Page 90 of My Sister is Going to Kill Me

She crawled forward until her headlamp caught the corner of her dad’s sleeping kit: a blue hammock stretched between two ratchet straps, a yellow sleeping bag slumped within.

But her father wasn’t there.

“Dad?” she whispered.

There was a rustling sound below her.

She froze.

“Mandy?”

She peered down. The ropes that bound her father’s wrists and ankles were still attached, but somehow he had rolled or slid down from his hammock. Guy was wedged beneath it in a pile of camping chairs and PFDs. It couldn’t be comfortable. But he showed no eagerness to get out.

“Are you alone?” He cringed in the bright glare of her headlamp.

She flicked it off. “There’s no one else here.”

“You sure? The lady’s gone?”

“What lady?”

“Did she hurt him?” Guy asked. “I heard Stefan arguing with some woman. It sounded bad. Real bad. So I rolled over to hide down here.”

Mandy peered down at her father in his burrow of life jackets. “Stefan is dead,” she whispered. “Someone . . . someone slit his throat, Dad.”

Her father went very still. “We have to leave. Now.”

But there was nowhere to go. Mandy didn’t move. Didn’t turn on her headlamp. Somehow it felt safer in the dark.

“When did you hear them?” she asked.

“Thirty minutes ago? I can’t say for sure. I heard a woman’s voice saying something about how she couldn’t tolerate being disrespected. That Stefan was being replaced. Then she must have—”

“Did you see who it was?”

“He just kept calling her lady.”

“Katy? The datura thing?”

“No. Maybe. Just—Lady, don’t do this. Lady. Lady. Then there was this awful groan, not loud but raspy, broken, and . . . I just tried to be as quiet as I could.”

Mandy could see the whites around his irises now. “Think, Dad. Was there any clue in her voice, in what she said, that might tell us who—”

“Babette told me—” But then his voice cracked. “We have to go.”

“But if we figure out who did it, we can wake everyone up and—”

“No! Don’t you see? Babette asked me to come down here to help her. She said someone here was out to get her, trying to take control of her business. I thought she was talking about Stefan, but obviously I was wrong.”

Mandy stared at her father. “Why didn’t Babette tell you who she thought was out to get her?”

Guy shook his head. “She said if she told me who it was, I’d be in danger too.”

There was something he still wasn’t saying. But she’d heard enough. “Devon,” she said. “She’s a lady. Or could it have been Charlie, disguising his voice?”

“Charlie? But he was tied up too. Unless . . .”

Mandy shot a look past the crates to Charlie Sauvage’s sleeping quarters, her shallow breath echoing in her ears. She tried to open the folding knife, but her fingers were shaking too badly.