Page 51 of My Sister is Going to Kill Me

“A threat is an irrational act. Why inform your target of your intention to hurt them? Why give them information they could use to protect themselves from an attack? The threat is a kind of performance, distinct from any act of violence.”

“A performance, huh?” Mandy ran her hands through the water. “And you want to know who’s in the audience and who’s backstage.”

“Exactly.” Liv was impressed how quickly Mandy got it. “With multiple threats, it’s possible Babette does want to kill multiple people, or has paranoid fantasies of doing so. You’d be amazed how often a disturbed individual sends death threats to the ambassador, the pope, and the manager of their local coffee shop at the same time. But sometimes multiple threats can mean something else. It could be a way of stirring the pot, seeding confusion. Maybe Babette wants to mask who her true target is. Or maybe she isn’t trying to kill anyone but is trying to use the messages to extract a piece of information held by someone in the group.”

“Maybe there’s a threat to CareFree.”

“Or maybe CareFree itself is the threat,” Liv countered. “That’s what I want to find out.”

“Hikers!” Thor was up on the bank, waving a water bottle in the air. “Let’s get hoofing. Lots of ground to cover before we reconnect with everyone at Deer Creek.”

Liv and Mandy stepped out of the cool water and looked up Tapeats Canyon. A faint, scraggly trail snaked up the cliff alongside the fast-moving creek. Within minutes, Mandy would be hundreds of feet above her, tucked into pockets of crumbling rock, invisible from the river.

Liv pulled her sister into a quick, fierce hug.

“Be careful,” she said. “Stay away from the edge. Stay with the group. Remember, whether it’s real or not, you got a threat. It could have come from any one of them.”

For a moment, Mandy’s eyes widened. Maybe she was actually absorbing Liv’s words, taking her advice seriously. Then she slapped on a sunny smile and wriggled out of the hug.

“Don’t worry. I’m an international woman of mystery, remember? We’re going to have this all figured out by the time I see you in Deer Creek.”

Chapter Twenty-Four

For the first mile, Mandy could barely lift her eyes from the trail to Thunder Spring, let alone ask anyone questions. They walked single file, Fiona and Lucinda setting a surprisingly aggressive pace, with Charlie and Stefan loping close behind. Mandy tried to stay with them, but she kept stumbling over rocks, showering pebbles into the fast-moving creek below. It was clear from the tamped-down path that thousands of hikers had trod through here. But the trail’s potential for menace was just as apparent. There were snake holes, scorpion dens, and wobbly boulders ready to slide. She even saw a few places where a fallen rock had punched the trail away, leaving an empty comma of dead air in its place.

“Want me to ask them to slow down?” Thor asked.

Mandy couldn’t decide whether Thor was in the rear to watch over whoever was slowest or if he was checking out her butt. In contrast to her crunching lurch up the trail, the guide was moving silently, practically floating over the rocks in his minimalist leather sandals.

“I’m good.”

She took a breath and realized it was true. Despite the threats, her burgeoning sunburn, and the potential for each step to send her sprawling, her jittery tension had abated. The intensity and beauty of the hike had temporarily pushed the threats aside. The sandstone ledges they traversed were narrow but navigable, and a light breeze in the paper-dry air kept her sweat at bay. Where the Colorado was a thick greenish-brown, Tapeats Creek ran fast and clear, its music less a roar than a skittering rush as it fell over rocks and lacy tendrils of moss on its way to the river. The higher they climbed, the deeper they seemed to be heading into the side canyon. It was as if they were tucking into a pocket of paradise, a thin seam of the cliffside peeled back stitch by stitch to allow them passage.

“So.” A deep male voice jolted her out of her reverie. Mandy had been so focused on the scenery that she hadn’t noticed that Stefan had slowed down to join her. “What do you think of all of this?”

His voice was low, his accent and vague words obscuring her ability to interpret his meaning. Was he talking about this hike? The rafting trip? The threats?

This was the perfect opportunity for Mandy to talk to Stefan one-on-one. But the fact that he had approached her gave her pause. Stefan’s gaze was intense, and Mandy clocked for the first time how much larger than her he was. He had at least ten inches and fifty pounds on her. He could probably sweep her off the trail, into the abyss, without breaking a sweat.

She looked around. They were alone on a narrow ledge a hundred feet above the surging creek. Lucinda, Fiona, and Charlie were far ahead, ascending an endless staircase of rock. Thor was behind her, scrambling up the hillside toward a line of pockmarked boulders, presumably in pursuit of a rare and dubiously cute reptile.

Mandy sat down against a salt cedar tree, putting as much distance as possible between her and the precipice.

“Pebble in my boot,” she explained. She started untying the left one. It would make her vulnerable, being shoeless, but if Stefan was the one behind the threats, she wasn’t going to outmuscle or outrun him. She had a better chance if she kept her center of gravity low, the tree backing her up, a heavy object in her hands.

Stefan moved closer, crouching an arm’s length upstream from her. She resisted the growing tension in her body, letting her fingers graze the furrowed trunk of the salt cedar the way a child might stroke their worries into a battered teddy bear’s fur. Some of the tree’s purple blossoms fell into her hair. She brushed them aside. Confident. Calm.

“The messages in the hats,” she said. “You don’t seem to be as concerned as the others about them.”

Stefan looked down toward the water. He seemed reticent to respond, even though he had been the one to initiate conversation. They were exposed out here, on the wavering trail above the creek, the ragged edge of a rip in the earth. She had to find another way to inch along it.

“How did you get involved with Babette?” Mandy asked him.

“It is not me who is involved,” Stefan said. “My employer, the Regent Group. I am their agent. I convey their interests with respect to my division.”

“What division is that?”

“I represent investments in distraction.”