Page 97 of My Sister is Going to Kill Me

The look he flashed her was shocked and angry in equal measure.

Liv kept her voice calm. “We just need to know if there are any more surprises traveling with us.”

She looked up the hillside, where Katy had distracted the rest of the group with various fruit-salad-related tasks. It was what she’d asked for, and it was a nightmare. Each and every person had a knife in their hand. Fiona was stabbing a cantaloupe, Imogen slicing bananas, Lucinda using a paring knife to peel an apple in a continuous spiral. Liv had a fleeting vision of the beach blanketed in deadly knives, blades under every rock, in each of Devon’s zippered pockets, hiding in PK’s faux-hawk. She swallowed hard and blinked it away.

“What is it?” Big Pete asked her. “Do you know who did this?”

“No. Not even close. I don’t know if the killer is here with us or if they’re paddling down the Colorado with my family. But if we’re going to have a chance at figuring it out, we’ve got to open everything up. Every locked box. Every crumpled pillowcase. Every secret in every bag.”

“You aren’t in charge, you know.”

Liv didn’t like the challenge in Big Pete’s voice. “We’ve been working together.”

“No. My priority is keeping people safe. Not finding a murderer.”

“Isn’t that the same thing?”

“Can’t say. Not anymore. You told those men they’d be safest lashed to a boat. Now Stefan’s dead and a raft is gone. If you go commando now, tear through everyone’s stuff . . . I wouldn’t be surprised if they tie you up next.”

At that, Big Pete headed up toward the kitchen area. Another betrayal. Soon enough, he’d break the horrible news to the others, and gathering evidence would get trickier. Liv wondered if Pete had something to gain by resisting her suggestion. Maybe he had a secret that he didn’t want exposed. Maybe all of them did.

But it didn’t matter. Big Pete was right. She’d taken a gamble the night before and lost. It was impossible to say now what might have happened if they hadn’t tied up Stefan, Guy, and Charlie. It could have been better. Could have been worse. But it had been her idea, and now Stefan was dead.

A new feeling was hitting her: guilt. Her brilliant plan to keep everyone safe had done the opposite. She’d pushed Mandy away, into their feckless father’s arms. She’d restrained Stefan so someone could slash his throat with ease. She’d sent her sister running—or hostage—on a raft downriver, moving deeper into the dark heart of the canyon.

She heard Stefan’s voice again, reciting that eerie poem. What pleasure can we have to war with evil? She needed to turn things around.

She headed over to the relative privacy of her campsite and fished out the note she’d found in Mandy’s hair tie. She could see her sister’s fingertips imprinted in the whorls of red dust on the tightly folded paper, and for a moment, she resisted opening it. As long as it stayed shut, she could tell herself it contained everything she needed. The name of the murderer. Forgiveness from her sister. A way out of this nightmare.

Of course, it revealed so much less than that. It was Mandy’s baseball sketch, with a quick message scrawled on the back. I’m sorry. Watch out for the lady. I didn’t want to leave you. But I know you’ll figure it out.

Liv swallowed and cursed herself for imagining the impossible. She scanned the baseball sketch, the tiny horrible messages lettered on the figures’ caps. PK had received the vaguest one: Everyone is replaceable. Mandy’s seemed to refer to her investment, and perhaps their father’s crimes: Money can’t protect you. Devon’s suggested an executive power struggle—This is my company, not yours—and finally, there was Charlie’s, simple and brutal: Cross me and you’re dead too.

Each message suggested a rift between its recipient and Babette, giving Liv the impression she was looking at a laundry list of motives and suspects who might have killed the CEO. But she couldn’t ignore the possibility that someone else had sent the threats, a killer trying to cast suspicion on others. She, Stefan, and Imogen all had blank ball caps, and Fiona and Lucinda claimed not to have needed theirs. Could one of their hats be hiding a threat they didn’t want the others to see? She wondered if she should push to look inside Fiona’s and Lucinda’s hats, but that didn’t feel like the top priority now. Everyone was at risk at this point. And if one of the two women was the killer, it seemed too obvious to conveniently ditch the item that could have enabled them to masquerade as victims alongside the others.

There was one more person in Mandy’s drawing whose hat was blank. Front and center, smiling enigmatically: the magnetic, elusive Babette. Liv dug out the white ball cap she’d found by Babette’s dead body the day before. In the hubbub since then, no one had asked her for it, and she hadn’t had time to examine it.

Babette’s hat looked like the others. Liv rubbed dirt against the inner crown, hoping against hope that a message inside would reveal the answer, or a hint in the right direction. But she found no embroidery. No threat. The red dirt clung to the empty fabric, mocking her.

Liv turned back to Mandy’s note. Watch out for the lady. Who was she referring to? Did Mandy have information about the killer concealed behind this riddle? She felt a flash of anger at her sister for abandoning her with this terrible puzzle, as if she was a rat and Mandy the mastermind of a maze of granite and whitewater, dangling cheese in the form of cryptic notes and sketches. But that was ridiculous. Even if she did run away, Mandy was just as trapped in this nightmare as she was.

Trapped. Liv had constructed her life to never feel that way. Every other investigation she’d been part of, she’d worked methodically, gathering evidence—often for months—and lining up the resources to take down her target at the exact right moment, showing her work meticulously so no target could come back at them on appeal. But here there was no due process. Here there would be no appeal. She was on a beach with a dead man. Her sister and dad had disappeared. She prayed they were alive and simply doing what they did best—improvising a way forward, dancing over coals, whether toward greater danger or away from it.

Liv had to think like them now. Mandy and Guy wouldn’t be caught dead waiting for authorities or hoarding enough redundant data to make the highest-percentage decision on what to do next. She had to move like them: fast, half blind, without all the information she needed. She had to be willing to conceal the information she had, or even—though it was hard to imagine how she’d pull this off—twist it into something else.

She looked down at her backpack. Inside it was the unwanted gift from PK, a foreign object she’d intended to hand back to him this morning. Now Liv regarded the little tub with its silver-on-white logo and nearly invisible seal. It was everything she abhorred. A crude shortcut around responsibility, trumped up in bogus claims about what it meant to lead a fulfilling life.

Liv screwed open the container and regarded the lavender cream inside. She could almost hear the whispered promises emanating from the jar: a life free from hyperanalysis, a billion-dollar market potential, a blissed-out, destressed world. And then there were the other voices: Mandy chastising her for prioritizing work over family; Fiona’s warning that the substance might be more reactive in the hot sun; Stefan reciting Tennyson and raving in the dark. She thought of all the times in the Odyssey the boatman took what he wanted and suffered the consequences, until he staggered naked into the arms of Nausicaä, burner of ships, to tell his strange survival tale.

No sensible person would choose to forget right now. No rational person would want to. But deliberate, considered action wasn’t working for Liv anymore. She needed to unleash something wilder, to tap into the energy her sister would bring to an unprecedented situation like this.

Liv scooped up a tiny crescent of CareFree and dabbed it experimentally on her cheekbone. Then she plunged her hand in, like a bear discovering honey, and smeared it all over her face.

Chapter Forty-Two

It took three melted protein bars for Mandy to decide she needed to make a plan. It wasn’t her strong suit—not by a long shot—but if she didn’t do it, no one else would. They were drifting. Her dad was paddling sloppily in the front of the raft, guarding the radio at his feet as if it were a flighty girlfriend he suspected of cheating on him. Charlie was silent, his paddle seemingly propelled by a windup toy jammed under each shoulder blade. And Thor only seemed to care about the frequent reassurances he sought from Guy that he’d be paid for his services.

The morning light sluiced over the North Rim, slapping the waves with brightness that alchemized the whitewater into foamy diamonds. Mandy tried aiming her fake engagement ring at the sun, hoping it might create a flash of light she could use to signal a plane or helicopter. But cheap tricks wouldn’t help them now. The discount ring just bit at her tired hand.