The Undertaker's Daughter

by Sara Blaedel

  Ilka felt the woman’s eyes on her as they lifted the coffin out. She straightened up and concentrated on gripping the two handles. It wasn’t pretty, but they managed to keep the heavy coffin level so Mrs. Norton wasn’t shaken too much on the way across the farm’s parking lot.

  Dorothy held a small gray gate open for them. “There’s a catafalque over there by the wall. Go ahead and set the coffin on top of it.”

  She pointed at a long box the length of the coffin, equipped with two tracks to slide coffins in. With her foot, she unlocked the catafalque’s wheels, and they pushed it into a room across the tiled hallway with two empty coffins, lids open. As if two people had just gotten up and walked away.

  Ilka looked around. Whitewashed walls, clean reddish-brown floor tiles. The place was nice, not musty at all, and a bit cool, though there was a faint odor of an extinguished fire out in the hall. In here, though, where they left Mrs. Norton, she couldn’t smell anything. Cool and dark; that was it.

  “Cash would be fine,” Dorothy said. “You want a look at the oven?”

  She started down the hall before Ilka could answer. At the end, she opened a heavy double door. The noise was more pronounced than the heat when they walked into the room, which was open all the way up to the roof. An iron monster with glass doors stood in the middle in front of the brick chimney. Flames leapt up on one side. Underneath the glass doors was a broad trapdoor. The box the ashes fell into, Ilka guessed.

  Artie and Dorothy stood behind her, their voices drowned out by the noise from the oven. She resisted the temptation to walk over and peek inside the glass doors, not knowing what she would see. An iron cupboard with doors and drawers stood against the far wall, with a few iron boxes on the floor in front of it, filled with something. Bolts, it looked like, only bigger than the ones in Ilka’s toolbox back in Copenhagen. She walked over to check it out.

  From behind, Dorothy said, “Hip operations and artificial knees, complicated broken bones. All the reserve parts from the dead end up here. I sell them; I get a good price for titanium. The former owner donated the money to the local athletic club. Nowadays it takes a long time to fill the box up.”

  “How long does a cremation take?” she asked, now that Dorothy had warmed a bit to her.

  “Three, four hours. If it’s a kid, it doesn’t take quite so long. It’s all a matter of size.”

  Interesting, Ilka thought. There was something in Dorothy’s eye, now that she was talking about her work. As if fire was a craft she could control. A passion she wanted to share. “How hot does it get in there?”

  A long iron rod with a short, wide scraper on one end stood up against the wall. Dorothy walked over, opened the glass doors, and stuck the poker inside. She pushed around whatever was in there, and the flames leapt up again. “It can get hotter, but you cremate at between a thousand and twelve hundred degrees. It takes a while for the bodies to start burning, but when they start the heat is stable. It helps if the body is in a wooden coffin so the flames have something to work with.”

  Ilka nodded. Not that this interested her, but suddenly it felt important to break the ice, even though she had no plans to see this woman in coveralls again.

  While they stood talking, she remembered the urn. She went out to the hearse to get it, and on the way, she heard Artie ask if it was okay to come by after supper. The woman nodded and suggested he bring along a bottle of wine.

  It was quiet outside. A slight breeze whispered in the trees surrounding the farm buildings; on the steps stood several large, elegant glazed pots, blue, green, and yellow, that didn’t at all match the tall woman in working clothes. Despite the circumstances, Ilka wasn’t uncomfortable. The relationship between Artie and the woman did bug her a bit, which surprised her. She picked up the box containing the urn, walked back, laid it beside the coffin, then waited for Artie to say good-bye. On the way to the hearse, she noticed an old metal sign leaning against the end of the house by the covered coffins. CREMATORIUM.

  She looked around for a moment, but other than the old sign, nothing pointed to this being an authorized crematorium.

  “What is that place?” she said as they drove up the hill. She was still upset about being rejected at the Oldhams’ crematorium, and she was tired of it all. All the enthusiasm she’d felt that morning, the determination to turn things around, had gradually slipped away without her realizing it. And now this. It felt like they’d been let in through the back door to get a body burned. A body they otherwise couldn’t get rid of. “It can’t be a legal crematorium, can it?”

  Suddenly she felt old, older than these hills, and she shivered even though the sun was blazing. She couldn’t take any more. Maybe it was the men from the American Funeral Group that morning, acting as if they already owned the business. That had seriously shaken her, surprisingly so, and as the hearse rattled down the gravel road, she couldn’t see any use in staying to fight for the funeral home.

  Artie forced the hearse up the last stretch of hill. “It is; it’s actually legal. It’s a closed crematorium, or not really all the way closed, of course; it’s just that Dorothy doesn’t run it as a crematorium anymore.”

  “Who is she?” She stared in the side mirror. At the bottom of the hill, the farmhouse, the red stone building, the tall chimney with wisps of smoke curling up out of it as if it were about to vanish from sight.

  “Dorothy is a potter and artist. She bought the place five or six years ago to use the big ovens for her work.”

  “She burns clay in those ovens! And bodies?”

  Artie sighed and ignored her outburst. “She fishes down at the lake occasionally. That’s where I met her. She went to an art institute in Ohio where an old friend of mine in Key West went. Though they didn’t know each other. When she told me where she’d moved to, we talked some about that, and she’s helped us a few times with interments where there weren’t any relatives.”

  “The homeless, you mean, who also deserve a decent burial,” she said, repeating what she’d heard one of the first days she was in Racine.

  “Your dad made a big deal about everyone being treated with dignity after their death, including people without much money. Not all funeral directors in town see it that way, but Paul did. So, Dorothy let us use her oven.”

  “But is she allowed to do this?”

  “She’s not allowed to do the burning herself; you’re supposed to be a certified undertaker. But I am. All she has to do is renew her license every year; then it’s a hundred percent legal.”

  “But Mrs. Norton has paid for her cremation.”

  He nodded. “And she will be cremated. We’re paying Dorothy for helping us, of course. Just not as much as the Oldhams charge.”

  “And we get the same out of it?”

  He nodded again. “We’ll get her ashes in an urn. Any pieces of bone, silver fillings, and any screws she might have from operations are filtered out. And we’ll get her teeth in a bag to give to the family. We put them in small boxes stamped with our logo and deliver them with the photos from the funeral service and our final bill.”

  “Did we take photos?”

  He looked at her as if he didn’t know what she meant, but then he nodded. “The sister always takes pictures of the coffin during the services. And then some mood photos. Pictures of the buffet and the flowers. And then she gathers up all the condolence cards. We take care of everything so the family doesn’t have to worry about remembering. And when it’s over, we give it all to the relatives.”

  Ilka wasn’t aware of all that. “But surely someone knows about Dorothy Cane’s little moonlighting business?”

  “She doesn’t do it that often. If someone brought it to the government’s attention, she might have some problems. The IRS would probably be who’s most interested; they might check to see if she’s not reporting some income. I doubt she’d actually be in trouble. The crematorium meets the environmental standards, but of course the Oldhams might be pissed off if they found out about it. They
’d make as much trouble for her as they could. But Dorothy isn’t interested in competing with all the others. She’s just making a few extra bucks so she can do her pottery thing.”

  “Does the government keep an eye on crematoriums?” Ilka said.

  “Sure, of course. But every state has their own cremation laws, and like I said, Wisconsin requires a valid license, and cremations must be done by a certified undertaker. It’s possible the oversight is stricter after what happened down in Georgia, but I doubt it.”

  “What was that about?”

  “There was this guy who inherited a crematorium from his father in the mid-nineties, and five or six years later, bodies began showing up at the place. It was a major scandal. If I remember right, the first person to notice something was a driver delivering gas or oil to the crematorium. He said he saw body parts lying around, but nothing was done because the local sheriff thought it had to do with regulations, nothing criminal. The driver complained again, and the deputy sheriff went out there, but he didn’t find anything.”

  “All they did was go out there and look? They didn’t talk to the owner?”

  Artie shook his head. “Guess not. Then the next year someone reported seeing body parts in the forest near the crematorium. This time the sheriff went out, but he didn’t find anything either. Then finally two years after the first report, someone walking their dog stumbled onto some human bones in the forest, and the authorities moved in. They found fifty body parts spread around.”

  “That sounds insane.”

  “Yeah, it was unbelievable. They brought in a federal disaster team, and things really heated up. It was hard to identify the bodies; they were so decomposed. They found—I think it was three hundred thirty-four bodies on the property. Some of them were in the forest behind, some in sheds; there were bodies in coffins out in the yard. I think one body was even stuck halfway inside the oven. There were bodies everywhere. Some of them had been lying around for five years.”

  Artie shook his head. “The entire funeral home industry was in shock, of course, not to mention the relatives. Some of the deceased were in their Sunday clothes wearing jewelry, others in hospital clothes. The police found out that over twenty years, several thousand bodies had been sent there, the Tri-State Crematory. It was the only crematorium in the whole region. But all this happened after the son took over.”

  “How in the world could something like that happen?” Ilka realized she was sitting with her mouth open and fists clenched.

  “I haven’t followed the case since he was sentenced to twelve years in prison. But back then they called him the Mad Hatter; somehow he got poisoned and went crazy. Mercury poisoning can do that, make people insane and lazy, and mercury just so happens to be one of the dangers with cremation. The regulations are strict about filters, to avoid just that, mercury poisoning. Some people claim something went wrong when he left school to help his dad. They say he’d always been popular, a nice kid, but he didn’t want to take over the crematorium, and something in his head just went ‘click.’ What do I know, though? He’s the only one who does, but I don’t think he ever spoke out.”

  “How did the relatives take it? It must have been horrible for them.”

  “Yeah, no shit. It really stirred people up. And it turned out he’d been filling urns with cement dust and giving them to the families. They had no idea about all this until the story hit.”

  “Hold da kæft,” Ilka muttered. Incredible. She couldn’t imagine anything like that happening in Denmark.

  “It didn’t exactly promote trust in the funeral home industry. Other things have happened, just not as big a tragedy. The authorities found eight bodies in the house of another licensed undertaker; the guy apparently was in trouble financially. Over three hundred bodies, though, that’s a whole different level.”

  They were almost back in Racine. Neither of them spoke the rest of the way; Ilka couldn’t shake the terrible feeling inside her, and she badly needed a cup of coffee and a sandwich.

  31

  The back door out to the parking lot was unlocked when they returned. Ilka ignored it; even before they’d left Dorothy Cane’s crematorium, she’d been holding back the call of nature, and now she rushed through the foyer to the guest bathroom while Artie parked the hearse in the garage. She heard him call out for Sister Eileen; then he walked by the bathroom toward the reception area and called her name again.

  Ilka came out of the bathroom and said, “Do you need help with something?”

  “I asked Sister Eileen to clean up after the embalming, and she didn’t put the key back.”

  “Where do you usually put it?”

  “I told her to lay it on the desk in the office, but it’s not there. Usually I keep it on me.”

  “I’ll look on her desk,” Ilka said, turning to go.

  “I already checked; it’s not there.”

  She walked back to the reception area anyway to see if she’d stuck the preparation room key in one of her drawers. “Is it on a key ring?” she yelled back.

  “There’s two keys, on a leather string with a ceramic amulet on the end of it. You can’t miss it.”

  Ilka tugged on the drawers. Two of them were locked; the top one was open. Paper, stapler, tape, envelopes, but no keys. When she closed the drawer, she noticed the nun’s bag beside the desk chair.

  A small, dark gray woman’s bag.

  “I don’t think she’s left,” Ilka said after she returned empty-handed. “Her bag is still here. And I told her to lock up if she left before we came back, and she didn’t. She must be in her apartment.”

  Ilka walked up the stairs to her father’s room to pack up all the folders containing the business’s accounts. She’d planned on going through everything, but now she didn’t feel like starting on anything that might help save the funeral home. It simply wasn’t worth it any longer. What did she think she was proving? Other than that she wouldn’t be scared off.

  “She’s not in her apartment,” Artie yelled from the hallway. His voice was higher than usual, and she stopped on the stairs. He sounded worried. She turned and took the last steps down in one jump.

  He grabbed the doorknob to the preparation room and shook it as he called the nun’s name. He knocked, then slammed the palms of his hands against the door, as if he hoped it would cave in.

  “Why do you think she’s in there?” Ilka asked. What had gotten into him?

  “I don’t necessarily, but she might be; maybe she started feeling bad while she was cleaning up.”

  She heard the worry in his every word; she hadn’t thought much about the relationship between her father’s two employees, but clearly, Artie cared about her.

  “Maybe she lost track of time and suddenly realized she had to go,” Ilka said, wanting to reassure him. “And forgot about returning the key because she was in such a hurry.”

  “And forgot to lock the back door?” He didn’t believe it. “Her apartment door wasn’t locked, either, and her lunch was on the kitchen counter, half-eaten, and her tea was cold.”

  He knocked again.

  “You’re afraid she’s locked herself in,” Ilka said.

  “It’s dangerous in there when the exhaust fan isn’t running. The fumes are poisonous.”

  “But surely she didn’t stop in the middle of her lunch to come over and clean up. Don’t you think she finished cleaning first?”

  He banged on the door again and called her name. “You said her bag was in the reception area. Was her wallet there?”

  “I didn’t look for it,” Ilka admitted. Artie said he would run home for his extra key.

  The house was oddly quiet after he left. As if no sound could get in or out. She felt jittery, agitated, and the feeling spread throughout her body. Suddenly it was as if she were in a house of farewell, a house filled with loss and sorrow. Not a chilling feeling, but empty.

  She went over to the preparation room and slumped to the floor beside the door. The stillness was intense; it
spread under her skin like a gust of wind.

  When Ilka heard Artie drive in, she opened the back door. Infected by his worry, she followed him to the preparation room and stood behind him as he unlocked the door and opened it.

  The room had been cleaned. Every surface had been washed; water still stood on the floor here and there after the hosing down. But the sister wasn’t there. The only thing that caught Ilka’s eye was the thin gold chain Mike had worn around his neck, lying flat under the architect lamp on Artie’s small worktable.

  “If we’re giving the chain to Shelby, I can put it in an envelope for her so it doesn’t get lost.”

  Artie shook his head; then he walked over and picked it up. “I forgot to put it on him. I’ll do it right now.”

  He looked around the room as if making sure the nun wasn’t in one of the corners; then he turned off the light.

  Ilka stayed while he walked over and punched in the code to unlock the cold room door. She was hungry. She could pick up some tacos over at the Mexican place. Or she could start packing the old accounts, like she’d planned on doing before, and lay aside everything she wanted to take home to Denmark. She was halfway up the stairs when she heard the scream.

  Sister Eileen lay on the floor just inside the cold room. The temperature was in the thirties, to hinder the decomposition of bodies without freezing them.

  The nun’s body was limp; her head covering lay beside her. Artie quickly kneeled; then he told Ilka to hold the door so he could carry her out.

  They took her into the office, which had a thick carpet. Artie spoke quietly to her, shaking her lightly. Finally, she opened her eyes, but she was so confused that Ilka couldn’t understand a word she said. She was alive, though, and Ilka let out a sigh she’d been suppressing for several minutes, as if she’d been holding her breath.

  Artie checked her pulse, and Ilka grabbed a thick blanket from a chair in the arrangement room. As she wrapped it around Sister Eileen, her hand grazed the nun’s ice-cold skin. She closed her eyes again, but her eyelids were quivering in fright. “I’m calling an ambulance,” Ilka said after she’d tucked the blanket around the sister’s feet.