Silent Victim - C. E. Lawrence [95]
State of New Jersey
BORN TO: Duncan and Fiona Campbell Adrian Campbell, baby boy
And underneath it, one word: Stillborn.
He stared at it. This was the first time he had any inkling that he and Laura had very nearly had a baby brother. His mother had never spoken of it. And yet, in a flash, it explained everything.
“So that’s what happened,” he murmured.
He slipped the document back where he had found it and replaced the book. He didn’t know why his mother had kept this secret from them all these years. Maybe she didn’t want their pity, maybe she didn’t want to relive that horrible day, or maybe it was too linked with their father’s desertion. Whatever her reason, the subject was clearly taboo. And yet she had saved his birth certificate—which, sadly, was also his death certificate. He wondered if she was even aware she still had it. But knowing how obsessively organized Fiona was, he thought it more likely that she had sent him to find the place mats because, on some unconscious level, she wanted him to find it.
But at last Lee understood his mother’s need to suppress her emotions. If she ever fully unleashed her grief and rage, he thought, she must imagine the resulting torrent would drown her. He found the place mats, closed the closet door, and went back downstairs. The irony didn’t escape him—now he and his mother each had a secret to keep from each other.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
Hildegard Elena Krieger von Boehm leaned over and scrutinized her makeup in the beveled mirror over the antique mahogany vanity. The dressing table, imported from Hamburg, was a birthday gift from her father. Squinting, she rubbed a stray smear of mascara from her smooth pink cheekbone and brushed on some rouge (“Afterglow” by Max Factor, a good Polish Jew, as her Vati would say). Turning her head this way and that, she flipped her thick red hair from her muscular shoulders and shook her head to make it appear fuller and a bit disheveled. She knew that men liked the tousled, just-from-the-bedroom look. Though she hated having a single hair out of place, she was willing to do whatever the job required. That was one of the secrets to her rapid rise within the ranks of the NYPD.
Hildegard Elena Krieger von Boehm—or Elena Krieger, as she was known—was not as hard as she appeared on the outside. For instance, she had made the decision upon entering the New York City police force to use her middle name instead of her Wagnerian-sounding first name. She also dropped the “von Boehm,” an indication in Germany of her family’s noble blood (Beethoven, for instance, hoped the
“van” in his name would give the appearance of nobility). It was all well and fine to have a “von” in front of your name when you were in Düsseldorf, but in America, she feared, it would simply conjure up images of Nazi storm troopers. Krieger was her mother’s maiden name, whereas “von Boehm"—her paternal family name—meant “from Bohemia.”
She regarded most Americans as pitifully unaware of their heritage. Germanic blood still ranked as their most common ancestral lineage—more ubiquitous than English or Dutch. A large number of Hessian mercenaries settled in states such as Pennsylvania after the Revolution and were given land in exchange for their promise to never take up arms against the United States again. This fact troubled Hildegard Krieger not a bit. She regarded practicality—which might manifest on occasion as discreet opportunism—as a virtue. Though the irony of the situation was not lost on her, she thought her ancestral cousins had made a good investment. Why travel back across a treacherous sea to a crowded, contentious continent scarred by centuries of squabbling when you could start afresh in a new, relatively unsettled land of unrivaled abundance and beauty?
She lifted the crimson feather boa from its box, peeling away layers of crumbling tissue paper, and wound it around her neck. She had worn it only once before, in a cabaret show back in Germany, where her talent