larger than what you’d stumble across lying on the beach and perfectly intact, a true find.
He admired the shell, made studies of it in his sketchbook that very day on the beach. It became the basis for his Conch Series, and Candy gave it to him to keep.
“My heart’s in this shell,” she’d said to him, and for a while, he believed her. “As long as you have this shell, you have my heart.”
The shell had been in his beach house, sitting on a steel Army-issue bookcase. The bookcase had survived the fire, but Mick noticed the shell was gone. There was soot atop the bookcase in the spot where the shell had been. So whoever set the fire took the shell first.
He knew it was Candace, and she was such an awful wretch to carry on her bitterness this long, long enough to still hate Mick, long enough to set that fire in his studio that killed Donnie.
He’d be putting her out of her misery, really. “You’re not so big, Mick,” she said the last time she drunk-dialed him. “You’re small where it counts, no matter how big-ass your paintings get.”
And this gem: “I never loved you anyway. I told you what you wanted to hear. Like every other woman in your life.”
He drove like a madman, ignoring the speed limit and the growing darkness. In the sherbet-colored dusk, he saw wide-winged birds swooping across the Everglades.
Once he’d gotten lost on a hike that turned into a slog through the ’glades. He kept slogging that night though his feet were wet in his boots. He remembered trying not to think about the rather large carcasses of birds and boars he’d seen earlier in the hike and was deeply relieved when he spotted car headlights in the distance. He followed them till he came to a road, which eventually brought him back to his car. That was Christmas Eve, two years ago, he realized. He’d spent it alone.
But he would rather be alone than shackled to someone like Candace.
Finally, the Fiat rumbled into Sanibel. He knew her house; she’d inherited it from her mother. Mick had had dinner there once, made small talk with the old bird of a mother who died not long after of heart disease. He hated the gingerbread Victorian design of the place, the narrow rooms and hallways.
He banged on Candace’s door, not caring that it was late, her porch light off. He banged until he heard a cat meow and knew Candace was up.
“What in the h—” She came to the door, tying her robe closed across her belly.
He grabbed her by the shoulders and pushed her into the house.
“Mick!” she said, pulling her cell phone out of her robe pocket. “You get out of here! I’m calling the cops.”
“You aren’t calling anyone.” Forcing her to sit down, he grabbed the phone out of her hand and tossed it across the room. It skittered under a wicker chair and broke apart when it hit the baseboard. The noise startled her cat, which ran out of the room.
“That’s my phone, you asshole! Get out of my house!”
He hauled off and smacked her across the face, knowing as his hand hit her that he’d spiraled out of control, that he had crossed a line, and that he was hitting both Jenny Baines and Candace Shreveport in one go here.
She got quiet.
“Where’s the shell?” he asked.
She didn’t answer.
“The conch shell, Candy. I know you have it.”
She folded her arms across her chest. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Mick laughed. It looked like fifty miles of bad road had been laid atop the woman he once got a hard-on from just looking at. He remembered flashes of a dream of hers he kept inadvertently slipping into back when she’d moved into his beach house. Something about being the prettiest ballerina, the one other girls envied. Not for her dancing, but for her looks. At the time he thought it was kind of sweet and sad, but now it seemed indicative of where Candace had gone wrong as a human being.
“You’re old, Candy.”
“So are you.”
She was right, of course. He could turn the mirror back onto his own flabby middle, his graying hair, the wrinkles creasing his forehead.
“Mick the Dick,” she hissed.
“At least I’m not a murdering sack of shit.”
“Murder? What are you talking about, Mickey Travers? I’m no murderer.”
“You took the shell, Candy. From my house. I know you have it. So that means you set the fires. You killed Donnie.”
Candy kicked him in the shin, and it hurt like hell. He resisted the urge to smack her across the face again and only felt mildly disturbed by how strong that urge was.
“Is that how you treat a woman, Mick
? You abuser!” She began to cry, and he deeply resented her tears.
“What happened to you?” He meant it.
“What happened to you?” She reflected the question back to him in a way that really hit the mark.
He sat down, put his face in his hands. “I don’t know.”
She made a run for it, out the back door, but he took off after her and grabbed her robe from behind, sending her sprawling to the floor. They struggled there on the floor of her kitchen, the linoleum sticky and laden with crumbs, till Mick gained the upper hand. He tied her to her kitchen table with the sash from her robe.
“You can’t do this to me!”
“Oh, yes I can.”
With that, Mick set out to find the shell. He swiped knickknacks off shelves, turned over unfinished paintings, and emptied the contents of every drawer.
As he rifled through her house, Candy screamed at him from the kitchen. “You don’t belong here, Mickey! I hate you! I wish you had died in that fire! You’re the biggest asshole that ever held a brush!”
He finally found it in the bottom of a hat box tucked away in the back of her closet. It was his shell, undeniably, with two white barnacles flanking one side and a chip out of one edge. It had been the subject of his Conch Series, which appeared in catalogs and magazines throughout the world. He’d recognize it on a beach littered with hundreds of shells.
He stomped back out to the kitchen and shoved the shell in her face. “Is this worth killing for, Candy? Eh?”
She broke into a laugh. “Is that what you think, Mick?”
He stood there, staring at her, listening to her infernal laughter.
“You think I wanted that shell?” she howled. “You can keep your damn shell.”
“Then what?” he asked, at a loss, his voice breaking. “What did you want?”
She looked at him, her face reverting to the face he knew years ago, open and full of a longing he could never fill.
“I wanted us, Mick. In that beach house. You promised me we’d stay there forever. But it was always your place. Yours alone. You filled it with your art till there wasn’t any room for me anymore, and you pushed me out. And now look at you. Your art’s so big, there’ll never be any room for anyone else.”
Mick felt tears drip out of his eyes. “But a fire, Candy?” he asked, his voice hoarse.
Candace’s voice came from far away. “I wanted to burn you down, Mick. That’s all. I didn’t want you to have everything anymore. You’ve had enough.”
Mick heard someone behind him, and he turned to see a police officer, someone he recognized. Santiago, the one who worked with Alvarez. They must have put a tail on him after he left the beach house.
“That’s a confession,” Santiago announced. “I’m calling it in.”
Mick slumped down next to Candace, buried his face in his hands, and wept. He watched through wet eyes as Santiago cuffed Candace and read her her rights.
>>>
When Donnie’s parents arrived from Ohio, Cat was off somewhere else, and Pris was at a Buddhist temple nearby, where she’d been spending a lot of time meditating since the first fire.
Which meant that Mick had to deal with the grieving parents on his own.
He picked them up from the airport in his Fiat, which was not ideal, but he put the top up so their hair wouldn’t get blown around, at least. He and Pris had helped them deal with the cremation and other details long-distance, for which Donald Sr. and Mary Ellen were grateful.
But other than grace and gratitude, what emanated from the elderly couple was deep, deep sadness, and it knocked Mick back with a force he hadn’t encountered in some time. He couldn’t let go of the overwhelming feeling that their son should be there instead of him. Small talk seemed like an insult, so on the drive from the Miami airport to the hotel where he was putting them up, he told them about Donnie’s recent success as an artist and tried to convey in a genuine way what a talented son they had.
“I always knew he had the gift,” said Mary Ellen. “Isn’t that right, Donald?”
“That’s right,” Donald concurred. “I tried to dissuade him from what seemed like a hard row to hoe, but his mother here, she wouldn’t stand for it.”
Mick searched his memory bank for anything Donnie might’ve said about his parents, but he didn’t come up with much. Then he remembered something.
“Donnie got an idea once he said came from watching you make bread.”
“Is that so? My bread?”
Mick looked at Mary Ellen in his rear view mirror. The couple had opted to sit together huddled in the tiny back seat, and they were holding each other’s hands.
“Yeah, it was the way you kneaded the dough. He traced the pattern out on canvas once. I don’t know if you ever saw it—a piece called Dough Ties.”
“Oh, I’d love to see it.”
But then Mick regretted mentioning it, as he realized the piece was lost in the fire. He decided to change the subject.
“I’m glad you’ll be here for the wake,” he said. He and a bunch of other artists, with the help of the gallery owner, who was a fan of Donnie’s art, were planning a sort of “celebration of life” event in honor of Donnie’s passing.
“Well, we’d have of course preferred a Christian burial in our home town,” Donald said. “I don’t quite know what to do with my son’s ashes—” At this, the old man choked up. Mary Ellen offered him a tissue from her purse and patted his arm.
Mick was silent. Sometimes you had to let a man grieve.
He drove up I-90, glad for their sake the traffic was light. There was a cool breeze blowing off the water. With Christmas around the corner, Miamians had decked out every spare corner of their domiciles with season-appropriate ephemera. Even after the twenty years he’d called South Florida home, Mick still thought the juxtaposition of snowmen and reindeer against a backdrop of tropical flowers and sunshine was odd. Seeing it through the eyes of Donnie’s parents, it seemed practically surreal. And South Floridians weren’t known for their restraint, either. He passed a gated compound where an inflatable Santa Claus wearing a Miami Heat jersey was posed in a jump shot, hanging from a basketball hoop over a three-car garage.
Mary Ellen cleared her throat. “They certainly have the Christmas spirit down here, don’t they?”
Mick was caught between the desire to laugh and weep. He bit his lip and nodded.
When they arrived at the hotel, he helped them check in at the front desk and then carried their bags to their room, which he’d arranged with the hotel staff to set up beforehand. He’d taken down the bland hotel art and put up three of Donnie’s paintings that had been on loan in a gallery on South Beach. Mick had retrieved them, hoping his parents would want to take them home. They were some of the man’s finest pieces, and looking at them now, Mick could see that his friend had hit his stride with the fractal imagery. These looked like delicate crystals that, given time and space, would grow into infinity.
“Please call me if you need anything,” he told them. “Have a rest, and when you’re ready, I’ll drive you to the mortuary.”
Surprisingly, it was Donnie’s father who recognized the work around the room.
“That’s his art,” he said, putting on his reading glasses and walking over for a closer look. “My, my.”
Mary Ellen followed her husband. She placed her hand on the painting, and then it was her turn to cry.
Mick closed the door, leaving them alone.
As he turned into the cottage driveway, there was Pris, walking back from the Buddhist temple, a serene smile on her face. She wore oversized Jackie O glasses and a wide-brimmed hat. His sister at seventy-eight still had flair.
“Hello, my dear,” she said, kissing him on the cheek.
“Did we achieve enlightenment?”
“Enlightenment is not to be achieved. It just is.”
He smiled, and then dropping the smile, he said, “Mr. and Mrs. Hines are here.”
Pris saw that his Fiat was t
he only car in the drive. “Oh, Mick. You didn’t make them ride in your little roadster, did you?”
“I had no choice. Cat took your rental god knows where.”
“Isn’t it time you traded up?”
Mick had an immediate reaction against that idea. The Fiat had been with him for decades. He’d nursed it through several clutches, a rebuilt engine, and a total body overhaul. He couldn’t get rid of it now. It was practically family.
He told this to Pris, who shook her head as if she pitied him.
“Well, for heaven’s sake, Mick. Did you at least offer them lunch? They must be famished.”
He hadn’t thought of that. “No.”
“Well, let’s give them a chance to regroup, and then we’ll head over to that café I like on Coral Way.”
They did just that, and Mick was relieved to have Pris’s energetic, skillfully conversational presence there as a buffer. The four of them made it through a meal without anyone crying, and by the time they walked back to the building, Donald turned to Mick and said, “Let’s visit the mortuary tomorrow, if you don’t mind, Mick. Mary Ellen and I—we need some time today.”
Mick was glad to give them space. He had a lot to do to get ready for Donnie’s celebration, and he was working on a new painting as well.
The next afternoon, he switched cars with Pris at her insistence and took Donnie’s parents to get the ashes. The mortuary was a large, clean, beautiful place, a bit of old Florida elegance, if you could forget that it was a house for dead people, that is. The attendant, a cute young thing in a skirt suit and actual pantyhose, something Mick hardly ever saw anymore, offered to show Donald and Mary Ellen the crematorium. They declined. “Only the, ah, ashes, please,” said Donald.
What was left of Donnie was presented in a white ceramic urn, as generic as they come. Mick was sure if he got the full tour, he’d find a whole rack of them in back.
As they drove, Donald held the urn in his hands. The couple were sitting in back again, and they whispered to each other for a while. Mick turned on the radio at a low volume to give them some privacy.
“Say, Mick,” Donald finally spoke up. “Is there somewhere here we could put some of these ashes? Somewhere Donnie liked to go.”
Framed and Burning (Dreamslippers Book 2) Page 10