The Undertaker's Daughter (Ilka #1)(19)

“I’m staying here. I’ll pick my things up at the hotel, and please make sure I’m not locked out when I return.”

The nun stood for a moment, looking like a child who had just been bawled out, but then she nodded. “Of course. You’re quite welcome to stay. I just thought it wouldn’t be nice for you sleeping upstairs while Artie works. We’ve all gotten used to that, also to the smell. But you are more than welcome if it doesn’t bother you.”





7



“No,” Ilka told the receptionist. “I won’t be needing the room. I’m just here to pick my things up.”

“But we can’t cancel a reservation when the room has already been occupied,” he argued. He was so big that Ilka couldn’t see the chair he was sitting in. His arms filled the sleeves of his blazer, and when he moved them, she smelled stale sweat and something else she couldn’t put a finger on.

“Yesterday you didn’t have a room, even though we’d reserved one, so doesn’t this even things up?” Ilka didn’t care if it cost her a night’s fee, or rather, if it cost Artie and Sister Eileen.

There was a small coffee bar across from the reception desk. Unmanned. Ilka could stand a cup of coffee, and she looked around for someone to serve her while the receptionist conferred with a coworker. Several minutes passed, and she couldn’t hear anything from the back room, only the insistent whining sound she’d heard the day before, like a telephone ringing somewhere.

At last she gave up and walked through the hotel lobby. The nun had given her the room card along with the car keys. When Ilka walked past a wide ice machine, the humming drowned out the monotone whining sound for a moment. The room smelled of cigarettes when she walked in; she was glad to know the embalming fluids hadn’t ruined her sense of smell. Sweat and smoke apparently trumped the scents in a morgue.

Her suitcase lay on the bed beside her neatly folded coat.

The reception desk was still empty when she returned. She laid the room card on the desk, walked outside, and threw her suitcase into her father’s silver-gray Chevrolet. She got in behind the wheel and sat for a moment with her eyes closed. Again, she felt as if he were with her, though not because she recognized anything in the car. It was more a presence.

Inside the pocket on the door was a package of gum, an empty water bottle, a Post-it with an address, and a receipt from a parking machine. Ilka leaned over and opened the glove compartment. A pile of papers lay under the car manual, and she glanced at them. A questionnaire from a car wash—how was the service? A reminder from the dentist; a chimney sweep was coming. Things that come in the mail, but nothing about him. She stuffed the papers back in, but then she had second thoughts.

She brought out the reminder from the dentist and punched into the GPS the address it had been sent to. It would take ten minutes to reach the destination, she was told.

Ilka headed toward the harbor. A large, open area behind the hotel looked like a construction site that had been deserted for years, from the way the weeds and small trees had taken over. The windows of enormous warehouses closer to the city were boarded up, but a new park had been built in the southern part of the harbor area. It would have looked nice had there been people around. Someone here must have been ambitious, had wanted to accomplish something, she thought, but likely had failed. For a moment, the sense of emptiness and abandonment overwhelmed her. She looked at the GPS. Who knew what she’d find at that little black-and-white marker?



The residential street looked like the ones she’d driven around on earlier. But behind the house where her father had lived with his new family, the ground sloped down to a river with large trees leaning out over the banks. It wasn’t hard to see that this was one of the town’s better neighborhoods. Ilka approached the house slowly. She took in everything around her, tried to imagine how it had been for him to come home to the life being lived here. It was far from Br?nsh?j Square, in every way.

She parked in front of the large, square, white wooden house with a porch extending all the way across the front. It took her a moment to notice someone on the porch, a woman in a wheelchair moving toward the front door. The small, frail woman’s light hair was pinned up on her head. Her father’s wife; Ilka was sure of it. The front door opened, and a blond woman appeared carrying a tray. The two women spoke; then the younger woman looked over toward the car. She took the tray back into the house. The woman in the wheelchair stayed outside, but she didn’t look Ilka’s way.

Suddenly Ilka realized she was clenching the wheel. The engine was still running, and the car jerked when she stepped on the gas and drove away. Obviously, they had recognized the Chevy.

She reached the end of the street before noticing it was blocked, leaving her no choice but to turn around and drive back. This time she drove past the house without slowing. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the other woman in the doorway, this time without the tray.





8



Ilka blinked as the bright sun shone directly in her eyes. Mentally, she felt dead tired, and she was thirsty. Annoyed by the sunlight, she turned her head to the side. After her little excursion to her father’s house, she had tiptoed up to his room and closed and locked the door. She’d sat on the bed for a while before pulling out the drawers in his desk one by one, first carefully, then with greater impatience. She wanted answers. She felt his presence strongly, all the time, not only there in the room but when driving his car. At his enormous box of a house, with the charming front porch and the lawn that looked as if it had been trimmed with nail scissors, she hadn’t sensed him at all.