The Undertaker's Daughter (Ilka #1)(2)

Several years later, after complete silence on his part, he wanted a divorce. And that was the last they’d heard from him. When Ilka was a teenager, she found his address—or at least, an address where he had once lived. She’d kept it all these years in a small red treasure chest in her room.

“Surely it won’t take more than a few days,” Ilka said. “I’m planning to be back by the weekend. I’m booked up at work, but I found someone to fill in for me the first two days. It would be a great help if you two could keep trying to get hold of Niels from North Sealand Photography. He’s in Stockholm, but he’s supposed to be back tomorrow. I’m hoping he can cover for me the rest of the week. All the shoots are in and around Copenhagen.”

“What exactly are you hoping to accomplish over there?” Hanne asked.

“Well, they say I’m in his will and that I have to be there in person to prove I’m Paul Jensen’s daughter.”

“I just don’t understand why this can’t be done by e-mail or fax,” her mother said. “You can send them your birth certificate and your passport, or whatever it is they need.”

“It seems that copies aren’t good enough. If I don’t go over there, I’d have to go to an American tax office in Europe, and I think the nearest one is in London. But this way, they’ll let me go through his personal things and take what I want. Artie Sorvino from Jensen Funeral Home in Racine has offered to cover my travel expenses if I go now, so they can get started with closing his estate.”

Ilka stood in the middle of the living room, too anxious and restless to sit down.

“Racine?” Hanne asked. “Where’s that?” She picked up her steaming cup and blew on it.

“A bit north of Chicago. In Wisconsin. I’ll be picked up at the airport, and it doesn’t look like it’ll take long to drive there. Racine is supposedly the city in the United States with the largest community of Danish descendants. A lot of Danes immigrated to the region, so it makes sense that’s where he settled.”

“He has a hell of a lot of nerve.” Her mother’s lips barely moved. “He doesn’t write so much as a birthday card to you all these years, and now suddenly you have to fly over there and clean up another one of his messes.”

“Karin,” Hanne said, her voice gentle. “Of course Ilka should go over and sort through her father’s things. If you get the opportunity for closure on such an important part of your life’s story, you should grab it.”

Her mother shook her head. Without looking at Ilka, she said, “I have a bad feeling about this. Isn’t it odd that he stayed in the undertaker business even though he managed to ruin his first shot at it?”

Ilka walked out into the hall and let the two women bicker about the unfairness of it all. How Paul’s daughter had tried to reach out to her father all her life, and it was only now that he was gone that he was finally reaching out to her.





2



The first thing Ilka noticed was his Hawaiian shirt and longish brown hair, which was combed back and held in place by sunglasses that would look at home on a surfer. He stood out among the other drivers at Arrivals in O’Hare International Airport who were holding name cards and facing the scattered clumps of exhausted people pulling suitcases out of Customs.

Written on his card was “Ilka Nichols Jensen.” Somehow, she managed to walk all the way up to him and stop before he realized she’d found him.

They looked each other over for a moment. He was in his early forties, maybe, she thought. So, her father, who had turned seventy-two in early January, had a younger partner.

She couldn’t read his face, but it might have surprised him that the undertaker’s daughter was a beanpole: six feet tall without a hint of a feminine form. He scanned her up and down, gaze settling on her hair, which had never been an attention-getter. Straight, flat, and mousy.

He smiled warmly and held out his hand. “Nice to meet you. Welcome to Chicago.”

It’s going to be a hell of a long trip, Ilka thought, before shaking his hand and saying hello. “Thank you. Nice to meet you, too.”

He offered to carry her suitcase. It was small, a carry-on, but she gladly handed it over to him. Then he offered her a bottle of water. The car was close by, he said, only a short walk.

Although she was used to being taller than most people, she always felt a bit shy when male strangers had to look up to make eye contact. She was nearly a head taller than Artie Sorvino, but he seemed almost impressed as he grinned up at her while they walked.

Her body ached; she hadn’t slept much during the long flight. Since she’d left her apartment in Copenhagen, her nerves had been tingling with excitement. And worry, too. Things had almost gone wrong right off the bat at the Copenhagen airport, because she hadn’t taken into account the long line at Passport Control. There had still been two people in front of her when she’d been called to her waiting flight. Then the arrival in the US, a hell that the chatty man next to her on the plane had prepared her for. He had missed God knew how many connecting flights at O’Hare because the immigration line had taken several hours to go through. It turned out to be not quite as bad as all that. She had been guided to a machine that requested her fingerprints, passport, and picture. All this information was scanned and saved. Then Ilka had been sent on to the next line, where a surly passport official wanted to know what her business was in the country. She began to sweat but then pulled herself together and explained that she was simply visiting family, which in a way was true. He stamped her passport, and moments later she was standing beside the man wearing the colorful, festive shirt.