The Cool Room by Clifford Beck - HTML preview

Chapter 2

The funeral home performed one to two services on an average day, but with the town's dwindling population, clients were becoming more difficult to acquire. Eventually, the director saw it necessary to increase his fees, forcing some families to take their loved ones to the competition. Yet, the town possessed a large elderly population, and it was only a matter of time before his reception areas would become filled with friends and family grieving for a well-prepared loved one. Like any business, funeral homes operate on supply and demand, and over the last forty years, the town had seen a fifty percent drop in its population. This left the director desperate for ways to bring in new business without resorting to anything illegal. He had heard of one establishment that began harvesting bone from its clients without their families consent and selling the samples on the black market. As it happened, a piece of femur was harvested from someone who had passed from bone cancer. The recipient of that donation naturally developed the same disease and died, bringing about a storm of legal issues and criminal charges. This was a situation that Frank did not want to find himself in. There must be a better way.