The Undertaker's Daughter Read online

  And though stores were open, the downtown streets were also empty. The town simply seemed deserted. As if it once had been alive but now was gasping for breath, about to give up the ghost. Ilka reminded herself it was early September. Maybe there had been tourists all summer; the atmosphere might have been different earlier. But when she drove up a hill and shortly after found herself leaving town, she doubted there had been much life here. Ever.

  Everything around her was green. Horses grazed in large pastures on the left, and on the right, toward Lake Michigan, she glimpsed houses built on the cliff facing the lake. She slowed and tried to look down, but her view was blocked by high fences and hedges.

  Quite the place—nice! she thought. She drove by a whitewashed lighthouse. For a moment, she was tempted to drive down there, but the GPS said she would reach her destination in two minutes. She drove on until it told her to turn right.

  The road was winding and quite steep. Ilka drove so slowly that a person could easily have walked beside her. The vehicle swayed and floated its way down to a fence with an open gate; she wasn’t at all sure she could make it through. Slowly she coaxed the big Cadillac forward, and only one side mirror scraped as she slipped between the gateposts. She stopped at a cliff, where a small path led to the water. She slammed the door hard, hoping Artie would hear and not be too surprised when she appeared.

  She started down the path, and within short order, a breathtakingly magnificent sight spread out before her. Had she not known better, she would have thought Lake Michigan was an ocean; the calm waters looked boundless. So beautiful and peaceful. It smelled of freshwater, and despite the mirror surface on the lake, a light breeze was blowing.

  “Two men drowned down there last week.”

  The voice from behind almost scared her to death. Artie. She tried to hide her embarrassment.

  Two fishing rods were clamped under his arm, and he was carrying a lidded white plastic bucket. He didn’t seem at all surprised to see her; maybe Sister Eileen had had better luck getting through to him. He waved his bucket and said there would be fish on the grill if she wanted to stay and eat.

  Ilka shook her head and handed him the keys to the hearse. She didn’t at all care to listen to him talk about food. She was so hungry she could almost eat the fish in the bucket raw. “We have to work. A dead man at the morgue is waiting to be picked up. I brought along gloves, masks, and extra plastic, because they say he’s in bad shape.”

  Artie broke out into a broad smile at the sight of the hearse parked with its front grille just above the cliff. He shook his head at her, his grin still smeared all over his face. “You think we can get it back up?”

  She didn’t bat an eye. “Of course. If it can get down, it can get back up. Okay?”

  He opened the rear door and stood for a moment looking at the stretcher. Then he placed the bucket with the fish beside it.

  “You’re bringing the fish?” She couldn’t believe it, but Artie didn’t answer.

  “Let’s go.” He got in behind the wheel and backed the hearse up slowly.

  They reached the gate without speaking. “Yes, thank you very much, the meeting with the Nortons went well,” Ilka said. Artie backed the hearse between the posts. “They would like to hold a funeral service on Friday. Can they? You don’t need to answer right now, because you’ll be talking to them tomorrow.”

  He stared straight into the side mirror. “You talked to them?”

  “They showed up, and you weren’t there. Someone had to do it.”

  Obviously, he was thoroughly amused by the situation he’d put her in. “Friday is out. Maybe Saturday. How’d it go otherwise?”

  “It went fine.” She explained that the family wanted to do the flowers themselves. “The deceased loved her garden, and they all believed it would be a beautiful thing if the flowers came from there.”

  “Joanne won’t be happy about that,” Artie said without looking at her.

  “Joanne?”

  “The flower shop that usually delivers for the big funeral services. I’m assuming the family wants everything as magnificent and successful as when Mr. Norton passed away.”

  “I don’t know anything about that. But anyway, they want to do the flowers. The deceased is to be cremated, and they want to buy some charms. What are they?”

  Artie looked over at her. “A charm is a piece of jewelry that can hold some of the ashes of a deceased. They can hang from a bracelet or a necklace. Don’t you have them in Denmark? They’re really popular over here.”

  Back in town now, he drove down the main street in the opposite direction from where they’d arrived the evening before.

  “They expect between one hundred and one hundred fifty people,” Ilka continued. “And they want to borrow a coffin for the funeral service.”

  “Borrow a coffin?” He almost lost his grip on the wheel. Ilka ignored him.

  “And I promised that everyone can log on the memorial page we’re setting up for them. I don’t know how it works with passwords, but they want everyone to have access.”

  Artie ignored her right back. “We don’t loan out coffins. They’ll have to buy one.”

  “She will only be inside one for a few hours. There’s no reason to pay forty-five hundred dollars when she’ll be burned up anyway.”

  She felt his eyes on her. Then he shook his head, but not in respect, not like the way he had when he saw she’d driven the hearse down to the cliff. “The coffin’s already paid for. We don’t make refunds on anything prepaid that the deceased requested.”

  “After the funeral service we can move Mrs. Norton over to one of the cheap wooden coffins. They can pay for that.”

  He shook his head again; she knew what he was going to say wouldn’t be nice, and she cut him off. “Before my father moved over here, he owned a funeral home in Denmark that he left to my mother. One of the ways her employees cheated her was, after a funeral they took off the coffin lids and reused them. They bought coffins without lids and sold them for full price.”

  Ilka remembered how it had driven her mother crazy, but there was nothing she could do about it. Without the two undertakers, she couldn’t run the business, and without running the business, she couldn’t sell it.

  “Sometimes they even took the body out of the coffin after the services and put it in a box they made out of this, whatever it’s called, cheap wood stuff, and then they drove it to the place where people are burned.”

  This was one of the many stories her mother had told in the years after selling the funeral home.

  “We loan out coffins,” she declared. Artie had handed the reins of the conversation over to her. She owned the business; she made the decisions. “About money, we’ll figure something out. Like I said, they want to buy some charms, so we have to take care of that. We agreed that you will talk about that with them tomorrow.”

  His expression was closed up now, the smile that cast nets of wrinkles from the corners of his eyes long gone. “Okay. Now’s the time for you to learn what’s going on with your dad’s business. It was all in the letter I gave you, but I guess you haven’t read it.”

  A message beeped in, and she grabbed her phone. She didn’t want to hear what Artie Sorvino had to say.

  She nodded. “I know that I’ve inherited the business.”

  “This came out after he died,” he began, again without looking at her. “At the same time we found out about you.” He paused for a moment, as if weighing his words.

  “I don’t know anything about the business’s books. Never have; that was your dad’s department. I guess I might as well tell you straight out that he owes a hell of a lot of money. And when you say we can just lend them a coffin, so they can save money, I say, sure! That’s a hell of a good idea! Let’s just make the debt bigger. Listen, we can’t afford to lose the income from selling coffins. And we can’t afford higher prices from the crematorium because we change things around so they can’t send the coffins to a scrap-metal dealer to ear
n a little bit extra. The books are in bad shape; the business is about to be turned over to the creditors. I’ve managed to buy a little time with the IRS; I told them I had to bring you over from Denmark. It wasn’t easy to delay them, but now we have until Friday afternoon before they come in and shut us down. And that means,” he added, his tone hinting that there was more to come, “it’s too late to save anything. After Friday, you will not have access to your father’s private belongings. It’s all going to be seized until the government makes sure it has enough assets to cover what it’s owed. Then a long process is going to start; it’s something neither one of us wants to go through. And it’s probably not going to end before we have one foot in the grave. So right now, every single hour that goes by without us fighting to save your father’s business is a complete waste of time.”

  “But you went fishing and forced that meeting on me, instead of staying and telling me how things were,” she muttered.

  He nodded. “I had to find a way to get you out of that room. We don’t have time for you to lie in there and whine. We’ve got until Friday to put our rescue plan into action. You need to understand that this isn’t only going to hurt you. It’s our skins, too, if your dad’s business closes down this way. But I didn’t think you’d go through with the meeting. And I really didn’t think you’d put your signature on something without reading it, either.”

  He might as well have slapped her, several times.

  “What about my father’s new family? You say they live in a big house in West Racine. It must be worth something too.”

  The crow’s-feet spreading out from the corners of his eyes returned for a moment. Single strands of his long hair, which was combed back over his head, drooped down alongside his face. “What Paul and Mary Ann had together is her own property. You won’t get anything there. Whether it was her who saw it could end up bad, or your dad who wanted to protect her and the girls, I don’t know. But the debt is in his business, so if the IRS needs to seize assets any other place, to cover the losses in the funeral home, the first place they’ll go to is your property.”

  She heard her mother’s voice in the back of her head: If you go over there, you risk being liable for something you can’t get out of. And they might even arrest you.

  Artie glanced at her. “Do you own anything?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t have anything valuable, and no, I don’t own anything.”

  “Probably the first thing the tax authorities will do is investigate your financial situation in Denmark. But we do have an offer that can save everything your dad built up.”

  “But there must be money coming in, too,” she said, ignoring her knifelike pangs of hunger. “Because it looks like you’re busy enough. And with those prices! It’s not exactly cheap to die here.”

  They were outside the city again, driving down a long, straight stretch of highway with nothing but an occasional house and a few large barns. “I can’t say what he spent his money on, but he milked the business dry; no doubt about that.” Artie spoke with a seriousness that made it absolutely clear to Ilka: Her situation right now was desperate.

  She took a deep breath. Story of my life, she thought. She tried, really tried to get a grip on her life, and yet it always ended up with other people or circumstances controlling her.

  “Tell me about this offer. It wouldn’t be coming from a place called Golden Slumbers Funeral Home, would it?”

  Artie looked surprised. He nodded. “Yeah, the Oldham family runs the biggest undertaker business in the entire region. They have their own crematorium and can hold funeral services for over a thousand people. They can put up as many as sixty people when relatives show up from out of town. And they want to take over your dad’s business. To stop the IRS from freezing the assets, we must pay sixty thousand dollars before banks close on Friday. And that’s just a sort of deposit. We don’t have the money, but the Oldhams are willing to pay it if we sign a statement that we’re in the process of transferring the business to them.”

  “It sounds like you’ve already talked with them.”

  “Your dad started the negotiations before he died.” It seemed like Artie understood just how lousy the situation felt to Ilka, being dragged into the middle of a deal already taking place.

  “What do they want?” Ilka tried to ignore her hunger and jet lag, to keep her head clear, because she had a bad feeling about this.

  “They’ll take over the order book and all the debt in the business. That means you won’t be involved financially in the settlement with the IRS or with any of the other creditors. You would still be able to take any of your dad’s personal belongings you want.”

  “What does it mean—they’ll take over the order book?”

  They drove into a parking lot behind a long gray building. Artie nodded to a security guard and showed his ID, and they parked near a gateway leading to a ramp. “It means they’ll take over all the funerals paid for in advance. A lot of people begin making payments for their funerals when they’re young, so their relatives don’t have to borrow money to bury them. Like you said, it’s very expensive to die in this country.”

  “So the Golden Slumbers people take over the funerals already paid for? And my father already spent that money?”

  “No. That money can’t be touched; it’s in a special account.”

  “But what do they get by taking over the business?”

  “They also get a list of people who have signed up for a funeral but haven’t paid yet. Because of the expense, some people take out funeral insurance and pay on it their entire lives, and the insurance covers the funerals when they die.”

  Ilka nodded. “Okay, so that’s what they’re going after.”

  “If you’d bothered to read what I gave you, you’d know your dad’s will says that Sister Eileen and I have the preemptive rights, the right to buy, if you decide to sell the business.”

  “Okay,” she said, without understanding what would be left to buy.

  While they were sitting in the parking lot, another hearse had driven up to the gateway. Two people had gone into the morgue, but they must have returned without Ilka noticing them, because the hearse drove off.

  “I’d like to buy the house, if we manage to get out of this situation. But that won’t happen unless we avoid everything being frozen and then getting dragged into bankruptcy.”

  “The house isn’t part of the deal with the Oldhams?”

  Artie shook his head. “All they want is the actual business. I’ll buy the house from you, so at least you get something out of coming all this way.”

  Ilka was certain the deal with the Oldhams was to their advantage, but she didn’t care, as long as she avoided being held inside the US with an enormous debt. “Let’s get this deal going.”

  He nodded and asked if she was ready to go inside.

  6

  Artie handed Ilka a mask and a pair of white latex gloves, then walked behind the hearse and opened the rear door to pull out the stretcher. He shoved the bucket of fish to the side.

  “Have you ever been in a morgue before?”

  Ilka shook her head. She had been to the Forensic Institute in Copenhagen to see her husband one last time after his autopsy, and it had been horrible. She wasn’t sure why, whether it had been because no one had been careful enough to conceal the Y-incision in his body, or if it was more because he’d been lying there grayish and cold, and it all had happened too fast for her to realize he was truly gone. The autopsy had been unavoidable, because his death had come out of the blue. No illness, no sign that the end was in sight. Suddenly he was just lying there.

  “Okay then, I’ll see if there’s someone inside who can help lift, but I might need some help out here.”

  She nodded and followed him down the long hallway with frosted glass panes in the doors.

  “Wait here,” Artie said. A double door opened automatically and closed behind him as he walked around a corner.

  Ilka leaned against
the wall. She was dizzy and weak from hunger. She should call her lawyer and get her opinion on this deal with Golden Slumbers. The time difference between Racine and Denmark, however, was seven hours; she would have left work long ago. Ilka tried anyway, and to her surprise she got an answer.

  “Hello!” her lawyer repeated. She had worked for Erik long before Ilka had met him, and after his death, Ilka had kept her. The phone connection was breaking up on every third word because of the thick morgue walls, so Ilka walked back outside. The piercing voice of the lawyer came through again, loud and clear.

  “No, I don’t know if there’s a mortgage on the house,” Ilka said after she explained her situation.

  “Do not sign anything before I’ve read it,” the lawyer warned her. “Send it over right away.”

  “I’ve already signed something.”

  The wind was warm, but Ilka was freezing, and she gave a start when she heard a long, mournful scream behind her. The morgue door was open; a woman was being helped down the ramp by two uniformed police officers. She wore a light summer jacket and walked bent over with both hands clutched to her chest, as if she were afraid her heart was about to fall out. The sounds she made were those of an animal. Between her screams rising and falling in waves, she sobbed desperately, sobs that cut into the place where Ilka had stowed away her own sorrow.

  “What in the world is going on? Are you there?” the lawyer asked, but before Ilka could answer, Artie walked out the door, pushing the stretcher. He was still wearing the mask and gloves, but now he also had on a disposable lab coat with rust-red stains from dried blood.

  “I have to run,” Ilka said. She hung up and hurried down the ramp.