Page 57 of My Sister is Going to Kill Me

Thor was already wriggling out of his long-sleeved shirt and sandals, his blond hair brushing the golden skin of his shoulders. He stepped out onto a fallen cottonwood whose trunk sprouted a line of nascent young trees, spindly sentinels poking up into the sky.

She looked back, but no one else seemed eager to follow Thor. Lucinda’s gloved fingers spun across strands of river grass, weaving a braid of thatch. Stefan and Charlie were halfway up the hillside to Surprise Valley. Only Fiona met Mandy’s gaze.

“Your funeral,” Fiona said. “We’ll stay here.”

Mandy stripped to her bikini and gingerly traced Thor’s footsteps across the dead cottonwood, over a line of slick rocks, and onto a ledge from which water spilled like a milkmaid’s pail. The spring moved quickly, but Thor picked out a path that shielded them from the full force of it, dodging the slipperiest rocks and deepest pockets. He stopped at the edge of a shimmering pool backed by a sheet of clear falling water.

“Here we go,” he said.

He took a deep breath and jumped in, taking short, hard strokes toward the cascade. There couldn’t have been more than three feet to the drop, but the flow was pounding, and he was kicking hard to approach it. When he got close enough to touch the falling sheet, he dove under.

Mandy waited. Five seconds. Ten. Had Thor slipped into a secret cave behind the waterfall? It didn’t seem like there was room for that. But maybe the shadows were playing tricks on her.

Twenty seconds. It felt like forever. Then she heard a whoop, and Thor exploded out of the water on the far side of the pool, at least fifty feet away.

She screamed. She couldn’t help it.

“How did you . . . ?”

Thor grinned and shook out his hair. “It’s called the Maytag. Like a washing machine. Your turn.”

“Is it safe?”

“Officially, we don’t recommend it. But unofficially? It’s freaking awesome.”

Mandy hesitated. She could hear Liv admonishing her that this was an unnecessary risk, that Mandy was already in danger, that even being alone with Thor in a sketchy section of a powerful waterfall was beyond reasonable judgment.

Liv wanted her to be cautious. But Thor’s dazed smile, his sparkling eyes, the way he practically shone with joy as he shook out his wild mane—that was what Mandy wanted.

She jumped in and started powering her way to the waterfall. The current pressed in on her, but she kept windmilling her arms, ignoring the warning bells ringing between her ears.

“Cover your head when you go under!” she heard Thor call out.

Her fingertips grazed the falling water. She raised her head, facing away from the spray, and took one last deep breath. And dove.

The first thing she felt was the sensation of someone shoving her into a dark cave formed from sharp rocks, their edges banging the soft skin around her shins. She instinctively curled into a ball, wrapping her arms over her head, trying not to panic. She tried to count the flips as the water tossed her around the cave. It was impossible. She was spinning, losing control, alone in the dark. It felt like someone had slammed the door on her from above and she was trapped—forever?—under the water.

Then, just when it felt like all the breath had been squeezed out of her, the water around her elongated, pulling her into a channel. Was she moving up toward the surface? Or deeper? She had no way of knowing. No way of controlling it. It was just taking her. There was a small pop, and then she was shooting across the pool, lengthening out, as if she were a crumpled silk handkerchief pulled from the sleeve of a wily magician.

She surfaced two-thirds of the way across and shook herself free, gasping for air. Thor splashed over and grabbed her under the armpits and swung her around in the water. For a moment, they were no longer guest and guide. They were children, hooting and spinning and reveling in an impossibly cold pool under a perfectly blue sky.

Every ounce of her body had been liberated, reborn in this canyon that delivered terror and bliss in equal measure. If she had to die, let it be like this. Wild and carefree.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Liv placed herself in the middle of the nervous line of hikers up the trail to Deer Creek Patio. Big Pete led them along sinuous curves of sandstone above the creek, the water lapping and falling prettily from one set of rocks to the next. Everyone was quiet, walking silently with their presumed hopes for—or fears about—the reunion with Babette. Finally, they reached what felt like the culmination of the winding path: a cul-de-sac of broad shaded ledges flanking a deep pool. Above the last little waterfall that fed the pool, the view stretched up into Surprise Valley and toward the rim, the orange canyon walls kissing the sky.

While there was no poolside waitstaff to attend to them at Deer Creek Patio, there were people there, five of them, a grizzled group of old-timers scrubbing themselves in the clear water.

It was the first time since they’d hit the river Liv had seen new people up close. The hikers splashed in the sunshine, their backpacks and dusty boots lined up on a far ledge. Liv stared, surprised at how quickly she’d come to feel like the Babette rafting group were the only people out here. There were other cultures in the canyon, other conflicts and mysteries to unravel.

Big Pete gave the hikers a neighborly wave. “Afternoon!”

Two of the women ignored him, busy with their ablutions, but a third, stocky and smiling, waved back, her bare shoulders rising like two pink boulders from the water. Liv was pretty sure she was naked.

“You hiked down from the North Rim today?” Big Pete asked.

“Sure did.” A skinny, hawk-nosed man stood and smiled at them. Oh. They were all naked. “Just taking a splash before supper. We’re hiking out early tomorrow morning.”