Page 91 of My Sister is Going to Kill Me

She crept toward Charlie. The man hardly looked like a threat. He was cocooned in a hammock, trembling, the thin fabric shivering around him as he moved. Only his eyes were visible. They were wide open, imprinted with terror.

“Charlie?” she whispered.

He burrowed deeper in his cocoon.

She carefully peeled back the edges of his hammock with her free hand. Her headlamp picked him up in pieces: misbuttoned shirt, dirt-caked pants, wrists and ankles still tied to the ratchet straps. She didn’t see any blood or sign of a struggle.

“It’s me, Mandy. Did you see what happened to Stefan?” she asked.

“Heard it,” Charlie whispered. “I pretended I was asleep.”

“Do you know who did it?”

He shook his head.

“Mandy!” Her father’s voice shot across the pile of equipment between them. “Let’s get moving.”

“Where?”

“Away. In a raft. It doesn’t matter.”

“I’m coming, too,” Charlie said. “They’re going to kill me next.”

“Who is they?” Mandy asked.

“I don’t know. But they killed our CEO and our lead investor. I’m next in line. Whoever killed Babette and Stefan is probably out to get me too.”

Mandy was usually all for running away from problems, but this time, it didn’t seem like the best idea. She’d never attempted escape on a literal life raft, and she suspected Charlie and Guy were even less capable than she was of navigating the fast-moving river. But she wasn’t the one who’d received a direct death threat. She wasn’t the one who’d lost a sister. She wasn’t the one who’d been forced to listen to a man get murdered while tied up just a few feet away.

She stood up, straddling the crates between the two men. “We should call the police.”

“No,” Guy protested. “You heard them on the radio yesterday. It could take days for them to get down here. And then they’d probably just point the finger at me. I know how it looks. I was the one who had the most time alone with Babette. I was the one who accused Stefan. And now, with his death—”

“He’s right,” Charlie said. “The cops can’t move fast enough to help us now. We have to get away.”

“So we go to Liv,” Mandy said. “You tell her every single thing Babette said to you. We can figure it out. She can come up with a plan to keep us safe.”

“Your sister won’t believe me,” Guy said. “And her plan is the reason Stefan Eriksen is dead.”

Her dad was talking about the present, about the urgency of what they did next. She knew that was important. But the recent past was wailing and waving its arms too. Babette, dead on that rock. Stefan, dead on the supply boat. Had Stefan murdered Babette and then someone took revenge on him? Or had someone else killed them both?

“I’ll untie you,” she said. “If you have to go, go. You can take a raft and some supplies. But I won’t leave Liv.”

“Can you convince her to go with us?” Guy asked.

Mandy glanced up the hillside. She tried to calculate what it would take to sell Liv on leaving. The math wasn’t promising. She knew Liv wanted to protect her. But she wasn’t sure Liv trusted her and their dad enough to do it in the way Mandy needed.

“Just leave without me,” she finally said.

Before Guy could respond, a gravelly voice jumped at them from the beach.

“What’s all this talk about leaving?”

“Thor,” Mandy whispered. “Be careful.”

“Why?” His voice was throaty, almost flirtatious. “You got a big surprise for me?”

His headlamp clicked on, the beam running across Charlie, her, and Guy. Then he pulled back, and the illumination fell on Stefan.