The Undertaker's Daughter Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Acknowledgments

  Discover More Sara Blaedel

  About the Author

  Books by Sara Blaedel

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2018 by Sara Blaedel

  Translated by Mark Kline, translation © 2018 by Sara Blaedel

  Cover design by Elizabeth Connor

  Cover photographs: field © Nikki Smith/Arcangel, woman © Westend61/Getty Images, sky © Vinod K. Pillai/shutterstock

  Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Blaedel, Sara, author. | Kline, Mark, translator.

  Title: The undertaker's daughter / Sara Blaedel; translated by Mark Kline.

  Other titles: Bedemandens datter.

  Description: First edition. | New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2018.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017023764| ISBN 9781455541119 (hardcover) | ISBN

  9781478940289 (audio download) | ISBN 9781455541096 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Fathers and daughters—Fiction. | Widows—Fiction. |

  Murder—Investigation—Wisconsin—Racine—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PT8177.12.L33 B4313 2018 | DDC 839.813/8—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017023764

  Printed in the United States of America

  LSC-C

  First edition: February 2018

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  To Victoria

  1

  “What do you mean you shouldn’t have told me? You should have told me thirty-three years ago.”

  “What difference would it have made anyway?” Ilka’s mother demanded. “You were seven years old. You wouldn’t have understood about a liar and a cheat running away with all his winnings; running out on his responsibilities, on his wife and little daughter. He hit the jackpot, Ilka, and then he hit the road. And left me—no, he left us with a funeral home too deep in the red to get rid of. And an enormous amount of debt. That he betrayed me is one thing, but abandoning his child?”

  Ilka stood at the window, her back to the comfy living room, which was overflowing with books and baskets of yarn. She looked out over the trees in the park across the way. For a moment, the treetops seemed like dizzying black storm waves.

  Her mother sat in the glossy Børge Mogensen easy chair in the corner, though now she was worked up from her rant, and her knitting needles clattered twice as fast. Ilka turned to her. “Okay,” she said, trying not to sound shrill. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe I wouldn’t have understood about all that. But you didn’t think I was too young to understand that my father was a coward, the way he suddenly left us, and that he didn’t love us anymore. That he was an incredible asshole you’d never take back if he ever showed up on our doorstep, begging for forgiveness. As I recall, you had no trouble talking about that, over and over and over.”

  “Stop it.” Her mother had been a grade school teacher for twenty-six years, and now she sounded like one. “But does it make any difference? Think of all the letters you’ve written him over the years. How often have you reached out to him, asked to see him? Or at least have some form of contact.” She sat up and laid her knitting on the small table beside the chair. “He never answered you; he never tried to see you. How long did you save your confirmation money so you could fly over and visit him?”

  Ilka knew better than her mother how many letters she had written over the years. What her mother wasn’t aware of was that she had kept writing to him, even as an adult. Not as often, but at least a Christmas card and a note on his birthday. Every single year. Which had felt like sending letters into outer space. Yet she’d never stopped.

  “You should have told me about the money,” Ilka said, unwilling to let it go, even though her mother had a point. Would it really have made a difference? “Why are you telling me now? After all these years. And right when I’m about to leave.”

  Her mother had called just before eight. Ilka had still been in bed, reading the morning paper on her iPad. “Come over, right now,” she’d said. There was something they had to talk about.

  Now her mother leaned forward and folded her hands in her lap, her face showing the betrayal and desperation she’d endured. She’d kept her wounds under wraps for half her life, but it was obvious they had never fully healed. “It scares me, you going over there. Your father was a gambler. He bet more money than he had, and the racetrack was a part of our lives for the entire time he lived here. For better and worse. I knew about his habit when we fell in love, but then it got out of control. And almost ruined us several times. In the end, it did ruin us.”

  “And then he won almost a million kroner and just disappeared.” Ilka lifted an eyebrow.

  “Well, we do know he went to America.” Her mother nodded. “Presumably, he continued gambling over there. And we never heard from him again. That is, until now, of course.”

  Ilka shook her head. “Right, now that he’s dead.”

  “What I’m trying to say is that we don’t know what he’s left behind. He could be up to his neck in debt. You’re a school photographer, not a millionaire. If you go over there, they might hold you responsible for his debts. And who knows? Maybe they wouldn’t allow you to come home. Your father had a dark side he couldn’t control. I’ll rip his dead body limb from limb if he pulls you down with him, all
these years after turning his back on us.”

  With that, her mother stood and walked down the long hall into the kitchen. Ilka heard muffled voices, and then Hanne appeared in the doorway. “Would you like us to drive you to the airport?” Hanne leaned against the doorframe as Ilka’s mother reappeared with a tray of bakery rolls, which she set down on the coffee table.

  “No, that’s okay,” Ilka said.

  “How long do you plan on staying?” Hanne asked, moving to the sofa. Ilka’s mother curled up in the corner of the sofa, covered herself with a blanket, and put her stockinged feet up on Hanne’s lap.

  When her mother began living with Hanne fourteen years ago, the last trace of her bitterness finally seemed to evaporate. Now, though, Ilka realized it had only gone into hibernation.

  For the first four years after Ilka’s father left, her mother had been stuck with Paul Jensen’s Funeral Home and its two employees, who cheated her whenever they could get away with it. Throughout Ilka’s childhood, her mother had complained constantly about the burden he had dumped on her. Ilka hadn’t known until now that her father had also left a sizable gambling debt behind. Apparently, her mother had wanted to spare her, at least to some degree. And, of course, her mother was right. Her father was a coward and a selfish jerk. Yet Ilka had never completely accepted his abandonment of her. He had left behind a short letter saying he would come back for them as soon as everything was taken care of, and that an opportunity had come up. In Chicago.

  Several years later, after complete silence on his part, he wanted a divorce. And that was the last they’d heard from him. When Ilka was a teenager, she found his address—or at least, an address where he had once lived. She’d kept it all these years in a small red treasure chest in her room.

  “Surely it won’t take more than a few days,” Ilka said. “I’m planning to be back by the weekend. I’m booked up at work, but I found someone to fill in for me the first two days. It would be a great help if you two could keep trying to get hold of Niels from North Sealand Photography. He’s in Stockholm, but he’s supposed to be back tomorrow. I’m hoping he can cover for me the rest of the week. All the shoots are in and around Copenhagen.”

  “What exactly are you hoping to accomplish over there?” Hanne asked.

  “Well, they say I’m in his will and that I have to be there in person to prove I’m Paul Jensen’s daughter.”

  “I just don’t understand why this can’t be done by e-mail or fax,” her mother said. “You can send them your birth certificate and your passport, or whatever it is they need.”

  “It seems that copies aren’t good enough. If I don’t go over there, I’d have to go to an American tax office in Europe, and I think the nearest one is in London. But this way, they’ll let me go through his personal things and take what I want. Artie Sorvino from Jensen Funeral Home in Racine has offered to cover my travel expenses if I go now, so they can get started with closing his estate.”

  Ilka stood in the middle of the living room, too anxious and restless to sit down.

  “Racine?” Hanne asked. “Where’s that?” She picked up her steaming cup and blew on it.

  “A bit north of Chicago. In Wisconsin. I’ll be picked up at the airport, and it doesn’t look like it’ll take long to drive there. Racine is supposedly the city in the United States with the largest community of Danish descendants. A lot of Danes immigrated to the region, so it makes sense that’s where he settled.”

  “He has a hell of a lot of nerve.” Her mother’s lips barely moved. “He doesn’t write so much as a birthday card to you all these years, and now suddenly you have to fly over there and clean up another one of his messes.”

  “Karin,” Hanne said, her voice gentle. “Of course Ilka should go over and sort through her father’s things. If you get the opportunity for closure on such an important part of your life’s story, you should grab it.”

  Her mother shook her head. Without looking at Ilka, she said, “I have a bad feeling about this. Isn’t it odd that he stayed in the undertaker business even though he managed to ruin his first shot at it?”

  Ilka walked out into the hall and let the two women bicker about the unfairness of it all. How Paul’s daughter had tried to reach out to her father all her life, and it was only now that he was gone that he was finally reaching out to her.

  2

  The first thing Ilka noticed was his Hawaiian shirt and longish brown hair, which was combed back and held in place by sunglasses that would look at home on a surfer. He stood out among the other drivers at Arrivals in O’Hare International Airport who were holding name cards and facing the scattered clumps of exhausted people pulling suitcases out of Customs.

  Written on his card was “Ilka Nichols Jensen.” Somehow, she managed to walk all the way up to him and stop before he realized she’d found him.

  They looked each other over for a moment. He was in his early forties, maybe, she thought. So, her father, who had turned seventy-two in early January, had a younger partner.

  She couldn’t read his face, but it might have surprised him that the undertaker’s daughter was a beanpole: six feet tall without a hint of a feminine form. He scanned her up and down, gaze settling on her hair, which had never been an attention-getter. Straight, flat, and mousy.

  He smiled warmly and held out his hand. “Nice to meet you. Welcome to Chicago.”

  It’s going to be a hell of a long trip, Ilka thought, before shaking his hand and saying hello. “Thank you. Nice to meet you, too.”

  He offered to carry her suitcase. It was small, a carry-on, but she gladly handed it over to him. Then he offered her a bottle of water. The car was close by, he said, only a short walk.

  Although she was used to being taller than most people, she always felt a bit shy when male strangers had to look up to make eye contact. She was nearly a head taller than Artie Sorvino, but he seemed almost impressed as he grinned up at her while they walked.

  Her body ached; she hadn’t slept much during the long flight. Since she’d left her apartment in Copenhagen, her nerves had been tingling with excitement. And worry, too. Things had almost gone wrong right off the bat at the Copenhagen airport, because she hadn’t taken into account the long line at Passport Control. There had still been two people in front of her when she’d been called to her waiting flight. Then the arrival in the US, a hell that the chatty man next to her on the plane had prepared her for. He had missed God knew how many connecting flights at O’Hare because the immigration line had taken several hours to go through. It turned out to be not quite as bad as all that. She had been guided to a machine that requested her fingerprints, passport, and picture. All this information was scanned and saved. Then Ilka had been sent on to the next line, where a surly passport official wanted to know what her business was in the country. She began to sweat but then pulled herself together and explained that she was simply visiting family, which in a way was true. He stamped her passport, and moments later she was standing beside the man wearing the colorful, festive shirt.

  “Is this your first trip to the US?” Artie asked now, as they approached the enormous parking lot.

  She smiled. “No, I’ve traveled here a few times. To Miami and New York.”

  Why had she said that? She’d never been in this part of the world before, but what the hell. It didn’t matter. Unless he kept up the conversation. And Miami. Where had that come from?

  “Really?” Artie told her he had lived in Key West for many years. Then his father got sick, and Artie, the only other surviving member of the family, moved back to Racine to take care of him. “I hope you made it down to the Keys while you were in Florida.”

  Ilka shook her head and explained that she unfortunately hadn’t had time.

  “I had a gallery down there,” Artie said. He’d gone to the California School of the Arts in San Francisco and had made his living as an artist.

  Ilka listened politely and nodded. In the parking lot, she caught sight of a gigantic blac
k Cadillac with closed white curtains in back, which stood first in the row of parked cars. He’d driven there in the hearse.

  “Hope you don’t mind.” He nodded at the hearse as he opened the rear door and placed her suitcase on the casket table used for rolling coffins in and out of the vehicle.

  “No, it’s fine.” She walked around to the front passenger door. Fine, as long as she wasn’t the one being rolled into the back. She felt slightly dizzy, as if she were still up in the air, but was buoyed by the nervous excitement of traveling and the anticipation of what awaited her.

  The thought that her father was at the end of her journey bothered her, yet it was something she’d fantasized about nearly her entire life. But would she be able to piece together the life he’d lived without her? And was she even interested in knowing about it? What if she didn’t like what she learned?

  She shook her head for a moment. These thoughts had been swirling in her head since Artie’s first phone call. Her mother thought she shouldn’t get involved. At all. But Ilka disagreed. If her father had left anything behind, she wanted to see it. She wanted to uncover whatever she could find, to see if any of it made sense.

  “How did he die?” she asked as Artie maneuvered the long hearse out of the parking lot and in between two orange signs warning about roadwork and a detour.

  “Just a sec,” he muttered, and he swore at the sign before deciding to skirt the roadwork and get back to the road heading north.

  For a while they drove in silence; then he explained that one morning her father had simply not woken up. “He was supposed to drive a corpse to Iowa, one of our neighboring states, but he didn’t show up. He just died in his sleep. Totally peacefully. He might not even have known it was over.”

  Ilka watched the Chicago suburbs drifting by along the long, straight bypass, the rows of anonymous stores and cheap restaurants. It seemed so overwhelming, so strange, so different. Most buildings were painted in shades of beige and brown, and enormous billboards stood everywhere, screaming messages about everything from missing children to ultracheap fast food and vanilla coffee for less than a dollar at Dunkin’ Donuts.