The Memory Painter

Linz gave him a sideways glance. “You’re serious?”


He cracked open one eye and peeked at her. “Yeah. You stayed in India. I went to China to train Shaolin monks.”

They both burst into laughter, as if that was the most hysterical thing either of them had ever heard.

“I can’t believe your mom is Barbara,” Linz added, and they doubled up even harder.

“I wish I could have seen your face when she opened the door.”

They laughed until they had tears in their eyes. “Stop, I can’t breathe,” Linz begged. She took several calming breaths and grew serious again. “So what do we do now?”

“I don’t know. I’m thinking.”

“We need to hide, leave Boston until we can figure this out.”

“Agreed.” Bryan straightened up. “Where’s your passport?”

Linz shot him a look. “My house. Why?”

“Let’s get it, then swing by my place.”

“Why do we need passports?”

“To go to Egypt.”

Linz pulled over and turned on the hazards lights. She was beginning to feel light-headed. “You want us to go to Egypt?”

“Conrad is obsessed with getting me to remember a life there. That’s what the procedure was for. The answer to everything is in Egypt. I’ve had … dreams about it.” Bryan refrained from sharing anything else. He wasn’t ready to talk about it.

Linz chewed on this information, remembering what Conrad had said before Michael and Diana had died. The key did lie in Egypt.

She thought about the Egyptian goddess painting and realized it had been left untouched to taunt them. Her heart began to ache again at the thought of how his studio had looked, every painting a black void.

Bryan looked at her, concerned. “What?”

“I went to your place to look for you. Someone had broken in, and everything was trashed. All your paintings were…” She couldn’t bring herself to say it.

Bryan processed the news with little emotion. “They’re just paintings. I could do them all over again if I wanted to.”

“How can you say that? It’s your work, your creations.” She could feel herself getting weepy.

“Because I really could paint them all again. They’re just memories,” Bryan said softly, “road maps to help me get here … to get to you. I don’t need them anymore. I just need my passport.”

“What if it’s been taken?”

“I keep it hidden. We have to go to Cairo,” Bryan repeated. “You know we do.”

“We can’t just fly off to Egypt.”

“Why not? We both have the money.”

“What about Finn?”

“We’ll give him an update when we get there,” he reasoned. “Say we needed to lay low for a while.”

“For how long?” she asked.