The Undertaker's Daughter (Ilka #1)(71)
He nodded again. “We’ll get her ashes in an urn. Any pieces of bone, silver fillings, and any screws she might have from operations are filtered out. And we’ll get her teeth in a bag to give to the family. We put them in small boxes stamped with our logo and deliver them with the photos from the funeral service and our final bill.”
“Did we take photos?”
He looked at her as if he didn’t know what she meant, but then he nodded. “The sister always takes pictures of the coffin during the services. And then some mood photos. Pictures of the buffet and the flowers. And then she gathers up all the condolence cards. We take care of everything so the family doesn’t have to worry about remembering. And when it’s over, we give it all to the relatives.”
Ilka wasn’t aware of all that. “But surely someone knows about Dorothy Cane’s little moonlighting business?”
“She doesn’t do it that often. If someone brought it to the government’s attention, she might have some problems. The IRS would probably be who’s most interested; they might check to see if she’s not reporting some income. I doubt she’d actually be in trouble. The crematorium meets the environmental standards, but of course the Oldhams might be pissed off if they found out about it. They’d make as much trouble for her as they could. But Dorothy isn’t interested in competing with all the others. She’s just making a few extra bucks so she can do her pottery thing.”
“Does the government keep an eye on crematoriums?” Ilka said.
“Sure, of course. But every state has their own cremation laws, and like I said, Wisconsin requires a valid license, and cremations must be done by a certified undertaker. It’s possible the oversight is stricter after what happened down in Georgia, but I doubt it.”
“What was that about?”
“There was this guy who inherited a crematorium from his father in the mid-nineties, and five or six years later, bodies began showing up at the place. It was a major scandal. If I remember right, the first person to notice something was a driver delivering gas or oil to the crematorium. He said he saw body parts lying around, but nothing was done because the local sheriff thought it had to do with regulations, nothing criminal. The driver complained again, and the deputy sheriff went out there, but he didn’t find anything.”
“All they did was go out there and look? They didn’t talk to the owner?”
Artie shook his head. “Guess not. Then the next year someone reported seeing body parts in the forest near the crematorium. This time the sheriff went out, but he didn’t find anything either. Then finally two years after the first report, someone walking their dog stumbled onto some human bones in the forest, and the authorities moved in. They found fifty body parts spread around.”
“That sounds insane.”
“Yeah, it was unbelievable. They brought in a federal disaster team, and things really heated up. It was hard to identify the bodies; they were so decomposed. They found—I think it was three hundred thirty-four bodies on the property. Some of them were in the forest behind, some in sheds; there were bodies in coffins out in the yard. I think one body was even stuck halfway inside the oven. There were bodies everywhere. Some of them had been lying around for five years.”
Artie shook his head. “The entire funeral home industry was in shock, of course, not to mention the relatives. Some of the deceased were in their Sunday clothes wearing jewelry, others in hospital clothes. The police found out that over twenty years, several thousand bodies had been sent there, the Tri-State Crematory. It was the only crematorium in the whole region. But all this happened after the son took over.”
“How in the world could something like that happen?” Ilka realized she was sitting with her mouth open and fists clenched.
“I haven’t followed the case since he was sentenced to twelve years in prison. But back then they called him the Mad Hatter; somehow he got poisoned and went crazy. Mercury poisoning can do that, make people insane and lazy, and mercury just so happens to be one of the dangers with cremation. The regulations are strict about filters, to avoid just that, mercury poisoning. Some people claim something went wrong when he left school to help his dad. They say he’d always been popular, a nice kid, but he didn’t want to take over the crematorium, and something in his head just went ‘click.’ What do I know, though? He’s the only one who does, but I don’t think he ever spoke out.”
“How did the relatives take it? It must have been horrible for them.”
“Yeah, no shit. It really stirred people up. And it turned out he’d been filling urns with cement dust and giving them to the families. They had no idea about all this until the story hit.”
“Hold da k?ft,” Ilka muttered. Incredible. She couldn’t imagine anything like that happening in Denmark.
“It didn’t exactly promote trust in the funeral home industry. Other things have happened, just not as big a tragedy. The authorities found eight bodies in the house of another licensed undertaker; the guy apparently was in trouble financially. Over three hundred bodies, though, that’s a whole different level.”
They were almost back in Racine. Neither of them spoke the rest of the way; Ilka couldn’t shake the terrible feeling inside her, and she badly needed a cup of coffee and a sandwich.
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