by Sara Blaedel
Ilka turned and left the room. She almost slammed the door, but she thought better of it. After a moment, she walked into the garage. Artie was over on the other side, opening the rear door of the hearse.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ll go in and find the papers.”
Artie turned to her. They stood for a moment, letting their anger seep away. Then he offered to help find the urn if she would look to see which model Mrs. Norton had ordered.
Now that they’d cleared the air, Ilka scolded herself. She was going to have to make this work.
In the office, she brought out the folder on Mrs. Norton’s funeral. A clay urn had been ordered and paid for, nothing fancy. Just a common model to be put in the grave where her husband already lay.
Before going over to the storage room to find the urn, she noticed two men in dark suits about to get out of an expensive car. They walked across the parking lot toward the front entrance. She stepped back just inside the door, out of sight. There was something purposeful about them, the way they walked silently, straight to the door.
Curious now, also a bit nervous, she moved closer to the reception area. The doorbell rang, and Sister Eileen said something Ilka didn’t pick up. A dark, masculine voice replied. She stayed in the foyer and listened. It seemed that the American Funeral Group hadn’t accepted her refusal to meet with them. Or else they were extremely hard of hearing. Which she doubted. Either way, she was annoyed.
She walked up to them and introduced herself. “Like I already said earlier today, this business is not for sale.” She didn’t want to sound directly rude. Just almost.
Instead of backing off, however, one of the men simply walked farther inside and looked around, as if he’d been invited to take a tour of the house. It was a conscious provocation, obviously, and insolent, which worried Ilka. The sister sat behind her desk, her eyes lowered, while the other dark-suited man stood to the side like a silent threat.
“I want you to leave, now,” Ilka said. She walked over and opened the door. As she held it open, she caught Sister Eileen’s eye; she looked guarded, uncertain, sitting there slumped in her chair. Ilka briefly thought about getting Artie, but instead she again told them to leave.
“I don’t think you know who you’re dealing with,” said the smaller of the two men, the stocky one standing beside the desk. His hands were stuck deep into his pockets, as they had been since the two men had walked in.
“Dealing with? I don’t plan on dealing with anyone. I’m just telling you my father’s funeral home business is not for sale. Not now, anyway. Which I told you on the phone this morning.”
“But it’ll be up for sale later?” he said.
Ilka immediately regretted her choice of words, but she was losing patience. “There’s no reason for you to think that. Right now it’s not for sale.”
There was something in his eye that stopped her from being more forceful. Don’t burn your bridges, a small voice in the back of her head was telling her; these people could prove to be useful. But they couldn’t just barge in this way, and besides, it was none of their business whether or not the funeral home would be for sale in the future.
“We knew your father,” the taller man said, walking over to her. “We also know about his problems. What I think is, you’re making a big mistake, not listening to our organization’s offer.”
He was in her face now, inches away; they were the same height, and it felt as if his eyes were burning straight through her, which enraged her. She stared straight back at him. “Leave, now.”
They stood there without moving; then he broke the tension by glancing over at his partner. They turned and walked out without closing the door.
After they drove off, Ilka slammed the door and glared at it. When she turned around, she saw the nun was pale and frightened. “Have they been here before?”
“They’ve never showed up in person. But American Funeral Group contacted Paul; they’ve been trying to monopolize the market here in Racine for some time. Several years ago, they took over a funeral home on the outskirts of town, an old family business. He should never have sold.”
“Are they trying to control prices?” Ilka still felt uneasy. She would never claim they had threatened her, and perhaps she was just sensitive. But what that tall man had said about her father was about as close as he could come to a threat without being direct about it.
“Paul said they had a reputation for ruining undertakers who didn’t go along with them. But he always managed to avoid them.”
“But they contacted him?”
Sister Eileen nodded. She still looked pale. “They did, a few times. But Paul wasn’t interested in being part of their chain, even though they offered to let him run the business. Changes would of course have been made; we would have had to follow their way of doing business. All their funeral homes are run the same way. But he would have kept his position as funeral director. Your father called it a monopoly, and he kept them at a distance.”
Artie stood in the doorway now. He spoke quietly. “This is exactly what I wanted to keep you away from.”
She turned to him. “What do you mean?”
“If we’d gone through with the deal I set up with Phyllis Oldham, they wouldn’t have targeted us. Now we won’t be able to shake them. American Funeral Group wants to take over everywhere. They undermine businesses, pressure people to sell. I’ve seen it before, and it’s not pretty. They’re brutal. They’ll stop at nothing. If they can’t scare us into selling, they’ll make sure no one dares do business with us. They’ll ruin us, take everything we have so we can’t fight them. And they won’t give up until we surrender or close down.”
“They can’t do that,” Ilka said. “It’s not like this is the Wild West.”
“Oh no?” the sister muttered.
“Matter of fact, they can. They’re financially powerful, and they’ve got connections in places that make us vulnerable. They can see to it that we can’t renew our license. Or they can get the IRS to come in and check every last detail in our books. That would be trouble for anybody. They can invent problems for us we never even heard of.”
Ilka listened without speaking as she tried to ignore the knot growing inside her, the one that made her bend over a few inches and fold her arms.
“Just look at Gregg, like Sister Eileen says. He was forced to sell his funeral home to them a few days before declaring personal bankruptcy. You’ve seen him around town; he usually hangs out on the square or in Oh Dennis!, when they let him in. He’s a shadow of himself. The rest of him disappeared the day he turned over the keys to his funeral home. Drive by and you’ll see how they’ve let the place go. Like, the flag outside the door is ripped; they’ve boarded the windows. The best thing they can do for the place is level it. American Funeral Group closed it right after they took over. They weren’t one bit interested in running the business. All they wanted was one less funeral home. No one knows how they managed to ruin him, but it was a lesson for all of us.”
Artie fished a cigarette out of his pocket. His voice was thin now. He’s under pressure, Ilka thought. And he feels bad. Maybe he’s even scared.
She watched him walk out of the foyer; then she turned to Sister Eileen. “I’m going along to the crematorium to see how everything is done. If we’re not back before you leave, just lock up.”
The nun forced a faint smile and nodded.
30
Artie had already driven the hearse out of the garage. He asked if Ilka had remembered the urn and papers.
“I’ve got it all right here.” Carefully she laid the urn in the hearse. Mrs. Norton’s death certificate was in her bag. She hoped Artie had calmed down.
“Ready?” He pointed to the coffin. “We’re putting her in feet first.”
Ilka looked up in surprise, and he smiled. “That way, if she wakes up and sits up in the coffin, she’ll be able to see out the front windshield. Paul taught me that on our first trip together.”
They
grabbed the handles on each side of the coffin, lifted it over onto the small rollers in the back of the hearse, and carefully pushed it in.
Ilka noticed several rusty spots around the rear door as she closed it. In fact, a few places looked almost rusted away. Iron peeped through the uneven rusty brown splotches, which looked like scabs. She inspected the back; the rust was worst at the bottom of the door. But as long as it drove okay, she thought, it would do. At a distance, it looked decent enough. It wasn’t something she had to take care of right now, and anyway, if the funeral home business was sold, it would probably end up at an auto salvage yard.
She got in. “Is it a long drive?”
Artie shook his head. “The crematorium is on the edge of town. Douglas Oldham was going to build onto Golden Slumbers, but Phyllis didn’t want the soot from burning dead bodies bothering her when she was out on her terrace. Douglas promised there would be a particle filter and machinery installed to remove the mercury in the smoke, and he got permission from the city, but not his wife. So they built it at the end of a residential street where the Oldhams owned a big lot. Now the neighbors out there get to enjoy the crematorium’s chimney.”
“Why didn’t they just build it outside of town?” Ilka fastened her seat belt as the hearse slowly swayed out of the parking lot. Their mood lightened as they chatted.
“Probably for practical reasons. So they wouldn’t have to drive so far. And I think Douglas wanted to show everyone who’s boss, after the county gave him permission to build within city limits. The people living there raised hell, of course, but that didn’t change anything. You got the bucks, you can get it done. It was a great status symbol for his funeral home.”
Ilka looked over at him; she didn’t understand.
“A lot of people think funerals are cheaper if the funeral home has its own crematorium. That’s not true, of course, but the Oldhams hoped it would bring in more customers.”
Gray two-story buildings slid by. Failed businesses, abandoned industry, empty back lots with graffiti smeared on walls visible through mesh fences and open gates. Construction waste and trash had been bulldozed into large piles. It looked like no one had taken responsibility for cleaning up after everything had closed. So much of Racine was like a ghost town that Ilka could hardly imagine the lively trade center where many Danish immigrants had settled. And her father had been one of them, though he must have arrived at the end of Racine’s glory days. What the hell were you doing here? she thought. She leaned her head against the window and watched it all pass by.
They crossed a four-lane bypass that led to the freeway, and after a church and a gas station, Artie signaled and turned off into a residential district with tall trees on both sides of the street. The hearse swayed.
They had ridden silently most of the way, but suddenly he asked, “So we’re not going to see each other? Privately, I mean?”
That took Ilka by surprise. She glanced over at him and smiled. “Like you said, it’s probably not so smart.” She looked out at the front lawns with their low hedges and neat lawns.
“You didn’t think it was so wrong the other day,” Artie reminded her quickly.
“It’s not at all that I think it’s wrong. We’re adults; we don’t owe each other anything. I’m just not so good at planning. Anyway, not at this sort of thing.”
“We don’t have to plan anything,” he said. “It was nice that you just showed up. But it might be even better if I was a little bit prepared.”
“You mean so I don’t walk in on you and your other women.” She expected that would embarrass him, but he didn’t react. Maybe he’d already forgotten the woman who had driven off the first evening Ilka came to get him. Then she thought about the guy at the bar who had showed up at the funeral home. She dropped it.
Artie hummed something she couldn’t hear. At the end of the street, a low, square brick building with an enormous chimney came into sight. A small paved driveway to the left led around the building. CREMATORIUM was written in the same gold cursive script as on the sign at the Oldhams’ funeral home. But there was nothing pretentious about anything else. The chimney rose above the treetops, pointing to the sky like a symbol of death.
Artie drove around the building and backed the hearse up to a green door. He’d just gotten out when an older man wearing a black shirt tucked into a pair of heavy canvas pants stepped outside. His Irish cap pulled down over his forehead shaded his eyes. Ilka sensed a problem, and sure enough, the man folded his arms and shook his head when Artie approached. For a moment, the two men stood talking, but before she could loosen her seat belt, Artie was back in the hearse. He slammed the door angrily and turned the key.
“This is fucking blackmail; I’ll be damned if I’m going to stand for this.”
They roared out of the driveway, as much as the hearse could be said to roar, and the chimney disappeared behind them as he floored it.
“Blackmail?” Ilka didn’t understand.
They drove for a while in silence while he calmed down.
“He demanded cash before he would accept the body! And they’re charging us thirty percent extra for being late on our payments.” He was furious again. “If they think they can run us out of business because we backed out of the deal, they’ve got another think coming.”
“Can they do this? I mean, I’m sure they can demand cash if we owe them. But can they add thirty percent? Isn’t that a lot? Isn’t it usually just a few percent for a late payment?”
Artie shrugged and stared straight ahead, though he kept his eye on the cars crossing the highway ahead. “In principle they can do whatever they want; they own the place. But we’re not taking this lying down. I don’t know if Paul had a special arrangement with them. It wouldn’t surprise me if he’d been paying extra to keep the peace, since the Oldhams didn’t try to cut prices and run him out of business. But if I know Golden Slumbers, they profited from it.”
“Do we have to take Mrs. Norton back? Or are there other crematoriums we can just show up at?”
Artie nodded. “There’s a private crematorium just outside of town; it’s open twenty-four hours a day. We can drive up there, but it’s expensive. And there’s one down in Kenosha. They also burn pets; not all crematoriums do. Right now, they’re closed, though. They’re renovating the place.”
Ilka thought of the crematorium at Bispebjerg Hospital back in Copenhagen. It was hard for her to understand that Americans could charge whatever they wanted, though she didn’t know anything about it. It just seemed so improbable that there weren’t regulations. But then, she didn’t know if pets could be cremated in Denmark, or if cremations were done twenty-four hours a day. She’d never needed to know.
Artie had turned off, and now they were headed west, away from Lake Michigan, according to Ilka’s sense of direction. Which wasn’t particularly reliable. “We’re not going north?”
Artie didn’t answer, but soon, when the trees seemed to close in on the narrow road, he turned off again. They drove through hills with large, open fields, sectioned off into enormous squares. “First let’s see if Dorothy has her oven up and running,” he said.
He slowed down and turned off onto a winding gravel road leading to a farm nestled in the hills. Ilka couldn’t spot a sign, which made her wonder, but she waited for Artie to say something.
“Here we are,” was all he said.
Two long ells of a farmhouse lay at angles to each other. Potted plants stood in the windows of the one Ilka guessed was the living quarters. A building with an oddly shaped tall roof lay farther back. The crematorium, she thought, when she noticed the tall chimney at one end. A thin, almost invisible wisp of smoke rose out of it. There were no other cars in the parking lot, no signs indicating this was a crematorium. In contrast to the wooden and masonry houses in town, the buildings were made of red stone.
Artie punched the hearse’s horn several times, and soon a middle-aged woman in coveralls, her medium-length gray hair held in a scarf, came o
ut and stood on the front steps. When she saw the hearse, her face lit up in a big smile. She waved.
Artie jumped out of the car and walked over to her. She didn’t look at all like someone who ran a crematorium, nor did the place even look like a crematorium to Ilka. Beside the building with the chimney, though, the ends of two coffins stuck out from under a tarp, with firewood stacked beside them. An ax stuck up out of a chopping block.
She looked back at the woman. Obviously, she and Artie knew each other well. Something in the way they faced each other told her they might have been lovers. Curious now, Ilka leaned forward for a better look. Suddenly the woman stared over at the hearse; her smile disappeared as she concentrated on what Artie was saying. They seemed to be negotiating.
Being ignored this way annoyed her. She got out of the car, walked over right past Artie, and introduced herself.
“She’s from Denmark,” Artie said. She waited for the woman to measure her up. Reluctantly she held a surprisingly big, strong, dry hand out to Ilka.
“Dorothy Cane.”
When she stepped down to face her, Ilka was surprised to see they were the same height. They eyed each other for a moment before Artie broke in. “We can carry the coffin ourselves.” He pointed out at the hearse.
“What is it?” Dorothy asked. “The cold room is shut off; I can’t have anything sitting around here. And I’m busy.”
“This is one of the quick ones,” Artie said. “A small older lady.”
She nodded. “Okay, then.”
Artie smiled at her; then he got back into the hearse and slowly backed up toward the red building. He waved Ilka over to help him with the coffin.
“What about the money?” Dorothy said.
“We’ll pay you right here and now,” Ilka said. Not that she had any idea how much it would cost to burn Mrs. Norton, but the two thousand dollars she’d promised to Sister Eileen was in her pocket, and she wanted so badly to shut Dorothy Cane up. For some reason, the woman irritated her.