Page 120 of My Sister is Going to Kill Me

Mandy held it in her outstretched palm toward the jittery CFO.

“I could be wrong,” Charlie said, “and I don’t want to get anyone in trouble.”

Mandy resisted the urge to roll her eyes. This was how accountants killed people, with an abundance of caution.

“But I think I saw Marc showing it to someone that first day, down at the beach, before we got in the rafts.”

“Who?” Thor asked.

“Imogen and Lucinda. I first noticed them chatting at the luggage drop, now that I think about it. Imogen had her phone in the air, streaming everything. She was arguing hard to bring a lighting bank along with her tripod. Marc told her there wouldn’t be electricity down in the canyon, and she flipped out.”

“I was with Marc that morning,” Thor said. “I don’t remember any of this.”

“You were flirting with this one,” Charlie said. “I believe you and Mandy were swapping tips about backcountry hair care.”

Touché. The accountant had some nerve after all.

“Anyway,” Charlie said, “once Imogen got over her disappointment, she stalked off, and the other two repacked the bags together. It seemed like they knew each other.”

“Marc and Lucinda?” Thor asked.

Charlie nodded. “When she told us she’d rafted the Grand Canyon before, I assumed maybe Marc had been a guide on another trip she’d taken. But then you told us he’d just been hired a few days ago.”

“Marc was green as a Muppet,” Thor said. “Told me the only desert he’d ever seen was on active duty in Afghanistan.”

Mandy tried to picture Thor at a dusty bar in Flagstaff surrounded by hikers, thrill seekers, and wannabe desert cowboys. Thor said he’d recruited Marc, but maybe it was the other way around. She imagined the hulking bald man approaching Thor, talking him up, buying him a beer or five. Marc must have profiled Thor. Tracked him. It took a level of professionalism and focus that made Mandy very uncomfortable.

Then she realized something.

“The military group Marc was part of, JT whatever it was . . . that’s Canadian Special Forces, right?”

“So?” Thor asked.

“Lucinda and Imogen are Canadian,” Mandy said.

“Canada’s a big place,” Guy said.

“I know,” Mandy said. “But Imogen said they’re related to royalty. Lucinda Duvray might really be a lady. With a capital L.”

“The lady in the poem!” Thor said. “I knew it wasn’t Tennyson.”

“What?” Guy said.

“When Stefan was reciting that poem on the beach,” Thor said, “he repeated this line, like ‘the lady has gone mad, the lady has gone too far,’ and I remember thinking, there’s no lady in that poem. I mean, it’s about the lotus eaters, and probably some of them were women, but it’s not like when Odysseus gets trapped by Circe or Calypso or when Nausicaä helps him. The lotus eaters are just generic opium fiends. There is no lady in that part of Odysseus’s journey across the water.”

The water. Mandy turned to Charlie. “You said you saw Marc and the Duvrays talking down by the river too?”

“That’s right.” Charlie’s words were coming faster now. “When we were eating lunch and waiting for Babette. It was just the two of them, Marc and Lucinda, feeding watermelon rinds to the mules. That’s when I saw the knife. Maybe he gave it to her.”

Mandy nodded. It fit. If Lucinda and Marc had a plan to kill Babette, they would have had to scramble when the helicopter didn’t show up. They would have had to improvise.

It was time to put her cards on the table. “It’s Lucinda. She’s the whale. She’s the killer.”

“The grandma?” Guy asked.

“How could she have killed Babette?” Charlie asked.

“I think she directed Marc to do it on the hike down.”