Chapter Forty
If Mandy had to be taken hostage, she wished it could have been under more exciting circumstances. Pirates. She could get
down with pirates. Or a band of sexy fighter jet thieves. Instead, she was in a raft with her dad, an accountant, and an anarchic
river Tarzan. Three selfish, scared men. Not that she was much better than them. She could have fought harder to stay with
Liv. She could have run over the rocky beach and woken up Big Pete before they got away. But the truth was she’d been terrified
too. She’d allowed herself to believe that she had no choice but to go with them. It was only once they launched the raft
downriver that she realized she’d betrayed her sister and the others.
The river. It was maddening how similar the Colorado felt to the days before, burbling along, unconcerned by the conflicts
among the people it carried downstream. The breeze off the water was cool, and the high cliff walls boasted a predawn hangover
of purple and blue shadows. The rock was dark, the river black, their little yellow raft a speck of cheer in a canyon of gloom.
Inside the raft, the mood was decidedly more gloom than cheer.
There was no idle banter. No chitchat about CareFree.
No one commented on the quavering cry of the canyon wren nor the ghostly outline of three desert bighorn sheep sure-footing across the knife-edged granite.
Charlie’s head was on a swivel, looking back upriver every few seconds to check whether they were being followed.
Mandy couldn’t tell whether he craved the sight of another boat or feared the possibility.
Thor was stoic in the back, hat pulled down low, contributing minimal adjustments with his paddle and even fewer words to the conversation.
And then there was Guy. At first her dad talked a blue streak, trying to keep the energy up, assuring Charlie and Thor they
were doing the right thing, the best thing, not just for themselves personally but for Devon and Liv and the rest of the group.
They’d get to help faster this way, unencumbered by fears and suspicions—their own of the others, the others’ of them. There
was no radio signal or satellite phone reception in the narrows, but Guy knew a guy—a whole raft of guys—who could swoop in
to help the moment the sat phone was back in commission.
Mandy wasn’t so sure. The faster Guy talked, the more his words knocked emptily against the granite walls. Eventually even
he stopped talking. He knew the power of words, and the danger of not being listened to. He had taught Mandy never to love
the sound of her own voice past its utility to help her get what she wanted.
What did she want?
She wanted to be safe, and alive. No doubt about that. She wanted her dad and sister in those categories as well. Beyond that,
she wasn’t sure.
Her sister. Mandy wondered what Liv was thinking now. Did she assume Mandy had taken off with their dad intentionally? Was
she terrified or furious? Or simply relieved not to have to deal with their shenanigans any longer?
No. Even if Liv blamed Mandy for leaving, she loved her. She’d do anything to try to help her. And what had Mandy done? Marooned
her with a killer, without so much as a goodbye.
The only shot she’d had to communicate with Liv was right before they left.
Her dad and Thor wouldn’t let Mandy leave the cove—too afraid she might alert the others—so she’d had to improvise.
After she cut Charlie and Guy free with that horrible folding knife, she’d helped her dad and Charlie grab a mess of supplies, handing them down to Thor, who stacked them in one of the rafts.
Just before they were ready to take off, she pulled her silly baseball sketch out of her pocket, along with her scrunchie and a pen that she’d stuck in her bun that morning.
She flipped the sketch over to the blank side.
I’m sorry, she wrote. Then she hesitated. She almost crossed it out. Why was she apologizing? If Liv hadn’t tied their father up, none
of this would have happened.
Mandy wanted to be clear: She wasn’t sorry she was being kidnapped. The thing she was sorry about was too big and undefined
to contain in words scrawled on a scrap of paper. She was sorry her sister’s sanctimonious confidence had put them in this
position, sorry that Liv couldn’t make any of it better, sorry that a part of her expected Liv to do so. Most of all, she
was sorry that they’d gotten to this point, with her wanting to punch her sister in the face and crawl into her sleeping bag
and curl around her like a koala at exactly the same time.
The first two words stayed.
What else should she write? Something about the killer. Dad says it’s a woman, she thought, but that sounded like a baby announcement, and she wasn’t sure Liv would take anything Guy said seriously,
even if he was a thousand percent sure about it.
Mandy thought about what she knew. The tiny pebbles of information she had and the hundred-ton boulders she didn’t.
Watch out for the lady, Mandy settled on.
What else? She wanted to write something like You find her, I’ll get help, but she wasn’t sure she could promise that.
I didn’t want to leave you. But I know you’ll figure it out, she finally wrote.
Then she folded up the paper and tucked it into the scrunchie on the shore.
Now Mandy cursed herself for all the things she didn’t write.
When she’d been scribbling the note on the supply boat, it had been easy to imagine she and Liv would be reunited soon, swallowing the hurt, pouring more coffee into each other’s mugs.
But now, as their raft slipped down the dark river, she felt herself falling further and further away.
What if Liv couldn’t figure it out? What if the murderer struck again?
Why hadn’t she made one more attempt to convince her dad and Thor to let her stay with her sister?
And why hadn’t she written I love you while she still could?