Page 98 of My Sister is Going to Kill Me

What was her goal? To reunite with her sister. Scratch that: to safely reunite with her sister. Which meant she had to do two things: figure out what was really going on with the murders and stop the raft’s forward movement.

Which was more important?

Mandy thought about how her sister would evaluate the question. Liv would know which information was crucial and what could be ignored, and if she didn’t, she’d invent a nine-dimensional prioritization matrix to figure it out. Meanwhile, here Mandy was, sorting through scattered marbles rolling across the floor and hoping she might pick up the right one at random.

She had to do better. She had to think like her sister.

“It’s time to call for help,” she said to her father.

“Give me a few more minutes,” Guy said. “This is delicate. Gotta get the right people on the bus.”

“Raft.”

“Can’t we just call the police?” Charlie said.

“No cops,” Guy responded. “That’ll only add to our problems. They’re tied up in red tape, and they’ll ask questions we can’t answer. This will be faster. Better.”

“Better for you,” Charlie grumbled.

“It’s not like the park police jumped to the rescue last night,” Guy retorted. “And now that we’re a bunch of fugitives, if they do show up, it’ll be with handcuffs. We need our own team now.”

Mandy bit her lip. Her dad did have a knack for charming people into helping him, and she knew he cared about Liv. But she didn’t love the fact that they kept paddling further away from her.

“Sounds like we should stop,” she improvised. “You can focus, and we need a rest. We’ve been paddling all morning on barely any sleep.”

“She’s got a point,” Thor said. “Upset Rapid’s coming up in a few miles. And I’m starting to see double.”

“Then we’ll pay you double,” Guy said.

“Dad. If we could just stop for a bit—”

“Can’t stop,” he said.

Why? she wanted to scream. But that was a Mandy impulse. Liv would keep the question from coming out. She would turn it over in her own head first.

Why was her dad so insistent on barreling down the river? Was he racing toward something, or away from someone?

Away, she decided. He didn’t know anything about the Grand Canyon or what lay ahead. But he knew what he was escaping. She wondered if he planned to tell his contacts that a world-famous entrepreneur and her lead investor had been murdered, whether dropping Babette’s and Stefan’s names would sweeten his ask or make it harder to secure help.

Stefan. If they couldn’t get help or stop yet, she’d work on her other goal: securing information. She put down her paddle and leaned forward.

“How long did you work with Stefan Eriksen?” she asked Charlie.

He didn’t even turn his head. “A year.”

“And the business he was in?”

“The Regent Group is a private equity firm.”

“Based in the Netherlands?”

“Their investments are global. I don’t know where the home office is.”

This interrogation was going nowhere. Charlie was boring, and Mandy didn’t waste her time on boring people. But then she remembered whom she was trying to emulate. Liv wouldn’t see Charlie as boring or not-boring. Liv would see him as useful.

She tried another way in. “You know, when I got that email from PK inviting me to be your first outside investor, I thought it was a joke.”

Charlie kept paddling.