Chapter Thirty-Two
“You!” PK lunged at Charlie, who had crumpled back onto the stone steps beneath his sister’s body. “You did this.”
“Whoa.” Devon grabbed the young man’s arm. “Slow down. Let’s stay calm.”
“Calm? Babette is dead, and you’re telling me to stay calm?”
Mandy was still processing what had happened. She kept blinking, trying to chase away the impossible horror before her. She’d
dreamt of getting close to Babette, but not like this. Never like this.
Thor coolly removed Devon’s hand from PK’s forearm, angling his body to allow the woman to slide past the wild-eyed assistant
and join her brother and their dead sister at the rocks. PK kept trying to shove his way through, but the guide was eerily
relaxed, as if he’d prepared for this situation. He stood silent, an implacable wall separating Mandy and the Sauvage siblings
from the rest of the group.
PK whirled around, seeking new targets among the others. “It was both of them. Charlie and Devon. Babette knew they were trying
to take her down. That’s what the messages in their hats must have been about. They’ve always been jealous, they’ve never
been at her level, and she gave and gave but they took and took until here we are on the worst hike in the history of the
universe.”
“I cannot believe this,” Stefan said.
“My goodness,” whispered Lucinda.
“Um.” Imogen looked sick. “Are we sure she’s dead?”
Lucinda reached out to take her granddaughter’s hand.
“Because it would be way better if she wasn’t,” Imogen clarified.
“She was murdered.” PK’s eyes had gone black with fury. “By them.”
Charlie shrank into Devon, who tried her best to stand up straight, one arm wrapped around her brother. Mandy remembered the
message in PK’s hat, the way Babette called her assistant replaceable. Was it possible he was pointing the finger at Charlie
and Devon to divert attention from his own pent-up desire to lash out at Babette? Could PK have somehow killed his hero? Mandy
needed Liv, but she couldn’t spot her. Her eyes were still blurry with tears, her body frozen in place in grief and horror.
Thor moved to climb the stairs to the sandstone throne.
“What are you doing?” Devon snapped.
“I’m a wilderness first responder,” Thor said. “I can take a closer look.”
Fiona stepped forward. “I’m a doctor. I’ll do it.”
She climbed up the great stone steps to where Babette lay. Fiona checked Babette’s neck for a pulse, then put a hand to the
woman’s heart. She ran her fingers lightly over Babette’s entire body, barely touching her. Something about the doctor’s tentative,
thoughtful movements snapped the edge off Mandy’s shock. She watched, letting her gaze follow Fiona’s over Babette’s broken
form. There was no blood. No tear in Babette’s clothing. Instead, Mandy caught little suggestions of how recently Babette
had been alive. Her cheeks still had color, her forehead broken out. Was it possible the skin care mogul secretly suffered
from adult acne? Were there stresses not even the queen of CareFree could wash away?
Fiona gently pressed Babette’s eyes closed and turned to the rest of them.
“Is she dead?” Lucinda asked.
Fiona nodded, her smooth skin revealing not even a wrinkle of concern.
“Murdered?” PK’s voice was hysterical.
“There’s no way for me to know that,” Fiona said. “Her eyes made it look like she was afraid of something. She’d popped a blood vessel from strain. But she climbed up on that throne somehow, and there’s no obvious wound, no marks on her skin. With her eyes closed, she looks perfect.”
“Babette always looked perfect.” Imogen fumbled her phone from her pocket. “I should capture something. For posterity?”
Lucinda swatted at her. “Put that away.”
Mandy inched out from behind the Sauvage siblings and headed toward her sister. She felt shaky, but Liv locked eyes with her,
and Mandy shuffled toward her steadiness, trying to match her sister’s solid gaze with deliberate footsteps.
But before Mandy reached Liv, another impossible sight hit her. Her father, rushing toward her.
“Dad? Dad! What are you doing here?”
Guy squeezed Mandy to his chest. His warmth felt good, but also strange. Smothering. She couldn’t make sense of his presence,
and instead of offering her answers, he was holding her so tight the wrinkles in his windbreaker creased her cheek.
She felt his words more than heard them, a low rumble against her ear. “Babette didn’t make it. But I’m here. You’re safe.”
Mandy gave in to the oddness of it, sinking into his chest and taking big, gulping breaths. In her periphery, she could sense
Liv trying to reach her, trying to insist her way into the reunion. But Guy held her so close. And she was sobbing now, really
crying, her tears mixing with the sweat and dust on her father’s jacket. He seemed to be shaking a little, too.
“You?” Stefan took a step toward Guy. “Are you responsible for this?”
“Stefan,” Guy responded softly. “Buddy. You know me. I would never—”
“Who are you?” Lucinda asked.
Everyone was looking at Guy now. Mandy felt her father’s hand clamp tighter around her shoulder as he regarded them. But when
he spoke, he sounded calm.
“I’m Guy Chisholm, Mandy and Liv’s father, and Babette’s investment advisor.
I hiked down with Babette today, as her guest.” His words were simple, measured.
“Four hours ago, Babette started to get overheated. Marc, the guide, told me he’d help her cool off and get hydrated, and that I should hike ahead to find you and get more water. ”
“The guide,” Charlie hissed. He turned to Devon. “I told you the guides could be behind all of this.”
“A guide did not kill our sister,” Devon said. “Think rationally.”
PK glared at the Sauvage siblings. “Rationally, Charlie was the one with her when she died. We all saw. No one else was here.”
“She was already mostly gone,” Charlie whispered. He looked frightened. “It couldn’t have been me.”
Fiona looked at Guy skeptically. “If a guide was with her when you left, where is he now?”
“I don’t know,” Guy said. “He told me to find you, and that he’d help her. Then I got lost for hours.”
“And yet we found you so close to here,” Devon murmured.
“I was wandering blind,” Guy said. “Couldn’t tell up from down by the time you found me. Might have a touch of heatstroke
myself.”
“Maybe she didn’t recover,” Big Pete said. “If Babette’s symptoms got worse, and you hadn’t found us yet, Marc might have
felt that he had to get her to a secure location and then seek medical help himself.”
Mandy looked around. The Throne Room was wide and cavernous, visible from above and below. The spring was little more than
a trickle, but there was shade, and Charlie had found that water bottle in her lap. Maybe this spot had looked to Marc like
a safe harbor for an ailing woman.
“So her death was an accident,” Lucinda said.
Devon stared at Guy. “If you and the guide both abandoned her, it sounds more like negligence to me.”
“Or murder,” Fiona murmured.
Next to her, Mandy felt Guy stiffen. Her father’s grip was starting to make her shoulder throb. She looked around for an escape, for Liv. But her sister was crouched down on the ground, behind Babette’s throne, picking something up.
“Was this her hat?” Liv asked Guy. Mandy could just barely make out the white italicized B raised up above the smudges of red dust on the cap.
“That’s right.”
Liv tucked the hat into the waistband of her pants, then looked up and nodded. Mandy broke free of her dad and followed Liv
as she strode across the huddle, stopping in front of Big Pete. The lead guide was swallowing compulsively, his Adam’s apple
bobbing like a rubber duck in unruly waves.
“What happens now?” Liv asked.
He stared blankly for a few seconds before it apparently dawned on him that he was in charge of this nightmare.
“We have to get back to Katy and the boats,” he said. “We’ll call the park police on the sat phone from there. They’ll send
a helicopter to the beach. Rangers. Search and rescue. They’ll know what to do.”
“How will we carry her body down the trail?” Devon asked.
Big Pete swallowed again. “It’s against the rules to move a dead body in the park.”
“She has to stay here?” PK asked. “With the coyotes and mountain lions?”
“I’ll stay with her.” Charlie’s voice was low and hoarse.
“Me too,” Devon said.
“Like hell you will,” PK said. “Probably try and kill her all over again.”
“Let’s all calm down,” Lucinda said. “These accusations help no one.”
“That’s right. We don’t know what happened here.
” Big Pete sounded more confident now, though his words were still laced with stress.
“And no one is taking any more risks today. It’s only a mile back to the rafts, but it’s getting late and we don’t have enough headlamps for everyone.
So. We will all walk down. I’ll call in the death to the Park Service.
Then, if and only if they approve it, two people can hike back up here with Thor and enough camping gear to spend the night.
The rest of us will stay down on the beach by Deer Creek Falls. ”
“Is he coming with us?” Fiona said, pointing at Guy.
“Everyone is coming with us,” Big Pete said firmly.
“Sure you don’t want me to look for Marc?” Thor asked.
“If he went for help and we didn’t run into him already, he likely went back up to the rim,” Big Pete said.
“I could catch him,” Thor said. “I know the backcountry better than he does.”
Thor didn’t seem shocked or destabilized like the rest of them. His voice held the same buzzy energy as when he’d suggested
the shortcut through the slot. As if this were just the kind of adventure he hungered for.
“No.” Big Pete frowned at his eagerness. “From now on, we follow protocol. Everyone stays together. As they should have on
your hike.”
“I think this situation calls for a divergence in protocol,” Thor shot back.
“You don’t get paid to think,” Big Pete said. “You get paid to take guests safely down the river.”
Thor flashed him an angry look and spat on the ground. But he didn’t say another word.
“How soon can they get a medical examiner and a detective down from the rim?” Liv asked.
“Depends,” Big Pete said. “The Park Service has an investigation unit, but they only have a handful of special agents across
the entire country. My guess is when I radio it in tonight, they’ll broadcast out for help from Coconino County Sheriff’s
Office, maybe Arizona State Police. FBI, even, if there’s a possibility of foul play.”
“But if it was heatstroke—” Devon said.
“I’m not sure she died of heatstroke,” Fiona interrupted. “Her skin is pale, not flushed. She might have gotten overheated
earlier, but I think something else killed her.”
Big Pete stared at her for a moment. “Then they’ll almost certainly involve the feds.”
“Feds?” Guy cleared his throat. “This is a terrible moment. But let’s not leap to conclusions.”
“Are you suggesting she’s still alive?” Fiona asked. “Would you like to check my work?”
“No. This isn’t about you. It isn’t even about us. It’s about Babette, what she would want. I think we should all take a beat
and consider that.” Guy bowed his head, which might have seemed respectful if Charlie hadn’t taken this opportunity to snap
out of his stunned grief.
“How do you have even one ounce of a clue what my dead sister would want?”
“You’re in shock.” Guy’s voice radiated compassion. “It’s getting dark, and we’re in the middle of nowhere. We have to focus
on our safety now. Our goddess is dead. Broadcasting it isn’t going to help her.”
“Guy is right.” Stefan seemed to be the only one who had accepted her father’s surprise appearance. “We are down here. The
world is up there. No one needs to know.”
“No.” Devon’s voice was firm. “Absolutely not. This is my sister. I’m not playing Weekend at Bernie’s: Grand Canyon Edition.”
“Devon, think about it,” Stefan said. His voice was as gentle as Devon’s had been brash. “We are all, every one of us, invested
in CareFree becoming a success. If information gets out that Babette has died, before we know what happened, before the product
is launched—”
“It would be a disaster,” Guy said.
“It already is a disaster,” PK said.
“You can’t be serious,” Liv said.
No one responded.
“This would mean breaking several laws, let alone some basic standards of—”
“Livvie.” Guy put a hand on Liv’s shoulder. “It’s okay to be scared.”
She shrugged him off, but Guy kept going. “Babette was beloved by so many. By everyone here, I’m sure. But sending up smoke
signals to the National Guard is not going to bring her back.”
“This is not okay,” Liv said. “Right, Mand?”
Mandy didn’t know what to say. She was still half dizzy from the shock of it all, and she wasn’t sure what she thought about when and how to call the cops. But she got the sense Liv wasn’t just asking about what they should do. She was asking whose side Mandy was on.
When she didn’t respond fast enough, Liv shook her head. “We can’t do this.”
“Someone didn’t love her,” Charlie muttered.
“What?” Mandy asked.
“When I found her, she was still alive,” Charlie said. His shaking had settled into a faint tremor, but he was still holding
tightly to Devon’s arm. “She was up on that throne, writhing in pain, clawing at her shirt, yelling at phantoms. Raving about
how it wasn’t her company anymore, how someone was trying to take it all. And then she just”—he shuddered again, a full-body
expulsion of the memory—“seized up.”
“She was alive?” Fiona said. The perfect skin between her eyebrows puckered. “For how long?”
“I don’t know,” Charlie said. “It might have only been a couple minutes.”
PK looked at him with open hatred. “You really think we’re going to believe this? If anyone was trying to take Babette from
her, it was you and Devon.”
Guy stepped forward. “May I suggest we continue this conversation down by the rafts? Over dinner, perhaps?”
“You.” Charlie’s voice shifted from terrified to fierce. “You came down with her. You could have hurt her. You had all that time
on the trail with her and—”
“Whoa, buddy,” Guy said. “Let’s think before we speak, shall we?”
“Is that a threat?”
“Enough,” Big Pete cut in. His voice was tight. “We’re a team. The faster we get moving, the faster the authorities can come
to our aid. Let’s go. Daylight’s fading. And no one else is getting hurt on my watch.”