Amanda Read Online Free PDF

identities twenty years ago—by claiming that a hospital fire had destroyed records of Amanda’s birth and that her own birth certificate was somehow lost during the chaos of World War II, something like that. Stranger things have happened. But I can’t find elementary-school records for an Amanda Grant in Boston, where she supposedly grew up, and high-school records are incomplete and—oddly enough—missing photographs of Amanda Grant.”
    Impatient, Jesse said, “So maybe she’s camera-shy or just happened to miss school that day.”
    “All four years? Eight years counting college, because she isn’t in those yearbooks, either. And here’s another odd thing; Amanda Grant minored in architecture, but when I casually asked the lady upstairs if she knew anything on the subject—she said no.”
    “Probably misunderstood you,” Jesse decided.
    “I don’t think so.”
    “Well, I do!”
    Walker sighed, but didn’t give up. “Okay, then what about medical records? She claims they didn’t have a family doctor, that there was a clinic in their neighborhood, but it was rather conveniently closed down a few years ago and I haven’t been able to find out where the paperwork went.”
    “Who the hell cares about medical records? Do you think it matters when she got her vaccinations or how many times she had the flu?”
    Walker held up a hand to stem the old man’s irascibility. “That’s not the point. The point is what’s normal. People leave a paper trail, Jesse, a trail of photographs and documented facts. But not her. In twenty years of living, even under a false name, she should have accumulated documents in different areas of her life. School records, medical records, bank records. But all hers are either remarkably incomplete or unavailable. She has a checking account less than a year old. She signed the lease on her apartment in Boston just six months ago. Before that, she’d ‘rather not say’ where she lived. No credit cards or accounts. She’s never owned a car, according to the DMV, and claims she’s misplaced her driver’s license.”
    “Well, so what? Hell, Walker, I have no earthly idea where
my
license is.”
    Walker didn’t bother to point out that since Jesse hadn’t driven himself in thirty years his license had long ago expired. “Look, all I’m saying is that her story looks suspicious as hell. There are too many questions. And whoever she is, I’m willing to bet she’s fabricated a background with just enough information to sketch in a life. She can’t prove she’s Amanda Daulton—but I can’t prove she isn’t. Maybe the DNA tests will be conclusive, but it’s doubtful since there’s nothing distinctive enough about the Daulton family —genetically speaking—to show up in the blood. And having to use your blood for comparison instead of the parent’s makes it even more difficult. At best, we may be told there’s an eighty percent probability that she is who she claims to be.”
    “I’ll bet on eighty percent,” Jesse said flatly, his eyes fierce.
    Walker didn’t have to have that explained to him. As the only child of Jesse’s only son, Amanda occupied a very special place in the old man’s heart. He had loved Brian so much that his two other children had been all but excluded from his affections, and Jesse was as ruthless in his paternal feelings as he was in everything else. He had seemed virtually unmoved when Adrian died with her husband, Daniel Lattimore, in a plane crash in 1970, leaving her two boys for Jesse to raise, and Kate might as well have been invisible for all the attention her father gave her.
    But Brian had been different, and his daughter was all Jesse could have of that favored son.
    If Jesse convinced himself the woman upstairs was indeed his granddaughter, he was entirely capable of leaving no more than a pittance to his daughter and grandsons and bestowing the bulk of his estate onAmanda. Never mind that Reece worked hard as a junior VP of