The Uninvited

by Cat Winters

  Perhaps this wasn’t one of the family members.

  He raised his head, as if my gaze had formed a cold mark on the side of his neck, and he turned his face my way, revealing blue eyes and lips drawn in a taut line.

  The dead man’s brother.

  I had seen him in the store once before when passing by on my way to purchase sheet music down the way, but I hadn’t paid him much heed. I didn’t even know either of the men’s names. They were just “those Germans who sold tables and chairs.”

  I slipped back into shadow and continued onward with my bags. My shoes ground across more piles of glass before I reached the stone bank building next door and met with smoother sidewalk.

  I would wait to make amends the next day, when the hurt wasn’t so fresh and the sun softened the viciousness of night.

  LIKE WERNER STREET ITSELF, the Werner Street Hotel had boiled, bleached, and scrubbed its German name clean at the start of the war a year and a half earlier. Therefore, it was the Hotel America that I entered with my bags weighing down my arms and my family’s sins burning a hole through the center of my stomach. In the far corner, next to the sheer curtains covering one of the lobby windows, stood an American flag with a wilted, wrinkled air, as if it had tired of everything expected of it. Wicker chairs sat in welcoming angles in front of an unlit fireplace that smelled of ash, and blurry photographs of Buchanan’s dirt-covered streets from the late 1800s hung on burgundy walls. Potted ferns attempted to lend a resort-style ambience.

  Behind the front desk sat a fellow with red hair parted smack-dab down the middle of his skull—Mr. Greene, if I remembered his name correctly from Buchanan’s second-most-notorious adultery story, as told to me by my friend Helen Fay. He lounged in a chair with his big brown shoes propped upon the wooden countertop. His face hid behind the October issue of Blue Book, my brothers’ favorite fiction magazine because of the Edgar Rice Burroughs stories. His feet wiggled a little, and he seemed content, despite the rumors that his wife had left town with a handsome young anti-Prohibitionist only five months earlier.

  “Good evening.” I plunked my bags on the floorboards. “Do you have any rooms left tonight?”

  Mr. Greene lowered the magazine to his lap and squinted at me through round wire spectacles. He possessed the type of aging-gentleman complexion that looked wrinkled and craggy and doughy white, with fuzzy little pipe-cleaner eyebrows that matched his strawberry hair.

  “It’s a little late for a lady to be traveling at night, don’t you think?” he asked.

  “Well, I . . . um . . .” I brushed the sweat from my palms on the sides of my skirt. “It’s just . . . I was ill this past week, and now that I’m a little better I want a . . .” I swallowed down the quaver in my voice. “A respite from the house.”

  He nodded. “I had that same illness myself. Knocked me clear off my feet right here at the front desk.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry to hear that.”

  He waved away my concern. “Aw, no need to feel sorry for me. I’m still here. Unlike some . . .” He swung his feet off the counter and dropped his soles to the floor with a dull thud. “I keep hearing this particular strain of the flu is killing horrific amounts of people, especially down in the foreigner part of town.”

  “Oh?” I stiffened with my arms straight by my sides. “I . . . I didn’t realize the flu had turned quite so serious. I saw the sign warning travelers not to enter Buchanan, but—”

  “The germs spread at that Liberty Loan parade on the last day of September.”

  “I was already sick and missed the parade.”

  “Well”—he shook his head and knitted those pipe-cleaner eyebrows—“it’s pretty bad. People are saying it’s taking younger adults mainly. Healthy ones.” He lifted his copy of Blue Book with all the pulpy newsprint pages flapping about. “If you want to know the truth, it reminds me more of a science fiction story than a regular old flu. There’s something unnatural about it.”

  I pressed my hand against my right temple to stave off a bout of dizziness. “I’m sorry to hear it’s that serious.”

  He opened a drawer and stuffed the magazine inside. “You know, I’m the one who should be sorry. Influenza isn’t a very hospitable subject matter for a hotel looking to sell a good night’s sleep, is it? Let me start over again.” He folded his hands on the counter and sat up straight. “We do have vacant rooms if you’d care to stay for the night.”

  “Yes, I would. Thank you. Sh-should I . . .” I stepped toward the hotel’s open register, smelling old pipe smoke and perfumes embedded in the fibers of the pages. “Should I fill out my name in here?”

  “The fountain pen’s not working.” Mr. Greene cupped his right hand around his mouth and lowered his voice. “There’s an APL fella who checked in a little while earlier.” He gestured with his thumb toward a staircase upholstered in worn red velvet. “I think he broke the pen on purpose when he was snooping around in the register. Probably trying to run me out of business.”

  I glanced toward the stairs and dropped my voice to a whisper. “How do you know he’s in the American Protective League?”

  “He pretended to be from the gas company last month. Asked to inspect my pipes. I think he’s spying on me.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “Because he’s got nothing better to do. I’m one hundred percent American, though—don’t worry about that.” He nodded toward the wilted flag in the corner. “He won’t find anything German here.”

  “Well, my own family would fall under the category of ‘superpatriots,’ so there’s no need to worry about me either. Ooph.” A hot flame of pain flared between my eyes. I winced and rubbed the bridge of my nose and thought of the German brother standing amid blood and battered furniture at Liberty Brothers. “I’m sorry. I’m still recovering from the illness. If you need to know my name, in spite of the broken pen, it’s Ivy Rowan.”

  “Oh! Frank’s daughter.”

  The pain deepened, planting spiked heels in my sinuses, splintering my bones with a steel pickax. “Yes. I’m his daughter.”

  “I went to school with him. I still see him at the saloon now and then.”

  “Yes, well . . .” I swallowed. “That’s the only time you’re likely to find him in town. The farm demands so much work these days. Our crops are helping to feed Europe.”

  Mr. Greene leaned forward on his elbows and peeked toward the staircase. “Say that last part a little louder,” he said in another whisper. “Please.”

  “I said”—I raised my voice—“our crops are helping to feed Europe. The government pays us well, but the pressure is high.”

  He scowled and shook his head.

  “But it’s a good pressure,” I added, allowing my words to echo across the burgundy walls for the APL informant to hear. “We’re happy to grow our wheat for the starving overseas.” I sighed, exhausted, my shoulders slumping. “I’m sorry, but I just really need that room.”

  “Sure, sure. I’ll get you settled.”

  Mr. Greene stood and turned toward a grid of keys that hung on tiny golden wall hooks. With the soft clink of metal tapping wood, he fetched a silver one that dangled under the number twenty-two. “I’ll help you with your bags.” He pivoted back around on his heel. “I hope I haven’t frightened you with all this talk of disease and death and”—another whisper—“spies before bedtime.”

  “No, it’s all right.” I forced a smile. “I’ve already survived the illness, and I hope my mother is strong enough to continue to avoid it. Hopefully, this is just a short scare that will pass swiftly.”

  “Let’s hope. They’re not panicking in Chicago yet, which is always a good sign.”

  “Yes, that’s true.”

  I followed Mr. Greene and my swinging bags upstairs to the empty room, but I didn’t dare admit that it wasn’t the flu that pricked at the nape of my neck and drove me to glance over my shoulder every few seconds, as if a dead man stood there, waiting for me to apologize on hands and knees.
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  MY HOTEL BED CREAKED and wheezed worse than my bones and my lungs had during my bout with the fevers. If I stayed perfectly still, the creaking stopped, but then an awful silence gripped the hotel. I feared that the APL man stood on the other side of my wall, listening through a water glass to hear if I’d confess in my sleep my repulsion toward the German’s murder. No floorboards whined from his footsteps, though. He didn’t cough or belch or produce other bodily sounds made by men when they think ladies aren’t listening.

  For the past twenty-five years, I had fallen asleep to the clamor of Father and Mama bickering downstairs and the snores that ceaselessly rumbled from the boys’ room next door to mine. The dogs were always barking out in the yard, and feet pattered nonstop through the house. Breezes rattled through the cracks between the windows and doors. The chimney whistled. Our home possessed a heartbeat, a pulse, and a steady breath that perpetually assured me that I never wanted for company. The noises told me that everyone remained alive and well despite the anger simmering and bubbling like molten lava beneath the foundation.

  Nighttime silence, therefore, struck me as unnatural and wrong.

  I curled onto my side with a low groan of bedsprings, and I hummed “Down in the Valley” to fill the room with some sort of sound. Eventually, my eyelids thickened and fluttered shut. I fought to block out visions of the shock of blood on Father’s overalls, and over and over I imagined myself walking through the doors of that shattered and butchered German furniture store. I envisioned telling the murdered man’s brother, I’m sorry. It was my father and brother who killed him. I’m sorry. What can I do to help? How can you purge me of this guilt that’s now wedged like a razor blade in my belly?

  My stomach burned for hours, moaning and complaining and undulating with waves of shame-fueled pain—roiling, clawing pain. Eventually, well past midnight, my brain succumbed to a restless version of sleep, and I dreamed of a fall morning ten years earlier, when I was fifteen and Billy twelve. Peter, just seven, played somewhere off in the fields, chasing bugs or the dogs, his blond hair blending in with the rustling stalks of corn. Billy and I worked in the stable, raking the stalls, stirring up the sweet scent of hay that epitomized the smell of our childhood. He and I were the same height by then, and we shared the same hair color—a blend of hues that people called everything from dark blond to brown, and even red, depending on the light and the beholder. We were known for our golden-brown eyes, freckled cheeks, and prominent cheekbones, supposedly inherited from an Iroquois great-grandmother whom no one ever talked about. People called us both “handsome,” but that word always made me feel like a boy.

  In my dream, as in real life, Father walked in on us just as Billy started flinging hay at me and chuckling with his rich belly laugh. I froze when I saw Father standing at the stable’s entrance—half in shadow, half in sunlight. His thick arms, covered by the blue sleeves of his work shirt, hung by his sides, and he narrowed his eyes beneath his hat. His jaw tightened.

  My heart leapt into my throat, for Father was always hollering at Billy and tanning his hide for one thing or another.

  Don’t play the piano like your sister. That’s a girl’s instrument.

  Stop reading so much and get your damn head out of the clouds.

  Stand up straight, boy. You look like a half-wit.

  “You think your chores are a joke, boy?” he asked in a low growl that turned my blood cold. “You know what I ought to do when you disrespect our farm and your pa like this?”

  Billy stood there with the rake still poised in the air, frozen in the act of sending golden strands of hay flying off the rusted teeth.

  “I ought to whack you on the side of the head,” said Father, “and knock out all those lazy, pompous thoughts of yours.”

  Billy stood up straight, and with a boldness and defiance I’d never seen in him before, he tossed his rake into a pile of horse dung. “Is that why you’re so stupid, Pops?” he asked, and my chest tightened. “Someone knocked out all of your intelligent thoughts by whacking you in the head?”

  Father grabbed a shovel and ran at my brother. Before I knew what was coming, he raised the blade and struck Billy in the side of the head with the sickening thud of metal hitting bone. I screamed and felt my own brain crack wide open just from the sound alone. Billy dropped to the ground but didn’t lose consciousness. He vomited during the rest of the day, and Dr. Lowsley came to visit. We had to say one of Billy’s friends threw a baseball bat that accidentally smacked him in the head. We all lied for Father and prayed for Billy. Dr. Lowsley instructed us to wake Billy up throughout the night and check to make sure he stirred, but Mama’s footsteps didn’t whisper across the floorboards to my brothers’ room often enough.

  Around midnight, I planted myself on the edge of Billy’s bed, and I watched him for the rest of the night—just as I would watch over everyone in that house for the rest of my years within those walls.

  My brain would split wide open again if I ever didn’t keep the household intact.

  MUSIC STIRRED ME AWAKE in the Hotel America. I opened my eyes and stared at the hulking black outline of a chest of drawers across the room, and for a good thirty seconds, all I could hear were my own ragged breaths.

  There it was again—music.

  Jazz music.

  The faint syncopated rhythm of horns and drums and a lusty piano slipped through the window along with a draft and settled inside my soul. The sounds relaxed my shoulders, soothed my lungs, and erased the sharp aftertaste of the German’s death and my dream about Billy and the shovel. Somewhere beyond the hotel’s thick brick and mortar walls, people found the strength to pick up instruments and continue on with their lives, despite the strange influenza, despite the war, despite the murder that had knocked me sideways and thrust me out of my own home.

  My toes bobbed to the beat of the percussion. Deep breaths assuaged some of the burning in my stomach. I lay back down on the warm sheet and shut my eyes, and when I fell back to sleep, I dreamed I danced on a mahogany table, dressed in a giant pair of bright-blue butterfly wings . . . wearing absolutely nothing else but my naked skin.

  Chapter 3

  I opened the door of my hotel room and found a short, dark-haired man in a charcoal-gray suit loitering at the far end of the hallway. He leaned his right hand against the wine-colored wallpaper at the top of the stairs and seemed to be listening in on someone who whistled “For Me and My Gal” down in the lobby.

  I dragged my bags out to the hall, doing my best to look my most American—if such a feat is at all possible when one is closing up a hotel room while wracked with guilt over a death.

  The man turned my way, and I spotted a familiar young face with a stubby nose and thick, round glasses that magnified the eyes behind them into enormous brown orbs.

  The orbs blinked at me.

  “Ivy?”

  “Oh. Lucas.” I picked up my bags and wandered down the hall toward the fellow, who happened to be one of Billy’s closest pals. “What are you doing here?”

  “Shh.” He touched an index finger to his lips. “Never mind me. How’s Billy over in France?”

  I set my bags down again. “He’s . . . umm . . .” I blinked back tears and rubbed my neck. My throat stung too much to speak.

  “Oh, God.” Lucas stood up from the wall. “Is he—?”

  I nodded, my chin quivering.

  “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know.”

  “Thank you. We just found out last week.”

  “Jesus.” Lucas turned his face back to the staircase. “I should have been over there with him. I should be with all of them. The draft board turned me down because of my danged eyesight.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m doing what I can here at home, though.” He glanced at me out of the corners of his astronomical eyes and peeled back the lapel of his coat. A silver badge with the emblem of an eagle flashed at me from his vest. The words AMERICAN PROTECTIVE LEAGUE spanned the perimeter of the thing, surrou
nding the phrase SECRET SERVICE.

  I shuddered in spite of myself.

  “Well . . . I see” was all I could think to say.

  Lucas closed his coat and folded his arms over his chest. “As a matter of fact, I think I’m about to catch a slacker.”

  “Oh?” I lifted my bags.

  “Mr. Greene’s son, Charlie, down there is eighteen, but he’s not enlisting. The draft age just got dropped from twenty-one, and he’s eligible to go.”

  “Well, I should actually be off . . .”

  “Say, how old is your other brother, Peter?”

  I stiffened with my elbows locked. “He’s not eighteen until December, Lucas. We just lost Billy, for heaven’s sake.”

  “He could still get in, though. Several boys write the number eighteen on the bottoms of their shoes. When the draft board asks, ‘Are you over eighteen?,’ the boys technically aren’t lying when they say yes.”

  I stood there and gaped at this baby-faced buddy of Billy’s who used to set up model trains with my brother in our basement and once ate a worm on a dare in Mama’s vegetable garden. Lucas’s brown eyes peered back at me through those bottle-cap lenses, and the edge of his silver badge poked out from beneath his gray coat.

  “I’m sure Peter will enlist as soon as he’s able,” I said, and I maneuvered past him with my bags and headed down the stairs. “Good-bye, Lucas.”

  He didn’t respond, but I could feel the weight of those probing eyes of his on the nape of my neck. All the hairs back there bristled. An awful chill sliced down my spine.

  Down in the lobby, in the morning’s hazy yellow sunlight, a young redheaded fellow—Charlie, the “slacker,” presumably—swept lint and coins from beneath the whicker chairs. He whistled to himself, clanked the change into his pockets, and paid no attention to me, so I waddled with my suitcases over to Mr. Greene at the front desk.

  “Pleasant stay?” asked Mr. Greene, sliding Blue Book back into its drawer again.