The Simeon Chamber Read Online Free PDF Page A

she’s quite friendly with your mother. The two of them got to talking one afternoon …”
    “I see.” She was single, all right. The equation suddenly made sense—the two old ladies, the beautiful niece and the eligible bachelor lawyer. His mother would never quit. Ever since he and Pat had split up Angie had spewed venom at the woman who jilted her son. She tried to fill the void with matches made over her dining room table, enlisting the aid of friends and family. Under other circumstances he might have been angry. But looking at Jennifer Davies, Bogardus found hostility to be one of his more remote emotions.
    “Let’s get back to your father.”
    “Yes, well, I’ve tried to get information from a number of public agencies—Social Welfare, the State Bureau of Vital Statistics. But I keep running into a stone wall. They all tell me the same thing, that adoption records are sealed and not public.
    I’ve been told there’s no way I can find out who my father is unless he decides independently that he wants to see me.”
    Bogardus leaned back in his chair and coupled his hands behind his head. “Have you talked to your stepfather? Have you asked him for information?”
    “Yes, repeatedly. But the story is always the same. He says my father died during the war.
    When I press him he becomes angry. He knows more than he’s saying and I can tell that he’s frightened.” The woman’s gaze dropped to the large handbag on her lap. “I think as long as my mother was alive, the two of them shared the secret. But now that she’s gone, he’s afraid of the responsibility, afraid he might hurt me by telling me the truth.”
    She paused for a moment. “He believes that he and my mother were my only real parents, and for me to search for my natural father now is somehow disloyal to her memory and our years together as a family.” Her voice broke and trailed off. She shifted in her chair as she regained her composure. “But now I know he’s not telling the truth.”
     
    “What makes you say that?”
    The woman crushed her cigarette in the ashtray on Sam’s desk and opened her purse, producing a large manila envelope bulging with papers. She handed it across the desk to Bogardus, who removed the papers and spread them out. They took several seconds to unfold. There were four large pieces of heavy paper. Sam placed the ashtray on the corner of one page and his desk lamp on the other to keep the papers from folding up like an accordion.
    “About a year after my mother died I received a letter in the mail, unsigned and with no return address.” She reached across the desk and pointed to a single piece of plain bond paper clipped to the larger pages.
    Sam passed his eyes over the brief typed lines. THESE PARCHMENTS TELL AN ANCIENT TALE, A LEGACY FROM YOUR FATHER WHO LIVES AND PASSES THIS GIFT TO YOU AS A REMEMBRANCE.
    Sam removed the paper clip and tried to read the larger stiff pages. He could make out individual words, but the context made no sense. The edges of the papers were tattered and some of the lettering was faded and worn. He had seen documents like these before, but always under glass cases in museums.
    They were old and, he assumed, of some value.
    He looked at the postmark on the envelope. It had been posted in San Francisco and addressed to a post office box in Saint Helena, Napa County, and the date was clearly legible. There was no return address.
    “Is this your post office box number?”
    “It actually belongs to my stepfather—for his business. Family mail sometimes comes there.”
    Sam turned the papers over on his desk and examined the back side. The texture of the paper was brittle and it had a translucent sheen. In the upper corner of one page Sam saw a faded ink stamp. He took a magnifying glass from the center drawer of his desk and turned the light of the lamp toward the mark. He ran the glass over the letters.

THE JADE HOUSE
    OLD CHINATOWN LANe SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIa Under the stamped