Chapter Eleven
“SWIMMER!” Katy stood at the back of her raft, hands cupped around her mouth. The entire right side of her boat was empty.
“TWO SWIMMERS!”
Liv saw them first. Two bodies, floundering and yelling and swirling uncontrollably through the wild heart of the river.
“We’ll pick it up,” Thor called out. He whipped their raft around so they were perpendicular to the flow.
“Steady, now.” He held a rope in one hand, a life preserver in the other. “Left side, reach out your paddles so they can grab
on if I don’t catch them.”
Liv counted the seconds as the bodies moved toward them. One of them, lying face up on the surface in their neon orange jacket,
mostly kept their head above water. The other was little more than a muddy Babette hat that bucked and bounced through the
waves.
“And . . . NOW!”
Thor knelt down and grabbed the first floater by the PFD with his bare hands. Liv’s extended paddle snagged the other. Thor
hauled up the first person—Devon—then Charlie, who was clutching Liv’s paddle, launching each of them into the raft in a sprawling,
soaking cascade.
Devon rose up blinking and gave a shout—was it angry? joyful?—into the wide open sky.
“You okay?” Mandy asked.
“Right as rain.” Devon’s voice was hoarse, but energy pulsed through it. “I forgot about this.”
“What?”
“The way the river makes you feel alive.” She took off her hat and rubbed her salt-and-pepper hair, the droplets sparkling
as they fell. Then she looked down at her brother. Charlie was still sprawled across the boat, racked with coughing.
“Breathe,” Thor instructed him. “You’re safe now.”
Liv reached down to pull Charlie’s PFD away from his neck. “It’s okay. We’ve got you.”
His skin was mottled red and white, the adrenaline in his eyes making him resemble a cornered animal.
Liv leaned even closer. “Are you okay?”
He gave her a tight shake of the head.
“Did someone push you?”
“I can’t . . . I don’t think . . .”
He pushed himself upright and glanced around. While the world felt larger to Liv after making it through the rapid, Charlie
looked shrunken. Scared. As if the canyon had trapped him.
“Think of it this way,” Mandy said. “Now you don’t have to wonder what it might feel like to fall in.”
“That’s right,” Thor said. “You’re not a river virgin anymore.”
“River virgin. Dunked for the very first time.” What Mandy lacked in singing ability, she made up for in enthusiasm. “River vi-ir-ir-ir-gin—”
Charlie clamped his hands to his temples, pressing his soaked Babette hat to his head. Liv leaned toward him again.
“You’re fine. It’s just a shock.”
“She said it’d be safe out here,” he whispered. “She was lying.”
Liv could barely hear Charlie over the rushing water and Mandy’s singing. But she heard the emotion in his voice. It wasn’t
fear. It was more than that. It was terror.
She bent down close to him. “Your sister?”
“She set this up.”
“Did she push you? That’s what I thought I saw, but I wasn’t sure . . .”
“Devon? She got knocked into me by that wave.” Charlie shuddered like a wet dog. “No. It’s Babette. She planned this.”
The raft jolted left, and Charlie slumped down into the footwell, his face hidden by the brim of his cap. The river had ruined
his hat, replacing its pristine white fabric with a smeared mottle of reds and browns. But that wasn’t the only thing that
had changed. In the middle of the crown, a snow-white uppercase B looped across the muddied fabric.
Liv reached up and touched the crown of her own hat. Just as Mandy had noted earlier, there was something raised there, a
swooping layer of embroidered thread. She traced it with a finger. An italicized B.
Liv looked over to where her sister was playing air guitar with Thor. For all Mandy’s frivolous impulses, she was observant.
Mandy saw underneath things, rooting out stories she could shape from the little surprises and aberrations of life. As their
dad had always said, the best lies are based in something true.
“Your hat,” Liv said to Charlie.
“What?”
“It changed.” She removed the cap gently from his head and turned it to face him. The bright, looping B burst from the dirtied crown like a shout. Like a slap.
He flinched when he saw it. “I’m telling you, she arranged for this to happen. Not showing up. Me falling in. Like Fiona said.
It’s all part of her plan.”
“Her plan to what?”
“To get rid of me.”
“Why would she want to do that?”
Charlie shook his head and shoved the cap back down over his eyes.
“I don’t think Babette could have anything to do with whitewater knocking you off a raft,” Liv said.
“Please. This is a woman who convinced the FDA to issue a short-term ban on Uruguayan snail slime to force a competitor into bankruptcy.” Charlie tapped the B on his hat. “She’s a pro at making things happen.”
Liv shot a glance around the raft. No one else seemed to have heard Charlie’s wild accusations. Devon was gazing out at the
towering cliff walls, the embroidered B on her own cap glinting in the sunlight. Lucinda was adjusting her paddling gloves. Imogen was dabbing her face with the
bottom hem of her T-shirt, while above her, Mandy and Thor were upright, straddling the middle bench and performing a rousing
homage to Madonna, their paddles-turned-air-guitars spraying river water on everyone else in the raft.
“Siblings,” Liv said. “They’re put on this planet to test us.”
Charlie didn’t look convinced.
It took twenty minutes of flat water to assure Charlie that it was safe to clamber back into Katy’s raft. He crossed and lowered
himself onto the left side of the middle bench, his sister settling in behind him, Devon’s hand pressed consolingly—or was
it oppressively?—to his shoulder. He folded forward, hands on his paddle, brim of his cap pulled down, eyes cast to the river
as if resigned to a gruesome fate.
Six more days. Dozens more rapids. And no way out.
Was that how Charlie felt? Back on the beach, Liv had read his reaction to Babette’s absence as one of acquiescence. He had
taken charge and rallied them to continue the trip. But had his earlier confidence masked a deeper fear? Was there something
in Babette’s absence that made Charlie think he was under threat? Each time Liv glanced over at Katy’s raft, Charlie’s eyes
were scanning the canyon walls.
If they were being watched, there was nothing to see for the next hour but whitewater.
Salt Creek. Granite. Hermit. Boucher. Liv lost track of the names of the rapids as they shot through them, each one bigger than the last. To her surprise, she found herself enjoying it.
Each time a wave slammed the boat, she felt the shock of it, then delight.
She leaned into her strokes, her ears now tuned to Thor’s steady drawl, his insistence that they paddle harder through the turbulent water, the raft rising and falling like they were riding the knobby spine of a giant dragon.
It seemed impossible that she and Mandy and the other guests, complete novices, could dig their paddles into a wall of water and yank themselves five, ten, fifteen feet into the air. But they did.
Thor navigated them over the tongue of Crystal Rapid and to the left of a hole big enough to swallow an elephant. Once they’d
paddled their way through a rock garden, he spun them into an eddy on Crystal’s quiet backside, and they watched as Katy’s
boat, bucking and falling, followed their line through. As far as Liv could tell, Charlie had locked himself in, his feet
clamped under the tubes, one hand clutching a strap on the side of the raft, without pretense of paddling or otherwise contributing
to the effort of his fellow rafters.
But they made it through. They all made it through.
Just as quickly as the whitewater had risen, it fell. They paddled easily through a set of small, sparkling rapids—the Gems,
Thor called them—and watched the sun tickle the fluted rock on either side of the river, disappearing into sinuous side canyons.
Finally, the water went quiet, tiny ripples crinkling along its surface, gossamer-thin and toothless. The only hint of the
river’s ferocious power was the caves littered along the base of the canyon walls, curves carved into the cliffsides by water
shoving its way downstream.
The Colorado sprawled out in the sunshine like a hunt-drunk lion. Liv dropped her paddle and stretched her arms high above
her, relishing the contrast between the freezing water drenching her body and the dry, hot air. According to Thor, until they
got to camp, they now had nothing to do but float.
“Told you it’d be great out here,” Mandy said. She lay stretched out on her back on the outer baffle of the raft, her hat
flipped over her face, soaked sneakers dancing on the water. “Even if you think Babette’s a cult.”
“I don’t just think it. Look.” Liv reached down and dunked her cap in the river, waving it through the muddy water until the
white thread revealed itself.
“See the B? The high priestess sent us a message.”
Mandy grinned. “I knew there was more to the hats.”
“You were right.”
Mandy’s smile got bigger. “Say that again.”
“Don’t push it.”
“Maybe she isn’t missing.” Mandy submerged her own hat and waited for the looping white B to appear. “Maybe this really is all part of her plan.”
“What do you mean by that?” Imogen asked from the second bench.
“I bet Babette has an even bigger surprise. The helicopter wasn’t grand enough. She’s coming another way.”
“A flying mule?” Liv asked.
“Or a submarine. Not yellow, obviously.”
It was classic Mandy. One minute, Babette was kidnapped. The next, she was in a silver submersible. Liv knew her sister was
just hunting for the best story, the most colorful picture. But the paranoid fear that flashed across Charlie’s face earlier
was not an invention. There was something going on that didn’t add up.
“You really think Babette’s coming?” Lucinda asked.
“Eventually,” Mandy said. “Babette loves the wilderness.”
“Yeah,” Imogen chimed in. “She, like, goes camping. For fun.”
Liv wondered if the teenager was aware that they too would be camping, or if she expected an air-conditioned villa to be waiting