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“We didn’t,” Russell answered. “Daddy had us homeschooled by tutors.”
“What happened to your accents?”
Marjorie didn’t answer immediately. “Oh, I see what you mean. When we were about four, he sent us to live with our aunt in Connecticut. We lived there until we finished school, then moved back to Houston to work for Daddy.”
“So he wasn’t around much when you were growing up?” Sam asked.
“He’s a busy man.”
Marjorie’s reply was without a trace of rancor, as though it were perfectly normal to bundle your children off to another state for fourteen years and have them raised by tutors and relatives.
“You two ask a lot of questions,” Russell said.
“We’re curious by nature,” Sam replied. “Comes with the job.”
Sam and Remi expected little to come of their visit to Chobar Gorge, and they weren’t disappointed. Russell and Marjorie pointed out a few landmarks and offered more canned travelogue.
Back in the car, Sam and Remi asked to be taken to the next location: the city’s historical epicenter, known as Durbar Square, which was home to some fifty temples.
Predictably, this visit was as unrevealing as the first. Shadowed by the King twins, Sam and Remi walked around the square and its environs for an hour, making a show of taking pictures, checking their map, and jotting notes. Finally, shortly before noon, they asked to be taken back to the Hyatt.
“You’re done?” Russell asked. “Are you sure?”
“We’re sure,” said Sam.
Marjorie said, “We’re happy to take you anywhere you’d like to go.”
“We need to do some research before we continue,” Remi said.
“We can help with that too.”
Sam put a little steel in his voice: “The hotel, please.”
Russell shrugged. “Suit yourself.”
From inside the lobby, they watched the Mercedes pull away. Sam pulled his iPhone from his pocket and checked the screen. “Message from Selma.” He listened to it, then said, “She’s dug something up on the King family.”
Back in their room, Sam put the phone on Speaker and hit Speed Dial. After thirty seconds of crackling, the line clicked open. Selma answered with, “Finally.”
“We were on a tour with the King twins.”
“Productive?”
“Only in that it reinforced our urge to get away from them,” said Sam. “What’ve you got for us?”
“First, I’ve found someone who can translate the Devanagari parchment you found at Lewis’s house.”
“Fantastic,” Remi said.
“It gets better. I think it’s the original translator—the A. Kaalrami from Princeton. Her first name is Adala. She’s almost seventy and is a professor at . . . Care to guess?”
“No,” Sam said.
“Kathmandu University.”
“Selma, you’re a miracle worker,” Remi said.
“Normally, I would agree, Mrs. Fargo, but this was dumb luck. I’m e-mailing you Professor Kaalrami’s contact info. Okay, next: after hitting dry hole after dry hole in researching the King family, I ended up calling Rube Haywood. He’s sending me information as he gets it, but what we’ve got so far is interesting. First of all, King isn’t the family’s true surname. It’s the anglicized version of the original German: Konig. And Lewis’s first name was originally Lewes.”
