“Curious!” Bill smiled at her. “I think we’re onto something, don’t you? He was clearly under suspicion. Look.” He ran his finger down a column. “Here are the dates each letter was received and the places they were posted from. They seem to have come from a village in the Urals, from Perm, from Moscow—never the same place twice.”

“So you think Maria was moving around? I suppose she would have done, to evade capture.” Val pointed at another ledger. “What’s in this book?”

Bill opened the pages. Val noticed that he had long fingers with neat, well-kept nails. It surprised her, since his clothes were scruffy: a beige jacket with saggy pockets, as if he walked around with his hands permanently shoved in them, and faded khaki trousers that bagged at the knees. “It gives the dates of trips from Manchuria into Russia between the years 1920 and 1925. And get this: it ties in with the dates that letters were received at the Vasnetsov house. It looks as though your father traveled to the places each letter was sent from. Perhaps Maria was writing to Peter Vasnetsov and your father hoped to find her by tracking the letters.”

“But look at all those trips!” Val realized the ledger covered the years when her father was dealing in stolen White Russian goods. That was why he kept traveling into the country. She didn’t want to admit it to Bill, though.

“He was using the different identity papers so as not to arouse suspicion,” Bill continued. “But what fascinates me is that he would never have gone to so much trouble if he hadn’t had good reason to think Maria was alive. He must have had some evidence.”

“Weren’t there theories that Anastasia escaped? I’m sure I read that somewhere.”

There was a pause while Bill chewed his last bite of sandwich. “Yeah, there’s a woman in America who’s been claiming since the early 1920s that she is Anastasia. She seems undeterred by the fact that no one who actually knew the family believes her.”

Bill glanced at Val’s uneaten sandwich, and she grinned and pushed it across to him. “Go ahead. I’m not hungry.”

“Are you sure? I’m the world’s biggest glutton. I can eat my own body weight and still be starving.” His eyes were lingering on the sandwich, and the minute she said, “I’m sure,” he snapped it up, took a bite, then continued. “There were claimants for all the Romanov children, but none were ever verified.”

The sandwich disappeared in no time. Val wondered how he could eat so much and still be thin. He didn’t have an ounce of excess flesh but at the same time he didn’t seem a sporty type. Maybe he burned it off with nervous energy.