The Undertaker's Daughter (Ilka #1)(16)

“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.

“Someone beat him to death,” Artie said after they had rolled the stretcher to the hearse. “He might as well have been hit by a train.”

Ilka nodded at the police car. She was still shaken by the anguished screaming, though the woman had stopped and now was sobbing deeply. “Is that a relative?” she asked after the police car drove off.

Artie shook his head and nodded toward the morgue. “She’s the mother of a little girl in there who drowned earlier today on a class trip. They just got hold of her; she works at the pharmacy in Racine, but today is her day off. She was in Chicago visiting her mother. The lake is a big part of people’s lives here, but it’s dangerous. It looks peaceful enough, but it’s cold and it’s deep, and it’s windy once you get away from land. It takes a seaworthy boat to sail out there.”

Ilka watched the police car drive off. “Is he from town too?” She glanced at the stretcher, which Artie was sliding into the hearse.

He shrugged. “Looks like he’s been living on the street; he only had a few clothes in a bag. The police are trying to locate his relatives. A security guard found him behind one of the empty factories at the edge of town, lying in the grass. The police report says he died at the crime scene; maybe he’d been sleeping there and someone attacked him.”

He shrugged again and closed the back door. “Usually the funeral homes in town take turns handling the homeless. Sometimes we get a small fee from the state, but it hardly covers the cremation, not to mention the cost of a coffin.”

“So it’s not something you’re crazy about doing,” she said.

He shook his head. “When you become an undertaker you take this oath, that everyone has the right to a dignified departure from this world. And that includes the people who can’t pay. But you’re right; we don’t fight over these jobs. Like I said, we take turns.”