Framed and Burning (Dreamslippers Book 2)

by Lisa Brunette

  Yoga on the beach was an unparalleled experience, in Grace’s opinion. One didn’t need a mat—simply slide your hands and feet into the soft sand and root yourself that way. Out there, part of the elements, a yogi could feel her connection to nature without the barrier of buildings and concrete. Grace breathed in the salty air, detecting hints of spice on the trade-wind breeze. What a wonderful place Florida was, she thought, that you could practice yoga on the beach in winter.

  Their teacher, Spiritfire, was a master yogi who had traveled through the earth’s chakras, from points in India to South America and beyond. It had never occurred to Grace that one could travel through the earth’s energy centers. She made a mental note to do so before she died.

  Spiritfire led them in a series of what he called “moon salutations,” a variation on the poses usually done in honor of the sun. Grace enjoyed the movement as her stiff joints became lubricated. She was aware of Cat next to her, being a good sport and giving the movement her full attention. It had been a while since the two of them had done yoga together. Grace always felt a preternatural connection with her yoga partner, even if the two of them had their own solitary practices.

  Grace breathed ujaiyi breath, synchronizing her breath and movement, and as she did so, she heard Cat’s breath slow and ground itself the same way. Good, thought Grace. But then she took her attention off Cat and centered on her own heart chakra, as that was what she needed to do to get to the core of this case. There was so much swirling, intense emotion in it: Donnie’s horrifying death… Candace’s dramatic break… Mick’s paintings… the envy of those artists who hadn’t made it as he had… whatever cord pulled taut between Candace and Mick…

  And there Grace sensed the cord between those two being pulled even tighter, as if in a game of tug o’ war. She felt an assurance within that Candace hadn’t set that first fire. But then who did?

  As she moved to Spiritfire’s lovely, liquid voice, she searched the energy in Miami, under the intense full moon, for something. They transitioned to a back-bending series, and Grace prepared for the heart-opener that was camel pose by squeezing her inner thighs, lower abs, and glutes. Then she arced backward, working to keep her core strong and supportive while bending her spine backward, reaching to the moon with her heart.

  And there, holding that pose, it was as if an energy whispered to her. She closed her eyes to hear it better, tuning it in. The energy was dark and red, vibrating to some frequency that wasn’t positive. She thought she heard the sound of large wings beating. Her eyes flew open. Breathing hard, losing her ujaiyi breath, she carefully extracted herself from the pose and took a resting pose on her knees, her hands in her lap. The place where her heart chakra should be ached.

  Spiritfire came over to her and whispered, “Are you okay?”

  She nodded. “I need a minute.”

  “Ustrasana, camel pose, can reveal so much,” he said. “And it’s not always pleasant.”

  She nodded again, rubbing the space that ached. It was an emotional ache, not a physical one. And it had to do with whoever set that first fire. The energy there was intensely negative, not accidental.

  As she came back to her breath and to the class there on the beach, she decided that Cat should take that trip to New York to pore through the Art in Our Time archives, and soon.

  After class, Cat’s eyes seemed shinier, the worry lines in her forehead relaxed. “That was incredible,” she said, brushing sand off her yoga pants. “I’m glad you got me to go.”

  “You’re welcome,” said Grace, but she must have looked uncharacteristically worried herself, as Cat asked, “What’s wrong? Did something happen during that camel pose? You seemed bothered by it.”

  Grace could still feel the remnants of the ache. “There’s something really nasty at the bottom of this case.” She let out a sigh. “I think you should go to New York. Find out who wrote that letter.”

  Cat agreed, but they spent some time discussing finances. Grace preferred to trust that the money would come, but Cat was much more conservative, owing to her own mother’s influence. Grace was secretly proud that her daughter, Mercy McCormick, had raised Cat so well. But sometimes Mercy’s conservative streak could be an obstacle.

  The matter of money was still being quietly debated when they arrived at the cottage to find Mick still up, which was not itself surprising since he kept irregular hours. But he was sitting in the living room with a disturbed look.

  “What’s the matter?” Grace sat next to him.

  “Everything.” Mick ran a hand through his hair. “Cat, what was that you were telling me about dreamslipping with Lee, over thousands of miles?”

  Cat washed out her water bottle in the kitchen and set it on the drying rack. “Yeah, his PTSD dreams,” she said to Mick, a shadow crossing over her face. “I was in Illinois, at the Plantation Church, and he was on the East Coast.”

  “Oh, God,” Mick said, burying his face in his hands.

  Grace tugged on his shoulder. “Mickey, tell us what’s going on. Did you dreamslip while we were out?”

  “Yes,” he said, shaking his head. “Into one of Candace’s dreams. A recurring nightmare, like the ones she had years ago, when we lived together. Damn, I thought she was here. Then I thought maybe she was outside. But she’s not. She’s locked up in jail, downtown.”

  Grace was excited by this. She stood up and began pacing. “Extraordinary!”

  Cat sat next to Mick. She patted his back. “I know how freaked out you must be.”

  “Freaked out doesn’t even begin to describe it.”

  Grace saw a pattern of dots like constellations in the air in the room, and she traced them. She spun on her heel as she realized what they meant.

  “I think maybe our dreamslipping grows stronger when the three of us are together.”

  “But we were out on South Beach,” countered Cat.

  “Yes, but we’ve been here together, dreamslipping in each other’s dreams and engaging in energetic activities,” she said, waving her arms at the two of them. “I think we kick up each other’s powers a notch.”

  “Okay,” said Mick. “But why Candace?”

  Grace smiled, walking over to Mick. She placed her hands, the bangles on her wrists jangling, on his knees and leaned her face into his. “Because you once loved her. And maybe still do.”

  “Who am I, Patty Hearst? That woman tried to kill me.”

  “No, she didn’t,” said Grace.

  Mick looked at Cat in a way that signaled he hoped she’d come to his defense, but she didn’t.

  “She destroyed your beach house, Uncle Mick, but we don’t think she set the first fire.”

  “Have you two lost your minds?” Mick said, his hands clenched into fists.

  “Think about it,” Grace said. “Cat has had long-distance slips twice: The first being Lee, whom she loved, and the second was a girl named Wendy, whom she also loved and felt a good deal of guilt for betraying.”

  “What does that have to do with me and Candace?”

  “Mickey, she’s the only woman you ever lived with. The two of you had a relationship for several years—tumultuous, admittedly, but an on-again, off-again thing means there’s a lot of passion at stake. You want to tell me that was just sex? You seem to have been able to get that anywhere.”

  Mick was silent for a while. “Fine. I loved her. But not anymore. I can barely stand that woman.”

  “There’s a thin line between love and hate,” Grace said, but Mick did not respond.

  “But she didn’t kill Donnie,” Grace added.

  “Yeah, that’s what Candace said in the dream.”

  “Whoa, what?” Cat asked. “She declared her innocence in the dream?”

  “Yep.”

  Grace began to pace again. “Interesting! Candace’s consciousness might be struggling against the psychic break. Maybe she’s telling the truth in the dream. We might get her to tell the truth in real life.”

  “But not too soon,�
� said Cat. “We want the real killer to think she’s taking the rap.”

  They agreed.

  “There’s one more thing,” Mick said. “Candace seems to know I’m in her dreams.”

  Grace couldn’t believe her ears. “How do you know?”

  “She said she could hear me, but not see me. She said something about always knowing I was there.”

  Grace looked at Cat to see if she could back up what Mick had said from her own long-distance experiences. Cat nodded. “I was able to communicate with Lee in his. I was able to sort of get him to let go.”

  Grace had never been prouder of her granddaughter than in that moment, though she understood now the depth of her granddaughter’s loss. He was the sole person in the world besides her family members who knew about her dreamslipping, and now he was dead.

  “Cat, you’ve been the most amazing apprentice,” Grace told her granddaughter, feeling her own eyes tear up. “The pupil surpasses the teacher.”

  Cat hugged her in return.

  Grace also felt a surge of hope about Mick. He’d only used his dreamslipping as another tool in his artist’s toolbox, but here he was helping them solve the crime despite himself. It showed true progress, spiritually speaking.

  Mick cleared his throat. “Hey, ah, listen. Here’s another thing. I heard you talking about a trip to New York when you came in, and I know it’s expensive to be running around working on what’s basically my case, but without pay.”

  Grace demurred. “Oh, but Ernesto is letting us stay here.”

  “He’s been very generous,” Mick said. “But I have not.”

  “You’ve been in shock,” said Cat.

  “Please,” he said, looking at his grandniece. “Don’t make excuses for me. I’m done with Ernesto’s charity, for one. I’m going to find a new studio and live there.”

  He stood up and took Grace’s hand. “Secondly, you’re both on my payroll, starting now. I want to find the bastard who killed Donnie. If it’s not Candace, then let’s find out who it is.”

  Grace tried to protest, but Mick held up his hand. “Don’t even try. I received an insurance settlement for the first fire, and there will be more to come with the second. So don’t worry about ol’ Mick.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  The offices of Art in Our Time were near Times Square, which blinded Cat with its audacious display of flashing advertising. She swirled around, taking it in, excited to be in New York for a second time, and so soon, and this time without Granny Grace as chaperone.

  Jacob Reiner, the assistant editor who’d scored her access to the back archive, greeted her at the front desk. Cat had to walk around the lobby sculpture, which depicted Michael Jackson with a monkey on his lap. It was constructed out of white porcelain, with gold trim, like the angel statuettes her Grandmother McCormick kept in a locked china hutch, but this was life-sized.

  Noticing the expression on her face, Reiner said, “You’ve never seen that before, have you?”

  “No,” said Cat. “But I wish I could un-see it now.”

  Reiner nearly choked on his laugh. “That’s a Jeff Koons!”

  “Great,” said Cat.

  “You have no idea what that means?” he said, incredulous.

  “Should I?”

  Jacob smoothed down his turquoise tie. “Some people would say, yes. But I guess I find that refreshing. Most people try to sound impressive in the presence of that piece.”

  He led her to his office, which was only half an office that he shared with a woman who looked to be about twelve wearing a suit made out of see-through plastic. Thank God she was wearing a slip under that suit, Cat thought. She could hear the plastic squeak as the woman pecked at her sleek silver laptop.

  Jacob angled his head in the woman’s direction. “That’s our intern, Jacinta.”

  Cat sat down in a chair next to his desk.

  “So,” he said, “How is it that the grandniece of one of our most acclaimed artists can’t identify a Jeff Koons when she sees one?” His voice had taken on a vaguely flirtatious quality.

  “I think you just answered your own question,” Cat said, laughing. “I’m his grandniece. Do you even know who your great-uncle is?”

  Jacob smiled. “I do, but he’s dead. Actually, I had two. Both dead.”

  “Did you know them?”

  “Not really,” Jacob admitted. “Family reunions, that sort of thing.”

  “Well, mine’s always lived in Miami. We visited him once, but he and my mother aren’t close. He’s not very close with anyone in the family, actually… But my grandmother loves him dearly.” Cat stopped, aware that she was for some reason telling her family history to a stranger. “Anyway, where’s the archive? I don’t have a lot of time, and judging by what you said on the phone, it’s probably going to be a chore to find what I’m looking for.”

  “Right,” said Jacob. “Which is a letter to the editor submitted to the magazine back in the Seventies.”

  Cat opened her bag and took out a photocopy of the microfilm version of the letter in the magazine, which she’d found in the Miami Public Library. “This letter, to be exact,” she said. “I was very encouraged when you said they kept such good paper records back then, that you might have the original.”

  “Yes,” said Jacob. “But you’re right about what a chore this will be. And the archives aren’t here. They’re in a warehouse in New Jersey.”

  Cat felt peeved about wasting more time. “How do I get there?”

  “I’ll have to drive you.”

  “You have a car here in the city?” Cat knew enough about New York to know how expensive that would be.

  Jacob snorted. “Not on an assistant editor’s salary,” he said. “But I’ve got the company car.” With that, he opened his desk drawer and grabbed a set of keys.

  It was ten a.m. when they exited the parking garage, and Cat had a sense that the traffic was light for New York. She wondered what it would be like to live in such a big city, with so little green space. At least in Seattle you didn’t have to go far to feel like you were in nature again.

  Jacob was a steady driver, and she enjoyed the look of his side profile. He had a large, prominent nose, and she found those to be sexy on the right guys. Jacob was the right kind of guy for it, with his olive complexion, brown eyes, and black hair. They’d hit it off easily on the phone, and he seemed to find either her or her case intriguing. She reasoned it might be a bit of both and wondered if he’d done his homework on her. She’d certainly done her online research on him. He was from a Jewish family but didn’t eat kosher. He’d graduated magna cum laude from The New School for Social Research. His thesis had been on the impact of graffiti art on schoolchildren’s early art consciousness.

  “So what’s it like, hanging out in Miami with the art celebs?” he asked.

  Cat shrugged. “Probably not too different from hanging out in New York with the art celebs. I mean, isn’t that what you do at the magazine?”

  “When they don’t keep me chained to my desk,” he said. “It’s not exactly a nine-to-five job. I get to attend an industry function maybe every other month, if I’m lucky.”

  The traffic through the Jersey Turnpike slowed to a crawl, but soon they were free. Cat recognized some of the landmarks from the drive she and Granny Grace took with Clive, that artist who went to graduate school with Mick, the one who in Cat’s opinion had a legitimate bone to pick with the art establishment for its racism.

  “Do you know the artist Clive Smith?” she asked.

  “It sounds familiar, but I’m not sure.”

  “African American,” she said. “Mixed media. I’m not good at describing these kinds of things, but his work is kind of…sculptural? Like a lot of Mick’s, the paint builds up like it’s caked on.”

  “The process painter? Kind of mid-list, I think.”

  “Mid-list?”

  “More of a publishing term. You know, not quite there, but not undiscovered, either.”

&nb
sp; “Yeah,” said Cat. “That’s him. What do you mean by process?”

  “Oh, he’s kind of into chance operations.” When this elicited no recognition from Cat, he further explained. “He sets up a pattern in his painting and then lets the process break down organically.”

  Cat thought about the paintings she saw in his house, which at the time had looked like nothing so much as a field of raised dots on blue. Now she remembered the dots weren’t uniform but rather like cupcakes that had been poured by hand, each one coming out different. There were splatters of paint in between. She told this to Jacob, who smiled. “You got it, sister.”

  Clive wasn’t really a suspect in Cat’s book, but there was nothing to rule him out other than his own insistence. She thought Clive’s beef about the art world was a lot more personal than he had let on, and she had a feeling Mick was included in that.

  They drove into the parking lot of an aluminum-clad warehouse building surrounded by a barbed-wire fence. “Have you been here before?” Cat asked Jacob, and he nodded.

  “Just once. I was looking for the original art for a vintage ad we ran in the Sixties.”

  He took out another set of keys and slid one into a rusty lock. “Behold,” he said. “You’re about to be transported to a bygone era.”

  Dust motes swirled in the shafts of sunlight let in by clerestory windows. Jacob threw a series of light switches on the wall, flooding the warehouse with light.

  “All right,” he said. “We’re looking at these dates on the end caps.” He pointed to a yellowed index card taped to the side of one of the metal bookshelves. This one said, 1922-3, AD COPY, so they walked down to another section. It took them about fifteen minutes of tracing around, as the rows weren’t always sequential, before Cat spotted it. “Here it is. 1973-5, LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.”

  They spent a good hour digging through the boxes of letters, Cat surprised by how many there were, but Jacob not so much. “You should see my email inbox,” he groaned.

  The letters were an interesting lot, she had to admit, and the most interesting ones were the ones that had never been printed. They bore huge red REJECTED stamps. There was one from a housewife in Mobile, Alabama, that requested the magazine “stop printing those lascivious nudes.” The writer went on to catalogue every nude appearing in the magazine for the past three years, each page noted, and the nude described in almost lurid detail. Cat read it aloud to Jacob, the two of them roaring with laughter.