The Undertaker's Daughter (Ilka #1)(78)

Suddenly she realized what she’d just said. Mike Gilbert lay in the only wooden coffin they had. Artie hadn’t made a mistake after all.

She stopped. “Shit,” she muttered. Her legs were about to give out from under her. Quickly she explained what had happened, and they went back inside. Artie’s hand rested on her back, as if he were nudging her along.

Ilka felt herself walking like a mechanical doll as she followed him into the cold room. Irene’s blue coffin was just inside the door. Her hands were folded over a blanket, and a small flower stuck up from between her fingers. Artie must have plucked it out from among the bouquets in the foyer.

At the far wall stood the zinc coffin with Ed McKenna and his dog, to be flown to Albany. Ilka waited just inside the room while Artie unscrewed the coffin lid, which took some time. Even from a distance, she could make out the elderly man.

Without a word, Artie screwed the lid back on. Ilka pulled herself together, returned to the chapel, and asked Shelby to follow her into her father’s office. They sat down across from each other.

“Something absolutely terrible has happened, and I can’t explain it.” Ilka told her about finding the sister in the cold room earlier that day. “But I didn’t think it could have anything to do with Mike.”

Shelby listened silently; she looked as if she expected Ilka to make some sense out of all this, to help her understand why it had happened to her. She leaned forward. “Is Sister Eileen all right? Is she hurt?”

“She’s okay. We found her in time. She was lying on the floor, with a weak pulse. She wasn’t breathing well. Her voice was…blurry, and she wasn’t making much sense. But at least she was conscious.”

Artie appeared in the doorway. “The police are coming, but the dispatcher couldn’t say exactly when they’ll be here. There’s a big accident outside town. They’re still cleaning up.”

Shelby asked if they could go home. “The children need to go to bed, and Kathy looks like she’s about to collapse, the poor girl. I don’t know what she knows about Mike’s background, either, and what happened back then. She deserves to hear about that.”

“Of course,” Ilka said at once. “I’ll call you as soon as we find something out.”

She nodded, but before she stood up, she said, “Did you see how much they look like him? Both of them. It’s like looking at Mike when he was three. And Kathy seems very nice, don’t you think?”

Ilka nodded.

“They’ve known each other five years, but they weren’t married. Her parents live in Oregon. I’ll never forgive Tommy for not telling me about them. He knew, but he never visited them, even though he had their address. And he didn’t come here to say good-bye, either. He’s always been an asshole.”

Ilka followed them outside. Shelby and Kathy each carried a child, while Emma opened the car doors for them. Her head felt frozen as she watched them drive away. Frozen, or emptied out and stuffed with cotton. Artie came over and stood behind her.

The red taillights disappeared in the dark, and she turned and accepted the cigarette he held out to her.





34



“No,” Ilka repeated, “we have no idea who broke in and locked Sister Eileen in our cold room. No sane person would do such a thing. She could have died if we hadn’t found her.”

“Can she describe the assailant?”

Artie shook his head. “Sister Eileen didn’t see anything. Someone pulled a shroud over her head.”

Ilka stopped listening. She sank into a funk; she’d given up trying to make sense of it all.

“But we know that Sister Eileen was locked in the room,” Artie persisted. “And we know we didn’t shut and lock the door from the outside, because we weren’t here.”

“Where were you?” Officer Thomas said. He pulled a notepad out of his pocket.

“At the crematorium.”

“Which crematorium?”

The policeman looked up when Artie hesitated a beat. “Oldhams’,” Artie said. “And then we drove to Kenosha to see if they could do it quicker, but it was closed. I’d forgotten about that. And then we came back.”

“So you delivered a body to the Oldhams to be cremated?”

“Look, do you really think we locked Sister Eileen in? Shouldn’t we be focusing a little bit on Mike Gilbert disappearing from his coffin? Christ, don’t you think he and his family have suffered enough? If nothing else, take it seriously for Shelby’s sake.”

Officer Thomas grunted; then he straightened up, still holding his notepad. “What about the surveillance cameras? They must cover the back too; you should be able to see who comes in.”

Ilka glanced over at Artie. He looked tired. “They still haven’t been activated. But Sister Eileen was here. It was the middle of the day.”

The officer leaned over the table, his stomach rolling over the edge. He also looked tired—exhausted, in fact. And sad. “I understand if you’re thinking Howard Oldham might be on the warpath again. But it’s not him. Right now, he’s being operated on; the doctors are trying to save his life. He was involved in a serious traffic accident earlier today. For some reason, he lost control of his car out on the highway. He hit a truck head on. He’d been in Chicago, meeting with the family’s lawyers. I don’t know if you’ve heard, but he and Phyllis recently decided to sell their funeral home to the American Funeral Group, the big chain.”