The Uninvited

by Cat Winters

  “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 into 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.”

  I HAD SEEN 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 g
irl 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.”

  “What?” I leaned forward. “How on earth is recovering a shame?”

  “I thought God might have sent this flu to help all us Widow Street girls join our darling husbands. That would’ve been kind of Him.”

  I swallowed and debated how to respond to a statement such as that.

  “Do you have an income that would allow you to pay rent?” she asked.

  “Yes. I’ve been teaching piano lessons to children out at my family’s house for the past seven years.”

  “‘Tickling the Ivories with Ivy’?”

  “Yes.” I blushed. “That’s the slogan I use on my card.”

  “I’ve seen your card in the music store window. How did you put it there if you’re a recluse?”

  “I don’t actually . . .” I cleared my throat and leaned forward on my toes. “I don’t personally call myself a recluse. But my brother Billy hung that up for me. He helped me find students before he . . . before . . .” I gestured with my thumb to the east. Toward France.

  She nodded in understanding.

  “Do you play an instrument?” I asked. “Is that why you were in the music store?”

  “No.” She toyed with another nail—the one at the tip of her left ring finger, on which she still wore a gold wedding band, I noticed. “The store’s just next to the beauty parlor where I get my hair done.”

  “Ah.” I grabbed up my bags. “Well, I’m really sorry to have troubled you this morning.”

  “Hey.” She cocked her head again. “Even if you are a recluse—”

  “I told you, I don’t call myself—”

  “Even if you’re a tad on the shy side, don’t you have any other old school friends who’d take you in, besides handsome Eddie’s widow?”

  I backed down the porch steps and debated if I should mention a word about Helen, a principal player in Buchanan’s first-most-notorious adultery story. Or Sigrid Landvik, who ended up marrying Wyatt Pettyjohn, an old beau of mine of sorts. “My closest friend moved out of town just this past summer,” I decided to say, and it was the truth. Helen left town with Buchanan’s exiled German, Mr. Weiss.

  “You’ve never married, then?” asked May, shading her eyes from the morning sun with her left hand, the light glinting off her gold band.

  “No, I’m an old twenty-five-year-old spinster, I’m afraid.” I offered a thin smile and turned to leave.

  “Not any more, you’re not.”

  I stopped. “I beg your pardon?”

  May pushed her door farther open with the tips of her fingers. “You’re not just an old spinster anymore. You’re now the distinguished first-ever boarder at Dover’s Home for Women of Independent Means.”

  “But—”

  “You said you have an income, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “And I have the spare room. I lost interest in the idea of a boarder when Eddie got killed, but maybe I should talk to someone else besides myself and ghosts.”

  “Ghosts?”

  “It’s just a manner of speaking.” She nodded toward the house’s interior. “Come inside. I’ll show you the room.”

  “Th-thank you. Oh my goodness, thank you.” I hoisted up my luggage and ran back up to the porch with my square heels clomping all over the place.

  May led me inside to a small front room with pale yellow walls covered in paintings of furniture and fruit and women bathing in lakes in dresses that hugged their hips and bosoms. A green sofa and an armchair inhabited the center of the room, and a black Singer sewing machine, along with a naked dress form and a large basket of fabric, took up the leftmost side. The air carried feminine fragrances similar to the ones I remembered from my aunt Eliza’s house. Roses and lavender. Toilet waters and potpourri.

  A framed photograph of Eddie sat upon a table at the back of the room, and its presence seemed the only speck of evidence that a man had ever dwelled in the place. He wore his U.S. Air Service uniform in the photo, and he looked nothing like a fellow about to die. My eyes lingered too long on his fair hair and broad shoulders.

  “Who is the artist of all of these watercolors?” I asked, turning my attention to one of the bathing ladies.

  “I am.”

  “You paint?”

  “Mm hmm.” May nodded and straightened the image closest to her.

  “They’re beautiful.” I leaned closer to better observe the details of the rippling reflection of the woman on the water. “I used to wish I could draw well, but music’s always been my calling. My escape. Along with poetry.”

  “You should write songs, then, like George M. Cohan.”

  I laughed. “Maybe.”

  “So . . . this is the main room.” She held out her arms and swiveled toward a doorway in the back-left corner. “And that’s the kitchen back there. Nothing too fancy, but it has everything you’ll need. The room over there belongs to Eddie and me.”

  She spun on her heel toward a door to my right and didn’t correct herself for speaking of Eddie in the present tense.

  “And up here”—she headed over to a staircase that started next to the bedroom door—“is one big attic room, which can be yours, if the place suits you all right.”

  I followed her up a turned staircase with a small landing in the middle, and I noticed the steps made mere whispers of sound compared to the squeaks and hollers of our rickety stairs back home. The silence made me worry the Dovers’ house, like the Hotel America, might sit too still for proper sleep.

  Upstairs, we reached an open room with a bed smothered in white ruffles and a ceiling pitched like the roof. Everything that couldn’t fit into the rest of the house—crates, rugs, lamps, a toaster, two copper washboards, a chest of drawers, a doll’s crib, Eddie’s Buchanan High School football uniform—appeared to have found a home on the attic floor.

  “So”—May placed her hands on her hips—“what do you think?”

  “It’s nice.” I rested my bags in an empty square of flooring next to the bed. “Plenty of room. Good amount of sunshine.”

  “I’ll bring up my spare key after I head back downstairs.” She traced a finger through dust on an old credenza parked near the top of the stairs. “It has been lonely here, I do admit. I should have p
robably left that ROOM FOR RENT sign up longer.”

  “I’m sure you’ve still been adjusting”—I eyed Eddie’s football jersey—“to life.”

  She nodded with her lips pursed, and her eyes, which also strayed to Eddie’s clothing, moistened.

  I suddenly worried I’d see Eddie up there, standing in the shadows amid his belongings.

  I don’t know why we females of the family see them—these Guests, Mama had said to me after I’d witnessed my first one when just a child. We just do. Granny Letty saw them as well. They always arrive before someone dies, as if to warn us to steel ourselves against grief.

  I rubbed at a chill that breezed across my arms. “Have you heard anything about the . . .” I licked my lips. “The incident that occurred down the street last night?”

  May furrowed her brow. “What incident?”

  “Did you ever meet those two German brothers who own a furniture store at the other end of Willow?”

  “Sure, that’s where we bought our sofa when we first moved into the house, but”—she lifted her hands—“that was a whole month before Uncle Sam declared war on Germany.”

  I took hold of a round brass post at the foot of the bed. “Some people killed one of the brothers last night.”

  “Oh, Lord.” She cringed. “I wish I could say I’m surprised, but after that story about the Robert Prager lynching—”

  “It wasn’t a mob lynching.” I pressed the bed knob against my stomach and felt words tumble from my mouth. “It was a man and his son. They were drunk and furious about the loss of a family member and killed the Kraut with their own bare hands.”

  May leaned the small of her back against the credenza. “Which of the German brothers was it?”

  “I’m not sure. Why?”

  “The older one has been living in Buchanan for quite a while—since 1912 or so. Hardly even has an accent anymore. But that younger one . . .” She crossed her arms over her chest. “People say he didn’t leave Germany until after the war broke out in Europe.”

  “Do they think he’s like Mr. Weiss?”

  May shrugged. “There are rumors he’s a traitor and a spy. My neighbor somehow knows whose phones are being wiretapped in town, and she said the Schendels have been the main targets of the APL’s investigations, mainly because of the younger brother. Their sofa is comfortable. That’s the most I can say about them.” Her eyes flitted toward the square window behind me. “Do they know precisely who killed him?”