The Uninvited (3 page)

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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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 bed springs, 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 in 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.

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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 onward 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.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins
Publishers

....................................

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
A
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spanned the perimeter of the thing, surrounding the phrase
S
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.

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.

“Yes, thank you.”

“No problems from—?” He gestured with his head in the direction of the staircase and Lucas.

“No. Thank you.” I unhooked the gold clasp of my handbag and fetched three crisp dollar bills from my cache of piano-lesson earnings. “Do you happen to know of anyone who’s renting rooms nearby?”

“Well . . .” Mr. Greene slid my payment toward himself across the glossy countertop. “I’m sure any one of the women on Widow Street would be happy to take in a boarder.”

“Did you say
Widow
Street?”

“Um, that’s what . . .” He cleared his throat and averted his eyes from mine. “That’s what we townies call Willow Street these days. Far too many young wives are losing husbands overseas, I’m afraid.”

“So I’ve read in the newspaper.” I swallowed and snapped the clasp shut. “Unfortunately, many of the widows—and their husbands—were my classmates.”

“Yes, I suppose you might be that age.”

“Men in their twenties are a dying breed, or so it seems.”

“Well . . .” He scratched behind his right ear. “I reckon you should have no trouble finding a room with one of those nice young ladies, if you know them.”

I bit my lip. “I haven’t been very good about keeping in touch with everyone since school. I’ve been teaching piano lessons out at our farmhouse, you see, and . . . well . . .”

“You know what I just remembered?” Mr. Greene leaned forward with a hush to his voice and focused his eyes back upon the staircase. “I’ve seen a sign for a room in the window of the Dover house.”

“E-Eddie Dover’s house, you mean?”

“That’s the one.” Mr. Greene’s cheeks flushed pink. “He has that fine-looking widow. A Chicago girl. I remember seeing the young missus watering geraniums on the front porch when the weather was warmer.”

“And you don’t think she’s found a boarder yet?”

He shrugged. “I’m not sure. She lives”—his voice dropped to an almost inaudible whisper—“on the corner of Willow and Plum. A red mailbox sits out front. Go ask her.”

“Is the APL worried about her? Is that why you’re whispering again?”

“I just don’t want that fella following you around. Frank Rowan’s an upstanding man, and I wouldn’t want any harm coming to his daughter.”

“Oh.” I shrank back, and my elbows dropped off the countertop. “Thank you. I appreciate your help.”

I picked up my bags and moved to leave, but before I reached the exit, Dale Cotton—one of Peter’s classmates, a tall, beefy boy—threw open the front door and blew inside the lobby, his brown hair tousled and shiny with perspiration. He wore a white work apron from his father’s flower shop, and bits of soil sprinkled the floor below the hem, as if he sweated dirt.

“Jesus Christ!” He bent forward and fought to catch his breath, his cheeks bright red.

“What’s going on?” asked Charlie. “What are you all worked up about?”

“There’s been a murder—a violent one—just down the goddamned street.”

I squeezed my hands around the handles of my bags.

Charlie stopped sweeping. “Where?”

“That
Boche
furniture store,” said Dale. “Two vagrants came through town last night. Demolished the place. Beat a German to death with their bare hands.”

The redhead winced, and I lowered my eyes toward the faded gold spirals of the rug beneath my feet, which blurred and writhed like coiled snakes.

“You gotta come see.” Dale lunged toward the door, the soles of his shoes slipping and squeaking. “The place is surrounded by reporters, police, the APL, and even the goddamned mayor. There’s more excitement than when the train crashed into those Southsiders.”

“Jesus Christ!”

Charlie let the broom fall to the floor with a splat, and both boys tore out of the building and down the street, as if the sight of blood carried more weight than gold. Without glancing back at Mr. Greene to catch his reaction to the killing—or at the staircase to check for Lucas—I used my right shoulder to shove open the door and exited the Hotel America.

Out in the glaring daylight, on both sides of the street, rows of American flags snapped in a breeze from beneath the white awnings in front of each store. Model Ts driven by regular middle-class folk puttered past me, motoring off in the direction of Liberty Brothers Furniture. Three boys on bicycles rode by in streaks of brown overalls and caps, and I heard the word “murder” stream from their lips.

With my thick heels clapping across the sidewalk, I trekked westward on Willow, away from the hotel and the furniture store, away from the reporters and police and even the “goddamned mayor.”

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Eddie’s widow, May Belmont Dover, the year before, at the 1917 Fourth of July picnic—one of the few Buchanan functions I’d attended since my high school graduation in 1911. Billy always did his best to lure me out to the town, tempting me to the Moonbeam Theater by buying me copies of
Motion Picture
magazine, promising to introduce me to the parents of potential piano students if I attended Buchanan’s Independence Day festivities.

I remembered what May looked like. She could have waltzed straight out of a Hollywood motion picture, even in her plain cotton dress and floppy straw hat that hid her dark ringlets. Billy referred to her as “Buchanan’s Vamp.” Father and Peter couldn’t keep their eyes off her and the
v
-shaped dip in her flimsy white bodice, as I recalled from the picnic. “Eddie’s jazzy new wife was a souvenir from his last big weekend in Chicago before enlisting,” my friend Helen had said when she joined me at the picnic, twirling her finger around a red curl with a hint of jealousy, for she had once kissed Eddie at a dance. Eddie sat beside May on a blue gingham blanket and gazed at his wife as if she were a chocolate sundae topped with a voluptuous crimson cherry. As if he wanted to lick her all over until she melted in a flood of vanilla and red lipstick.

The Dovers’ tapioca-colored home rose up ahead, beyond two trees ablaze with autumn leaves. I spotted the red mailbox out by the street, as Mr. Greene instructed, and noticed Eddie’s family name painted on the side of the box in flowery white handwriting. A weather vane topped with a galloping silver horse pointed to the west, above an upstairs dormer window.

I climbed the steps to the wide front porch and reminded myself,
This is the start of your new life, Ivy. No more worrying. No headaches. Just living.

I knocked on the door, and I waited.

Childish voices and laughter chirped from the backyard in the neighboring house to the right. The weather vane above me squeaked a little from a nudge of the breeze.

I knocked a second time and then turned to leave, discouraged, when footsteps approached from the other side of the door. The latch clicked. The door opened. There she stood.

Mrs. Eddie Dover.

The Vamp.

She blinked her eyes like she’d just woken up from a long and luxurious nap, and her fingers lazily buttoned up her midnight-black blouse, as if she’d just slipped out of bed and gotten herself dressed. Thick ringlets the color of velvety ink spilled down her shoulders to the famous May Belmont Dover breasts that Peter spoke of often, when he didn’t think I could hear him. The buttonholes of her shirt strained to keep those mountainous curves inside.

“Can I help you?” she asked in a drowsy voice.

“Yes, hello. Umm . . .” I readjusted my bags in my hands. “I’m looking to rent a room. Mr. Greene at the Hotel America said you used to have a sign advertising space for a boarder.”

“He did?” She peeked out the door in the direction of Mr. Greene and his business, even though the hotel stood three blocks away, beyond other houses and trees. “I haven’t had that sign hanging up since summer.”

“Well, he brought up your name, and—”

“Didn’t I meet you once? You look familiar.”

“Yes, we met at last year’s Fourth of July picnic. I knew your husband in school.”

She rolled her eyes. “
Every
girl in Buchanan knew Eddie in school.”

“I didn’t know him well. You’ve probably never even heard of me. My name’s Ivy.”

“Ohh . . .” She tilted her head and nodded with little dips of her delicate chin. “Oh, yes. I think I might remember you now. Eddie said he hadn’t seen you since you finished high school together. He said you never left your house. Called you a recluse.”

“Well . . . I . . .”

“Are you running away from home or something?”

My hands sweated on the handles of my luggage. “I-I-I beg your pardon?”

“You have that desperate look about you.” She crossed her arms and peered down the street again. “Is an irate husband about to show up and cause a scene?”

“A . . . what?”

“Or are you a war widow, too?”

The muscles in my arms ached and shook to the point where I had to plunk down the bags on her porch. “No, I’m not a widow. One of my brothers just lost his life in France, though, and my family is . . . um . . .” I braced my hands on my hips. “Well, we’re not doing well. I’ve decided to head out into the world and live my own life now. Sort of”—I forced a smile to my face—“burst out of my cocoon, so to speak.”

May merely blinked in response at first, but then she arched a dark eyebrow and said, “You picked one hell of a time to spread your wings, little butterfly.”

“Yes, I suppose I—”

“Have you heard about this wicked flu?”

“I already had it, just this past week. How about you?”

She leaned her right hip against the doorjamb. “I had a terrible headache the other day. I thought I might be getting sick, but then I sat down for a spell and recovered.” She picked at the little nail of her left pinky. “Which was a shame.”