Framed and Burning (Dreamslippers Book 2) (18 page)

He puckered up his lips real good. He wanted that pudding pop. In came Mama’s face, her cherry red lipstick bleeding into the cracks around her mouth. Mick could smell the cooking sherry on her breath. It made him worry that she was going to have one of her spells. The smell of sherry always accompanied Mama’s spells.

She relinquished the cherished pudding pop, and Mick stuck the gooey lovey dove treat in his mouth, letting the fudge slip down his throat. He was in heaven. His mama loved him.

But then she turned into a pink bird like the ones in the white cage in the parlor and began flying around the room. She swooped down and took his pudding pop from him, devouring it in her beak. He began to cry.
 

Mama the bird cackled. He threw a rattle at her, and she flew up and then straight for his eyes. He screamed from the pain and struggled to pry the bird off his face. But he was only a baby, so everything he did felt thick and awkward. He fell down out of the high chair, and then blood dripped out of his eye. He tasted it with his tongue, his own salty blood mingling with the taste of chocolate still in his mouth.

Finally he wrested himself free of the bird and broke its neck in his hands. He could see with only one eye, but he cried again. He hadn’t meant to do it.

But then the pink fuzzy boots came alive as wriggling caterpillars and were crawling up his pants legs. He jumped up and down and tried to get free of them, even stripping off his clothes. He was naked and noticed he did not have the dangling piece of boy flesh he knew should be there, and that’s when Mick Travers realized he had slipped into one of Candace’s dreams.
 

After all these years.

He woke with a start, looking for her in the room. But she wasn’t there. He walked down the hallway to Cat’s room, and it was empty. So was his sister’s. They must still be out at that woo-woo yoga thing on the beach, he told himself, but he suddenly felt afraid. Why had he slipped into Candace’s dream? It was a recurring one, a variation on a dream of hers he’d slipped into when they lived together.
 

It was these dreams that both made her more interesting than some of the other women with whom he’d shared a bed and also made her more dangerous. Her nightmares had always been overwhelming and weird like this and always featured her mother, whom Mick had met in person and couldn’t figure for a child abuser, so why the attack dreams?
 

Now Mick wondered if Candace had maybe killed her own mother, like the bird in the dream. But where was she? She’d have to be nearby, but as far as he knew, she was in a jail cell downtown.

He grabbed a decorative boat paddle off the wall in the foyer and went to inspect his makeshift studio in the lanai. As he opened one of the double glass doors, he heard something fall. His heart pounding, he flipped the overhead light on and raised the boat paddle.

“Candace,” he called. “If you’re hiding out in here, it’s time to come clean.”

But there was no one in the room. He realized a paint can set precariously on the edge of an easel was what had fallen. He’d left the lid off, but, luckily, the paint was dry, so there was no mess on the floor to clean up. He was alone.

And the rest of the house was vacant as well. Mick sat down in the living room, puzzled. This had never happened to him before.

Then he got an idea. He went outside and walked the perimeter around the house, checking the cars to see if Candace could be sleeping inside one of them. But they were empty. The neighborhood was as quiet as it could be, with only distant highway noise to be heard.

He began to panic and felt himself sweating. Suddenly everything seemed topsy-turvy to him. He jogged as far as he could, peeking into every car. Nothing.
 

About seven blocks away from Ernesto’s cottage, a cop car pulled up, and the officer inside asked him what he was doing.

“Sorry, Sir,” Mick said, flustered. “I’m looking for someone. I thought she was out here.”

The officer shined a flashlight in Mick’s face. “You been drinking? We got a complaint from the neighbors that someone was casing the cars out here.”

“Nope,” Mick said. “Just looking for someone. Sorry, Officer. I thought she’d be out here.”

“And who is that?”

Mick smiled, shaking his head. “My attempted killer.”

“Excuse me?”

“Yeah, I’m Mick Travers. The artist someone tried to set fire to. Twice.”

“Oh, I know about you, Mick. I think I saw your killer, too, when they brought her in. Is that who you thought was out here?”

Mick gave an embarrassed laugh. “I guess so.”

“Oh, man. Don’t worry. She’s locked up tight. We’ll throw the book at her, believe me.”

“Sure you will,” Mick said. “Sorry to cause any trouble. I’ll head home now.”

“Good idea,” said the cop.

Mick returned to the cottage, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that everything had flipped upside down on him. The fabric of reality had unraveled, and he didn’t know why.

It took him a long time to go back to sleep, which was a shame, as he really needed it. He hadn’t been getting much since Donnie died.

As soon as he hit the REM cycle, he realized he was dreamslipping again.
 

“Such a pretty girl,” her mama cooed. She was sitting in front of a mirror, with her mama standing behind her, brushing her curly blonde hair. Mama’s hair was tied up in curlers with a bandana over them. Mama’s hair was naturally straight, while Candy’s was naturally curly. She didn’t need any curlers, and this made mama jealous sometimes, but she was being nice right now, brushing Candy’s hair, making it fluff out around her face like a halo.

“Some day a boy will ask you to marry him,” Mama said. “And you’ll wear a veil trailing over your pretty hair, and you’ll walk down the aisle, and he’ll be there. Your husband. A man to love you forever, like your daddy loves me.”

Mick couldn’t stand it anymore, so he forced himself to imagine Candace in the real world, in some jail cell, and he tore himself away from her. He was so fused with Candace’s consciousness, however, that this took some struggle. It was as if he could hear the ripping sound as he separated his mind from hers. But it worked. He was out.

There was nothing to do but watch as little Candace sat in the chair, her mother brushing her hair. The moment seemed frozen in time.

But then everything shifted. Now Candace was about the age she was when she lived with him, and she was wearing a wedding dress. There was a dream version of himself here, too, waiting for her at the end of the aisle. But they were in a life-sized painting, and Candace’s mother was a giantess, standing there, her brush poised over Dream Mick’s head. She painted a smile on his face, and painted his hand extending toward Candace.

“No!!!” Mick yelled. “You can’t trap us here.”

But neither Candace nor her mother could hear him. For once he wished he’d paid more attention to his sister’s advice to hone his dreamslipping skills. There wasn’t much he could do now but watch the painful show.

Candace’s mother spoke, but her words came out as if in slow motion, and her voice sounded deep and echoey, as if her tremendous size had altered the sound waves carrying her voice. “All… you have to do…” she boomed, “is be pretty for him…”

“You’re lying, Mama,” Candace said, but she was putting lipstick on as if she still wanted to believe it. Dream Mick took the lipstick out of her hand and began to draw with it over Candace’s face.
 

“Be pretty for me,” he kept saying over and over as he painted her face with the lipstick. Mick watched his dream self, painfully aware that his characteristic painting gestures were captured well by Candace’s imagination.

Things shifted again, and they were at Coral Castle, a real place in Homestead, Florida, that Mick had taken Candace to once. The story of the castle was that some quirky Latvian midget—Mick mentally corrected himself—little person, built the castle by hand out of large slabs of limestone coral rock, and locals claimed he’d used supernatural powers to achieve such a feat. It had been featured in a couple of Billy Idol music videos, which explained the sudden look of an Eighties rock video that Candace’s dream had taken on. Mick shook his head, feeling judgmental that even in her dreams, Candace couldn’t come up with her own original material.

She was wearing a bikini, and he recognized it as the red one she often wore down in the Keys in those days. Just the sight of Candace in that bikini used to fill him with lust. But the body in the bikini was the one Candace walked around in now, in all its middle-aged splendor, the pouchy belly, the cellulite, the sagging breasts. But in the dream, Candace carried herself with great confidence, strutting around in that bikini as if she still looked like she had in her late twenties. She was still strong, with nice, defined calf muscles, and her ass was larger, which to him was not a bad thing at all, and it was the same general shape, which he’d always admired. Her big blue eyes were the same, too, large and too expectant, like a baby bird’s. Something about the way she moved began to awaken his lustful impulses…
 

Till he stopped himself, shaking it off. This woman wanted to kill him, after all.

Candace began to giggle. “Silly Mick,” she said. “I didn't try to kill you!”

“You didn’t?” he heard himself say before he realized he’d voiced his thought and it would be futile to speak.

But Candace startled, as if she’d heard him. She hid behind a rock carved into the shape of a moon. “Mick?” she asked, peeking out carefully. “Are you butting into my dreams again?”

“Candace?”

“Mick! You get out of here! You’re invading my privacy!”

“Can you hear me?” He moved toward her.

“Yes. Now get out of here.”

He moved closer, unsure what he was doing. “Can you see me?”

She laughed. “No, Mick. I’ve never seen you. But I always know you’re there.”

Mick woke up screaming, “Ah!” His sheets were soaking wet from apparent night sweats. Once his breathing slowed down, he got up and turned on the shower.

Standing in the cooling stream, he tried to make sense of what had just happened.

But he could not.

Chapter Thirteen

Grace firmly believed that you couldn’t stay too much in your head on any investigation. Besides the need for “boots on the ground” work to interview witnesses and suspects, she also knew that the best ideas came to an investigator when she wasn’t actively working on the case.

That’s why she insisted Cat accompany her to a class called “Midnight Moonlight Yoga.”

Of course, it took some convincing. Cat wanted to stay home with her face glued to that laptop of hers, as if it held the answers. But Grace had persevered, which is why the two of them were standing in mountain pose on the beach beneath the full moon and open stars.
 

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.