Chapter Twenty-Five
Liv spent the three river miles between Tapeats and Deer Creek in the back of Katy’s raft, her T-shirt doused in river water
and pulled over her face to shield her from the sun. She feigned drowsiness—not difficult in the blistering heat—and tried
to fade into the rubber wall of the boat while Imogen took photos of a family of spiky-crested ducks (mergansers, Katy called
them) and Devon and PK debated what lay ahead for them at Deer Creek.
“Who do you think is coming down with her?” Devon asked.
“I’m guessing a board member,” PK responded.
“But who?”
“Not Frank,” PK said. “He straight-up laughed when I invited him to this Essence Quest. Said he was still recovering from
the last one.”
“Maybe she convinced Michael to come,” Devon said.
“He’s in Saint Bart’s honeymooning with his fourth wife,” PK said. “I messengered them a Fierce couple’s basket.” He squinted
up at the sun for a moment. “Maybe it’s someone else who can breathe firepower into the launch. Didn’t Babette have dinner
recently with Giselle? She’d be a much better spokeswoman than . . . that.”
He pointed his chin at Imogen, who was bouncing on the very front of the raft like a bull rider, whooping and waving a selfie
stick in the air.
“She does seem carefree,” Devon said.
“Brain-free is more like it,” PK muttered.
“Do you think it’s possible Babette convinced the lead investor to join us?” Devon asked.
Liv noticed how carefully Devon said it, as if it discomfited her even to utter the words. It was becoming clear that PK was
closer to Babette than her own sister. Either that, or Devon was out of the loop on the business side of things. Maybe they
were the kind of family that compartmentalized, each tending their own garden. If Liv ever ran a business with Mandy—let alone
a fast-growing, multibillion-dollar one—they’d need clear delineation of responsibilities to avoid strangling each other every
other second.
“Stefan’s boss has never shown an interest in personal involvement before,” PK said. “No one has even met him besides Babette.
Why would that change now?”
Devon dropped her eyes to the water. When she looked up, her tone shifted. It was lighter. False. “We don’t have camping gear
if she’s bringing someone with her. Every spot is taken.”
“I’m sure they’ll drum up another god-awful yellow sleeping bag,” PK said. “Seems like more than enough of those floating
around.”
He scooted forward to talk with Imogen, and Liv seized the opportunity for a one-on-one with Devon. She pulled her shirt down
off her head and slid across to the other side of the raft.
“How are you feeling?” Liv asked.
“About what? The fact that my sister has threatened me and my brother?” Devon’s voice was light, but her eyes were sharp.
“So you did cross her.”
Devon said nothing.
“It wouldn’t be surprising if you were scared,” Liv said. “I can help if you tell me.”
The older woman regarded her. “My sister and my brother are the emotional ones in our family. I prefer to deal with the facts.”
“What are the facts about Justine?”
“Excuse me?”
“Earlier, when we were looking at your brother’s hat. You said Justine. Who is she? Someone who was killed?”
Devon glanced forward, to where PK and Imogen were huddled over her phone. “Justine Long’s death was an accident,” she whispered.
“An unfortunate consequence of the focus groups we couldn’t have anticipated.”
So Mandy had guessed right. But Devon’s wording gave Liv pause. “It wasn’t a sign of potential danger in CareFree?”
“Not at all.”
“And Babette? Does she see you as a danger to CareFree?”
The boat rocked, its nose dipping to kiss the river. Katy had shifted into a standing crouch, using her paddle to point forward.
“Deer Creek’s coming up. Grab your paddles, and let’s get to the beach.”
“We’ll see my sister soon enough,” Devon said. “And whoever she’s with. It’s all going to be fine.”
She looked as if she were commanding herself and Liv to believe it.
The beach they pulled up to at Deer Creek was empty. While Katy and Big Pete wrangled the boats, Liv and the others got their
bearings on the bank. Babette hadn’t made it here yet, but there was another powerful force to contend with: the enormous,
pounding cascade of Deer Creek Falls. In the past two days, Liv had encountered more waterfalls in the wild than she’d seen
in her entire life to date. They sprang out of cliff sides. They trickled over moss. They cascaded prettily through rocks.
Each one was more perfect, more dramatic, so much so that now, staring up two hundred feet at Deer Creek Falls, she was entirely
unsurprised.
But then she got closer. The water was falling straight down like a girl’s long hair, but Liv could feel the lateral power
of it, how it created its own wind system at the bottom, spraying mist outward with enough force to shove her back and make
her shiver. Tiny droplets caught the sun in midair, creating a perpetual rainbow that shimmered before her.
Liv walked in beyond her comfort zone, without regard for the cascade’s cold fury or the way the spray blasted her full in the face.
It stung, but it didn’t matter. The sparkling, frigid water was a reprieve from the hot air and blood-and-dun muddiness of the Colorado.
The rainbow mist was magic. It was unicorn water.
Mermaid water. The kind of water Liv dreamed of as a kid.
When she was eight, their dad had told her and her sister that mermaids were real and living in San Diego. Liv was old enough
to question her father’s promises, but she wanted to believe in mermaids. When they arrived, however, they spent the whole
time in a tiny apartment over a liquor store with Guy’s waitress girlfriend and her flatulent dog. The waitress’s bangs curled
up like a wave, but the ocean nearby was gray and flat, crowded with shipping containers and beat-up seagulls. Every morning
while the adults slept, Liv and Mandy would walk along the marina. Whenever Liv yanked her little sister’s hand to avoid a
splotch of bird poop or a rogue skateboarder, Mandy would squeal and say, “I saw one!”
Liv remembered her five-year-old sister pointing at shattered sparkles on the dirty water.
“You missed it,” Mandy said. “She was waving at you.”
Liv had given up on mermaids long ago. But now, looking at the rainbows shooting off Deer Creek Falls, Liv wondered if she’d
had it wrong. She wondered if it would have been different if they had a dad who took them camping instead of to sales conventions.
She wondered again if she’d made a mistake when she split from Mandy earlier, each of them heading to different waterfalls.
That was the way they’d always functioned, moving at different speeds, in different parts of the world. That was what worked
for them. But Liv didn’t want to frolic in the rainbow-misted water on her own. If there were mermaids on this planet, she
wanted to meet them with her sister by her side.
“Here it is.” The voice floated toward her from beyond the spray. It wasn’t Mandy. It was Devon. “Datura.”
Liv moved toward her. The older woman had tucked herself in beside the falls, crouching by a cluster of plants with rich green
leaves and pale, thin-skinned trumpet flowers.
“This is what CareFree derives from?” Most of the blossoms were closed, but a few had their curled lips parted, their delicate white bells revealing deep purple veins and a ghostly lavender edge.
“Close,” Devon responded. “We use Datura wrightii. This is a different varietal, Datura quercifolia. Don’t touch.”
“Are there thorns?” Liv couldn’t see any.
“Only on the seedpods, not the flowers. But the entire plant is toxic. If you get some on your hand, and then in your mouth . . .
it might be unpleasant, especially in this heat.”
The flowers looked so innocent. They smelled intoxicating, sweet and metallic, like honeysuckle after rain. There were dozens
of them, hundreds, on bushes Liv now noticed winding up away from the pool at the base of Deer Creek.
“What does it take to turn a toxin into a skin care product?”
Devon looked thoughtful, and Liv braced herself for a scientific explanation or a self-aggrandizing speech about the essential
lifesaving work of the skin care industry.
But Devon gave her a wry smile and a one-word answer.
“Money.”
The botanist rose to her feet, her gaze zooming out past Liv to the pounding waterfall.
“You asked about Justine Long’s death,” Devon said. “It was regrettable. But Justine wasn’t killed by CareFree. She had a
reaction to a chemical involved in the datura extraction process, something we remove entirely before making the product.
It was a true accident. If anyone was responsible, it wasn’t Babette. It would be me. Or Fiona.”
“What happened after the accident?”
“We reflected, of course. Babette made a substantial donation to Justine’s family, and she personally reached out to help them through the aftermath.
I stayed in the lab, where we solved the problem and moved on.
Once we could reliably sequester that dangerous material, we knew CareFree was ready for market.
Babette found investors. Small investors led to big ones.
Which led us to Stefan Eriksen. His company’s investment a year ago made it possible for us to scale our manufacturing.
Babette put the charm on Stefan’s boss to seal the deal, but all interaction with the Regent Group is now brokered through Stefan. And he’s a cipher on his own.”
“Had you met him before this trip?”
“Once. I don’t get involved on the money side. If an investor wants to visit the research facility, I’ll give them a tour.
Otherwise, I stay out of it.”
“And you haven’t met the backer Stefan represents.”
“I have not.” Devon shook her head. “Apparently an investor that big keeps their name away from the limelight.”
“It’s a secret?” That seemed odd to Liv.
“For security purposes, probably. Babette signed an NDA when she met them.”
“Do you have any guesses on who it might be? Or where in the world they’re from?”
Devon eyed her carefully. “I actually wondered if it might be your sister.”