The Uninvited by Cat Winters Read Free Book Online Page A

hands hang by his sides and breathed in a gentler rhythm. Soft sips of air glided through his nose.
    I closed my eyes, too, and let the melody slide through my blood until my heart thump-thump-thumped with jazz and strength and an unexpected surge of hope.
    The last note died away, and the room fell silent.
    I raised my eyelids and found Daniel watching me over his shoulder.
    “You can start on the bloodstains . . . if that’s what you truly want.” He walked over to the bristly wooden brush he had kicked across the floor and picked it up.
    I shook off the music’s spell—literally wiggling my arms and hands to bring my brain back into focus—and ventured over to him on legs gone wobbly and rubbery. My fingers managed to pluck the cleaning tool out of his hand without actually touching his skin.
    “I’ll have the stains gone before the night’s over,” I said. “My father cut himself all the time when he was working on our farm, and I learned how to clean up the mess.”
    “Well, bully for his clumsiness, then.”
    Daniel wandered away before I could check his eyes for any signs of his knowing the identity of that clumsy father of mine.
    I S C O U R E D T H E dark floorboards with a solution of vinegar and water that made my nostrils sting until I thought they’d bleed. Across the room, Daniel fitted a new wooden backing onto a lacquered maple cabinet that Peter and Father must have knocked over during their attack.
    My mind did a terrible thing: it strained to envision how my family members actually managed to destroy both the furniture and Albrecht in the very room in which I knelt. My nostrils burned all the more, and my stomach knotted and groaned, but I couldn’t stop seeing them in there, beating a man to death, violating his property, spilling the blood that sullied the wood below my knees.
    At one point Daniel dropped the new piece of wood and swore under his breath in German—or at least the words he spat out sounded like swearing. I kept my face directed toward the fading pink splotches and scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed.
    My father and brother murdered your brother, I wanted to confess from across the store as the bristles ground against the floor. The words perched on my lips and buzzed across the edges of my mouth, but the poisonous admission refused to leave my body. I’m sorry. They were drunk. The telegram about Billy came last week. They must have been drinking in the saloon and got riled up from all the sympathetic shouts and the anti-German slurs. It was my father and brother who beat him with their own bare hands.
    Daniel looked up at me, and I worried that he had somehow heard my confessions in my mind. I lowered my head and kept on scrubbing.
    He returned to his hammering and asked over the din, “How old was your brother?”
    “Twenty-two,” I called back. “How old was yours?”
    “One month shy of his twenty-ninth birthday.”
    “Does that make you the older or the younger brother?” I asked with my heart pounding to the beat of his hammering.
    “The younger.”
    Oh, Christ .
    The potential traitor and spy.
    I poured another wash of vinegar over the floor and dwelled on a brand-new fear: Herr Daniel Schendel might rush over with that metal hammer of his and strike me in the head. An eye-for-an-eye act of revenge. One Rowan sister in exchange for one Schendel brother. The scenario seemed awfully Shakespearean, but before April of that same year, I never would have imagined a mob of Illinois citizens stringing up a German by the neck either.
    Daniel rested his hammer on the floor with a gentle clank and ran the tips of his fingers over his work.
    Another jazz song shimmied through the boarded-up windows.
    I glanced up. “What’s that one called?”
    “I beg your pardon?” he asked.
    “You knew the name of that other song. I figured you might know this one too.”
    He kept his back toward me, but I could tell by the way he held his neck straight and still