Page 54 of My Sister is Going to Kill Me

When she was eight, their dad had told her and her sister that mermaids were real and living in San Diego. Liv was old enough to question her father’s promises, but she wanted to believe in mermaids. When they arrived, however, they spent the whole time in a tiny apartment over a liquor store with Guy’s waitress girlfriend and her flatulent dog. The waitress’s bangs curled up like a wave, but the ocean nearby was gray and flat, crowded with shipping containers and beat-up seagulls. Every morning while the adults slept, Liv and Mandy would walk along the marina. Whenever Liv yanked her little sister’s hand to avoid a splotch of bird poop or a rogue skateboarder, Mandy would squeal and say, “I saw one!”

Liv remembered her five-year-old sister pointing at shattered sparkles on the dirty water.

“You missed it,” Mandy said. “She was waving at you.”

Liv had given up on mermaids long ago. But now, looking at the rainbows shooting off Deer Creek Falls, Liv wondered if she’d had it wrong. She wondered if it would have been different if they had a dad who took them camping instead of to sales conventions. She wondered again if she’d made a mistake when she split from Mandy earlier, each of them heading to different waterfalls. That was the way they’d always functioned, moving at different speeds, in different parts of the world. That was what worked for them. But Liv didn’t want to frolic in the rainbow-misted water on her own. If there were mermaids on this planet, she wanted to meet them with her sister by her side.

“Here it is.” The voice floated toward her from beyond the spray. It wasn’t Mandy. It was Devon. “Datura.”

Liv moved toward her. The older woman had tucked herself in beside the falls, crouching by a cluster of plants with rich green leaves and pale, thin-skinned trumpet flowers.

“This is what CareFree derives from?” Most of the blossoms were closed, but a few had their curled lips parted, their delicate white bells revealing deep purple veins and a ghostly lavender edge.

“Close,” Devon responded. “We use Datura wrightii. This is a different varietal, Datura quercifolia. Don’t touch.”

“Are there thorns?” Liv couldn’t see any.

“Only on the seedpods, not the flowers. But the entire plant is toxic. If you get some on your hand, and then in your mouth . . . it might be unpleasant, especially in this heat.”

The flowers looked so innocent. They smelled intoxicating, sweet and metallic, like honeysuckle after rain. There were dozens of them, hundreds, on bushes Liv now noticed winding up away from the pool at the base of Deer Creek.

“What does it take to turn a toxin into a skin care product?”

Devon looked thoughtful, and Liv braced herself for a scientific explanation or a self-aggrandizing speech about the essential lifesaving work of the skin care industry.

But Devon gave her a wry smile and a one-word answer.

“Money.”

The botanist rose to her feet, her gaze zooming out past Liv to the pounding waterfall.

“You asked about Justine Long’s death,” Devon said. “It was regrettable. But Justine wasn’t killed by CareFree. She had a reaction to a chemical involved in the datura extraction process, something we remove entirely before making the product. It was a true accident. If anyone was responsible, it wasn’t Babette. It would be me. Or Fiona.”

“What happened after the accident?”

“We reflected, of course. Babette made a substantial donation to Justine’s family, and she personally reached out to help them through the aftermath. I stayed in the lab, where we solved the problem and moved on. Once we could reliably sequester that dangerous material, we knew CareFree was ready for market. Babette found investors. Small investors led to big ones. Which led us to Stefan Eriksen. His company’s investment a year ago made it possible for us to scale our manufacturing. Babette put the charm on Stefan’s boss to seal the deal, but all interaction with the Regent Group is now brokered through Stefan. And he’s a cipher on his own.”

“Had you met him before this trip?”

“Once. I don’t get involved on the money side. If an investor wants to visit the research facility, I’ll give them a tour. Otherwise, I stay out of it.”

“And you haven’t met the backer Stefan represents.”

“I have not.” Devon shook her head. “Apparently an investor that big keeps their name away from the limelight.”

“It’s a secret?” That seemed odd to Liv.

“For security purposes, probably. Babette signed an NDA when she met them.”

“Do you have any guesses on who it might be? Or where in the world they’re from?”

Devon eyed her carefully. “I actually wondered if it might be your sister.”

Liv dropped her eyes to the deadly flowers, trying not to let her surprise show. Her brain was whirring. Mandy had said she wasn’t the biggest investor in CareFree. If one of Babette’s top executives thought she was . . . could that be the reason Mandy had been threatened and Stefan hadn’t?

But Babette knew who the big investor was. Babette knew it wasn’t Mandy. The more Liv learned, the less the threats in the hats made sense.

“I can assure you my sister is not working at that level,” Liv said. “What about Charlie? Does he know your lead investor?”