Page 77 of My Sister is Going to Kill Me

If only he could say the same for the rest of them.

Chapter Thirty-Four

Mandy offered to help with dinner to keep her hands busy. Not that she was very helpful; when Katy handed her a crate of tomatoes, jalapeños, and onions to make pico de gallo, the simple ingredients formed a nine-dimensional puzzle she couldn’t parse. She settled instead for warming tortillas on the griddle, letting the hot corn singe her fingertips with every flip.

They’d rowed across the Colorado to this beach in silence. Set up camp—Mandy lining up her sleeping pad in tight synchrony with her sister’s—in silence. Grief and fear had rendered the group listless. Katy and Thor prepped dinner while Big Pete radioed up to the Wild Adventures office, but Marc hadn’t shown up yet, so there was no new information for anyone to latch on to. Lucinda was icing her ankle. PK dug in the sand with a stick like a little boy. Devon and Charlie were making a small altar to their sister, Devon pulling crumpled white trumpet flowers from her day pack and laying them across a marbled rock while Stefan, Imogen, and Guy looked on. Only Liv seemed engaged, her eyes bright, her big brain likely sorting questions into categories and subcategories and Roman-numeraled lists. It was one of the paradoxes of her sister. Liv shied away from physical exertion. She stubbed a toe on every edge of the great outdoors. But when it came to intellectual challenges or psychological danger, she dove straight in.

Right now, Liv had her sights set on Fiona, who was sitting by the cook site, watching Charlie and Devon make their altar and drinking from a glass thermos that appeared to be lined with charcoal and glitter.

“I think you saw something when you examined Babette,” Liv said.

Fiona took a long swig, the minerals in her water bottle swirling into sparkly tornadoes. “As I said, I don’t believe she died of heatstroke. Her skin was the wrong color.”

Liv nodded. “A useful observation. But I think you saw more.”

The dermatologist looked at her warily. “Are you here on behalf of your father? Making sure he covered his tracks?”

“He didn’t—” Mandy started.

But Liv talked over her. “As you said, you’re not a medical examiner. Not an expert on venomous snakes nor poisons. So my guess is you noticed a reaction on her body you’ve seen before.”

Fiona stayed silent. She glanced back at Devon’s altar, her face blank.

Mandy could see Liv wasn’t going to get anywhere with this strategy. All Fiona had to do was keep quiet and drink from her cylindrical snow globe, and eventually Liv would have to give up. Her sister was a trained investigator, but she was used to working with the full force of the federal government behind her. Here, Liv had no jurisdiction. No way in. Mandy, on the other hand, had never relied on a badge to get what she needed.

She leaned out over the stove, careful not to let her sarong hit the griddle.

“I saw it too,” Mandy said.

Fiona and Liv both looked up at her.

“On Babette’s body?” Mandy continued. “I didn’t remember until you two started talking about it just now.” Tactic number one: Suggest that Fiona was an active participant in a conversation in which she had yet to contribute anything.

“But then something shook loose in my memory, and BAM!” Mandy slapped down a tortilla on the griddle. “There it is in front of me again. You’re seeing it too, aren’t you?”

Fiona opened her mouth. “I—”

“Crazy, right?” Tactic number two: Cut Fiona off. A weird one, but it almost always worked. An interruption, before Fiona could disagree or shut down the conversation, would only make her more eager to be heard.

“There it is, front and center, clog-dancing through my brain.” Mandy snatched up the tortilla and waved it in the air. “I’m even seeing it in these.”

The surface of the tortilla was a chaotic constellation of ground corn, char marks, and air bubbles. Mandy didn’t have a clue what it might evoke, but it was like a horoscope or a Rorschach test: All that mattered was what Fiona saw in it. And Fiona was staring at her now.

Mandy went in for the kill. “We should just tell her, don’t you think? My sister’s smart. She might be able to figure out what it means.”

“It’s not conclusive,” Fiona mumbled. Her eyes flicked again to Devon’s altar.

“Does it have to do with Charlie and Devon?” Mandy asked.

“Sort of. Not exactly. I’ve only seen it once before.” She looked at Mandy anxiously. “You’re an investor; I assume you got to see some of the focus group reports. Is that where you saw it?”

Mandy racked her brain for any clue to what Fiona was talking about. Every three months since she and her dad made the investment two years ago, she’d received an email with an attachment from Babette’s lab about the latest tests of CareFree. The document was always hundreds of pages, incredibly boring, and the last one she’d forwarded on to her father without even scanning. Mandy tried to think back to earlier attachments, scrolling the reports quickly on her phone. There were testing protocols, interviews with participants, and maybe . . .

“The photographs,” Mandy said.

Fiona nodded. “I’m surprised you spotted it. The stippling on the skin was subtle. I only recognized it on Babette’s forehead because I’d seen it in person before.”

“Mandy’s an artist,” Liv said. “She sees things other people don’t.”