Chapter Sixteen
The constellations marched across the desert sky, tracing age-old myths through the night. Mandy and her sister ignored them.
Liv grilled her, and Mandy laid out the details of her and their dad’s investment in CareFree, fielding every question thrown
her way. Mandy thought it sounded solid. Impressive, even. She’d absorbed more about the project than even she’d realized.
The splashy marketing rollout Babette and PK had planned, the financial projections Charlie put together, the extraordinary
promise of CareFree’s secret ingredient that Devon and her team had developed in the lab. Even this rafting trip, which she
described to Liv as part prelaunch deep dive, part celebration of what everyone hoped would be a huge success.
But Liv was too focused to celebrate.
“Who here knows that you’re part of Dad’s Nassau LLC?”
“What do you mean?”
“If you were their first investor,” Liv said, “some of them know that, right?”
Mandy considered it. “Charlie must know who I am. He sends out the monthly investor reports. If PK was in charge of invites
for the trip, he’d know. And of course, Babette. She and Dad have met a bunch of times.”
“Does she know about Dad’s criminal background?”
“I’m not sure. Why?”
“The message in your hat. Money can’t protect you. Maybe Dad pissed her off somehow, and she’s threatening to expose him for violating the terms of his parole. To cancel your
investment.”
It didn’t make sense to Mandy. “Why would she turn her back on her first investors? It wasn’t a thousand percent kosher, but
we don’t have that big a stake. And Dad told me they have a real connection.”
“Does he have a connection to Charlie, too? If Charlie is crossing Babette somehow, and Dad is helping him—”
“I don’t think so,” Mandy interrupted. “Dad only ever talks about Babette. He introduced her to some other prospective investors,
and they got at least one hit, another backer who’s way, way bigger.”
“The one Stefan represents?”
“Maybe? I’ve never met anyone here before. Honest.”
“You’ve never met them. They’ve never met you. And yet here you are, with a threat embroidered into your hat.”
Mandy realized most of what she knew about the company had come through Babette’s autobiography, social media, or her father,
all of which employed filters that made things look shinier than they really were. Now she sat with Liv in the rough-edged
darkness, their headlamps casting overlapping pools of weak light on the unfiltered sand.
“We don’t know for certain that these messages came from Babette,” Mandy said. “Charlie was the one handing out the hats.
He could’ve lied about where they came from. It seems convenient to blame the person who isn’t here.”
“But why would he doctor his own hat to threaten himself?”
“Maybe he’s trying to draw attention away from something else.”
“Like what?” Liv said.
Mandy racked her brain for anything her dad might have said to suggest a fight or power struggle between the Sauvages.
There was nothing. Just Dad’s boasts about the big-money investor he had introduced Babette to, and the even bigger payout he envisioned for himself and Mandy.
She believed in Babette, but she’d also heard that kind of talk from their dad many times: about a made-to-order omelet delivery service, an AI pet matchmaking app, an mRNA-based drug that cured arthritis.
Guy Chisholm had the tendency to talk about investments in the rosiest terms until they went belly-up, at which point he insisted he knew they’d been doomed from the beginning.
Liv turned Mandy’s cap over in her hands. “Charlie gave me the impression he and Devon were planning something that was supposed
to happen on this trip. Besides the rafting. He didn’t say what, but it must be volatile. No matter how scared he feels right
now, that message in his hat wasn’t enough for him to tell me the whole story tonight.”
“So maybe he isn’t that frightened?”
Liv shook her head. “Or not that certain. If he’s not positive his sister hired someone to cause him harm, he might not want
to divulge whatever it is he had planned. Some people defend their secrets to the grave.”
“You know,” Mandy said, “if one of the Sauvages was going to bail on this trip, I would have picked him.”
Liv eyed her curiously. “What do you mean?”
“Devon and Babette both love the outdoors. Devon’s been here before, and Babette planned this Essence Quest. But Charlie’s
clearly not comfortable here. If he’s doing something so terrible Babette would want him dead, why would he agree to come
out into the wilderness with her?”
“Family. It makes you do weird things.”
Mandy looked down at her sister’s dust-reddened hands. “How does Charlie think Babette is going to kill him if she isn’t even
here?”
“Charlie believes Babette planned to ditch this trip,” Liv said. “He thinks she hired a hit man and marooned him here in the
wilderness, where he’d be a sitting duck.”
Mandy stared at her. “A hit man? On this trip?”
“I know,” Liv said. “It sounds crazy.”
“It is crazy.” Mandy reached out and rubbed the brim of her hat. “Do you believe it?”
“Charlie seems legitimately afraid. He made allusions to some incidents—deadly ones—where Babette was involved. But he wouldn’t
tell me exactly why he thought she was after him.”
“Maybe he’s overreacting,” Mandy said.
“If only Charlie had gotten a message, I’d say he was jumping to conclusions. Hurdling over several sleeping elephants to
conclusions. It isn’t easy to orchestrate a hit on someone.”
“And if Babette went to all that trouble, why give him a heads-up about it ahead of time?”
“Exactly.”
“So, no hit man.”
“Well . . .” Liv re-angled her headlamp. “Things changed when you got a threat too. Even if it doesn’t make sense, we have
to take it seriously. Though what it is, I still don’t know.”
Mandy could see the wheels turning in that big steel-trap brain of hers.
“Something isn’t adding up,” Liv finally said. “Charlie gets a threat. You get a threat.”
“You’re right. It would be a heck of a lot better if Oprah was down here handing out free cars.”
“This is no joke. This is a small group. A threat to one of us could be a threat to everyone. We can’t just do nothing.”
“So what’s the plan?” Mandy asked.
“I don’t know yet.”
Liv looked exhausted. They were sitting side by side, close enough to touch, their bodies separated only by a slender column
of night air. Mandy wanted to reach out and comfort Liv, to insist everything would be all right. But it was her choices that
had etched the worry lines onto her sister’s forehead. Mandy watched as Liv pulled Mandy’s cap toward her, flipped it up again,
and shone her headlamp on the ugly words.
“Money can’t protect you,” Liv read. “Is there anything about this that makes sense?”
Mandy shook her head. She really, really wished they’d gone to Tierra del Fuego instead.
But they hadn’t. And she couldn’t run away or stick her head in the river until Liv figured this out. She wasn’t willing to be Liv’s crusade again. She had grown beyond the little chaos monkey who needed her big sister to swoop in and save her. At least, she hoped she had.
“No. But let’s figure it out together.” She gently removed Liv’s headlamp, brushing a wayward lock of hair from her sister’s
forehead. “After we get some sleep.”