Page 11 of My Sister is Going to Kill Me

“Did she text you?”

“No.” PK looked around anxiously at the others. “Did anyone hear from her?”

Around the circle, people made a show of taking out their phones, as if they hadn’t been told dozens of times that there would be no reception once they got down into the Grand Canyon. One by one, they shook their heads.

“She ditched us?” Imogen asked.

“She wouldn’t,” PK said. “Something must be wrong. We have to hike back up.”

“I’m sure she is on her way,” Stefan said. “We have all put a lot of energy into being here.”

“She isn’t coming.” Fiona, the blond doctor from Los Angeles, spoke in a clipped, definitive voice.

“We didn’t know you were coming,” Devon muttered.

“You think I wanted to be here? With you?” Fiona shot back. “Babette called me two weeks ago and begged me to join. I postponed a trip to Seoul, slept in that moth-ridden lodge on synthetic sheets, got up at four in the morning to hike down to meet up with her. All of us made sacrifices to be here. Now we’re a mile underground and Babette is . . . where exactly? A conference room? A luxury spa?”

“No,” PK said. He looked like a frustrated child about to cry. “She planned to be here.”

“This whole trip was her vision,” Charlie said.

“Precisely,” Fiona said. “You know how relentlessly she pursues her visions. Remember the Raw Essence Quest, when she hired crews to break into our kitchens in the middle of the workday and replace all our cooked food with fresh-pressed turnip juice? Or when she made her assistant hike Half Dome with a fractured humerus during Fierce?”

Stefan frowned. “I thought this was a corporate bonding exercise.”

“It is,” PK said. “I can’t speak for earlier Essence Quests.”

“Of course you can’t,” Fiona said. “You were hired after Fierce, because your predecessor broke his arm in Yosemite, and when it healed improperly, she fired him for having poor alignment.”

“That can’t be real,” Mandy whispered to Liv.

“Not in the autobiography?” Liv whispered back.

“That was a long time ago,” Charlie said.

“People like Babette don’t change,” Fiona said. “She’s ruthless. And thorough. She hurts people who get in her way.”

“What’s your point?” Devon asked Fiona.

“You know your sister.” Fiona’s eyes were dark. “She isn’t late, or lost. My guess is she marooned us down here intentionally, without internet or phones.”

“Why would she do that?” Imogen asked.

“CareFree is all about letting go of your worries,” Mandy improvised. “Maybe Babette wanted to give us a scare. A before to make the after even sweeter.”

“Whatever game she’s playing, I’m not interested.” Fiona glared at Charlie and Devon. “Babette operates like Vegas. The house always wins.”

Chapter Seven

Liv eyed the scuffed yellow rafts, wondering if they’d ever board them. Once again, her sister’s plan had come with a messily knotted string attached. It seemed that the potential for this sister trip to move forward rested on the question of whether Babette Sauvage’s absence was intentional or accidental, benign or malignant.

No one seemed to have access to relevant data that might help answer this question, and Liv was still getting a handle on how the others were all connected. Over a simple lunch of sandwiches and watermelon—deliciously cold in the mounting heat—they did what all people do in the face of insufficient information: leapt to conclusions that served their diverging self-interests.

“If Babette’s not coming, I’m out,” Fiona said. She turned to Marc, who was mid-conversation with Lucinda, and snapped her fingers. “Mule man. Take me to the top with you.”

“Me too,” Imogen said. “Even if he smells like the back of a barn.”

“Imogen!” Lucinda scolded. She turned to Marc. “You smell just fine, dear. But we’re not going back up with you. We’re here to raft the canyon.”