“Charlie?”
I turned around and saw that there was a guy standing in front of me. He was wearing a baseball cap and a long-sleeved T-shirt with STANWICH LANDSCAPING printed across the front of it, and jeans with dirt stains on the knees. He looked like he was the age of my older siblings, with blond hair and green eyes, and it took me a moment to place him—this was Olly Gillespie, Linnie’s high school boyfriend.
“Hey, Olly,” I said, lifting a hand in a wave.
Olly and Linnie had been pretty serious in high school—they’d dated through junior and senior year, and then the summer before college. She’d broken up with him before she went to Dartmouth. Apparently, after Linnie and Rodney had gotten together, he hadn’t taken the news that Linnie had moved on very well. I wasn’t clear on what had happened in real life, but Olly’s strip doppelgänger drove to Dartmouth in the middle of the night to stand under her dorm window with an iPod and a portable speaker to try to win Linnie back. It obviously didn’t work, and I didn’t see much of Olly until Linnie moved back after her split with Rodney.
A few weeks after she’d moved home, Olly Gillespie started showing up again—he was in the driveway, picking Linnie up, standing around the kitchen with us, in the backyard talking mulch with my dad. From what I’d been able to gather, he’d never really left Stanwich, and after college he’d started working for his dad’s landscaping company. Although it was clear to all the rest of us that Linnie and Rodney were going to get back together eventually, it seemed like Olly had never gotten over Linnie. I was never sure what, exactly, had happened with them when she and Rodney were broken up—but as soon as she got back together with Rodney, Olly disappeared again.
“I thought it was you,” he said. “What are you doing here?” He crossed to the Stanwich Landscaping truck that was parked two cars down from mine and hoisted out a leaf blower. I turned to gesture to Bill, to introduce him, only to see that Bill was on his phone again and had walked halfway to the steps.
“Just wedding stuff. Linnie’s getting married this weekend, so . . .” I immediately wondered if that had been tactless.
Olly grabbed a rake with his other hand and nodded. “I know.” I was about to ask how he knew this, when I remembered that you couldn’t be following any of Linnie’s social media feeds and not be very aware that a wedding was in the mix. “Don’t let me keep you,” he said with a quick smile. “I’ll see you soon.” He gave me a nod after saying this, and walked with his equipment around the side of the building.
I turned away from Olly and hurried to the Inn’s front steps, where Bill was waiting for me. “Sorry,” I said. “That was . . .” I glanced back to where Olly had disappeared to, but there was no sign of him. “Just a family friend,” I said, figuring that was true enough, and also that the wedding coordinator’s nephew didn’t necessarily need to know details of my sister’s romantic history.
We headed up the steps to the Inn together, and as I walked in through the door Bill held open for me, I looked around. The lobby of the Inn was just like I remembered it. There were chandeliers above, dark wood furniture, and woven, patterned carpets. There was a bar in the lobby, which always became the reception area when there were events. From the beginning, it had been Linnie and Rodney’s choice for the rehearsal dinner, and they’d rented out the private dining room in the restaurant. I glanced around, wondering what exactly the problem here was and who we should talk to to fix it, but Bill was already making a beeline toward the tiny check-in/concierge desk.
By the time I joined him, a woman in a pantsuit was crossing around from the desk and motioning us to follow her toward the restaurant. “I’m glad you’re here,” she said, her voice low and serious, the way people talked about impending disasters and grave illnesses. “I had a feeling it wasn’t right when the boxes were delivered, but they had the correct name on them, so they were signed for. . . .” We followed her through the restaurant—empty except for a few yawning servers setting up for lunch—to the private dining room in the back. She opened the door and hit the light.
Immediately, a song I vaguely recognized started blasting, something about coming from a land down under. My eyes widened as I looked around, and Bill took a startled step backward.
There were life-size cutouts of kangaroos, koalas, wallabies, and crocodiles placed around the room. There was a map of Australia stretching across one wall, streamers with the Australian flag on them hanging in delicate, twisted loops from the ceiling, and a blown-up picture of two of the Hemsworths.
“I assumed these were not the decorations intended for the rehearsal dinner,” she said, and Bill and I both shook our heads wordlessly. She sighed and crossed the room to where an iPod had been docked and shut the music off.
“There were supposed to be pictures of my sister and Rodney,” I said, noticing now that there was a stack of gift bags in bright neon, lined up in neat rows. “Everything was supposed to be peach and gray? And there weren’t . . . supposed to be marsupials.”
“Well, this clears it up a little.” I turned and saw Bill holding up a banner, the kind that was clearly meant to be stretched across a doorway. G’DAY, CLAY! HAPPY 9TH BIRTHDAY, MATE! was printed in huge letters across it.
“Okay,” I said, nodding. “So there was obviously just a mix-up. And this Clay kid probably got our decorations by mistake, that’s all.”
“You have to admire a kid who wants an Australian-themed birthday party,” Bill said as he rolled up the banner. “That’s a pretty awesome move. I’m pretty sure the theme of my ninth birthday was just ‘eat as much pizza as possible without puking.’ ”
The woman behind us cleared her throat. “I let William know this already. But my staff needs to have the proper decorations in enough time to get set up before the event begins.”
“Right,” I said, nodding, like that would help me come up with a plan for tracking down what had happened to Linnie and Rodney’s stuff. “We’ll get them to you,” I promised recklessly.
“Absolutely,” Bill agreed.
“Great,” she said, heading toward the door. “Just let us know when you have the right materials here and my staff can get started.”
When she’d left, I looked at Bill, hoping that he secretly had some plan beyond the one I had formulated, which was to google “Clay birthday location nine Australia.”
“Okay,” Bill said, “so I’m guessing this is a Clementine issue? Pland said that she was getting events mixed up.”
“You’re probably right,” I said, silently cursing Clementine in my head.
“I’ll get in touch with Pland,” Bill said, already typing on his phone. “Find out where this birthday party is taking place. And—”
My phone buzzed in my back pocket, and I pulled it out, expecting that maybe it was Linnie, wanting an update on the decorations. But it wasn’t Linnie. My screen read MIKE CALLING.
I hesitated; then right before voice mail would have picked up, I answered. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d even spoken to Mike. “Hello?”
“Hey, Charlie.”
I turned away and took a few steps toward the door. It felt too surreal to talk to my brother while a kangaroo cutout looked back at me. “Um. Hi.”
“Sorry to bother you,” he said, speaking, as usual, more quietly than most people, so that you had to lean in to hear him. Linnie always claimed that Mike being soft-spoken was just a normal reaction to following J.J. in the birth order, but I knew it was a low-key power move.
“What’s going on?” I asked, not in the let’s catch up way, but in the what do you want way.
“Can you come get me?”
“Come get you?” I asked, turning the volume up all the way on my phone and pressing it closer to my ear.
“Yeah. I’m at the airport,” Mike said, and I felt my breath catch somewhere in my throat. “I came for the wedding. I’m here.”
CHAPTER 5
Or, The Prodigal Son Is Waiting at Baggage Claim