The Uninvited by Cat Winters Read Free Book Online

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