Page 108 of My Sister is Going to Kill Me

Chapter Forty-Five

“We did it!”

Imogen leapt off the tarp, arms raised triumphantly. Her waist was ringed with empty Babette water bottles strung together with yellow paracord, punctuated by three Babette soft coolers duct-taped to her back.

“Watch this.” The girl strutted down the beach, her waist-belt jangling. She pressed her phone into Liv’s hand. “Take a video, okay?”

Liv gamely held up the phone. The effect of the CareFree was fading, and she could feel her good cheer melting in the prickly heat. Imogen gave a theatrical shriek, slid her feet into the cool mud, and lowered herself into the river. She slipped all the way under the water, shooting Liv a dazzling smile as she descended.

Then the teenager started to rise. The bottles around her waist came up first, bobbing in a yellow circle, giving the impression of a last-minute Halloween costume of the floating island of plastic waste in the middle of the ocean. The zipped-up soft coolers on Imogen’s back kept her aloft, but she kept flopping from side to side like a dead fish.

“Ta-da!” The girl popped back up to standing and flipped her hair dramatically behind her. “I floated!”

“You floated,” Liv said. Sort of. For a few seconds. In calm conditions. One of the Babette coolers taped to Imogen’s back unpeeled itself and started drifting.

“So we’ll just make six more of these, and we’ll be good to go!”

“Imogen, I don’t think—”

“And we’ve got paddles now,” PK added. He waved something in the air that looked like a junkyard snow shovel. Upon closer investigation, it was the skeleton of a camping chair, stripped of its fabric and lashed into a bundle of poles, a baking pan duct-taped to one end. PK and Fiona had five such chair paddles assembled, each with a different kitchen implement secured to its head. The cast-iron skillet had a promising shape, but it was so heavy Fiona could barely lift it. The last three paddles were outfitted with a matrix of spatulas and wooden spoons. They looked like the world’s worst pitchforks, and try as she might, Liv could hardly imagine them propelling a raft anywhere but ruin.

The CareFree had definitely worn off. Now she could see the situation for what it was: a disaster. Liv had done the first part right, selling them a story that pushed them from terror into action. But it was useless action. Even Imogen, the internet’s poster child for radical honesty, had deluded herself into embracing the color yellow. If Liv told the truth now, it might crush them. Their frenzied hope would sour and flip. They wouldn’t just go back to fear and uncertainty about Babette’s and Stefan’s deaths. They would go lower, into raw anger, paranoia. Terror. The crash would be worse than where they started.

“This isn’t going to work.” It was Lucinda. She didn’t sound upset about it. Just matter-of-fact.

Devon agreed. “We’re stuck here,” she said. “We’re stuck on this beach while my brother gets paddled to his death—”

“Maybe Thor isn’t the murderer,” Liv impulsively blurted out. “Maybe they were going for help.”

“I thought you told us it was his knife,” Lucinda said.

“You were so confident,” Devon added.

Terrific. Now Liv had broken the cardinal rule of lying. She’d smashed her own story for no good reason but panic.

“I’m just saying we can’t give up hope,” Liv said.

It sounded weak even to her own ears. Liv thought of all the times her sister had spun up an audacious whopper of a dream and sold it to her, all the times she’d gotten fed up with Mandy for skirting the truth and taking the easy way out. But Mandy’s way wasn’t easy. Conjuring up a world better than the one they were stuck in, fabricating and finagling her way into that dream—that was no shortcut. It was a survival tactic. And Liv had failed miserably in trying to execute it.

She had to find another way to survive.

Big Pete came striding up from the beach before she could come up with any brilliant ideas of how.

“There’s something I have to tell you.”

No good conversation ever started that way.

“While you all were playing dress-up, I used a crowbar to lever open the gang box.” He grimaced. “It wasn’t there.”

“What wasn’t there?” The question came from Lucinda, who was gathering up dislodged bottles from the failed flotation belt experiment.

Big Pete glanced uneasily at Liv, the question of whether to answer written plainly on his face.

Liv weighed her options. She looked from Big Pete to Lucinda Duvray. Both were competent. Both had no prior connection with the Babette empire that Liv knew of. If she was going to trust anyone here with the truth, it was going to be these two.

“You can say it,” she said.

“The gun,” Big Pete said. “It’s missing.”