The Undertaker's Daughter (Ilka #1)(14)
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 earn 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.”