Framed and Burning (Dreamslippers Book 2)

by Lisa Brunette

  As they finished up lunch, she asked to see what he was working on. He’d erected several giant easels in the middle of the room. All Cat had seen so far were the canvas backs of his new works in progress.

  “Sure,” he said. “You might even recognize them.”

  This further piqued her interest. He led her around the easels and lifted a drop cloth.

  Cat gasped. Her uncle’s painting referenced in obvious ways the dream of hers that Mick had slipped into a few days after the fire. She recognized Anita’s face, albeit an abstracted version, but it was Lee’s killer nonetheless. And there was a lot of red in the painting, signifying the blood coming out of Lee’s head. Lee wasn’t identifiable, but the work was unfinished, with canvas showing through parts of it, the brushstrokes rough.

  “Oh, my God.” She began to breathe heavily, remembering that terrible day.

  “It’s upsetting you,” Mick said. “Sorry. I didn’t mean for that to happen.”

  “It’s okay,” she said, calming down. She forced herself to look at Anita. “I’ve never”—she paused, looking for the right words—“I’ve never had anyone capture my innermost life like that. It’s startling.”

  “I’m really sorry,” he said. “I can’t seem to get your dream out of my head. It wants to come out on the canvas.”

  “Right,” Cat said. “I can understand that.”

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah,” Cat said. “But now I’m kind of wishing we’d had something stronger than mango lassis with lunch.”

  They laughed a little. Then gazed at the painting in progress.

  “Do you want me to paint over it?” Mick asked.

  “No,” Cat said. “I don’t think so. But I’ll let you know if I change my mind.”

  Something occurred to her at that moment, something so obvious she couldn’t believe none of them had considered it before. And there she’d been, circling around Mick’s destroyed paintings, but for the wrong reasons.

  “Uncle Mick,” Cat said, placing her hand on his arm. “You’ve done this a lot, right? Painted what you’ve seen in people’s dreams?”

  “Off and on, over the years, yeah. But most of the time, that’s not what I paint.”

  Cat felt the case open up before her. “I need you to look at those paintings again, the ones destroyed in the fire, and tell me if any of them came from dreams.”

  “Why, Cat? What are you thinking?”

  “I’m thinking you might have painted something that the arsonist didn’t want anyone else to see.”

  They went through the list one by one, Cat marking anything that Mick said had a connection to a dream.

  Out of the more than two hundred paintings destroyed in the fire, thirty-two had been inspired by dreamslipping. Mick had digital images for nineteen of those, which was lucky, Cat thought. But this still amounted to a search for a needle in a haystack.

  “I think we need to get a projector and blow these up really big. We can go through them in detail,” Cat said. “But I want to wait for Granny Grace. She’ll notice things we won’t.”

  “Yes, she will,” said Mick.

  Cat peered at her uncle, wanting to ask him something but not quite sure how to phrase it.

  “What?”

  “Sorry. I…” Cat swallowed. “What’s the deal with you and my grandmother, anyway? You live on extreme opposite ends of the country.”

  “I like Miami. She likes Seattle.”

  “But is that it? I mean, you’re both dreamslippers. And you’re the only other dreamslippers I know.”

  “Look, Cat.” Mick paused to sweep their takeout detritus into a large barrel he used as a trash can. “Your grandmother is my older sister. You wouldn’t know this, being an only child, but older sisters are as bossy as they come.”

  “That sounds kind of childish.”

  “Well, it is. I admit that. Which is why I invited the two of you out here for Art Basel.”

  “Granny Grace was so excited to see you,” Cat said, feeling wistful about the days before the fire. “She went out and put together a whole wardrobe for the tropics. We wrapped up our cases and didn’t take on anything new. I’ve never seen her like that.”

  Mick frowned. “I’m sorry the two of you got dragged into this mess instead.”

  “Oh, it’s okay, Mick. I think it’s been good for us. Both.”

  He smiled. “Your grandmother wasn’t always so enlightened, you know.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, she made some mistakes with her dreamslipping, early on. And one of them cost me a lot. But that’s all you need to know, Cathedral.”

  Cat prodded him to tell her more, but he refused.

  “I think I can get a projector from the gallery where we held the wake,” Mick said, changing the subject.

  “Sounds good,” she said. “But you know, Uncle Mick, I’m a private investigator. I’ll find out your Granny Grace story eventually.”

  She laughed with him as he shooed her out the front door.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Mick set the projector up in his studio. The three of them examined each of the nineteen paintings for signs of anything their arsonist might not have wanted shown on one of Mick’s large, public canvases.

  The collection spanned the many decades of his career, from one he painted in graduate school that contained fragmented images from a dream of Annie Lin’s to a stray cheerleading pom-pon that cropped up in a recent painting. That one came from a woman he’d slept with whose age was too embarrassing to admit to Cat and his sister. Suffice to say she was still young enough to be dreaming of her high-school glory days.

  The three of them went through the paintings slowly, Cat and Pris quizzing him about each one. He racked his brain to remember the original dreams that had inspired the paintings. They analyzed every piece of imagery in every painting, Cat sitting with her laptop and searching for words and phrases online as they flipped through the slides.

  There was a fire engine with the number five emblazoned on it in gold that Cat and Pris got excited about for a moment but then couldn’t take further.

  Next was a trash can tucked into the corner of a painting. Cat fixated on it for a good hour or so, or at least it seemed that long to Mick. She could make out the name of the waste-management company on its side, Sauvey Systems. She searched the web for any crimes connected to that company but didn’t turn up anything significant. They moved on, but Cat made a note to have Alvarez check it against the police database in case any dead bodies had been found in a Sauvey Systems dumpster.

  When they came to a painting of his titled Red Shift Sunset, Pris said, “That red…” and walked up closer to the projected image. “There’s a number here.”

  “Yeah, I sometimes scrawl numbers into the top layer of paint. It’s kind of a thing I do.”

  “Did the number come from a dream?” Cat asked.

  Mick thought about it, hard. He barely remembered the dream that had inspired the painting, which he’d completed several years ago. At the Brickell Lofts, he rarely ever slipped into the other artists’ dreams. He wasn’t sure why; maybe it was because the walls in the old warehouse were so thick, or because he’d got better at shutting dreams out by that point in his life, with advice from Pris. But there was one that slipped through, and this was it. He was certain it belonged to one of the short-term residents, a young guy, fresh out of art school, who didn’t last long before he’d moved on to a regular day job. Harry, that was his name. He was from California, and the sunset in the dream looked to have been over the Mojave Desert. But the numbers, they were Mick’s.

  “Nope,” he said. “That’s my locker number from high school.”

  He hated to disappoint Pris and Cat, and even more than that, he hated that their art-review project wasn’t yielding anything worthwhile. What they had at the end of a long evening spent on those nineteen paintings was exactly nothing.

  Pris paced the room, and Cat flipped over on Mick’s couch s
o that her feet dangled over the back of the couch and her head hung from the seat. She stared at painting number thirteen, still projected on the wall.

  “Looking at it upside-down isn’t making this any better,” she said.

  Mick felt frustrated and drained by the whole case. It had been such a roller coaster ride for him, first wanting to kill Candace, thinking she was responsible, and then having to dredge up those old feelings about Chester Canon. And it turned out that neither of them was guilty, at least not of killing his friend.

  “I don’t see how this is getting us anywhere,” Mick said. “If you’re right, and the killer torched the studio to destroy one of these paintings, then he must have been paranoid. Because we’re looking at them, and nothing’s standing out.”

  “These paintings have been a dead end since the beginning,” Cat said. Her face was turning red as the blood rushed to it.

  “There must be something we’re missing…” said Pris.

  Mick walked over to the painting on his easel, the one inspired by Cat’s dream. He lifted a lid off a can of paint sitting nearby, picked up a brush, dipped it once, curled the brush sidewise to catch the drip, and then began dabbing it onto the canvas. It was red paint, which was always thinner than other pigments. It went on bright, almost pink, but would dry much darker.

  Working a bit freed his mind, although he was conscious of Pris and Cat in the room with him.

  He thought about the two hundred or so paintings he’d lost, some of them without even a photograph left due to his own negligence. He wondered why Pris hadn’t said how Buddhist that was, how clean he should feel now that half his life’s work no longer existed.

  And how strange it was that the sum of who he was as an artist now belonged to other people. The only paintings he himself now owned were works in progress, his unfinished stumblings around after the fire: An abstracted image of Donnie all burned up, like a piece of human jerky. This unfinished painting from Cat’s dream. Everything else was spread throughout the world, in galleries, houses, a few middle-grade museums.

  And he thought of something.

  He set the brush down and turned around. “We’re looking at the wrong paintings.”

  Cat righted herself on the couch. Pris stopped pacing.

  “We’re looking at the paintings that no longer exist,” he said. “But what if the painting is still around, and our arsonist doesn’t know that?”

  There was a long silence. Mick could practically see his words hanging in the air, like someone’s textual art.

  “That’s good, Mick,” said Pris. “This is an amateur, after all. What if he failed?”

  “We need the other database,” agreed Cat. “The one of the surviving paintings.” She scrambled to find it on her laptop.

  They made quick work of the new list of paintings, and Mick identified another twenty-six that had been inspired by dreams. Of those, twelve were accompanied by images.

  Cat called Sergeant Alvarez again, and explained their theory. “He could have assumed it was in Mick’s studio, since it was well known that Mick kept his work there. But it might not have been there. It could have been sold, or on loan.”

  Mick wasn’t able to hear what Alvarez was saying, but it sounded as if she were skeptical, or else growing weary of their dead-end case.

  “I know, I know,” said Cat. “You’re right. But just look at the remaining digital images, at least. I’ll even flag the ones that, um, look promising.”

  Mick figured those would be the dreamslip paintings.

  After Cat did some whiz-bang stuff on her laptop to transfer the images to the Miami PD, the three of them turned their attention to the new crop of twelve paintings.

  The first three they were able to eliminate easily, as they were part of Mick’s most abstract stage, and they contained little that was discernible. He’d merely been inspired by the color and texture of those dreams, which hadn’t contained much substance anyway.

  The next one gave them pause, as again it contained a number that seemed to be a serial number. Mick couldn’t remember what it was at first but then realized it was the serial number for his Fiat.

  The two after that they analyzed for a good half hour each but couldn’t find anything in them to research further.

  The next six paintings didn’t yield much either, though they certainly gave Cat plenty to search on, everything ranging from the name of an old-fashioned soda company to the time 2:21, which was prominent in the painting Mick had titled When It’s At.

  So they reached a dead end. Again.

  Mick looked over Cat’s shoulder at the full database of surviving paintings. “If it’s here,” he said, “it’s probably one of the paintings I don’t have an image of. Sure wish I’d done better on the documentation side.”

  “Here, Uncle Mick,” said Cat, offering him her laptop. “Take a look at the descriptions.”

  He tried reading her tiny screen, but the words were jumbling together, and he hated the glare. So he walked over to a drawer and fished around till he found the printed copy on forty-three pages that Beverly had given him after the fire. One page for every year of my friend’s life, he remembered.

  He sat back down, flipping through the pages with Pris staring over his shoulder.

  “Find the ones that might have been sold or loaned out right before the fire,” Cat said.

  As soon as Cat said that, he flipped the page to where there was a description of a piece called Three Views, One Girl that he remembered letting his old friend Greta take back to New York with her two weeks before the fire. If Greta hadn’t been in touch with Beverly about his inclusion in a show at the Painted Stick so she could help publicize it, this painting would have been on the other list all along.

  Pris leaned in over Mick’s shoulder. “Mickey.”

  “Yes, sis?”

  “The painting in that gallery in New York—what was the name of it, Cat? The one with the girl. The one you won’t sell.”

  “The Painted Stick,” said Cat. “That’s the name of the gallery. Greta is the owner’s name.”

  The mention of it gave Mick chills even though he was staring at the description already.

  Cat seemed to know what Pris was onto. “Is that a dreamslip painting, Uncle Mick?”

  The image of the redheaded girl flashed in his head. He remembered the dream that had produced it. He’d fused with someone who desired that girl, and he hadn’t liked the feel of that at all. So he’d popped out of his dreamer’s consciousness and then out of the dream entirely. The girl stayed with him, though, so he painted her. He painted her to rid himself of her.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Why won’t you sell it?” asked Cat. “Greta told us you wouldn’t let her sell it.”

  Mick saw the girl in his mind’s eye again. “I don’t know,” he answered. “I feel like she shouldn’t be sold.”

  Cat and Pris looked at each other. “That has to be the one,” Cat said. Pris agreed.

  “I’m thinking the same thing.” Mick felt terror clench his stomach. Why did he have to paint that girl? He’d known it even as he was painting her that he shouldn’t have, that he should have let her go. “That would make sense,” he said, the logical part of his brain working the details. “I sent the triptych to Greta in New York right after Thanksgiving, right before the studio fire.”

  He told them about dreamslipping in some stranger’s dream, someone who desired the girl, how wretched it made him feel, and that he’d left the dream.

  “Where were you, Mick?” Pris asked. “When you slipped into that dream.”

  Mick tried to remember. Everything before and after the fire was a blur… And there it was. “At a party on Star Island.”

  Cat asked, “Was it at that patron’s house—Kristoff Langholm?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “But there were probably thirty, forty people there that night.”

  Cat went into the kitchen and got a sheet of paper and a pen. She thrust them at him.
“Write down the name of everyone you saw at that party. Everyone.”

  Mick sat staring at the white page in front of him. He jotted down Kristoff and Carrie, followed by Serena Jones.

  “I wish we had a copy of that painting,” Cat said to Pris. Mick resented the way they sometimes discussed his case as if he wasn’t there. “Maybe Greta used it in promotional materials,” Cat continued, popping open her laptop again.

  “Most likely not,” said Pris. “Since Mick didn’t wish to sell it. Remember? It was in the back of the gallery, marked ‘NFS.’”

  Mick cleared his throat. “Well, you know, I could call Greta and ask her to send a photo from her phone. She is my friend, after all.”

  Pris and Cat looked at him in amused surprise. Then the three of them burst out laughing, glad to have something break the tension.

  Mick called Greta, who was in her gallery, thankfully, and not busy. She was curious about the request but sent the image to Cat without too many questions. Mick’s phone was too old-school to handle digital images. Cat did some techie magic to get the image on her laptop and then projected it onto the wall.

  And there she was, in triplicate. His wan heroine, his redheaded lady-child. She wasn’t yet eighteen, as he’d tried to capture in the budding quality of her breasts under a white tank top. She had an unnatural thinness about her as well, as if slightly malnourished. The whole time he’d painted her, he felt as if he wanted to save her. That was the attempt in painting her, to save her and rid himself of her haunting eyes at the same time. But he felt strongly now that he had failed. And in his failure, he’d simply failed her.

  “What if it’s her,” said Cat, suddenly. “There’s nothing in the painting that seems searchable—no numbers or codes or passwords of any kind. Maybe it’s the girl herself.”

  “Perhaps she’s missing,” said Pris. She ran her hands over her bare arms, as if suddenly cold. “I don’t like the way this case feels.”