The Undertaker's Daughter (Ilka #1)(58)

She drove into the parking lot and noticed a light in one of Sister Eileen’s windows, while the rest of the funeral home was dark. She parked and got out. Stood for a moment, enjoying the mild late summer evening, though she still felt bad about being so short with her mother.

Why the hell did you even come here? she thought, scolding herself as she walked up the steps. She decided to spend Sunday going through the last drawers and boxes in her father’s room. She would send the whole mess to Denmark by FedEx, so her mother could see what he had left behind.

On the way up, the thought struck Ilka that it might help her mother stifle some of her anger if she knew what had happened back then. Even though she had found Hanne and had gotten on with her life, it was obvious to everyone that being abandoned still plagued her.

She walked in, threw her bag on the floor, and turned the desk lamp on. Suddenly she heard breathing and something moving on the bed, and she whirled around.

Amber sat cross-legged on the bed; she hadn’t even bothered to take her boots off. She leaned lazily up against the wall. Nothing about her hinted at how long she’d been waiting for Ilka to come back.

“Hi,” Ilka said. She held on to the back of her father’s chair, which she had grabbed in shock a moment before. Now she tried to act nonchalant, though her heart was in her throat.

“Don’t come by the house again,” her half sister said. Slowly she leaned forward and slid her legs off the side of the bed. “It’s not good for Mom. It’s not good for anything.”

“How did you get in?” Ilka tried to calm her heartbeat; her temples were pounding like shutters in a hurricane.

“Dad gave me a key several years ago.”

Ilka heard the provocation in her voice; she wanted to show she could come and go as she pleased. Apparently without Artie and Sister Eileen noticing. But why had she sat out on the bench when she could come inside?

Ilka walked over to the bed. She was so frightened, so angry, that she had to fold her arms to keep from hitting her youngest half sister. “What is it I’ve done to all of you? If it’s about this”—she held her arms out—“you can have it; I didn’t ask for it, this business. Really, I’d rather go back to Denmark. You’re more than welcome to take over, right now. In fact, I think it’s totally unfair that I’m the one who has to put things right, to get out of this horrible situation our father put his employees in. And none of you even come by and offer to help. What’s wrong with all of you? Don’t you know how much money this place owes? What kind of daughters are you?”

Amber was standing now, and for a moment they stood face-to-face. But she shrugged. “I’m sorry it has to be this way.”

Ilka listened to her footsteps fade down the stairs; then she threw herself on the bed.

What was it with these people? It was one thing if they didn’t care for her, didn’t accept their father having had a family before them. That she could handle. But not caring about what had been his daily life—that simply wasn’t normal. It was almost as if they were afraid of something.





26



“Wake up! You’ve got to come downstairs,” Artie said as he banged on the door.

Ilka lay still for a moment with her eyes closed. Fragments of his face close-up, the sense of freedom she had felt after their quickie, kept his voice and the sunlight through the curtains at a distance. She thought about Amber, about her father, everything she didn’t know about him. She had sat up half the night, going through the storage boxes piled up against the wall. Racetrack results and old programs, with notes written in ornate script in the margins. Winning tickets and receipts from losses that had been added to expenses. There were lots of those.

She had found several pictures in the bottom of one of the boxes. Photos of her father with his parents, her grandparents. She had seen them only sporadically after he left, and finally not at all. Both had died before she was twenty. In several of the old photos, her father was with boys Ilka didn’t recognize. Cousins, maybe? One box held old clippings from newspapers, again mostly having to do with racing. Which driver had switched stables. Who had new sponsors; trainers moving around. Some of them in a plastic folder were about a Danish trotter manager brought in to Maywood Park racetrack, Melrose Park, Illinois, in 1982. In the article, the manager was proclaimed to be one of Scandinavia’s most promising, with extensive experience and several Derby victories by drivers he represented under his belt. Ilka wondered about that. Her father had certainly not understated his accomplishments.

Her father. She had recognized him immediately from the grainy photo. Farther down in the article, she read that Paul Jensen was co-owner of the all-star team, that he had chipped in three hundred thousand dollars, the same as the other investors, but he was the only one involved in managing the stable. He looked exactly the way she remembered him: tall, with a tweed cap pulled down over his forehead. He smiled for the camera. A man of the world.

So. Her father had gotten a job over here. But three hundred thousand dollars! She couldn’t imagine where he’d gotten hold of that kind of money, with the funeral home in the red when he left Denmark. He did have his winnings, but they didn’t even come close to that amount. Her stomach sank.

Artie knocked again. “Shelby’s here. It sounds like all hell is about to break loose. You’ve got to come down and talk to her.”