The Uninvited (23 page)

“Have you heard about any of those fancy, famous people dying in the war either?”

I shook my head, my mouth pressed shut. “No, I suppose not.”

“The only famous dead person in all of this has been Archduke Ferdinand, who went and got himself shot and set all these troubles into motion. Everyone else is ordinary people. We’re just numbers, and when I was a little girl, I sure as hell didn’t dream of growing up and turning into a damned statistic.”

“But people won’t forget us.” I dropped down to the seat beside her with a squeak of the springs beneath the leatherette upholstery. “I think, even years from now, they’ll figure out that music like this . . .” I tilted my ear toward the lodge. “Cripes, just listen to that desperation mixed with a wild joie de vivre. That doesn’t come out of nothing. They’ll be able to hear that a massive eruption once rocked the world and scattered pain and passion in its wake.”

She slid her hands down the steering wheel until the tops of her fingers and thumbs hung from the bottom. “I hope you’re right.”

“They won’t forget.” I scooted across the seat to her. “And I’m sure they’ll learn from all of our mistakes.”

She popped her bottom lip in and out of her mouth and seemed to waver over what to do next.

I rested my hand on the crook of her right arm. “Do you want to go back up there and see your sister?” I asked. “Or would you genuinely feel better driving around?”

“What are
you
going to do, Ivy?”

I sighed from deep in my belly and glanced past her head at the closed door of Liberty Brothers Furniture standing there, motionless, in the steady electric lamplight shining across the street. “I’m going to talk to my German for a bit. But . . . after that . . .”

She knitted her brow. “After that, what?”

“That’s a very good question.” I climbed out of the ambulance and smoothed down my skirt. “I spent so much of my life hiding and protecting myself from fear. I’m not quite sure what to do with this new taste of liberation.”

“Well, I think I’m gonna drive around a bit.” She pulled her gauze mask back up over her nose.

“Addie . . .” I leaned back down with my hands on my knees. “If you see a young doughboy with hair my color—someone who looks a little lost—will you ask him if his name is Billy Rowan?”

She nodded. “All right, I suppose I could.”

“And if it is Billy, will you tell him that Wendy Darling said to go to the Masonic Lodge, which is a little bit like the Neverland? If you mention that Ruth Sellman is there, showing off her gams, that would probably help.”

“Your brother, right?”

“Yes, my brother. The one we lost in France.” I cast my eyes down the sidewalk to the nearest streetlamp to see if he happened to be standing right there. A golden haze hovered beneath the bright bulbous casings, but I didn’t see Billy—although a pair of thick lenses glowed in the darkness beyond.

“I’ll tell him,” said Addie.

“Thank you.”

I stepped back from the ambulance and watched her adjust the levers for the throttle and the spark advance. With the skill of an expert driver that made my instructor’s heart proud, she maneuvered the vehicle around into the opposite direction and puttered off to the westward junction to Southside.

I put my hands on my hips and braced myself against a stark chill left in her wake.

“Go upstairs to the music, Lucas,” I called down the street without actually looking in the direction of the dark patch where I’d seen his spectacles. “Take off your badge and stop spying on me. You can retire now.”

No sounds emerged from his unlit corner. I puffed a sigh through my lips and turned my head toward him.

“You got sick from this flu, didn’t you?” I asked.

He didn’t answer, but I heard him kick a pebble into the street. The stone rolled around in the blackness of night and spun to a stop somewhere in the middle of the road.

“Did it turn into pneumonia or some other complication?” I asked.

“Yes,” he answered from down in the darkness. “Meningitis.”

“Do you know what happened to you? After the complication set in?”

Another pebble hurled into the street and clanked against the curb on the opposite side of the road, in front of Daniel’s store.

“Did you ever read any of Emily Dickinson’s poems?” I asked.

“Oh, Jesus,” said Lucas, still not stepping forward and showing himself in the light. “Billy said you read those things all the time. He worried you admired her so much, you wanted to
be
her, hiding away inside your father’s house like that. You turned so strange and ghostly.” He sighed. “You really bothered him with your oddness.”

Instead of responding, I quoted one of her poems.

“Death is a dialogue between

The spirit and the dust.

‘Dissolve,’ says Death. The spirit, ‘Sir,

I have another trust.’

“Death doubts it, argues from the ground.

The Spirit turns away.

Just laying off, for evidence,

An overcoat of clay.”

Neither of us spoke after my voice finished echoing across Daniel’s store and the limestone bank building beside it. I thought I heard the muffled pounding of a hammer beyond the boarded-up windows and the paint-spattered walls of Liberty Brothers, and I longed to be done with Lucas.

“Don’t let Death and the APL keep you trapped in the shadows, Lucas.” I sucked a deep breath of air through my nose and felt it settle inside my lungs. “Remove your badge, and go up and join the party in the lodge.”

A pair of hesitant footsteps shuffled toward me across the sidewalk. Lucas, still in his charcoal-gray businessman suit, wandered into view from beneath the lamplight with his arms wrapped around himself. Another wanderer, just like me.

“Remove your badge,” I said with a nod. “And go have some fun. All right?”

His dark coat quivered with the nervousness of his arms shaking against the fabric. He didn’t speak or move until the jazz band switched to an old childhood favorite that all of us kids who grew up in the early years of the century adored: “Bill Bailey.” Lucas lifted his face to the windows of the lodge with an expression of wonder in his bottle-cap eyes. Laughter and music and beautiful whiffs of booze streamed out with the glorious golden light of the chandeliers within.

He removed his badge and shoved it down into his right trouser pocket.

He passed me by on the sidewalk and hustled inside the humming and shimmying Masonic Lodge, which seemed ready to launch to the stars.

I heard his feet gallop up the staircase beyond the closed door.

Another soul had escaped the darkness.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins
Publishers

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

Chapter 27

I
blew inside Liberty Brothers Furniture as if carried on a breeze—which, perhaps, indeed I was. The little brass shop bell tinkled above my head with the flutter of an object unsettled by a shiver of wind, and all the ceiling lamps swayed.

Daniel sat across the room, hammering away at a piece of furniture with his back toward me, and my presence seemed to ripple through him as well. He shuddered, lifted his head, and turned halfway around on his spindle-back work chair with the same troubled eyes and pursed lips I had viewed on the night I first drifted past his store with my bags in hand. The band across the street played a cornet-heavy rendition of “Bill Bailey” that threatened to set me crying for the past. I balled my hands into fists with my nails digging into my flesh, determined not to shed a tear until I said what needed to be spoken.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked.

Daniel sat up straight in his chair. “How much do you know?”

“I know about the flu. What it did to me. I know”—I folded my arms across my chest and glanced at the faded pink patches on the scrubbed and bleached floorboards—“whose blood that is and why it was shed. I know that Frank and Peter Rowan burst into here . . .” I gritted my teeth and blinked back the sting of tears. “They burst into here, not just because of Billy. They came in here to kill”—I nodded to make the words shake free—“because of me.”

Daniel lowered the hammer and wood, rose to his feet, and reached for the back of his chair, grabbing the empty air twice before taking hold of the furniture. “How did you—”

“My mother is able to talk to me. For some peculiar reason, we Rowan women have always been able to see . . .” I filled in the unsaid word with another nod, and he squeezed his lips together.

“I know about our poor town,” I continued, “and my friends who drive the ambulance with me. I know about you and why you looked so lost when I wandered by that first night . . . why you have that rope burn scarring your neck, and why you can’t ever . . .” My voice broke. “Why you can’t ever father a child.” I tucked my chin into the warm collar of my blouse and cried soundless tears with gentle shakes of my shoulders. I closed my eyes and tasted the sea on my wet lips—or at least what I’d always imagined as the flavor of the faraway oceans, miles and miles away from Buchanan, Illinois.

Daniel cleared his throat and shifted his weight. “Your father and brother called out your name when they were here. That’s how I knew who you were that night you introduced yourself to me. The first thing they said when your brother pulled my arms behind me and your father socked me in the stomach was ‘This is for Ivy. Your people k—’ ”

I opened my eyes when he didn’t continue, and I watched him rub his hands across the sides of his legs while his lips sputtered and his eyes moistened.

“They said”—he wiped his cheeks with the back of a hand—“ ‘Your people killed her.’ And for a moment, I thought someone found out about Belgium. But then they beat me and kicked me and shouted about Germans dumping the flu into theaters, and I realized I was going to die because of ignorance and this damned anti-immigrant paranoia, not because of the real reasons someone should kill me.”

I inched toward him, my hands tucked beneath my arms, my fingers trembling against my ribs. “No one should have killed you, Daniel.”

“You heard what I did over there. I saw the look of horror in your eyes after I confessed my sins.”

“No matter how shocked and appalled I might have been when you first told me”—I stopped three feet away from him, feeling the firm pull of him within my chest—“I know others ordered you to kill. That wasn’t you deciding to take lives.”

“I took them just the same.” He leaned forward against the back of the chair. “I still see them sometimes. I’ll always see them.”

“My father and brother made you pay dearly for the ills of your native country. Don’t keep punishing yourself. I’m sorry I only made things worse with the things I said.”

He swallowed and gripped the chair with whitening fingers.

My eyes strayed down to the pink marks on the floor below my black shoes, and my mind once again envisioned the brutality of the night of Friday, October 4, 1918, now envisioning Daniel as the victim bleeding and hurting down on the floorboards.

“Did they make you suffer long . . . before they . . . ?” I closed my eyes to squeeze away the image of my father tugging a rope around Daniel’s neck. “Did they hang you in here like the mob that killed Robert Prager?”

“No.” Daniel sniffed. “They held me down there on the ground—someone’s knee pushed against my spine—and they yanked the rope around my neck until I blacked out. They garroted me.”

My balance wavered. I raised my arms out to my sides to steady myself and planted both feet solidly against the floor. “And . . . Albrecht was never here?”

“No. Only me. I heard them break the glass from upstairs and immediately ran down, but they grabbed me before I could get to the drawer and fetch the gun.”

I raised my eyes to his. “You’ve known what happened to us all along, haven’t you? Even that night I first came here and spoke to you, you knew.”

He nodded.

“How?” I asked. “How did you know when most of the rest of us didn’t?”

“I’d seen enough of death. I recognized the scent of its arrival—the strange feel of it in the air—to understand precisely what was happening to me.”

“Why didn’t you tell me any of this before? Why did you let me believe you were a grieving brother and I was alive and healthy?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Why?”

“I don’t—” He lowered himself to the chair with a clumsiness that made the wood slide with a squeak against the floor. “You just showed up in the dark of night . . . and you made me feel”—he rubbed his right hand across his chin—“as if the entire world hadn’t conspired against me. I didn’t want to frighten you away. You were always flitting off so quickly as it was.”

I wrapped my fingers around the back of his chair, close enough to touch the side of his warm hand.

“I’m sorry,” he said again. “I wanted this to become our Eden.”

“You wanted to keep me free of knowledge, you mean.”

“No.” He swallowed. “Just free.”

I reached up to the rope burn beneath his collar and traced my thumb across the smooth red line. His unsteady breaths tickled the back of my wrist.

“Why is this mark still here if your other wounds healed?” I asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Is it like the pain in my stomach, waiting to be freed?”

He shook his head and again said, “I don’t know.”

“What would free you?” I cupped my hand around his cheek and his chin and stroked his soft skin that, now that I thought about it, never seemed to grow much in the way of whiskers, beyond a thin and bristly layer of stubble that never, ever changed. “What would allow you to leave this place?”

He turned his face in the direction of the front-counter drawer that hid the
Sentinel
article about the murder.

“What is it?” I asked.

He drew my hand into his and peered up at me with glossy blue eyes. “I want to know that Albrecht and this store will be safe.”

I sank my teeth into my bottom lip, and the wood-paneled walls of Liberty Brothers seemed to squeeze against my chest, pressing all traces of hope for his well-being out of me.

“Oh, Daniel. You might be asking for the impossible.”

“I know.” He shifted his position in the chair with another dull squeak. “But my brother, he’s lived in this country since 1912. He’s never hurt a soul or betrayed America. And yet he’ll have a struggle to reopen the store and marry Nora because of slanderous attacks like the ones—” He darted another sharp glance at the closed drawer.

I pressed my hand over his, molding my palm around his knuckles, which somehow grew colder beneath me. “What can I do to help?” I asked. “What can I ask my mother to do?”

He shook his head. “Nothing. The war has to end first. People need to change their way of looking at other people to set things right for Albrecht.”

“And you believe you’ll remain trapped inside this building until that happens?”

He closed his eyes and nodded.

“That doesn’t seem right at all. Try to come with me.”

“I keep telling you”—he peeked back up at me with the same haunted look I remembered from the day I first walked in on him cleaning up the blood, his pupils wide and dark—“I can’t.”

“Just . . . come to the music and the dancing across the street . . .”

“Ivy . . .” Daniel brought me down to his lap with a soft pull of my elbow. “I’m not ready to go. If you need to keep moving and find whatever it is you’re searching for, I won’t stop you. But I’m not going. I’m staying right here until I’m certain it’s safe.”

A tenor with a lush vibrato—perhaps the slick-haired piano payer—burst out in song across the street and gave us both a start. His melancholy words and dreamlike melody caused my soul to tire inside me. The lights dimmed. The world withered. I lowered my head against Daniel’s shoulder and said, “I can’t stay here with you. This store reminds me of my father and my brother, and what they did.”

“I know.” He leaned his head against mine, and we trembled and fought against allowing the music to chip away at our hearts until nothing of us remained. We stayed tethered to the earth, for better or worse, and absorbed the sorrow of the tenor’s voice.

Daniel swallowed next to my ear. “Last night was the end of the world.”

I collapsed farther against him. “I know. I feel the same way.”

“No, I mean”—he brushed his cheek against mine—“that is the name of the song. ‘Last Night Was the End of the World,’ by Henry Burr.”

I emitted a sound that wavered between a whimper and a laugh and locked my arms around his shoulders. My eyes turned to the copper lamp dangling above us, and I stared at the unsteady bulb that hummed and flickered inside, fearful it would soon blink out and abandon me in a darkness where nothing ended or began. Just darkness and cold. And me.

The singer across the street reached his final crescendo; his voice shook throughout the store and volleyed across my legs and my head and my bones—or what I thought to be my bones.

And then the world fell silent.

I held my breath, clung to Daniel, and kept my face fixed on that teasing bulb above, willing it not to burn out just yet.