She told Maxence this, muttering under her breath so the other guys wouldn’t hear.
Maxence nodded and whispered back, “We’re staying in an inn tonight. We’ll figure out how to do this later. I can sleep in a tent with Isaak and Alfonso. We went to boarding school together. We have no secrets.”
Dree mounted her motorcycle and figured out how to turn it on, making sure she engaged both the clutch and front brake with the levers on the handlebars to ensure the bike didn’t go anywhere in case it wasn’t in neutral. The other guys also managed to start their bikes without running themselves over, which Dree took as a hopeful sign.
Batsa asked for directions to the inn where they had planned to stay that first night before setting out into the wilderness of Jumla, and he turned out to have an excellent memory and eye for directions as they rode to the inn. Plus, he could read the signs in the Nepali language.
Father Booker and Batsa were steady on their bikes.
Maxence and Alfonso seemed more than adequate.
Isaak wobbled a lot, but he knew what the handles did.
The inn that Batsa guided them to looked like pictures that Dree had seen of houses in New Orleans with porches on the first and second floors. The roof was painted the same lapis lazuli color as many of the other roofs that they had seen from the helicopter, and the plaster was white with emerald patches of moss. A small shrine to an elephant-looking idol out front had prayer flags hanging from cords that formed a little tent around it.
Batsa went inside as the advance guard and talked to the people who ran the inn. When he emerged, he said, “The good news is that the rooms are free as long as we promise to buy supper at the inn because it’s the off-season. They’re thrilled to see any guests.”
Isaak asked skeptically, “I thought tourists rented all the cars?”
Batsa laughed. “There aren’t any tourists, just people who are here for the holidays. Everyone stays with their families and sleeps on the floor when they come home for holidays. They flew or rode a bus to get here.”
As Dree was a girl who had grown up in what was gently called reduced circumstances, though reduced from what she never figured out, Dree doubted this. She speculated that there were never any jeeps at all, or that the jeeps went somewhere else for some other reason.
Maxence asked Batsa, “If that’s the good news, what’s the bad news?”
Batsa sighed, and his sour expression looked like he didn’t want to say what he had to. “They only have three rooms.”
Alfonso chuffed a laugh. “Considering it’s almost Christmas, I suppose we should be grateful there are any rooms at the inn.”
Father Booker looked at his feet. “I guess we know who Mary is, but which of us is Joseph, and which are the three wise men?”
Isaak glared at the two-story building and said to Batsa, “I thought you said there were no tourists.”
“They only have three rooms for rent in the entire inn. That’s it. Jumla isn’t a tourist area, especially in the winter. If we want to try to find some other hostel, we could. It would probably mean splitting up because I don’t think we’re going to find anything bigger.”
Dree volunteered, “I can sleep in one of the tents in the yard.”
Maxence shot her a disapproving look. “If anybody is sleeping in the yard, it’s one of us. In the meantime, Dree, you can have one room. The five of us will split the other two rooms. All missions have some unexpected setbacks. We will figure out how to do this.”
Dree saw why it was easier to have only one gender along on these missions. Trying to figure out how she could maintain her modesty, as those five guys probably thought about it, was cumbersome.
An even split of men and women would have worked better than one girl and five guys. She should note that to Augustine at some point.
Maxence,not Augustine.
Still weird.
Chapter Five
A Demon in her Ear
Maxence
That night, Maxence Grimaldi slept on the cold floor of the hostel room with a folded blanket as a pillow. He wished he’d laid out one of the sleeping bags piled in the corner, but he was too tired and fading in and out of twilight sleep to get up and grab one after he’d lain down.
Isaak and Alfonso hadn’t snored when they were all in boarding school together as teenagers, but now they did.
A lot.
