Free The Uninvited by Cat Winters Page B

breath. “I’m sorry if Buchanan hasn’t always treated you kindly.”
    She nodded. “Well, thank you. But you don’t need to take responsibility for the town’s sins, too.”
    “I just . . .”
    “Go up to bed, Ivy.” She smiled and gestured with her head toward the stairs. “As my mother always told me, there’s no use trying to face your troubles when you’re tired. The troubles always win.”
    A L O N G D A Y T I M E slumber up in the attic’s squishy bed, coupled with a late-evening bath, erased some of the strangeness and heartbreak of that long, lucid dream of a night. I donned a fresh pair of undergarments, a clean white middy blouse, and a honey-brown skirt I had sewn from extra fabric we didn’t need after Billy left for the army. Mama had bought the fabric for a new pair of Sunday trousers she intended to make for him before his number was called, and there was no sense in allowing good wool to go to waste.
    I followed the scent of freshly brewed coffee to May’s kitchen and found her sitting by herself at a round table near the icebox. She played some sort of game with a board and a flat wooden pointer shaped halfway between a spade and a heart. Darkness had already descended over the world outside the window, and the board reflected the glare of the electric light shining down from a stained-glass lamp above the table.
    “Hello.” May peeked up at me from beneath her long lashes and pushed the wooden pointer to the word GOOD BYE on the game board.
    “Hello.” I cleared my throat and leaned my hands against the back of one of her chairs. “What is that?”
    “You’ve never seen a Ouija board?”
    I jerked away from the table with a gasp.
    May snickered. “Don’t look so spooked, Ivy. The devil isn’t going to come crawling out of the board and snatch you away. It’s perfectly safe.”
    “Are you sure about that?”
    “Quite sure.” She tucked the wooden pointer inside a small bag made of gray cloth. “And I’ll have you know, I’m not the only Widow Street woman who employs Ouija boards and spirit mediums.”
    “You employ a medium?” I asked. “A séance sort of medium?”
    “Yes, a highly reputable one, another former Chicago girl, in fact. Why?” She lifted the board’s cardboard box off the floor. “Don’t you believe in ghosts?”
    “Oh, boy. What a question.” I pulled out the chair with a loud screech of the wood and dropped down onto the seat.
    “I’ll take that response to mean that you do indeed believe,” said May, a coy grin on her lips. “Might you have ghost stories of your own to share?”
    “Well . . .” I folded my hands on the table to stop them from quaking. “To be most honest—and I’m only telling you this information because of your own Spiritualist beliefs . . .”
    She nodded. “Go on.”
    “Well . . .” I inhaled a long breath with a lift of my shoulders. “The Rowan women are known to see the dead.”
    May raised her right eyebrow and settled the Ouija board inside its box. “The specifics, please.”
    “I’ve never once mentioned this peculiarity to another person outside the family,” I said in a whisper, as if the spirits themselves—as if Eddie Dover—might actually hear me. “Not even my closest childhood friends. But my mother and I . . . well . . .” I licked my lips. “Rowan women tend to see the ghosts of loved ones right before someone dies.”
    May rubbed her lips together and seemed to digest my confession. “Harbinger spirits,” she said with a pleased-looking nod. “Interesting.”
    I straightened my neck. “Is that something you know about?”
    “Not entirely. But I’ve learned various theories about spirits through the medium.”
    “And what are her theories?”
    “Well, she says”—May lowered the Ouija board’s lid over the box with a soft squeak of the cardboard—“some spirits get stuck in the places where they died. The haunted-house sorts of ghosts, if you will. Some struggle to