The Uninvited

by Cat Winters

  My heart thumped with such guilt and terror, I feared she heard the organ hammering against the wall of my chest. “I . . . I beg your pardon?”

  “I don’t like the idea of murderers lurking nearby. Do they know who the killers were? Was it the APL?”

  “I—” My lips and chin both shook so much that May must have seen my face twitching and quivering like a frightened rabbit’s.

  “Ivy?” She stepped forward. “Are you all right?”

  My entire head vibrated, and the room blurred and rattled until May looked as though someone were shaking her up like a bottle of ketchup.

  “Ivy? Do you need me to—?”

  “My father and brother—they beat the German to death,” I said, and the next thing I knew, my skull hit the floor.

  Chapter 4

  Even though the words of German writers should have been banned from my brain, I remembered that Goethe once said of honesty, “Truth is a torch, but a terrific one; therefore we all try to reach it with closed eyes, lest we should be scorched.”

  Oh, boy, was he right.

  Spitting out the truth about my family in front of May Dover—pushing out all that ugliness in one blunt go with my eyes open wide—burned, blinded, stunned, and crippled me for the better part of the day. May revived me with smelling salts and dragged me onto the foamy sea of white ruffles on the attic’s bed, which clogged my nose with tickling dust. She even went so far as to remove my shoes and prop my feet up on a satin pillow. Despite such fineries, I remained a mute and useless slug of a tenant, unable to sit up and apologize for the crime I’d just confessed.

  “Feeling better?” she asked at dusk, when sunlight stopped boring a fiery hole into my brain and shadows yawned across the attic floor. The homey aroma of vegetable soup—a scent that reminded me of my mother—entered the room along with May’s footsteps, and I opened my eyes to the sight of her carrying a tray with a spoon, a glass of water, and a steaming bowl of a dark broth. She bent her legs into a slow and graceful lunge and set the small supper on a leather traveling trunk beside the bed. A gold key shimmered beside the tray.

  I shifted onto my side, toward her and the soup. “Didn’t you hear what I said before I collapsed on your floor?”

  May perched herself on the edge of the bed and smoothed out her dark skirt. “Yes. I heard.”

  “About my father and brother?”

  “Yes. You said they were the ones who killed the German.” She looked me in the eye with an expression I couldn’t decipher.

  I swallowed. “Do you want me to gather my bags and leave?”

  “I’ve already unpacked your bags into that chest of drawers.”

  “You have?”

  She nodded. “My own father served a prison term for assaulting and robbing our landlady back when I was a young child. I haven’t seen him since I was seven years old.”

  “Oh, good heavens.” I sank back against the ruffles. “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m not telling you that information for you to feel sorry for me. I’m simply saying that if I had to go around taking blame for his sins, I would have killed myself long ago.” She sat up straight and folded her slender hands in her lap. “You are not your father and brother, Ivy. If you didn’t take part in that murder, you’re not guilty of their crime.”

  “I know.” I nodded. “I’ve been trying to tell myself the same thing, but the guilt’s still there. It’s stuck”—I pushed my fist against my middle—“deep in my stomach.”

  “Well, there’s no need for it to be there.”

  “The police are concealing what happened, though. They’re telling the town that two vagrants came through Buchanan and killed the German. They’re worried that this part of Illinois will turn into another Collinsville.”

  “Unfortunately”—May heaved a loud sigh—“I think many people would be proud to have Buchanan called another Collinsville. If you want to know the truth, my mother is Italian, and my father was born in Dublin, but I’ve never dared admit that I’m not one hundred percent American to anyone in this town besides Eddie.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut and breathed through a cramp that resembled a knife blade scraping away at my gut.

  “Hey,” said May with a nudge. “You’re not going to faint again, are you? I’m not running off to the police to tell them what you said. You don’t have to worry about me.”

  “I need to talk to the slain German’s brother.”

  “And say what?”

  “Apologize. Help clean up his store. Make him feel better.” I rolled onto my back and stared up at the sharp peak of the ceiling above. Little bits of gray and feathery spiderwebs dangled overhead. “Even if the surviving brother is the suspected traitor and spy, he’s likely hurting just as much as I did the day I learned about our Billy’s death.”

  “He’s probably turning tail and sailing back to Germany.”

  “Maybe. But if not”—I curled forward and lifted my upper back off the sheets, panting through another flare-up of pain—“I have to set things right. Especially if this flu is taking lives. He could be next. I’ve got to help him. Something tells me I absolutely must go to his store.”

  I PULLED MY WOOL COAT TIGHT around my middle and wandered past the darkened windows of Weiss’s Bakery, one block west and across the street from Liberty Brothers Furniture. Dried yellow paint stuck to the bakery windows, undoubtedly left over from the July raid on the store. I glanced inside the storefront and saw the cream-colored walls and the empty glass display counters where Helen, Sigrid, and I would sometimes treat ourselves to after-school cookies. We picked out our future wedding cakes and breathed in the scents of frosting and cinnamon until our heads went dizzy from the sweetness. We had no idea that Helen would one day involve herself with the green-eyed man with the thick accent who worked with his American wife behind the counter. Or that Buchanan residents would eventually want to murder people like him.

  An unseen cord tugged me onward down the street in the darkness. You must see that surviving German brother, I told myself. You must talk to him before anything else terrible happens. That pain in your stomach? Than gnawing agony? It will grow far worse than your migraines if you don’t hurry up and set everything right.

  I crossed Willow Street in the dark and traveled another block east before meeting up with the CLOSED sign posted on the front door of the furniture store. The black letters gleamed in the glow of the streetlamp behind me. The paint my father and brother had splattered across the red bricks had dried into dirty yellow veins that branched down the wall to the ground. Someone had taken the time to sweep away the broken glass from the sidewalk, and they had nailed sturdy planks over the damage to the door and the windows. Yet the paint lingered. Ugly scars running across the store’s protective skin.

  Electric lights shone inside the business. I peeked through a slip of exposed window and spied the brown-haired young man again. He crouched on his hands and knees on the floor and scrubbed at the bloodstains while wearing his tweed vest and tan trousers.

  I pulled back from the window and steadied my breath, which fluttered like moth wings in the base of my throat.

  Truth is a torch, but a terrific one . . .

  It took just a gentle nudge of my right knuckle to make the door swing open. An obnoxious bell above my head jangled in response, and the German peered up from his scrubbing with startled blue eyes. Down on all fours like that, despite the gentlemanly clothing, he resembled an animal caught with his foot in a snare—feral, defensive, ready to lash out with teeth and fists.

  “Who are you?” he asked in an accent that somehow made both a harsh and a singsong sound. “I saw you last night with your bags.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry for what?”

  “Just . . .” I drew a deep breath and tried to ignore the odd way he formed words in the back of his throat—and how his head seemed the ideal rounded shape for a spiked German army helmet. “I heard about your brother’s death. My own brother died
recently, too, and I wanted you to know . . . I’m . . .” I pressed my teeth together in a way that made my molars rattle against one another. I accidentally bit the right edge of my tongue and tasted blood. “I’m sorry you’re experiencing the same pain.”

  He eased his grip on the scrub brush and sank back on his heels. “What is your name?”

  I sealed my lips shut. My name belonged too much to my family.

  The German set the brush aside and got to his feet. He stood taller than me by at least a half foot, and his build looked to be slender yet sturdy. His arms and shoulders belonged to a fellow who hoisted around tables and bureaus and wide wooden beds.

  He put his hands on his hips and cocked his head at me. “What happened to you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Why were you traveling though the dark with your luggage last night?”

  “I told you”—I gulped so loudly he must have heard the sound—“my brother died. I’ve been sick since I learned that news, and now I’m trying to recuperate. I just . . .”

  He stepped toward me across the floorboards—boards still blotchy with pink stains of blood.

  I backed away. “Don’t . . . I-I just—”

  “Ach. Sie hat Angst vor Deutschen.”

  My back banged against the door, and my shoulder blades smarted. “W-what did you just say?”

  He came to a stop no more than four feet away. “I said, ‘Ah, she is afraid of Germans.’ Go away if you’re so scared. I don’t understand why you came in here if—”

  “I’m not afraid of Germans.”

  “Then why are you shaking like I’m pointing a Kaiser-issued rifle at your head, Fräulein? I bet you call me ‘Hun’ and ‘Kraut’ behind my back.”

  “I’m just here to see if you need any help cleaning up your store.”

  He relaxed his shoulders a breadth of an inch and lifted his chin. His eyes held mine in a stare that didn’t entail a single blink. “What did you say your name was?”

  “I didn’t say, but it’s Ivy.”

  “Ivy what?”

  “It doesn’t matter. I’m the only Ivy I know around here.” I pushed my back off the boarded-up door and stood up straight. “What is your name?”

  “Daniel.” He swallowed as if cramming anger down his throat. “And I have a terrifying Kraut surname, so if that makes you feel like you need to call in the American Protective League, then you had better—”

  “What was your brother’s name?”

  He was the one who shrank back that time around. He turned his eyes to the floor and shoved his hands in his pockets. “Albrecht. Albrecht Schendel.”

  “Did Albrecht have a wife?”

  “He did, back home. She died six years ago, though. There’s a sweetheart, one town over. An American woman.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  The German’s hands remained stuffed inside his pockets.

  “I really do want to help you clean up the damage,” I said. “I want to prove you’ll find kindness here, despite what happened last night, and what happened to Robert Prager down in Collinsville back in April.”

  He lifted his face. “You don’t understand, do you?”

  “I . . . no, I can’t say I understand what life is like for an immigrant treated as the enemy, but—”

  “That’s not what I’m talking about.” He clamped his lips together and stared without blinking again. “You are—how do you say it over here—‘naïve’? Is that a word in English?”

  “Yes.” I frowned. “It’s a word.”

  “You can do nothing to make me feel better about what happened.”

  I balled my hands into fists to curb the ache in my gut. “Do you have someone else who will help you with the damage, then? Other family members? A wife?”

  “I don’t need anyone else. My life here is over.”

  “I doubt your brother would want you thinking that.”

  “You don’t know anything about what my brother would want.” He backed way. “You know nothing about what it feels like to have your life ripped apart and—”

  “I’m sorry.”

  He turned and kicked the scrub brush across the room, where it clattered against the rockers of a chair lying on its side, like a dead deer in a road.

  I jumped.

  He ran his hands through his hair, grabbed his scalp, and trembled with a wave of some sort of merciless emotion that stopped him from breathing and turned his face a troubling purplish red. His entire body shook as if gripped in the throes of a seizure.

  I trembled as well. “Are you all right?”

  No answer. No breathing.

  “Mr. Schendel?”

  He exhaled a burst of air that could have been a groan or a sob. “Oh, Gott,” he said. “Oh, Gott. Was soll ich tun?”

  I grabbed the doorknob but couldn’t make myself leave.

  He kept speaking German—“Was soll ich tun? Hilf mir, bitte”—still clutching his scalp, still standing over those faded pink stains.

  Music erupted outside the boarded-up windows with such force that I gasped, and my shoulders jerked. Brass and winds and drums and a piano—that jazz band again, playing closer than when I had tried to sleep in the Hotel America.

  “Do you hear that?” I asked.

  Daniel panted. “What?”

  “Do you hear that music?”

  “Of course. I’m German, not deaf.”

  “Where is it coming from?”

  He turned his upper body toward the boarded-up windows and lowered his hands from his head. “It’s just a jazz band that plays upstairs in the Masonic Lodge across the street.”

  “Every night?”

  “I don’t know. They didn’t used to.” He exhaled more ragged breaths and rubbed at his neck with a pained grimace. “It’s ‘Jelly Roll Blues.’”

  “By Ferd Morton?”

  He nodded. “You know it?”

  “I almost bought the sheet music once, but I had to purchase Chopin for one of my students instead. I’ve been teaching piano lessons out at our farm—”

  I cut myself short, for the music loudened, as if telling me to shut my trap, stop bothering this stranger about my miniscule little life, and just listen. We both stood there, motionless, mute, absorbing the song into our bodies as if receiving anesthetizing shots of laudanum to kill off the pain. Daniel closed his eyes, and the hardness eased from his jaw. The red heat drained from his cheeks. He let his hands hang by his sides and breathed in a gentler rhythm. Soft sips of air glided through his nose.

  I closed my eyes, too, and let the melody slide through my blood until my heart thump-thump-thumped with jazz and strength and an unexpected surge of hope.

  The last note died away, and the room fell silent.

  I raised my eyelids and found Daniel watching me over his shoulder.

  “You can start on the bloodstains . . . if that’s what you truly want.” He walked over to the bristly wooden brush he had kicked across the floor and picked it up.

  I shook off the music’s spell—literally wiggling my arms and hands to bring my brain back into focus—and ventured over to him on legs gone wobbly and rubbery. My fingers managed to pluck the cleaning tool out of his hand without actually touching his skin.

  “I’ll have the stains gone before the night’s over,” I said. “My father cut himself all the time when he was working on our farm, and I learned how to clean up the mess.”

  “Well, bully for his clumsiness, then.”

  Daniel wandered away before I could check his eyes for any signs of his knowing the identity of that clumsy father of mine.

  I SCOURED THE DARK FLOORBOARDS with a solution of vinegar and water that made my nostrils sting until I thought they’d bleed. Across the room, Daniel fitted a new wooden backing onto a lacquered maple cabinet that Peter and Father must have knocked over during their attack.

  My mind did a terrible thing: it strained to envision how my family members actually managed to destroy both the furniture and
Albrecht in the very room in which I knelt. My nostrils burned all the more, and my stomach knotted and groaned, but I couldn’t stop seeing them in there, beating a man to death, violating his property, spilling the blood that sullied the wood below my knees.

  At one point Daniel dropped the new piece of wood and swore under his breath in German—or at least the words he spat out sounded like swearing. I kept my face directed toward the fading pink splotches and scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed.

  My father and brother murdered your brother, I wanted to confess from across the store as the bristles ground against the floor. The words perched on my lips and buzzed across the edges of my mouth, but the poisonous admission refused to leave my body. I’m sorry. They were drunk. The telegram about Billy came last week. They must have been drinking in the saloon and got riled up from all the sympathetic shouts and the anti-German slurs. It was my father and brother who beat him with their own bare hands.

  Daniel looked up at me, and I worried that he had somehow heard my confessions in my mind. I lowered my head and kept on scrubbing.

  He returned to his hammering and asked over the din, “How old was your brother?”

  “Twenty-two,” I called back. “How old was yours?”

  “One month shy of his twenty-ninth birthday.”

  “Does that make you the older or the younger brother?” I asked with my heart pounding to the beat of his hammering.

  “The younger.”

  Oh, Christ.

  The potential traitor and spy.

  I poured another wash of vinegar over the floor and dwelled on a brand-new fear: Herr Daniel Schendel might rush over with that metal hammer of his and strike me in the head. An eye-for-an-eye act of revenge. One Rowan sister in exchange for one Schendel brother. The scenario seemed awfully Shakespearean, but before April of that same year, I never would have imagined a mob of Illinois citizens stringing up a German by the neck either.