The Uninvited (21 page)

My feet galloped down the Masonic Lodge stairs, and I almost slipped twice in my haste.

Once again, I set off to right a Rowan wrong against Mr. Wilhelm Daniel Schendel.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins
Publishers

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

Chapter 23

H
is front door remained shut. I slowed to a stop in front of the boarded-up glass and rapped my knuckles against one of the rough planks with a sound that came out dull and hollow.

“Daniel?” I tried the brass knob but found it locked. “Please open up. I want to apologize for what I said.” I turned my ear toward the door and held my breath, but my pulse beat in my head like a clattering locomotive and muffled even the sounds of the band.

“Please, Daniel. Talk to me. You know I said those terrible words in a moment of panic. Let’s not end things like this.” I inched closer to the door. My voice shook. “The very idea of you walking away from all that horror over there—risking your life to do so—makes you a far braver and better person than I could ever be. I’m sorry I reacted so poorly. I know the war forces people to do atrocious things they wouldn’t normally do.”

The door clicked open, and Daniel stood in front of me with one hand on the doorknob and the other massaging his throat below his shirt collar.

“That word ‘Kraut,’ ” he said with a wince and a sharp swallow, as if the German slur burned at his mouth and stung his throat, “it never sounded so ugly as it did coming out of your mouth.”

“I know.” I pressed a hand against my stomach. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. Those were horrific things to say.”

“I don’t even know what we should do, the two of us.” He leaned his left shoulder against the doorjamb and breathed a weighty sigh. “The more truth you pull out of me, the worse things will get between us, and this whole beautiful world we created will keep shattering to pieces.”

“What do you mean by ‘the more truth’?” I stepped closer. “Are their other secrets you’re hiding from me?”

He averted his eyes to the Masonic Lodge windows up above.

“Daniel? What else are you keeping from me?”

“Those people up there in the lodge . . .” He nodded up to the music. “What do they say about you and me?”

“I told you, they don’t care that you’re German. Their drummer is half black, half German, and they’re kind as can be to him.”

“That’s not what I mean. What do people say about the world?” He tipped his head to the right and narrowed his eyes at me. “Those friends of yours in the ambulance, that man Wyatt you spoke with the other night. What do they think is happening?”

I shook my head, perplexed. “I don’t understand what you mean. Everyone feels the world is crumbling to pieces, but mainly people are looking to either help each other or escape. Or both.” I rested my left hand against the door and felt the pressure of his hand holding the nearby knob. “You know I’m terrified you’ll get this flu, but it would be awfully nice to go somewhere with you tonight and leave behind everything that’s haunting us inside this store. It doesn’t even have to be up in the dance hall. We could go somewhere private.”

He rubbed at his throat again, and he refused to meet my eyes. “I’m not going anywhere, Ivy.”

“No one will hurt you out here, Daniel. I swear. Please”—I took his right hand and sandwiched it between my shaking palms—“come with me. Let’s take a walk or—”

“I’m not going with you.”

“I know you’re still upset with me, but—”

“It’s not that.”

“Then come with me.”

He pulled his hand out of mine with a force that made me lose my balance. “I can’t go with you.”

“Why not?”

“I just can’t.”

“But—”

“I can’t leave the store, damn it! Don’t you hear me?” Without warning, he kicked the door inward with a startling bang that made me jump. “I can’t
ever
leave this goddamned building.”

I stepped backward, toward the street, and a cold rush of blood shot through my veins. The hairs on the backs of my arms and neck stood on end.

“But . . . no . . .” I shook my head. Every part of me trembled and ached with a terrible chill that hurt more than the knife blade scraping at my stomach. “I d-d-don’t understand.”

He gritted his teeth and turned his face away from me again, and I heard Goethe whisper in my ear,
Truth is a torch
. . .
we all try to reach it with closed eyes, lest we should be scorched
.

I pushed past Daniel and forced my way into the unlit shop, taking care not to trip over the silhouettes of chairs and tables propped on the floor at unsettling angles.

“Where are you going?” he asked from behind me.

I rounded the mahogany counter at the back of the store.

“Ivy?”

I reached for the top drawer below the register.

“No!” Daniel locked both his arms around my chest and hoisted me away before I could grab the knob and pull.

“Let me see the article.”

“No!” He carried me away, toward the front door.

“Daniel!” I kicked my legs and wriggled to break free. “Let me see it!”

“You’ll spoil everything.”

“It’s already spoiled. Show it to me. Let me see the name of the man they murdered. I want to see it.”

He threw me out to the sidewalk, where I fell to the ground and banged my knees against hard cement. The door slammed shut behind me. The lock clicked into place.

I stared at the boards vibrating against the glass and quaked as violently as they quaked.

Some spirits get stuck in the places where they died,
May had said as she sat at her table with all those letters spread before her on the Ouija board.
Some spirits get stuck in the places where they died
.

I pushed myself to my feet, meeting with the pain of a twisted ankle, and I limped eastward on Willow-not-Werner Street, toward my family’s home.

You don’t understand, do you?
Daniel had asked me the first night I met him.
You are—how do you say it over here—naïve? Is that a word in English?

My secrets won’t change anything
, he had also said, two nights later, after I’d somehow been with him—
twice
by then.
They can’t hurt you. What’s done is done.

My Uninvited Guests always signaled loss. Their presence suggested that the wall dividing the living and the dead had opened a crack. I kept seeing and seeing and seeing him, and people all around me in Buchanan died at an astounding rate that turned grocery wagons into hearses, social halls into morgues. He had stood over the blood on the night of the murder, his hands stuffed in the pockets of his tan trousers, his face directed toward the dark stain marring the floorboards, and if I really stretched myself back into time and truly thought about that night, my mind would show me his face again, and I’d see the truth blazing in his eyes. His brother had slept at his sweetheart Nora’s house that night, while Daniel remained at home—alone—until two strong men with revenge in their eyes burst into his store to kill.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins
Publishers

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

Chapter 24

M
ama!” I called up the staircase, not caring who I woke. “Come downstairs. Please! Hurry!”

I paced the floorboards and clasped my temples to keep my skull from breaking in half. When my mother didn’t hustle down fast enough, I grabbed an old studio photograph of my brothers and me as children—one that teased of happier times from above the piano—and hurled it at the opposite wall with a wild shattering of glass. “Mother!”

“Ivy?” Mama tiptoed into view at the bottom of the stairs and pulled her white cambric robe around her nightgown. “Why are you here so late—and so upset?”

I squared my shoulders at her and lifted my chin. “What is the name of the man they murdered?”

Her face drained to the color of that robe.

“You must have seen the article,” I said. “What was his name? Which Schendel brother did they kill?”

“What’s going on down there?” asked Father from their bedroom upstairs.

“It’s nothing, Frank. Go back to sleep.” She turned back to me and gripped the square newel post at the bottom of the stairs. “Oh, Ivy . . .”

“Tell me!” I said. “Why won’t anyone tell me anything? Stop treating me like I’m a delicate piece of china that mustn’t be broken.”

“Wait here.” She held out her hand, as if instructing one of the dogs to stay put, and pattered off to the kitchen on the bare soles of her feet.

I heard the pop of a tin lid coming off of a can, a sound that always betrayed Mama’s secret sips from a flask of booze she kept hidden in a biscuit container—her emergency dose of comfort, consumed whenever Father pushed her to the edge of sanity and composure. A newspaper rustled out there in the kitchen, and then Mama crept back around the corner and walked toward me with her hands tucked behind her back.

“Do you truly want to see it, darling?” she asked. “Are you absolutely certain this is what you want?”

I thrust my right hand at her. “Show me.”

She pushed a newspaper my way, and I saw the face of the victim—
his
face—along with his name:
WILHELM DANIEL SCHENDEL
. Key details about his condition at the time of death shot at me like stinging bullets:

Multiple bruises and lacerations . . . broken nose . . . fractured ribs . . . ruptured spleen . . . a rope strung around his neck . . . strangled. . .

And that opening sentence—
oh, God
.

Friday night a band of vagrants broke into Liberty Brothers Furniture Store and attacked and killed Wilhelm Daniel Schendel, aged 24, a German enemy of the U.S. who resided in downtown Buchanan.

I dropped to the floorboards with a jolt of my neck that hurt down to my knees.

“Oh . . . darling . . .” Mama stepped toward me with an offer of a trembling hand.

I recoiled. “I don’t understand! It doesn’t make sense. Why is it him? It doesn’t make sense.”

“Ivy . . .” She kneeled down in front of me. “My poor girl . . .”

“I was with him.” I shook the newspaper in her face until she blinked and flinched. “
With
him. Multiple times. How could I have been with a man my family killed over Billy’s death?”

Mama’s chin shook, and she could no longer look me in the eye.

“What?” I slammed the paper to the floor and heard a rip in the newsprint. “Talk to me. Why won’t anyone talk to me? What’s happening?”

“It wasn’t Billy’s death that set them off.”

“I don’t . . .” I wrinkled my brow. “Then what? What set them off?”

“This flu . . . it’s taken so many lives.” She bent her face toward her knees and grabbed hold of her stomach, as if she shared my same knife blade of pain. Her mouth twisted into a grimace, and she squeezed her eyes shut tight, deepening the lines of her crow’s-feet. “Your father got it into his head that the Germans dumped the germs into an American theater,” she continued. “He wanted to spill German blood for revenge. I know he was sometimes cold and harsh, that it often seemed he didn’t care, but he loved you so much, Ivy.”

“No, he didn’t.”

“Yes”—she nodded—“he truly did. He said that hearing you play the piano was the best part of his day after toiling in the fields until his back and fingers ached. He loved you so much that he . . .” She covered her eyes with one hand, and her lips quavered and sputtered. Her nose ran. “He loved you so much, Ivy . . .” She braced her left hand on her lower back. “He loved you so much that he killed a man.”

I braced my hands against the floor. Daniel’s face stared up at me from the newspaper down below, his mouth set in that defiant pose, his eyes both frightened and furious as he stood for a camera that captured the images of Germans.

I shut my eyes against the sight of him in that hellish article that didn’t make one damn bit of sense. “I don’t . . .” I shook my head. “I don’t understand anything that you’re saying. What’s happening here? What’s happening?”

Mama broke into tears. I kept my eyes closed, but I heard her weep, the same way she had cried the night Father and Peter slammed their way inside the house with blood on their clothes and their fingers—while I, fresh out of bed from the flu, had followed after everyone in my nightgown.

I followed after them, and no one but Mama had paid me any heed.

I stood there and watched them . . . and no one had noticed.

I opened my eyes. The fingers of my right hand reached down to the
Sentinel
and dared to curl back the front page with the soft crinkle of newsprint. On page 3, a list awaited—a collection of names of the Buchanan residents who had perished from the flu from October 1 through October 5, 1918
.
My pulse pounded in my ears; the air in the house felt too thick to breathe.

Eight of the names of the dead jumped off of the page and pierced my heart:

May Belmont Dover, widow of Edward C. Dover, aged 25

Howard Greene, owner, Hotel America, aged 42

Lucas Hart, American Protective League volunteer, aged 22

Benjamin Kelley, Negro, aged 19

Margaret O’Conner, grandmother and mother, aged 47

Wyatt Pettyjohn, farmer, aged 25

Ivy Rowan, daughter of Frank Rowan, aged 25

Ruth Sellman, widow of Jesse Sellman, aged 26

I rose to my feet, my legs burning to escape, to keep going, to keep wandering—to run.

Others,
May had said,
they roam the earth, unsettled, restless, unsure what to do or where they belong
.

“This . . . no . . .” I kicked the newspaper away and backed toward the door. “I speak with all sorts of people out there. Not just Daniel and May and Wyatt. I’ve been driving an ambulance around town, helping people in need—people stuck in their homes because they can’t get any care . . .”

Some spirits get stuck in the places where they died.

I squeezed my head between my hands. Pain simmered across my skull the way a fever burns in a brain until your very soul feels on fire. “Don’t sit there and tell me the flu took my life,” I said through blinding waves of pressure. Stinging black spots danced before my eyes. My ears rang with a screeching holler that couldn’t be silenced no matter how hard I swallowed. “We’re all alive. Everyone I see out there is alive.”

“Ivy . . .” Mama—just a blurry movement of arms and legs on the ground—fetched a handkerchief from the pocket of her robe. “The influenza has taken the lives of ninety-three Buchanan residents just in these first two weeks of October. If you add Wilhelm Schendel’s death to the count, plus those of three young Red Cross volunteers killed in a horrible train accident shortly before we lost you . . .”

“No.” My back banged against the door, and the cold knob dug into my spine.

She wiped her eyes. “That makes ninety-seven brand-new October souls from this one small town alone. Lord knows how many Buchanan servicemen have perished overseas or in training camps during that same amount of time.”

“Stop!” I slapped my hands over my ears. “Stop saying these things. This is a terrible trick you’re playing. Why are you saying these things?”

“I’m sorry, Ivy, but it’s God’s honest truth. I see you so clearly that it breaks my heart. I know it means that the wall between the living and the dead has cracked wide open, and more and more people will be lost in the coming days. I wish I could hold you and comfort you. I wish that you could comfort me . . .”

I cowered against the door and grabbed my chest and remembered the agony of my lungs suffocating with fluid. I shut my eyes and fought to push away the memory of my own sufferings from the influenza—memories that crouched in my brain, hiding behind all my other recent recollections, like a naughty child avoiding punishment.

“Please . . . don’t be frightened.” My mother got to her feet and stood up tall. “I’m helping those in need like you asked. I went to Polish Hall and saw the lack of care, and I complained to the city’s Committee of Public Safety. We’re going to be recruiting more volunteers and opening more emergency hospitals. I’ll do my best to save lives in your name. You don’t need to worry about a thing anymore, sweetheart. And Granny Letty is always here, watching over me . . .”

I turned away from the rocking chair, for I saw her—Granny Letty, with her silver hair pinned in a topknot and her gray eyes crinkling with a smile.

“Go back to that young German man,” said Mama, her voice as soft as when she used to read me stories of castles and magic and airy promises of happily ever after. “Go take comfort with him and everyone else you find out there. Enjoy yourself. Be free.” She squeezed her arms around her middle. “I’ll think of you every time I hear a strain of music, and I’ll tell myself, ‘My Ivy is in those notes. I know she is. I can hear her.’ ”

I turned and blew out of the house with a slam of the door that rattled across the windows and set the dogs barking. Tears swam in my eyes and turned the road ahead of me into a long and wavering black snake, but I gritted my teeth and pounded my soles against gravel all the way back to downtown Buchanan. For that’s all I seemed fated to do—to wander, to fret, to cling to the terrible troubles of the world.