Page 1 of My Sister is Going to Kill Me

Chapter One

Liv looked at her watch. Then at the crowd. Then, the abyss.

Her sister was missing.

The response at work when someone didn’t show up at an appointed rendezvous was clear: a twelve-step protocol Liv had memorized on her first overseas assignment. The protocol on a sister trip? Swallow the panic and wait.

In ten years, Mandy had never missed one of their annual joint vacations. But she always found a way to show up at the last possible moment, after Liv had mentally notified the National Guard, requisitioned a canine search unit, and completely lost her equilibrium. The one time she’d actually called the authorities—outside a reindeer ranch in northern Lapland—her little sister had come cantering up on an ice-bearded beast, curls bouncing wildly under a hot-pink stocking cap, eyes dancing at the sight of so many members of the Finnish police force deployed to track her down.

It was as if Mandy wanted her to feel off balance. To stumble into their time together instead of marching forward with confidence. And if any place could rattle her, the Grand Canyon was it. Liv had never been a fan of heights, but she hadn’t considered this alternative: plunging depths of carved-away rock, a natural wonder that hollowed out the world instead of reaching for the sky.

She forced herself to look over the cliffside railing she was clutching. The South Rim of the canyon stretched down and away from her, forming a greedy, treacherous mouth. If Mandy was here, she’d pronounce it beautiful, throw around words like “ombré” and “perspective,” paint a big bright picture of the two of them jaunting down the trail the next morning before the birds woke up. But Mandy wasn’t here yet, and all Liv sensed was danger. No matter how she craned her neck, their destination—the Colorado River—was beyond the terrifying zigzag of her field of vision. She couldn’t track more than a few hundred feet down to where the footpath dissolved into a gaping wound. But she could trace the bloodred shadows down the cliffside. She could feel the crooked switchbacks pulsing in her knees. She could sense the shimmering heat, which shifted from comfortable warmth at the rim to a blistering furnace down below. She could see enough to know for certain: This time, their sister trip really might kill her.

Liv walked back to their motel room, hoping to find Mandy on the doorstep, jiggling a key and humming a made-up song.

No luck. Her sister was good for surprises, but not the I-arrived-early-and-brought-extra-sunscreen variety. It was Liv who double-checked the packing list and dutifully purchased not one but three sets of Day-Glo strings to keep their sunglasses strapped to their heads as they bucked their way down the Colorado. One for herself. One for Mandy. And one in case of disaster.

She turned her attention to the two careful piles of luggage arranged on the queen beds. The left bed held the contents of Liv’s work life, tactical and practical. Three no-wrinkle black suits, one gun holster. A pair of low heels she always kicked off the second she was seated behind her desk. Also her laptop, credentials, and a vintage portable lie detector her boss in Bucharest had given her after her promotion from the visa office. She’d be going directly from the Grand Canyon to her next deployment in Bogotá, joining a smuggling task force as a profiler for the first time. She’d spent the plane ride brushing up on the latest data on human trafficking, exotic animal trade, and new trends in street drugs. This could be her big break into serious investigatory work. The only thing delaying her from it was this sister trip.

For which she was assembling the second bag. Liv stared at the foreign objects she’d bought for the Colorado River. A camp towel. A 50-UPF neck gaiter. Two insulated water bottles, absurdly large, so much so she’d started getting ads on her phone featuring bodybuilders who crushed raw eggs against their foreheads and let the contents drip into their mouths. Cotton T-shirts, which she bought a cheap five-pack of from a street vendor in Bucharest. Cotton seemed outdated compared to quick-dry synthetics—didn’t it kill in the backcountry?—but she’d read it could be 120 degrees at the bottom of the Grand Canyon in the summer, which meant the ideal clothing could be dunked in the freezing river and stay wet a very long time. She rolled the T-shirts into a tight tube, sliding them into her duffel between a can of bug spray and a bright blue rain poncho. At least the outfitter had provided a packing list. This was one of Mandy’s selling points for the Grand Canyon rafting adventure: It came with a detailed plan and day-by-day itinerary. For once, Mandy had picked a trip that didn’t consist of “we’ll get there and figure it out.” Liv had tried to suggest they could go somewhere with a schedule that also boasted air conditioning, but Mandy had waved her off.

“You get your trips,” Mandy pointed out. “I get mine.”

Liv hated when her little sister was right.

Their sister trips had started ten years ago, when Liv was twenty-four and Mandy twenty-one, after their dad was arrested for fraud and left them with a shoebox stuffed with hundred-dollar bills and an apartment full of unanswered questions. When the SEC determined the shoebox money wasn’t part of their case, Mandy convinced Liv they should keep it. With their mom dead and their dad headed to prison, they only had each other. The money—Liv preferred not to know which of Guy Chisholm’s dubious investments it came from—was something tangible they could share, a way to reinvest in their relationship.

Liv suggested a joint savings account. Mandy countered by proposing they quit their jobs, buy a sailboat, and spend the next decade hunting for shipwrecked treasure. After Liv put her foot down—she would not, under any circumstances, abandon her nascent foreign service career to become a pirate—they agreed to use the money for sister trips: once a year, trading off who picked the destination. At first they played nice and considered each other’s interests. Then, four years in, Mandy turned an alleged chill-on-the-beach vacation in Costa Rica into a death-defying caving expedition that gave Liv nightmares and foot fungus for months. After that, the gloves came off. Liv frog-marched her sister through Paris. Mandy took them fly-fishing in Idaho. Liv dragged Mandy to Dubai and Seoul. Mandy brought Liv to that Finnish bush village where they ate nothing but reindeer jerky.

Considering some of what Mandy’d put her up to in the past, rafting the lower half of the Grand Canyon was practically a resort vacation. One that would start with a ten-mile, forty-eight-hundred-foot descent at four thirty the next morning.

In the final hour before orientation, Liv tried not to think about the early morning hike, her jet lag, or whether her sister was about to flit through the door with a new vision for the week that involved helicoptering into a pit of javelinas. She focused on the task at hand, packing everything into its respective bag and zipping them up tight. The motel beds now held two black duffels, each stuffed with a different life. For the next week, she would be adventurous Liv. She would be fun Liv. She would be the cheerful big sister Mandy always wanted her to be. Even if it killed her.

Chapter Two

Liv was so going to kill her. Mandy made her first flight from Austin by some kind of miracle, but when she got to Vegas, she didn’t realize she had to take a bus to a different airport to catch the puddle jumper to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon. Which left her mid-conversation with the Cinnabon cashier about her teenage son’s Pokémon addiction when the bus rolled away without her.

Crap. Her phone was at 3 percent. Somehow Mandy’s phone sucked up battery faster than other people’s, or it just vibed with the way she flew through life’s tornado, especially in the summer, when she was no longer coaxing creativity from moody teenagers one fifty-two-minute class period at a time. She’d kicked off June at an all-night bonfire rave where she’d burned her school year planner. Since then, she’d relished losing track of what day it was, let alone the hour. But sister trips required getting back on schedule, or trying to. She found the number for the bus company and took a deep breath. Charm offensives at 3 percent required serious lung capacity.

The call connected, and she plunged in, channeling her inner cheerleader. “Hi! My name’s Mandy Chisholm, and I’m here at the Vegas airport to catch your transporter to the South Rim.”

“That bus has already left the terminals.”

“I’m afraid there was a misunderstanding, a lack of clarity about where I was supposed to meet the driver—”

“Our materials clearly state—”

“You’re right. I’m a dingbat and I apologize and I’m sorry if I sound out of breath, but I’ve been running to try to flag the bus down, and it’s really hot out here, and my father—”

“There will be another bus at eight thirty p.m.”

“My father, he disappeared years ago, and now all of a sudden he reached out to me, and he says he has something important to tell me, and I have to catch this bus to see him because I’m afraid . . . I’m afraid he might be dying.”

This was, of course, not true. Technically, it was possible—Mandy’s dad was full of surprises, and he’d been living life at double speed since he’d gotten out of prison seven years ago. It was just as likely he was knocking on death’s door at a Grand Canyon motor lodge as it was that he was spearfishing off his new girlfriend’s yacht in the Maldives. Or did he say Belize? Wherever Guy Chisholm was, he wasn’t her concern right now. What was her concern was how pissed Liv would be if Mandy missed the welcome briefing for their trip. But she couldn’t tell the minibus dispatcher she was scared of her big sister looking at her like the defective peanut at the bottom of the can. There was no upside in a truth like that.

Two percent. She coughed up a sob and gave it one more shot. “This might be the last time I can talk to my dad. Sir, I know the bus has left, but I’m hoping, please, I’m begging you . . .”

There was a long pause on the other side of the line.