Page 70 of My Sister is Going to Kill Me

“Stefan,” Guy responded softly. “Buddy. You know me. I would never—”

“Who are you?” Lucinda asked.

Everyone was looking at Guy now. Mandy felt her father’s hand clamp tighter around her shoulder as he regarded them. But when he spoke, he sounded calm.

“I’m Guy Chisholm, Mandy and Liv’s father, and Babette’s investment advisor. I hiked down with Babette today, as her guest.” His words were simple, measured. “Four hours ago, Babette started to get overheated. Marc, the guide, told me he’d help her cool off and get hydrated, and that I should hike ahead to find you and get more water.”

“The guide,” Charlie hissed. He turned to Devon. “I told you the guides could be behind all of this.”

“A guide did not kill our sister,” Devon said. “Think rationally.”

PK glared at the Sauvage siblings. “Rationally, Charlie was the one with her when she died. We all saw. No one else was here.”

“She was already mostly gone,” Charlie whispered. He looked frightened. “It couldn’t have been me.”

Fiona looked at Guy skeptically. “If a guide was with her when you left, where is he now?”

“I don’t know,” Guy said. “He told me to find you, and that he’d help her. Then I got lost for hours.”

“And yet we found you so close to here,” Devon murmured.

“I was wandering blind,” Guy said. “Couldn’t tell up from down by the time you found me. Might have a touch of heatstroke myself.”

“Maybe she didn’t recover,” Big Pete said. “If Babette’s symptoms got worse, and you hadn’t found us yet, Marc might have felt that he had to get her to a secure location and then seek medical help himself.”

Mandy looked around. The Throne Room was wide and cavernous, visible from above and below. The spring was little more than a trickle, but there was shade, and Charlie had found that water bottle in her lap. Maybe this spot had looked to Marc like a safe harbor for an ailing woman.

“So her death was an accident,” Lucinda said.

Devon stared at Guy. “If you and the guide both abandoned her, it sounds more like negligence to me.”

“Or murder,” Fiona murmured.

Next to her, Mandy felt Guy stiffen. Her father’s grip was starting to make her shoulder throb. She looked around for an escape, for Liv. But her sister was crouched down on the ground, behind Babette’s throne, picking something up.

“Was this her hat?” Liv asked Guy. Mandy could just barely make out the white italicized B raised up above the smudges of red dust on the cap.

“That’s right.”

Liv tucked the hat into the waistband of her pants, then looked up and nodded. Mandy broke free of her dad and followed Liv as she strode across the huddle, stopping in front of Big Pete. The lead guide was swallowing compulsively, his Adam’s apple bobbing like a rubber duck in unruly waves.

“What happens now?” Liv asked.

He stared blankly for a few seconds before it apparently dawned on him that he was in charge of this nightmare.

“We have to get back to Katy and the boats,” he said. “We’ll call the park police on the sat phone from there. They’ll send a helicopter to the beach. Rangers. Search and rescue. They’ll know what to do.”

“How will we carry her body down the trail?” Devon asked.

Big Pete swallowed again. “It’s against the rules to move a dead body in the park.”

“She has to stay here?” PK asked. “With the coyotes and mountain lions?”

“I’ll stay with her.” Charlie’s voice was low and hoarse.

“Me too,” Devon said.

“Like hell you will,” PK said. “Probably try and kill her all over again.”