Page 37 of My Sister is Going to Kill Me

“Right!” Mandy was as loud as ever, and Liv silently thanked the river for its gurgling roar. “Step zero point one. Find out as much as we can about why Babette is missing.” Mandy frowned. “That’s where we started. And got nowhere.”

“Mandy, if we’re going to look into this”—Liv reached out and tucked a loose flap of Mandy’s sarong back around her—“you have to let me take the lead.”

“I thought we could do it together.”

Could they? Mandy had no training as an investigator and, more importantly, no aptitude for it. Telling Mandy delicate information was like loading it into a confetti cannon. She was a suggestible, excitable fountain of imagination. Terrific for making art with kids. Not so much for threat analysis.

“We need to be methodical about it,” Liv finally said. “Discreet. Make a plan. Follow the evidence. And play it cool.”

“I can be cool.” Mandy was practically doing a jig.

Liv raised an eyebrow. “Like a cucumber?”

“My cool is more like a hamster with suspenders and a little bow tie.”

“Fine. I’ll be the cucumber.”

“And me?”

“Just try to keep the tap dancing to a minimum.”

Mandy waved her notebook dangerously close to Liv’s coffee. “I can plan. I can gather evidence. That’s why I made this.”

She flashed a drawing of what looked like an amateur baseball team. Mandy had sketched caricatures of every person on the trip—Devon fierce, Charlie quaking, Fiona with LED mask in hand. There was Lucinda in her rafting gloves, and Katy with her long braid flipped over her shoulder. Imogen and PK flanked the sides, holding the ends of a team banner that spanned across them. Liv counted fourteen people in the drawing: all the guests, the three guides, and Marc, who had hiked down with the mules at the beginning of the trip and would pick them up in a van at the end. Plus Babette. She was at the front of the pack, swinging a bat.

“This is . . . impressive,” Liv said. The pencil version of Mandy was grinning and waving a pennant from atop Thor’s shoulders. Meanwhile, the two-dimensional Liv scowled down at a clipboard.

“See what I did?” Mandy said. “I gave everyone a ball cap and wrote the hidden messages we know about real small across the brim. This way, we can keep track of what we learn about whose hat says what.”

Liv squinted down at the drawing. “CareFree Killers,” she read across the banner. “Catchy team name. But maybe a bit . . .”

“Stabby? I know. But I wanted the alliteration.”

“I appreciate your initiative.” Liv closed the notebook and put it on the rock between them. Big Pete had said it yesterday: If they wanted to survive, they had to play like a team out here. “If we’re going to find out who’s at the greatest risk—and who might be threatening them—we need to know more about everyone on this trip.”

“Where do we start?” Mandy’s eyes were shining with eagerness.

“Charlie seems to think Babette has been involved in deaths in the past. If that’s the case, someone else here will know about it. You have a natural reason to talk to Babette’s team. They’re probably curious to get to know their sparkly first investor better. And you already made friends at the poker game.”

“Fiona cheats. She hid an ace in her bra.”

“We’ll keep an eye on her.” Liv was still curious about the reason for Fiona’s presence on the trip and her stake in CareFree. She wished there was some way she could get access to the internet. She wanted to see annual reports. Earnings calls. Staff directories. Anything that could provide objective background research for analysis.

“What about the hats?” Mandy asked. “Should we ask to see them all?”

Liv scanned the other guests in their camping chairs, metal plates on their laps. Some were wearing their caps. More weren’t. She tried to weigh the benefit of getting as much information as possible against the risks. Paranoia was one of the most deadly plagues that could sweep a group, especially in isolation. It was well documented that even smart, high-functioning adults could fall prey to mob riots, phantom outbreaks, and imaginary hit men under the grip of mass terror. Charlie was already infected. If others reacted as strongly as he had, they could put themselves in real danger all on their own, without further intervention from Babette.

Was that Babette’s plan? To seed fear and mistrust among her team and let it tear them apart?

“For now, let’s be discreet,” Liv said. “And focused.”

“On what?”

Liv considered the options. “There are some questions we simply can’t answer down here. We don’t know what happened to Babette, or what she’s planning now. We have to devote our energy to information we can learn from the individuals who are here.”

“You want to talk with people one-on-one?”

Liv nodded. “But don’t scare anyone. Let’s keep our questions open-ended, and not just about Babette’s disappearance. There’s more going on here than a missing CEO. Any guest could be involved.”