The Uninvited

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HarperCollins
Publishers

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

By Cat Winters

The Uninvited

Y
OUNG
A
DULT

The Cure for Dreaming

In the Shadow of Blackbirds

Advance Reader’s e-proof
courtesy of
HarperCollins
Publishers

This is an advance reader’s e-proof made from digital files of the uncorrected proofs. Readers are reminded that changes may be made prior to publication, including to the type, design, layout, or content, that are not reflected in this e-proof, and that this e-pub may not reflect the final edition. Any material to be quoted or excerpted in a review should be checked against the final published edition. Dates, prices, and manufacturing details are subject to change or cancellation without notice.

The

Uninvited

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UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins
Publishers

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Copyright

This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used fictitiously. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.

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. Copyright © 2015 by Catherine Karp. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address HarperCollins Publishers, 195 Broadway, New York, NY 10007.

HarperCollins books may be purchased for educational, business, or sales promotional use. For information please e-mail the Special Markets Department at [email protected].

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Designed by Diahann Sturge

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

ISBN 978-0-06-234733-6

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UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins
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Dedication

For my parents, who filled my childhood with books and love

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins
Publishers

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Epigraph

If I can stop one heart from breaking,

I shall not live in vain;

If I can ease one life the aching,

Or cool one pain,

Or help one fainting robin

Unto his nest again,

I shall not live in vain.

—
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UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins
Publishers

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The Buchanan branch of the American Protective League, better known as the APL, continues to urge residents to report all suspicious activity to the group’s headquarters at the Chamber of Commerce on Willow Street. As a reminder, typical enemy behavior includes the following tendencies: food hoarding; interference with the draft; slackers who refuse to enlist for military duty; refusal to purchase Liberty Bonds; possession of books, sheet music, and phonograph albums celebrating German culture; speaking a language other than English; the use of hyphenated nationalities when describing one’s self (e.g., “German-American,” “Polish-American,” etc.); anti-war sentiments; the production of Socialist pamphlets and newspapers; and the discussion of unionization among factory workers. The APL states that this country’s best defense against espionage and other war-related crimes involves everyday Americans monitoring the loyalty of their neighbors. “We encourage each Buchanan citizen to do his part in chasing the dangerous specter of Germany out of Illinois,” said local APL chief Charles Williams. “We commend every single individual who takes it upon himself to cleanse the country of the enemy.”

—B
UCHANAN
S
ENTINEL
, October 4, 1918

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins
Publishers

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

Chapter 1

I
admit, I had seen a ghost or two.

The childhood night my mother’s father died, when silver moonlight graced the floorboards and the antique furniture in our front room, I came upon my granny Letty—gone one year and a month—rocking in my mother’s chair, next to the upright piano.

Uncle Bert—gone since 1896—stood on our front porch at sundown on Independence Day 1912. The bitter smoke of his fat cigar stole through the metal screen of our front door, spoiling the aroma of Mama’s cherry pie. A half hour after he left, we received a telephone call from my cousin, saying my aunt Eliza had died of appendicitis.

Uncle Bert again smoked on our porch the day my brother Billy was shot in the Battle of Saint-Mihiel in September 1918.

I likely don’t need to mention that these Uninvited Guests were not welcome sights. My mother saw them, too, and she agreed that such visits always signaled loss. Their presence suggested that the wall dividing the living and the dead had opened a crack, and one day that crack might steal us away to the other side.

Granny Letty paid another call to our house October 4, 1918. I saw her but a moment, standing in the yellow haze of twilight near the lace curtains of my bedroom, just an hour before my father and brother killed a man.

O
UR FRONT DOOR
blew open and whacked the wall. The dogs barked. Someone groaned in pain. Mama’s bare soles hurried down the staircase.

“What on earth happened?” she asked, her voice coming as a muffled shriek beyond the walls of my upstairs bedroom.

I rubbed at my forehead, finding my skin covered in sticky sweat. Spurred on by the panic surging through the house, I managed to climb out of bed after three days spent on my back with the flu. My legs buckled. I grabbed hold of my bedside table and knocked copies of
Motion Picture
magazine and Emily Dickinson’s
Poems
to the floor with thumps and smacks and the wild fluttering of pages. The stripes of my brown and yellow wallpaper blurred and rippled before my eyes.

“What happened?” shouted Mama again from down below.

I pushed myself upright, fetched my robe from the back of my door, and eased my way down the staircase on the legs of a feeble old woman, not feeling at all like a twenty-five-year-old young lady used to farm work and activity. To keep my balance, I clung to the rail with both hands, as if clutching the helm of a sinking ship.

Down in the front room, my father guided my seventeen-year-old brother, Peter, toward the kitchen by half-dragging the boy beneath his armpits. Peter’s right fist swelled and purpled and no longer looked like a human hand. Something dark lined the crevices in his knuckles and stained Father’s overalls. The two of them resembled each other with such chilling similarity at the moment—wheat-blond hair, stocky Illinois builds, large blue eyes, dazed by booze and some unknown horror. The house reeked of whiskey because of them.

Mama hounded the men into the kitchen. I clasped my temples to keep my head from swaying off my neck and rolling to the ground—which it seemed inclined to do—and followed after everyone.

“What did you do?” Mama grabbed Peter by the wrist and pumped cold water from the sink over those ballooning fingers. Peter hollered with the same unholy racket he had made when he knocked out two teeth jumping off a fence at the age of five.

Father, his face bright red, perspiration dripping off his nose, braced himself against the kitchen table. “The Krauts killed our Billy,” he said in a voice that was slurred and gravelly, “and they dumped this damned flu into our country. I read it in the paper. They turned the germs loose in an American theater.”

“What did you do?” asked Mama again. “Whose blood is this?”

Father lowered his head toward the table and swayed. “The damned Kraut went and died.”

I pulled my robe around my chest.

Mama turned off the water and gaped at my father.

“What are you talking about, Frank? What German went and died?”

Peter leaned over the sink and vomited. Father just stood there at the table and rocked from the alcohol and the aftermath of whatever violence they had just wreaked upon some poor soul.

“Those Krauts who own that furniture store—the last store in town owned by German immigrant bastards . . .” Father cleared his throat with a grinding ruckus that reminded me of our old tractor sputtering its last breaths. “One of them got himself killed.”

Mama gasped. Before she could utter a word, Father added, “The police know. Everything will be fine. We don’t want another Collinsville case, like that Prager lynching. No national attention.”

He said all of this with his face hanging down toward the uneven grain that ran in scraggly lines across the table’s blond wood.

Mama paled. “Are you saying that you and Peter killed a man tonight?”

“No.” Father shook his head. “That wasn’t a man. He was a German.”

I turned and staggered out of the room.

I was done.

Our oak staircase seemed to stretch four stories high above me, but I grabbed the handrail and forced myself to ascend the steps, my breathing labored, the muscles in my back and legs quivering and threatening to send me toppling back down to the ground floor. My parents’ shouts and cries down below roused me out of the delusion that this was all just the hallucination of a fever dream.

“Stop yelling at me, Alice!” said Father from the kitchen, his voice volleying across the dark-wood walls around me. “It was just a German. A goddamned German. You should be proud of your boy and me. You should be proud.”

I shook all over and panted for air. Upstairs, the stripes on my bedroom walls continued to wiggle and blur, but I somehow changed into a skirt and a blouse and packed two canvas bags full of clothing, toiletries, Emily Dickinson’s poems, and Peter’s old copy of J. M. Barrie’s
Peter and Wendy,
which I read to him when he was no more than ten. I also grabbed Billy’s letters from the war, including my favorite one: an optimistic note that included Billy’s caricature of one of my piano students—prim little Ruby Rogers—putting Kaiser Wilhelm to sleep by boring him with a sonata. Kaiser Willie snoozed on our settee and rested his feet on one of the hounds, while Ruby plunked on the keys of our piano.

I buttoned up my green wool coat and fitted my knit cloche over my hair, which I didn’t even bother taking the time to pin up. With both suitcases and my purse in hand, I turned my back on the lace and ruffled bedroom that had housed me from infancy to womanhood, and I shut the door behind me.

Mama sat at the bottom of the staircase and cried into a handkerchief monogrammed with a gold
R
for our surname: Rowan. She looked hunched and small and old in the black dress she wore to mourn Billy. Her neck straightened when I brushed past her with my bags. Her damp brown eyes peered up at me with almost childlike astonishment.

“I need to go, Mama.” I rested my luggage on the floor and wrapped my hand over her shoulder, which drooped from her stooped-over posture. “It’ll likely take me a while to fully recover from this illness, but I can’t stay here another minute.”

She nodded with her lips pursed and grabbed hold of my fingers, her hand as cold as winter. “You should have left years ago, Ivy. You’re twenty-five, for goodness sake. You wasted so much of your youth hiding away in this—”

“Don’t.” I squeezed her shoulder. “Don’t make me feel like an old maid again. You know quite well I stayed because of—”

“I know.” She nodded, her eyes moist and bloodshot. “Billy always called you ‘Wendy Darling’ because of how much you watched over him and Peter, didn’t he?”

“That’s what happens”—I peeked over my shoulder, toward the sound of Father clanking the neck of a whiskey bottle against an empty glass in the kitchen—“when one lives with Captain Hook.”

“You should have gotten yourself married to Wyatt Pettyjohn after school.”

“I’ve always been too choosy. You know that.”

“Life’s too short to be that choosy.”

“For some people it is. But for others”—I swallowed and turned away from her white-streaked hair and red-rimmed eyes—“life’s far too long to not be selective.”

She removed her hand from mine.

I bent forward and kissed her cheek, tasting salt and the burn of her sorrow. “I’m not going far,” I said, my voice low, my lips shaking. “Probably just to town for now.”

“I can’t even remember the last time you went to town.”

“Helen dragged me out to a Douglas Fairbanks picture the afternoon before she left. Remember?”

“That was way back in July.”

“I know.” I stood up straight, my hand still upon her. “Come stay with me if you feel like leaving, too. I know the farm is doing well right now, but all that prosperity isn’t worth”—I glanced back toward the kitchen again—“this.”

“Yes.” She wiped her eyes. “I will, darling. I’ll join you if I need to.”

I let her go, and a connection snapped. A binding stronger than the cord that had once tethered me to her womb frayed and split in two, and my stomach ached. The pain hit me again when I opened the front door and walked out on the commotion of Peter blubbering in the kitchen and Father choking on his drink. Despite my discomfort, I ducked my head out from under the black cloud that would now haunt my family worse than my Uninvited Guests, and I left that troubled white farmhouse.