The Lure of the Moonflower Read Free

Cosmopolitan Club, where all the arrangements simply happened, and no one had to figure out the placement of tents. My family has never gone in for camping. Or, for that matter, circuses.
    I tried to sound reassuring. “That’s the marquee, Mom. It’s where we’re having the reception.”
    My mother looked unconvinced. “Are you sure they didn’t rip off Ringling Brothers?”
    “I don’t think they have Ringling Brothers here.”
    My mother cast a dark glance over her shoulder. “Not anymore, they don’t.”
    “Send in the clowns . . . ,” sang Jillian, not quite sotto voce. “Don’t bother. They’re here.”
    I glowered at my sister over the domed lid of the Creepy Old Trunk. “Funny. Don’t you have a senior essay to write or something?”
    “Not until next month.” Jillian smiled beatifically at me. “Until then, I’m all yours.”
    “Lucky me,” I said dourly. Which, of course, really translated to
I love you
. It was, as Jillian would say, the way we rolled. We snarked because we loved. “Have I mentioned that I’m really glad you’re here?”
    “I know,” said Jillian serenely. She gave me a one-armed hug that somehow managed to be equal parts comfort and condescension, as only a college senior knows how. “Nervous?”
    “I can’t imagine why.” Drawing up a Selwick seating chart was like navigating a field full of land mines. And we all know how well that usually goes. Before the evening was over, someone was going to blow.
    I just hoped it wouldn’t be me.
    “Oy,” said someone from the doorway. His voice was rather muffled by the large, rectangular object on a dolly in front of him. “Where’d you want this?”
    “Not in the house,” I said quickly. “If you just take the path around the back to the garden, and make a right past the tent . . .”
    “I’ll show him,” said my mother, with her best martyr look. “You can go . . .” She gestured wordlessly at my face.
    “Make yourself look a little less like Barney?” Jillian suggested.
    “You used to love Barney,” said my mother reprovingly, and shooed the port-a-loo guys out the door.
    “I was three,” said Jillian, to nobody in particular.
    “Yup. I’m saving that for
your
wedding.”
    “Hmm,” said Jillian, with a look of deep speculation that did not bode well for tomorrow’s maid-of-honor speech. “Where’s Colin?”
    “Relative wrangling.” I’ll say this for the Selwicks: they’d all come out of the woodwork for our wedding, flying in from the far corners of the Earth, or stumbling in from the pub down the road, depending. There was a large Canadian delegation, as well as a bunch fresh off the plane from the UAE; there were Posies and Pollys and Sallys and enough hyphenated last names to make writing out place cards an exercise in wrist strain. The Posies and Pollys and Sallys were all very well. The main concern was that Colin not be left alone with his mother or stepfather for more than five minutes. I couldn’t even check in with him, since he’d left his cell phone with me, in case the tent people or the caterers called. “Oh, Lord. Would you—”
    “On it,” said Jillian, and whisked out the door in search of her future brother-in-law. Pity the Selwick who got in her way.
    There were all sorts of useful things I could be doing: tying bows on favors, chipping off my mud mask, promoting world peace, but instead I knelt beside the trunk.
    The note was there, half stuck beneath the trunk, the creamy stationery grimed. I wrestled the envelope out from under the edge.
    Eloise
, it said, in letters that had never seen a ballpoint pen. The handwriting was as elegant as ever, but, I noticed with a pang, less certain than I had seen it before. Mrs. Selwick-Alderly had seemed ageless when I first met her, but she wasn’t ageless, any more than the rest of us, and the last two years had taken their toll.
    With hands that weren’t entirely steady, I slid the note from the envelope.
    My dear