Chapter Thirty-Eight
Mandy woke before the sun again. She’d slept well, despite everything—Babette’s death, her dad’s strange arrival, her sister’s
betrayal. She’d ended the night annoyed with her father, pissed at Liv, unsure what to believe about the others. But still,
she’d fallen into an easy, unencumbered sleep, bundled in the cocoon of her sleeping bag and CareFree’s light, eucalyptus-scented
touch.
From what she could see in the glow of her headlamp, everyone else had slept like the dead as well. Dark lumps spread across
the sand like beached sea lions, each in their familial cluster. Imogen and Lucinda were curled up back to back. Devon, PK,
and Fiona formed a three-pointed star, sleeping heads in slapping distance of each other, feet stretching out and away. The
guides’ bright yellow air mattresses were down by the water, two occupied, the third presumably the property of whoever was
currently on watch.
Not that she could see the Colorado at all in the inky breath before dawn. But she could hear it growling.
She suddenly felt a need to see her father. Not to wake him; just to remind herself that he was there. That he was safe. Mandy
slid on her shoes and stepped around Liv’s rigid, dormant form, walking past the empty circle of chairs, beyond the kitchen
setup, and over to the rocky embankment that separated camp from the cove with the boats.
The cove looked quiet, but the roar of the river filled the space. It was a furious highway, letting through only the sounds it didn’t swallow in its wet mouth or crush against its rocky jaw.
The light of her headlamp picked up the sway of the supply boat floating high above the water, an empty raft flanking it on
either side. Thor was sprawled on the beach above the boats, passed out, an empty tequila bottle in one hand. She stepped
around the guide and into the shallow water, putting both hands on the outer rubber tube of the stern so she could press herself
up onto the supply boat. It wouldn’t be easy. The rubber wobbled under her palms, and the river sucked greedily at the bottom
of her pajamas, turning her bare feet and ankles to ice in the dark.
Three.
Two.
The boat lurched toward her, the inflated rubber tube bumping hard against her hip.
Just the river, she told herself. She looked down at the little eddy she was standing in, where the water seemed eager to
shove itself into the shore. It moved; the boat moved. Nothing surprising about that.
She put her hands back on the tube and braced herself to leap again.
Three.
Two.
Something was wrong. The air was dry. Her left hand was dry. But her right hand was wet.
She adjusted her headlamp to look down. Her hand was stuck to the yellow rubber baffle, outlined in a dark, sticky liquid.
She wanted to remove it. She wanted to plunge it into the river and erase whatever she’d touched there. But her eyes and headlamp
moved unbidden, tracing a path past her hand, past the tube, onto the boat.
Stefan Eriksen was lying in a jumble of duffel bags and tarps, his head lolling toward her, his beard coated in a mess of black goo.
There was no movement. No breath. The goo traced a ragged collar around his neck, staining his shirt and spreading out under his head, pooling on the tarp and spilling over onto the rubber baffle where she’d placed her hand.
Stefan’s hands were still tied above his head to an eyebolt at the tip of the stern, his feet lashed to a crate in the middle of the boat.
His ball cap had fallen beside him on a tarp, slathered in more reflective goo.
Blood. It was his blood.
Mandy swallowed hard. She yanked her hands from the tube and plunged them into the river, letting the icy water numb her to
what she’d just seen. But it was no use. The memory of Stefan’s bloody throat shone against the dark water, sending bright
green shock waves across her field of vision.
Something hard and slippery rolled under her left foot. A finger? She prayed it wasn’t a finger. She let the headlamp drop
to the shallow water and reached down for the object. It was a slender metallic cylinder, like a mascara wand or a fountain
pen. But when she pulled it out and shone the light on it, she saw she was wrong. It was a folding knife, an old silver one,
with a rough pattern of leaves and vines worked along its edge. It took her three tries to figure out how to extract the blade.
When she released it, it was shiny, edged in blood.
She turned to run, to wake Thor, and her sister, and the whole damn world if she could. Then the boat bumped her again.
Her father. Had he been hurt too?
She clumsily folded the knife into her pocket, took a deep breath, and flung herself up on the supply boat, training her hands
and eyes to the right of Stefan’s terrible outline. Her knees slipped against the rubber, and she almost fell back into the
river, but she found one more ounce of strength in her shoulders and thrust herself all the way up on the baffle.
She crawled forward until her headlamp caught the corner of her dad’s sleeping kit: a blue hammock stretched between two ratchet
straps, a yellow sleeping bag slumped within.
But her father wasn’t there.
“Dad?” she whispered.
There was a rustling sound below her.
She froze.
“Mandy?”
She peered down. The ropes that bound her father’s wrists and ankles were still attached, but somehow he had rolled or slid
down from his hammock. Guy was wedged beneath it in a pile of camping chairs and PFDs. It couldn’t be comfortable. But he
showed no eagerness to get out.
“Are you alone?” He cringed in the bright glare of her headlamp.
She flicked it off. “There’s no one else here.”
“You sure? The lady’s gone?”
“What lady?”
“Did she hurt him?” Guy asked. “I heard Stefan arguing with some woman. It sounded bad. Real bad. So I rolled over to hide
down here.”
Mandy peered down at her father in his burrow of life jackets. “Stefan is dead,” she whispered. “Someone . . . someone slit
his throat, Dad.”
Her father went very still. “We have to leave. Now.”
But there was nowhere to go. Mandy didn’t move. Didn’t turn on her headlamp. Somehow it felt safer in the dark.
“When did you hear them?” she asked.
“Thirty minutes ago? I can’t say for sure. I heard a woman’s voice saying something about how she couldn’t tolerate being
disrespected. That Stefan was being replaced. Then she must have—”
“Did you see who it was?”
“He just kept calling her lady.”
“Katy? The datura thing?”
“No. Maybe. Just—Lady, don’t do this. Lady. Lady. Then there was this awful groan, not loud but raspy, broken, and . . . I just tried to be as quiet as I could.”
Mandy could see the whites around his irises now. “Think, Dad. Was there any clue in her voice, in what she said, that might
tell us who—”
“Babette told me—” But then his voice cracked. “We have to go.”
“But if we figure out who did it, we can wake everyone up and—”
“No! Don’t you see? Babette asked me to come down here to help her. She said someone here was out to get her, trying to take control of her business. I thought she was talking about Stefan, but obviously I was wrong.”
Mandy stared at her father. “Why didn’t Babette tell you who she thought was out to get her?”
Guy shook his head. “She said if she told me who it was, I’d be in danger too.”
There was something he still wasn’t saying. But she’d heard enough. “Devon,” she said. “She’s a lady. Or could it have been
Charlie, disguising his voice?”
“Charlie? But he was tied up too. Unless . . .”
Mandy shot a look past the crates to Charlie Sauvage’s sleeping quarters, her shallow breath echoing in her ears. She tried
to open the folding knife, but her fingers were shaking too badly.
She crept toward Charlie. The man hardly looked like a threat. He was cocooned in a hammock, trembling, the thin fabric shivering
around him as he moved. Only his eyes were visible. They were wide open, imprinted with terror.
“Charlie?” she whispered.
He burrowed deeper in his cocoon.
She carefully peeled back the edges of his hammock with her free hand. Her headlamp picked him up in pieces: misbuttoned shirt,
dirt-caked pants, wrists and ankles still tied to the ratchet straps. She didn’t see any blood or sign of a struggle.
“It’s me, Mandy. Did you see what happened to Stefan?” she asked.
“Heard it,” Charlie whispered. “I pretended I was asleep.”
“Do you know who did it?”
He shook his head.
“Mandy!” Her father’s voice shot across the pile of equipment between them. “Let’s get moving.”
“Where?”
“Away. In a raft. It doesn’t matter.”
“I’m coming, too,” Charlie said. “They’re going to kill me next.”
“Who is they?” Mandy asked.
“I don’t know. But they killed our CEO and our lead investor. I’m next in line. Whoever killed Babette and Stefan is probably
out to get me too.”
Mandy was usually all for running away from problems, but this time, it didn’t seem like the best idea. She’d never attempted
escape on a literal life raft, and she suspected Charlie and Guy were even less capable than she was of navigating the fast-moving
river. But she wasn’t the one who’d received a direct death threat. She wasn’t the one who’d lost a sister. She wasn’t the
one who’d been forced to listen to a man get murdered while tied up just a few feet away.
She stood up, straddling the crates between the two men. “We should call the police.”
“No,” Guy protested. “You heard them on the radio yesterday. It could take days for them to get down here. And then they’d
probably just point the finger at me. I know how it looks. I was the one who had the most time alone with Babette. I was the
one who accused Stefan. And now, with his death—”
“He’s right,” Charlie said. “The cops can’t move fast enough to help us now. We have to get away.”
“So we go to Liv,” Mandy said. “You tell her every single thing Babette said to you. We can figure it out. She can come up
with a plan to keep us safe.”
“Your sister won’t believe me,” Guy said. “And her plan is the reason Stefan Eriksen is dead.”
Her dad was talking about the present, about the urgency of what they did next. She knew that was important. But the recent
past was wailing and waving its arms too. Babette, dead on that rock. Stefan, dead on the supply boat. Had Stefan murdered
Babette and then someone took revenge on him? Or had someone else killed them both?
“I’ll untie you,” she said. “If you have to go, go. You can take a raft and some supplies. But I won’t leave Liv.”
“Can you convince her to go with us?” Guy asked.
Mandy glanced up the hillside. She tried to calculate what it would take to sell Liv on leaving. The math wasn’t promising. She knew Liv wanted to protect her. But she wasn’t sure Liv trusted her and their dad enough to do it in the way Mandy needed.
“Just leave without me,” she finally said.
Before Guy could respond, a gravelly voice jumped at them from the beach.
“What’s all this talk about leaving?”
“Thor,” Mandy whispered. “Be careful.”
“Why?” His voice was throaty, almost flirtatious. “You got a big surprise for me?”
His headlamp clicked on, the beam running across Charlie, her, and Guy. Then he pulled back, and the illumination fell on
Stefan.
“You . . . you killed the poet?”
“No!” Mandy said. “We found him like that.”
Thor’s light dangled on the dead man, the blood shining around his neck. Mandy looked away.
“Is there a weapon?” Thor said.
“This.” Mandy showed him the folded-up knife with its engraved handle. “I found it in the water, by the bank.”
“Why would they drop it here?” Charlie asked.
“Maybe they got scared?” Mandy said.
“Or they didn’t know the river,” Thor said. “They might have tossed it, thinking it would sink or get swept away. But an eddy
this strong just pushed it right back to shore.”
“It wasn’t one of us,” Charlie said. “We’re still tied up.”
“And my girl got here after he died,” Guy said. “She wouldn’t hurt a fly.”
“That so?” Thor ran his light over the two hostages, reaching out to give a sharp tug on one of the lengths of paracord linking
Guy to the boat. Then he focused in on the knife in Mandy’s hand. He reached for it, then stopped.
“Open it,” he said to Mandy.
“What?”
“I want to watch you open the blade.”
She shot a glance at her dad, who nodded. Her fingers were numb now, her sweatshirt sleeve muddied with water and blood. She
fumbled with the mechanism, trying not to shake. The knife was old, tarnished under the light of Thor’s headlamp, and it took
four tries before she applied pressure to the handle properly, from both sides, to flip the blade open from its hiding place.
“Right.” Thor turned abruptly to Guy. “I believe you. She’s never fooled with that thing in her life.”
The guide took a long, slow look back toward the beach. “There’s a murderer up there, huh?”
“Someone who snuck down while you were on watch,” Guy said. Mandy could almost hear the implication sinking in. “We need your
help. We’ll pay you to take us out of here.”
“Sorry. I’ve got a code.” Thor flicked his light back toward Mandy. It almost blinded her. “I don’t ferry fugitives for cash.”
“Five grand,” Guy insisted.
Mandy wondered how Guy intended to make good on this promise, given that his cash situation was precarious even in the best
of circumstances. But she knew what her dad would say: That was a later problem.
“We aren’t fugitives,” Charlie said. “We’re victims.”
Thor said nothing.
“Seven grand,” Guy said. “But we leave right now. Untie us, grab supplies and a raft, and we’re out.”
“And I’ll go back to camp,” Mandy said. “Back to sleep. I’ll pretend I didn’t know anything about this. It’ll buy you time
to get away.” Liv would be furious at her, but she could handle that.
“Mandy,” Guy said. “I’m sorry.”
“About what?”
“We can’t let you go back up there. You might wake the murderer and then who knows what. It could be a bloodbath. If we sneak away, we can get to help faster.”
“But—”
“Your dad’s right,” Charlie said. “If we’re suspects, we can’t do anything. But if we go get help, we could be heroes.”
Mandy glared at Guy. “I won’t leave Liv.”
“If you want to protect her, we have to.”
A desperate feeling rose in the back of Mandy’s throat. “No.” She turned to Charlie, who was now looking at Thor. “I can’t
leave my sister. And you can’t leave yours. You and Devon both got threatened.”
Charlie didn’t take his eyes off the river guide.
Mandy tried one more time. “Cross me and you’re dead too. This is my company, not yours. Whoever murdered Babette and Stefan may be after you, Charlie. But they could be after Devon too. If we leave, and she dies—”
“Our only shot at saving everyone is to leave now,” Guy interrupted.
“Ten grand,” Charlie said to Thor.
“Deal.”
Before Mandy could protest further, Thor wrapped a wiry arm around her shoulders. It felt boa constrictor tight, locking her
in place on the sand.
“Sorry, sunshine. You’re coming with us. Law of the wild. We’ll keep you safe.”