The Undertaker's Daughter

by Sara Blaedel

  Ilka closed the folder and asked how they would describe their mother and grandmother.

  “She was very sociable,” Joe said. “Also after Dad died. She was involved in all sorts of things; she was very active in the seniors’ club in West Racine.”

  “And family meant a lot to her,” Helen said. She’d stopped crying without Ilka noticing. “She was always the one who made sure we all got together, at least twice a year.”

  Ilka let them speak, as long as they stayed away from talking about charms and choosing coffins. She had no idea how to wind up the conversation, but she kept listening as they nearly all talked at once, to make sure that everything about the deceased came out. Even gloomy Pete added that his grandmother made the world’s best pecan pie.

  “And she had the best Southern recipe for macaroni and cheese,” he added. The others laughed.

  Ilka thought again about Erik. After his funeral, their apartment had felt empty and abandoned. A silence hung that had nothing to do with being alone. It took a few weeks for her to realize the silence was in herself. There was no one to talk to, so everything was spoken inside her head. And at the same time, she felt as if she were in a bubble no sound could penetrate. That had been one of the most difficult things to get used to. Slowly things got better, and at last—she couldn’t say precisely when—the silence connected with her loss disappeared.

  Meanwhile, she’d had the business to run. What a circus. They’d started working together almost from the time they’d first met. He was the photographer, though occasionally she went out with him to help set up the equipment and direct the students. Otherwise, she was mostly responsible for the office work. But she had done a job or two by herself when they were especially busy; she’d seen how he worked. There was nothing mysterious about it. Classes were lined up with the tallest students in back, and the most attractive were placed in the middle so the focus would be on them. The individual portraits were mostly about adjusting the height of the seat and taking enough pictures to ensure that one of them was good enough. But when Erik suddenly wasn’t there, with a full schedule of jobs still booked, she had taken over. Without giving it much thought. She did know the school secretaries, and they knew her, so that eased the transition.

  “Do we really have to buy a coffin, when Mom is just going to be burned?” Steve said, interrupting her thoughts. “Can’t we just borrow one? She won’t be lying in there very long.”

  Shit. Ilka had blanked out for a moment. Where the hell was Artie? Did they have coffins they loaned out? She had to say something. “It would have to be one that’s been used.”

  “We’re not putting Mom in a coffin where other dead people have been!” Helen was indignant, while a hint of a smile appeared on her son’s face.

  Ilka jumped in. “Unfortunately, we can only loan out used coffins.” She hoped that would put a lid on this idea.

  “We can’t do that. Can we?” Helen said to her two brothers. “On the other hand, if we borrow a coffin, we might be able to afford charms instead.”

  Ilka didn’t have the foggiest idea if her suggestion was even possible. But if this really was her business, she could decide, now, couldn’t she?

  “We would save forty-five hundred dollars,” Joe said.

  Forty-five hundred dollars for a coffin! This could turn out to be disastrous if it ended with them losing money from her ignorant promise.

  “Oh, at least. Dad’s coffin cost seven thousand dollars.”

  What is this? Ilka thought. Are coffins here decorated in gold leaf?

  “But Grandma already paid for her funeral,” the grandson said. “You can’t save on something she’s already paid for. You’re not going to get her money back, right?” Finally, he looked up.

  “We’ll figure this out,” Ilka said.

  The boy looked over at his mother and began crying.

  “Oh, honey!” Helen said.

  “You’re all talking about this like it isn’t even Grandma; like it’s someone else who’s dead,” he said, angry now.

  He turned to Ilka. “Like it’s all about money, and just getting it over with.” He jumped up so fast he knocked his chair over; then he ran out the door.

  His mother sent her brothers an apologetic look; they both shook their heads. She turned to Ilka and asked if it were possible for them to return tomorrow. “By then we’ll have this business about the coffin sorted out. We also have to order a life board. I brought along some photos of Mom.”

  Standing now, Ilka told them it was of course fine to come back tomorrow. She knew one thing for certain: Artie was going to meet with them, whether he liked it or not. She grabbed the photos Helen was holding out.

  “They’re from when she was born, when she graduated from school, when she married Dad, and from their anniversary the year before he died.”

  “Super,” Ilka said. She had no idea what these photos would be used for.

  The three siblings stood up and headed for the door. “When would you like to meet?” Ilka asked. They agreed on noon.

  Joe stopped and looked up at her. “But can the memorial service be held on Friday?”

  “We can talk about that later,” Ilka replied at once. She needed time to find out what to do with 150 people and a place for the dogs close to the coffin.

  After they left, Ilka walked back to the desk and sank down in the chair. She hadn’t even offered them coffee, she realized.

  She buried her face in her hands and sat for a moment. She had inherited a funeral home in Racine. And if she were to believe the nun in the reception area laminating death notices, she had accepted the inheritance.

  She heard a knock on the doorframe. Sister Eileen stuck her head in the room. Ilka nodded, and the nun walked over and laid a slip of paper on the table. On it was an address.

  “We have a pickup.”

  Ilka stared at the paper. How was this possible? It wasn’t just charms, life boards, and a forty-five-hundred-dollar coffin. Now they wanted her to pick up a body, too. She exhaled and stood up.

  4

  Ilka walked out into the high-ceilinged hall and glanced around. The two glass showcases against the wall looked like they came from a jewelry store. One of them held small, elaborately carved wooden boxes and something that resembled the mantel clock over the fireplace at her grandmother’s place in Bagsværd. She walked out to the reception area to find Sister Eileen and talk her way out of the pickup.

  “No one else can drive,” Sister Eileen said without looking up. She was sorting through the day’s mail, slitting envelopes open and laying them on a pile without looking inside. “But maybe you don’t have a driver’s license?”

  “I have one, yes,” Ilka said, before realizing she should have said no.

  “Good. The keys are in the car. Here’s the morgue’s address. You need to make sure you bring along gloves and masks. It sounds like he’s been mangled badly.” She pointed at a door at the end of the hall. “You have to walk by the preparation room to get to the garage. Gloves, masks, and body bags are on the top shelf. And take a look at the coffins in storage; see if there are any unvarnished coffins. Apparently, the deceased was a homeless person; it’s possible that no one will cover the expenses. But you’ll have to take that up with Artie.”

  Ilka had stopped listening. She had to call Artie and talk him into coming. She lifted her phone out of her pocket and noted a backlog of messages from her mother; the phone had been on mute.

  “Niels will do jobs tomorrow and Friday, but can’t next week. You have four jobs Monday when you get home.”

  “The code to get into the garage is six-seven-eight-nine,” the nun said, adding that Ilka would need help to pick up the deceased. “It takes two.”

  “I’ll figure it out,” Ilka said, looking for Artie’s phone number in her address book.

  “By the way, someone sent you a bouquet,” Sister Eileen said as Ilka walked out. “I put it in Mr. Jensen’s office.”

  Ilka turned in surpri
se. “Who’s it from?”

  “There’s a card.” The nun looked up suddenly now, as if she’d finally noticed Ilka. “You look like your father. You have the same nose. And chin.” She smiled. “Please let me know if there’s anything I can do for you.”

  Something in the sister’s voice gave Ilka the impression she had been close to her father: her familiar tone. Ilka was puzzled for a moment; then she smiled and thanked the nun.

  She returned to the room to change into a pair of jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt. The wrapped bouquet stood on the small coffee table beside the bed. Written on the card: “We look forward to closing the deal with you.” It was signed by Golden Slumbers Funeral Home.

  She stared at the card for a moment before sticking it back in the flamboyant purple and white flowers. She went upstairs and grabbed her fleece jacket from the pile of clothes on the bed. She would have to ask Artie what the hell this was all about.

  It was one thing to put her to the test. See what she was made of. Have a little laugh at her expense. Fine. And if they were going to get involved with another business in town, honestly, she was more than fine with that. She might even avoid having to figure out how to dismantle her father’s business. But she was getting annoyed at how it was happening drip by drip. Why couldn’t they just sit down and talk about things? Hatch a plan and divvy up what needed to be done. She punched in the code to the garage. Then it hit her: She was the one who had yelled no, every time Artie had knocked on the door trying to talk with her. She was also the one who had signed the IRS document without reading it.

  “Just get this over with,” she muttered to herself. She froze when she stepped into the garage.

  The space was as large as what she’d seen of the funeral home’s first floor. Right inside stood an open coffin. Glossy black, with large gilded handles. It looked to her like something for a head of state, or at least someone who didn’t want their final journey to go unnoticed. The coffin had a white satin lining, with a pillow featuring embroidered initials, and it was open in a way that gave Ilka the impression that a person had just sat up, climbed out, and walked off. A coffin that looked a bit less pretentious stood up against a wall, but what she couldn’t tear her eyes from was the refrigerator at the far end of the garage. Not exactly like what she’d seen in large restaurant kitchens and institutions, but something along those lines. Unburnished steel, about six feet wide and not as tall as a normal refrigerator, with three drawers. A few rugs and a box had been tossed on top. The whole garage seemed a bit messy.

  Ilka knew she shouldn’t do it, but her feet were already on the way. When she opened the top drawer, the cold reached out and zapped her. But the tray was empty. She needed to open the next drawer only a crack to see the bluish foot on the steel tray inside. She shivered, closed the drawer, and looked out the window, checking the view—the same as from the room where she’d slept. In other words, her lodgings were above the funeral home’s morgue.

  She was being silly; she understood that. And yet she was caught in a mood that made her stare momentarily at the drawers of rust-free steel. The boy’s grandmother lay inside. The smell— It was true, the air smelled like death. And cold. And like something that had been disinfected. Mostly it smelled cold to Ilka, even though she couldn’t put her finger on what that meant.

  Thoughts roiled in her head, but she knew she was only stalling. She had an address and a body waiting for her, and she needed to figure out how to go about picking it up. She’d called Artie a few times, but he hadn’t answered. At last she pulled herself together and walked over to the hearse, which was parked just inside.

  A wheeled stretcher, like the ones used in ambulances, stood against the opposite wall. Under the stretcher were blankets lined with thick plastic and straps to fasten down a corpse. There was also a low cart, something that looked like a forklift. She didn’t need anyone to explain it was for transporting coffins.

  Ilka was unsure whether she was supposed to take along an unvarnished wooden coffin, or if she should just see if there were any left. To start with, she needed to find where the coffins were stored. She pressed the button to open the door to the funeral home’s spacious backyard.

  An addition to the house stood next to the parking lot. An overhang under which a vehicle could be backed connected the garage and the addition. FLOWERS was written on the door beside the garage. Ilka walked by a large Dumpster with a biohazard sticker, and over by the next door she noticed a small sign: STORAGE.

  Ilka walked in. The room seemed cramped. She turned the light on; she was right, the room was filled from floor to ceiling. In the back, two coffins had been stood up, one a light metallic blue, the other in imitation oak. She recognized the American coffins from films, yet these seemed to her even bigger and more pretentious. She also spotted one that was simple and unfinished—surely the one the nun had been talking about. It looked like a coffin from an old Western, rough wood, no carving or decoration whatsoever.

  She ran into Sister Eileen on her way back to the garage.

  “You haven’t left yet?” the nun asked. It sounded like an accusation.

  “I need to talk to Artie before I leave.” She looked for plastic gloves and masks on the shelves. She’d called him several times now, but he hadn’t answered. She tried again, but no luck. “Unless,” she added, “you can come along and help me.”

  Immediately the sister shook her head. “I can’t, and calling him will do you no good. He’s gone fishing; he always leaves his phone—”

  “I’ve decided I’m going to help until we figure out what to do with the business.” She spoke sharply—too sharply, she thought. “And if I have to bring in a corpse, I will drive the hearse. But I’m not going alone.”

  The nun handed her a note. “Pick him up on the way. Drive as far as you can down the last road. The last stretch before the lake is a bit steep.”

  Ilka looked at the note and shook her head. Sister Eileen had planned on having her pick Artie up the entire time; she’d been testing her. Ilka was about to say something, but she realized it wasn’t the right time for a show of authority. In fact, right now she had little authority to show. How had it suddenly become her job to pick up a dead person? She hadn’t even eaten since her flight, apart from the chips she’d wolfed down during the night.

  She took the note. “I’ll find him. Do I need documents or something to pick up the deceased?”

  Suddenly memories from before her father had abandoned them popped up, of him saying, “I have a pickup.” She had misunderstood and asked if he’d forgotten something, but then he explained it was called a pickup when he had to go someplace—a nursing home, for example—to put a dead person in a coffin and drive them to the funeral home. He also explained to her that you didn’t call a dead person a corpse. You always called the dead person “the deceased.” It was all about respect for the person. She had even gone along on pickups, but she’d never been allowed to go inside. She’d sat out in the hearse and waited until he came out with the coffin and rolled it into the back. And by then, the lid of the coffin had been screwed down.

  “You won’t need any documentation when Artie is with you. They know him.” The sharpness in Sister Eileen’s voice had disappeared. “This is a very simple pickup; you can handle it easily. But remember to take a stretcher to wheel the deceased on. And bring along some extra plastic. It sounds like it might be a mess.”

  Ilka nodded and smiled, reminding herself that it would soon be over.

  5

  Ilka settled in behind the wheel of the hearse and adjusted the mirrors; she quickly checked out the instrument panel. She wasn’t used to an automatic, so the car jerked when she braked at first. Tense now, she looked in the side mirror; this boat seemed twice as long as the station wagon she drove back home. The engine growled as she slowly backed out of the garage. She realized that a sensor would warn her if she was about to back into something. It actually did feel as if she were navigating a large boat instead of
driving a car. The axles creaked noisily.

  Was the rear door completely shut? She’d tried to fit the stretcher to the tracks, but it hadn’t seemed to sit exactly right, or maybe the wheels underneath hadn’t been pushed up well enough. Finally, she had shoved it in and slammed the door shut as best she could. Hopefully it was heavy enough that it wouldn’t spring open while she was driving.

  She turned around in the parking lot behind the funeral home, then punched in the address on the GPS. It wouldn’t take more than ten minutes to drive to where she hoped Artie was still fishing, she saw. It was just outside town.

  She drove down the broad residential street. It was deserted, but she noticed a school across the way from the funeral home. A group of kids were laughing as they hung over a fence and tossed their school bags down on the ground.

  The houses in the area all looked the same. Front porches and lawns open to the street, hedges to the sides. The Stars and Stripes swayed over several of the porch railings, and every house had the classic American mailbox in front. Ilka followed the directions given by the GPS, turning from one street to the next. She passed a supermarket with its doors open, though there seemed to be no one inside, no cars parked outside. She’d just turned onto the main street when her phone rang.

  “He can’t take care of your jobs on Friday after all,” her mother said, after asking how things were going. “Can you make it home by then?”

  Ilka assured her that everything was going fine. She sensed that her mother held back from asking more. “I don’t think I can be back that soon. But I’ll probably leave on Friday. Otherwise this weekend. Call West District School Photography. They usually have trainees; maybe we can borrow one. If we can’t, call back.” The GPS said to turn and drive over a small canal that looked like it ran far into the city. She seemed to be in an old industrial area, long since abandoned, though ships still lined the wharf.