Chapter Thirteen
A long, low horn sounded across the beach.
“DINNER!”
Liv could smell it from their campsite. She’d created a sleeping area for two sisters in perfect alignment: two pads squared
up in crisp parallel, pillows side by side, bags lined up by their feet. But Liv had set it up alone, while Mandy flitted
among the other guests, finding anyone except Liv to talk with.
Even on a sister trip, Mandy was happiest getting lost in a crowd.
It was her security blanket in good times and bad.
Liv remembered when she’d gotten the call at her college dorm fifteen years ago about their mom’s accident.
Her sister had been incoherent, babbling, her words knitted with sobs, but Liv caught the basics: her mother driving home late, a truck that migrated over the line.
Head-on collision. No survivors. Liv raced to find a flight from Washington, DC, home to Irvine, but somehow, in the fifteen terrifying hours it took to get there, Liv missed the crucial window to fall with her sister into that first shock wave of grief.
Mandy had hugged her when she arrived, long and hard, but all week she kept drifting away, floating into the arms of their dad and family friends, the unfocused pain on her face shot through with what Liv could only interpret as recrimination.
Because Liv hadn’t been there when it happened.
She hadn’t held her little sister’s hand when the first call from the police came in.
She hadn’t had to identify their mother at the scene.
It wasn’t fair. But it was true. The heartbreak that should have been theirs together was theirs apart.
There was no way to reclaim those fifteen hours and pierce the orbit of her sister’s grief. Mandy had turned to others, so
Liv did then what she did now: She made herself useful. Fifteen years ago, she’d taken out the trash, paid the bills, and
organized insurance paperwork. She saved her tears for when she washed the dishes at night, choking out hard, ugly sobs over
the sink while no one was watching.
She looked back down at their campsite, then up the brush-scraggled rocks. No one was watching now. Liv headed over the sandy
hillock that led back to the main beach. It had been transformed. Where there were once tarps and bags, there now stood thirteen
camping chairs in a circle, anchored on one end by a grill, a huge Dutch oven, and a long table loaded with steaming mashed
potatoes, green beans, and pineapple slaw. A minor miracle. She’d had nothing but granola bars and a smooshed peanut butter
sandwich all day.
Big Pete gathered them inside the circle of chairs. “We like to do something special your first night,” he said. “Rib-eye
steaks, or tofu if you don’t eat meat. German chocolate skillet cake for dessert. There’s plenty for everyone to stuff yourselves.”
“Babette specified a polyphasic forage-friendly diet for this trip,” PK said. “We need ingredient lists.”
“And macro counts,” Fiona added.
Big Pete smiled wearily. “We make menus, not miracles. What we got is good, hot, nutritious food. I suggest you act accordingly.”
He went over the basics of how meals worked: the handwashing protocol, where compost went, and how to sanitize everything
at the end. Liv was surprised they were so intense about hygiene. It seemed like a group of scruffy river guides wouldn’t
care much about that.
“Out here, we take health and safety very seriously,” Big Pete said.
“Falling in the river lasts a minute, but an outbreak of norovirus can have everyone laid out puking for days. We can’t pick up new supplies midstream, and there’s no way to leave the canyon if you get hurt or aren’t feeling well.
If there’s a life-threatening emergency, we have a satellite phone and a radio to call it in.
A helicopter can land at one of the medevac locations.
But there are only a couple of those. Unless someone is seriously injured, we’re on our own until we reach Lake Mead at the end of the week. ”
“Has Marc contacted you from the office?” Charlie said.
“No.”
“So Babette isn’t coming,” Fiona said. “I knew it.”
Charlie looked like he was about to protest, but Devon put a consoling hand on his arm.
Big Pete kept his voice calm. “It’s not conclusive. Marc might still be getting back to the rim. He could have had an issue
with one of the mules.”
“Or Babette might not have arrived or contacted your office at all,” Stefan offered.
“Hard saying, not knowing,” the guide responded. “Any other questions? Preferably ones I might be able to answer?”
Imogen raised her hand. “I didn’t find a tent in my sleeping gear.”
Big Pete nodded. “This time of year, you shouldn’t need one.”
“But what about scorpions?”
“They’re out here.”
“And snakes?”
“Them too.” Big Pete nodded to the long-haired guide behind the grill. “Thor is something of a reptile whisperer.”
“Shake out your sleeping bag before you hop in if you don’t want a bed buddy,” Thor said. Imogen made a face, but Thor grinned
back at her. “You’re all about honesty, right? This is honest living, plain and simple.”
“You’ll be glad not to have a tent clogging your view at night.” Big Pete spread his arms wide. “Welcome to the million-star
motel.”
“I was expecting four stars at least,” Imogen huffed.
“I’d settle for two stars and a flush toilet,” Fiona said.
Big Pete looked around at the group. “Our guides will do everything we can to make this a safe and enjoyable experience for
you, but we’re a team out here. The more you can pitch in, stay clean, and act smart, the easier this will be for everyone.”
Liv followed his eyes around the circle. Mandy and Lucinda looked excited. Fiona and Charlie looked stressed. Everyone else
seemed incapable of pulling their eyes away from Thor and Katy flipping steaks on the grill.
For the next week, this was Liv’s community. Big Pete, Thor, and Katy. Devon and Charlie. Imogen and Lucinda. PK, Stefan,
Fiona. And Mandy.
Liv was by no means superstitious, but she knew there was powerful magic in bringing together a group in an unfamiliar context
and applying pressure. It happened in disasters and tribal initiations, in stuck elevators and music festivals. When you leave
normal life, there’s a brief window of possibility to rethink agreements—to form a new collective identity. Sometimes that
leads to greater deviance. People who wouldn’t normally do drugs or shoplift might do so in untested environments. Groups
in isolation could unlock unprecedented levels of openness and vulnerability. Or, if things went wrong, aggression and fear.
There was a new social contract forming out here, held together by paddle high fives, poop buckets, and the implied promise
to protect each other from the worst of the whitewater. They’d hiked deep into the canyon and rafted through its rushing artery.
They’d made themselves small under the vastness of the desert sky. Liv thought back to earlier in the day, when Charlie and
Devon had tumbled into the river and Charlie had blamed his absent sister for his fall. How could Babette Sauvage find them,
let alone wield power over them here? Wherever she was, it was miles and worlds away.
Her sister hardly felt closer. Mandy barely acknowledged Liv during dinner, zipping through the food line before roping Stefan, Fiona, and Thor into a tight cluster of camping chairs, where they were now playing poker on an overturned milk crate.
Every few minutes, Mandy’s bubbly laugh rose into the air.
Her sister was always touching someone—a hand on a forearm, a punch in the shoulder, a high five with Thor after she took a big swallow from a bottle of bourbon they were passing around.
“Can I talk to you?”
Charlie had snuck up on Liv as she slid a second piece of chocolate cake onto her plate. She couldn’t decide how she felt
about Babette’s CFO. Charlie radiated stress, with an unappealing undercurrent of arrogance. That said, at least he wanted
to talk to her. Which was more than she could say for her sister.
Liv turned to him. “What’s on your mind?”
He was still wearing his muddy Babette ball cap, despite the twilit sky. He beckoned to her to follow him up away from the
beach, beyond the pool of bright light cast by the lanterns in the dinner area.
“I hear you’re a secret agent.”
Liv flashed a glare back toward Mandy, who appeared to be teaching Stefan how to do-si-do. Her sister was unreachable. Impossible.
She faced Charlie again. “I work for the State Department as an analyst and a profiler. I have a security clearance, but there’s
nothing top secret about it.”
“So you’re not a spy?”
“Not a spy.” But she knew there was no surefire way to convince him. It was exactly the kind of thing that was impossible
to prove: that she wasn’t something.
“But you work for the government,” he said.
“Yes.”
“And I can trust you.”
Another impossible statement. If she disagreed, she was setting herself up for an argument.
If she agreed, she was open to whatever it was he wanted.
But Charlie sounded hopeful, desperate even.
And here she was in this burgeoning new society, Liv not-a-spy Chisholm, sister to Mandy life-of-the-party Chisholm, face-to-face with Charlie possibly-paranoid Sauvage.
She couldn’t control what others thought of her. But she could choose how she would behave, how much generosity she was willing
to extend to a fellow traveler.
“How can I help?” she said.
“I have something I need your advice on. Discreetly.”
He removed the muddied ball cap from his head.
“This is my hat.”
Liv didn’t feel this statement merited a response.
“You saw how they came in that cardboard box,” Charlie continued. “All white, but labeled individually with our names.”
“Did you find a difference?”
He thrust his hat at her, and Liv took a quick scan. Charlie’s cap was dry, the embroidered white B standing out against the streaked mud and silt from his thrashing in the Colorado. Other than its mottled coloring, it looked
the same as the other hats, including the one she’d snapped to the belt loop of her pants.
“Take it,” he insisted. “Look inside.”
Did he want her to appreciate the tea tree mumbo jumbo in the lining? She flipped over his hat, preparing to extricate herself
from this odd encounter before she got trapped in a dissertation on the healing power of crystals. But when she looked inside,
she saw something she didn’t expect. More embroidered stitches—not thick and raised like the B on the outside crown, but fainter, barely visible. Bright white thread scratched wispy letters across the inside of the crown,
forming ghostly words. The message was only legible because the rest of the hat was so dirty.
CROSS ME AND YOU’RE DEAD TOO
She looked from the hat up to Charlie.
“It’s from Babette,” he said.
“What does it mean?”
Silence.
“You’re dead too?” she prompted. “Has someone close to you died recently?”
“Fourteen months ago, there was an accident. At the business. Babette took responsibility, but she wasn’t even there. She
didn’t . . .”
His voice trailed off, and he dropped his gaze back to his ball cap. Flipped over, it looked just like the others. Which made
Liv wonder. She pulled out her own hat and examined it. The fabric was grayed by the river water, with just a tinge of sweat
around the brim. She grabbed a handful of crumbly orange sand from the beach and smeared it across the inside of the crown.
Nothing.
She looked down at the two hats, one threatening, the other simply dirty. “You’re sure these came from Babette?”
“Positive. She buys special gifts for everyone whenever we have an Essence Quest. For Fierce, she got us all custom windbreakers
with our moon signs embroidered on them.”
Liv wondered if Babette’s former assistant had used his jacket as a makeshift sling after he broke his arm.
“She gets them all herself? PK doesn’t place the orders for her?”
“As far as I know, Babette’s always taken care of them directly. Wants it to be a surprise. She would have shipped that box
to the lodge on the rim a few days ahead of our arrival. If we were up in civilization, I could pull the tracking information
from our corporate account. But down here . . .”
Liv looked at Charlie’s hat, the words YOU’RE DEAD TOO plainly visible in thin white thread against the muddy material. She had a thousand questions for him. But there was only
one she had a good shot of getting a straight answer to.
“Why did you bring this to me?”
“I thought you were some kind of international hotshot detective.”
“I am an investigator. But this is outside my area of expertise.”
Charlie persisted. “If someone came to you with a message like this, what would your analysis be?”
She looked from his face down to the hat.
“I’d need more information.”
“If this was all the information you had,” Charlie continued. “Please.”
“I would say you’ve been issued a warning of some kind.”
“Not a threat? She said I’m going to die.”
“Not precisely. It says if you cross her, you’re dead. Did you cross her?”
Charlie didn’t answer.
Liv looked back down at his hat. The rational part of her said what she was feeling was not fear, but confusion. This whole
situation was drowning in it. She had fallen into a product prelaunch rafting trip for a reason she didn’t understand, with
people from a company she’d never heard of, whose CEO had gone AWOL. And now said CEO was sending menacing messages to her
brother and business partner via customized hat embroidery.
It sounded ridiculous. But it was the lack of rational explanation that made her shiver in the warm air. Charlie’s hat—the
planning, the delicate stitching, the sense that he had personally been delivered a threat—was creepy. Fear didn’t have to
make sense for it to crawl across her skin.
Liv looked at Charlie. “What are you afraid of exactly?”
“I—Devon and I—on this trip, we were going to . . .”
“You were going to what?”
“Can you protect me?” he asked.
“Tell me exactly what this is about.”
He stared at her. She stared back. It was the kind of stalemate Liv was well acquainted with: Unwilling informant meets unmoved
advocate.
“I think Babette hired someone to come down here,” he whispered. “To stop me and Devon from crossing her.”
“What kind of person? A lawyer?”
“A hit man.”
She stared at him, flabbergasted. “A hit man? You think Babette is going to kill you? Why?”
But Charlie said nothing.
“Does she have a history of extreme criminal actions?” Liv asked.
“Not directly. But there have been incidents.”
“Fatalities?”
He stayed silent. Liv kept pushing. “Are you talking about that assistant’s broken arm? Or the accident you just mentioned?”
Charlie grimaced. “Officially, they were all accidents.”
Liv stared at him, willing him to say more, but his lips were clamped shut. “You’re making a pretty strong assertion based
on a few words embroidered into a hat.”
“It’s based on a lifetime with my sister,” he said. “I know her. You don’t.”