The Uninvited (2 page)

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins
Publishers

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

Chapter 2

M
y westward journey led me close to a mile down a country lane to Willow Street, once called Werner Street, before the war made us cleanse the country of everything German. A train whistle pealed through the clear night air, and I heard the steady
click-clack, click-clack, click-clack
of the endless line of freight cars that would take a good fifteen minutes or more to traverse the heart of the town. My legs gained strength, and without a shred of regret, I passed the other farms in our pancake-flat Illinois terrain, toward the town I hadn’t visited in three months, out of fear of brain-cleaving migraines and a paralyzing terror that the house would crumble to pieces if I dared to step away for a spell. Both brothers no longer belonged to me. Wendy Darling had failed her boys. Time to move onward.

Another mile ahead shone a constellation of streetlights in downtown Buchanan, where most of the businesses slept for the night. To my left, past the southbound bend of the Minter River, rose the mills and the factories that seemed almost a separate city of their own. The black outlines of smokestacks and rooftops as flat as the land bled into the darkness of the nighttime sky, and I almost believed I imagined their towering silhouettes. Our city made itself known for its textile industry and railcar manufacturing—plus we boasted the county seat—so we were somewhere, compared to hundreds of other towns speckled across the vast Midwest. Some of our buildings, including City Hall, even stood over three stories high, and most were built of brick and a fine Illinois limestone.

A quarter mile or so from the first downtown establishments, before I crossed the old covered bridge that spanned the river, a sign painted red on white rose up in the dark:

I
N
F
L
U
E
N
Z
A
!

D
O
N
O
T
E
N
T
E
R
!

My feet stopped on the road, and a cold October breeze shook through my dress and my bones. The sign seemed primitive—medieval—like a warning for European travelers about to stumble upon the Black Death. It defied logic. Buchanan had been fighting influenza strains since it first existed in the 1860s, but no one had ever been stopped from entering the town because of it.

I kept plodding forward along Willow-not-Werner Street with my bags banging against the sides of my calves, and enter the town I did. Another sign, a hospitable black-and-white one, greeted me as I came upon the business district.

W
E
L
C
O
M
E
T
O
B
U
C
H
A
N
A
N
,
I
L
L
I
N
O
I
S
!

F
R
I
E
N
D
L
I
E
S
T
C
I
T
Y
I
N
A
M
E
R
I
C
A

P
O
P
U
L
A
T
I
O
N
1
2
,
5
0
0

I passed the barbershop, the
Buchanan Sentinel
headquarters, and the Moonbeam Theater, the latter in which Billy had spent his days and nights as the projectionist after he left home at the age of seventeen. A poster for a Mary Pickford film called
Johanna Enlists
caught my eye, and I remembered how much my chest had once fluttered with anticipation whenever I spotted new motion-picture advertisements. When we all still went to school, Billy, Helen Fay, Sigrid Landvik, Wyatt Pettyjohn, and I would sit on wooden folding chairs inside the darkened theater and watch marvelous flickering fairy tales, projected onto a bed sheet used as a screen—back when downtown Buchanan possessed magic. When Saturday afternoons tasted of heaven.

Ford delivery trucks rested alongside the curbs in front of several storefronts, the black paint gleaming beneath electric streetlamps with bright, bulbous casings. In front of other businesses awaited wooden wagons that would be drawn by horses in the morning. Telephone and electricity wires dangled overhead, strapped to ugly utility poles, and streetcar tracks ran the length of Willow Street, tying the business district to the Westside neighborhoods, where the non-farming middle class dwelled. I saw rows of white awnings and autumn-kissed maples that hadn’t yet shaken free of their leaves.

Up ahead another block, to my right, lay Liberty Brothers Furniture, which had been called some other name like Schreiner or Schumacher Furniture before the war. Unless I veered down a side street, I would be required to pass the store’s front door and its prominent display windows on my way to my destination: the town’s hotel. Furthermore, I
needed
to pass the store, to see—to witness with my own eyes—whatever grisly aftermath might await inside. Part of me hoped Father and Peter were simply telling a terrible tall tale, offering empty, drunken boasts about conquering the town’s last remaining German business owners.

The light of the streetlamp in front of the store twinkled across a sidewalk littered with shattered fragments of glass. Someone had smashed the front windows and the pane of the door with a blunt and powerful object, perhaps Peter’s baseball bat. Long streaks of yellow paint dribbled down the bricks and the black trim of the outer walls and formed soupy puddles on the cement. Spots of blood trailed out from the front door and disappeared behind me, toward our home. The entire scene made stories of the American Protective League’s raids on German families and union headquarters sound tidy and civil in comparison.

I dared to tread a few steps closer to peek inside, and the soles of my shoes crunched across the sparkling shards. My mind conjured images of the Germans I’d seen on the propaganda posters—fleshy men in spiked helmets with hate raging in their animalistic eyes.
Huns,
we called them.
Boches. Krauts
. Like the lecherous Mr. Weiss, whom the citizens of Buchanan had kicked out of town for failing to buy Liberty Bonds. They smelled of sauerkraut, and they spat as they spoke. They loved beer and war and indulged in rape and torture the same way we enjoyed baseball and summer picnics.

Only one person stood inside the store amid the damaged furniture. It was a man, a young one near my age, also in his mid-twenties, if I had to wager. He had short brown hair with a soft hint of curl and broad shoulders that hunched as if in either pain or sorrow. Or both. He stood there in the middle of the mess my family had hurled upon the business, his hands stuffed in the pockets of his tan trousers, his face directed toward a dark stain that marred the floorboards. He wore a tweed vest and white shirtsleeves and looked to be a gentleman, not a brute.

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.

L
IKE
W
ERNE
R
S
T
R
E
E
T
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 ambiance.

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.”