Page 71 of Acting on Instinct
“Brains are magical things,” Lynx said and stood to walk toward the bedroom, and Kira came to her feet to follow behind. “They take in millions of data points way more than we could process. Over the years, you might have seen or heard something that didn’t stand out enough to your brain to call your attention to it in the moment. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t paying attention. Your brain might have been storing something away for a moment when you needed it to survive.”
Kira opened her suitcase and spread the sides wide.
On top was the picture of her and Ty wrapped in the pink silk ribbon. Lynx smiled at it and set it carefully on Kira’s pillow.
Gator leaned into the wall with Houston sitting at his side.
As Lynx took out each item and looked it over, Kira moved to the slipper chair by the window.
Why now?
Lynx thought that was an important question, too.
That was the thought that kept running through her mind, and she kept going back to a dinner party. It was a beautiful June night in Qatar before London got married; the moon was full the garden was heady with the scent of roses.
The women had made the courtyard festive with strings of tiny lights, and Aunt Fatima had hired musicians to sit under the olive tree and play lively music for dancing. The tables were laden with food. Sambuusa and shawarma platters, machboos—a platter of spiced rice and meat, that night it had been lamb. Fruits. Nuts. Oh, and the desserts, cheese-filled pastries, dripping with syrup, rich custards scented with rose water, saffron, and pistachio. And the ubiquitous dates. The women flitted about like a kaleidoscope of butterflies in their rich satins, heavy with beading and sequins.
And Kira had been ill at ease.
It all seemed decadent and ill-placed, and she hated the conversations that floated through the air as the men sat around, talking about what they wanted to conquer in the world of commerce, no matter how they screwed over the regular families who were just trying to get by.
Lynx had turned to sit on the bed. Her hand painted over the nineteen-thirties-style wedding album. It was padded white satin aged to yellow, and held the four novels from the 1800s, written in secret by a woman with a poetic heart, and hidden under the pictures. After all, what man would go look through a wedding album?
Houston moved over to the album and was sniffing it over, and Kira wanted to stop him, lest he get any doggy drool on the antique cover.
But she kept quiet. There was something strange about Houston’s concentration.
He sat and lifted a paw with a whine.
Lynx looked up to catch Gator's gaze. They’d both focused on Houston.
Lynx laid the album on the bed and walked over to stand next to Gator, calling Houston to stand in front of her. Then, she commanded, “Houston, find electronics.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Kira
Houston had his eyes fixed on the album, and once again she was whining and wagging her foot.
Gator called Houston and pulled a cloth from his pocket to play tug with her, like Ty did to reward Rory for a job well done. Gator wouldn’t reward Houston if he didn’t believe that the indication was correct.
Electronics? Those were 19th-century novels and wedding pictures from almost a hundred years ago.
“Kira, Houston is trained to find hidden electronics like flash drives. He says there’s something hidden in here.”
Kira stared at the album. Lynx’s words were words. They all line up like tin soldiers. But Kira couldn’t make her mind make sense of their meaning. So Kira started talking, babbling, sharing about how the album had come to her and the novels inside. And that was her life’s project to translate, annotate, and interpret the stories. That was why she brought them. So she could continue with her project no matter where she ended up hiding.
“Let’s go through this together,” Lynx said, patting the bed beside her.
They sat and looked from picture to picture, and Lynx pointed. “Do you know who these people are?”
“No, not at all. One of my Aunt Fatima’s cousins—someone I don’t know—told my aunt that she had a friend who found this in her grandmother’s trunk. So I don’t have any connection to these people. The reason I have it is thatmy doctoral work focused on women’s writings from times and places that made it improbable for women to write at all.”
“Can you tell me again how this came to you?” Lynx asked. “Your Aunt Fatima sent it to you? Tell me about your connection to her.”
“My Aunt Fatima is in an arranged marriage with my Uncle Nadir, my father’s brother.”
“Your father came to America for university?”
