The Shroud Codex - Jerome R. Corsi [73]
“I’m sure I’m not the only person ever to be separated at birth from a mother,” Anne said.
Castle agreed. “Still, you are one of the lucky ones. Very few people separated at birth ever get a chance to reconcile with a lost brother, or to find out the truth about their parents. After your father died, you learned the truth about your mother and now you are back together with Paul.”
“I know it’s hard to believe,” Anne finally said, “but I think Paul is right. I feel surprisingly close to my mother now that I have met Paul. When Paul first saw me, he almost passed out. Judging from Paul’s reaction when he first saw me, I guess I do look a lot like my mother did when she was my age. I understand how hard it must have been for Paul to accept he had a half sister he had never heard about. Yet, after we had a chance to get acquainted, he embraced me and I felt like we had never been separated at all.”
“Why do you think you mother never told Paul that he had a half sister?” Castle asked.
“Since I never spoke with my mother, I’m only speculating, but my guess is that she did not want Paul to know her first husband was still alive, or that she had divorced him in order to marry Jonathan Bartholomew when he returned from Vietnam.”
“So, you think your mother might have been embarrassed about the divorce with your father?”
“I’m not sure,” Anne answered. “From the way I put the story together, my mother would never have married my father if she still thought Jonathan Bartholomew was still alive in Vietnam and coming back to her.”
Castle admired how willing Anne was to accept the truth. It took some courage to come to New York to be with her brother after all these years. She obviously did not want her brother to suffer alone, not when she knew he shared her flesh and blood.
“Are you deeply Catholic like your brother?” Castle asked.
“No,” Anne said. “My father was a Lutheran and I was raised Protestant.”
“How about now? Do you believe in God?”
“Yes, I do,” she said, “though I have to admit I’m not much for attending church regularly. Still, I can’t accept that everything happens by accident. I have to believe there is a reason I found my brother and deep down I believe that reason has to do with God.”
Castle saw no point in arguing with Anne about religion. He increasingly suspected she might help him better understand her brother.
As the limo entered Princeton, Castle enjoyed seeing once again how an Ivy League town looked. The open greens of the campus reminded him of Cambridge and his days at Harvard University. Finding the Physics Department headquartered in the modernistic Jadwin Hall, completed in 1968, was a bit of a shock. But despite the sweeping windows and central open spaces of Jadwin Hall, Professor Horton Silver’s office was pretty much what Castle had expected—floor-to-ceiling books and papers with one lonely window in the back that struggled to blend the ambient sunlight with the glare of Dr. Silver’s slick widescreen monitor. Once the chairman of the Physics Department, Dr. Silver was now an emeritus professor.
Dr. Silver looked every bit the eccentric Dr. Castle expected to find. Silver’s hair was just that—silver, and largely unkempt. His thick glasses seemed to protrude a quarter inch from their wire frames. Silver was comfortably attired in a loose-fitting sweater that looked as though it had reached its prime twenty years ago, complementing his baggy jeans and well-worn sneakers. Castle and Anne sat in straight-backed wooden chairs in front of the professor’s desk, while Silver sat in his armed swivel chair positioned at the desk’s helm