The Undertaker's Daughter (Ilka #1)(3)

“Is this your first trip to the US?” Artie asked now, as they approached the enormous parking lot.

She smiled. “No, I’ve traveled here a few times. To Miami and New York.”

Why had she said that? She’d never been in this part of the world before, but what the hell. It didn’t matter. Unless he kept up the conversation. And Miami. Where had that come from?

“Really?” Artie told her he had lived in Key West for many years. Then his father got sick, and Artie, the only other surviving member of the family, moved back to Racine to take care of him. “I hope you made it down to the Keys while you were in Florida.”

Ilka shook her head and explained that she unfortunately hadn’t had time.

“I had a gallery down there,” Artie said. He’d gone to the California School of the Arts in San Francisco and had made his living as an artist.

Ilka listened politely and nodded. In the parking lot, she caught sight of a gigantic black Cadillac with closed white curtains in back, which stood first in the row of parked cars. He’d driven there in the hearse.

“Hope you don’t mind.” He nodded at the hearse as he opened the rear door and placed her suitcase on the casket table used for rolling coffins in and out of the vehicle.

“No, it’s fine.” She walked around to the front passenger door. Fine, as long as she wasn’t the one being rolled into the back. She felt slightly dizzy, as if she were still up in the air, but was buoyed by the nervous excitement of traveling and the anticipation of what awaited her.

The thought that her father was at the end of her journey bothered her, yet it was something she’d fantasized about nearly her entire life. But would she be able to piece together the life he’d lived without her? And was she even interested in knowing about it? What if she didn’t like what she learned?

She shook her head for a moment. These thoughts had been swirling in her head since Artie’s first phone call. Her mother thought she shouldn’t get involved. At all. But Ilka disagreed. If her father had left anything behind, she wanted to see it. She wanted to uncover whatever she could find, to see if any of it made sense.

“How did he die?” she asked as Artie maneuvered the long hearse out of the parking lot and in between two orange signs warning about roadwork and a detour.

“Just a sec,” he muttered, and he swore at the sign before deciding to skirt the roadwork and get back to the road heading north.

For a while they drove in silence; then he explained that one morning her father had simply not woken up. “He was supposed to drive a corpse to Iowa, one of our neighboring states, but he didn’t show up. He just died in his sleep. Totally peacefully. He might not even have known it was over.”

Ilka watched the Chicago suburbs drifting by along the long, straight bypass, the rows of anonymous stores and cheap restaurants. It seemed so overwhelming, so strange, so different. Most buildings were painted in shades of beige and brown, and enormous billboards stood everywhere, screaming messages about everything from missing children to ultracheap fast food and vanilla coffee for less than a dollar at Dunkin’ Donuts.

She turned to Artie. “Was he sick?” The bump on Artie’s nose—had it been broken?—made it appear too big for the rest of his face: high cheekbones, slightly squinty eyes, beard stubble definitely due to a relaxed attitude toward shaving, rather than wanting to be in style.

“Not that I know of, no. But there could have been things Paul didn’t tell me about, for sure.”

His tone told her it wouldn’t have been the first secret Paul had kept from him.

“The doctor said his heart just stopped,” he continued. “Nothing dramatic happened.”

“Did he have a family?” She looked out the side window. The old hearse rode well. Heavy, huge, swaying lightly. A tall pickup drove up beside them; a man with a full beard looked down and nodded at her. She looked away quickly. She didn’t care for any sympathetic looks, though he, of course, couldn’t know the curtained-off back of the hearse was empty.

“He was married, you know,” Artie said. Immediately Ilka sensed he didn’t like being the one to fill her in on her father’s private affairs. She nodded to herself; of course he didn’t. What did she expect?

“And he had two daughters. That was it, apart from Mary Ann’s family, but I don’t know them. How much do you know about them?”

He knew very well that Ilka hadn’t had any contact with her father since he’d left Denmark. Or at least she assumed he knew. “Why has the family not signed what should be signed, so you can finish with his…estate?” She set the empty water bottle on the floor.

“They did sign their part of it. But that’s not enough, because you’re in the will, too. First the IRS—that’s our tax agency—must determine if he owes the government, and you must give them permission to investigate. If you don’t sign, they’ll freeze all the assets in the estate until everything is cleared up.”

Ilka’s shoulders slumped at the word “assets.” One thing that had kept her awake during the flight was her mother’s concern about her being stuck with a debt she could never pay. Maybe she would be detained; maybe she would even be thrown in jail.

“What are his daughters like?” she asked after they had driven for a while in silence.