Chapter Forty-One
Betrayal. That’s what Liv was looking at.
It wasn’t just that Mandy and Guy had run away and left her with a dead man. It was what they’d taken that hurt the most.
The catalog of supplies no longer available to Liv and the others was dismayingly comprehensive. Her dad and sister had stolen
the radio and satellite phone. Also the water filter, the crate of energy bars, and, for reasons Liv didn’t care to examine,
an entire braid of garlic.
Then there were the boats. Fortunately, they’d left the second raft tied up, and the supply boat appeared to be intact. The
same could not be said for the critical items needed to operate the watercraft: paddles and PFDs. They’d left exactly none
of each. Only the huge set of oars lashed to the supply boat remained.
“They stranded us,” Liv said.
“I was supposed to radio the park police again this morning,” Big Pete said.
“And we were going to talk to Marc.”
“But now . . .”
“We can’t go anywhere,” Liv said. “We can’t call anyone.”
“Those hikers might have a sat phone,” Katy said.
“They said they were moving on early this morning.”
Big Pete rubbed his temple. “Then our best shot is another rafting group stopping at Deer Creek Falls. But that might not be until this afternoon.”
“Not good enough,” Liv said. “By then, they’ll be far downriver. And we don’t know if the park police can help. We weren’t
their priority last night with one dead body, and we still might not be with two. We need a plan. And clean water. Unless
we figure out a way to seriously increase the output from Fiona’s rainbow sparkle water filter, we’re going to get thirsty.”
“We have iodine tablets,” Big Pete said.
“You think this group is going to drink iodine?” Liv asked.
“I don’t know what this group is capable of anymore,” Big Pete said. “Or why those four were the ones who left.”
Why had they left? A tree diagram sprouted in Liv’s head, branches forking to different conclusions. There were the bad options,
the a-murderer-has-my-sister options. If one of the missing four had killed Stefan and been seen, maybe they’d taken the others
hostage. But who could the murderer be? Not Mandy, obviously. Hopefully not her father. That left Charlie and Thor. Charlie
had been tied up. Was it possible he had a secret background as an Eagle Scout or a wannabe Houdini? Not likely. Thor, on
the other hand, was a former soldier, a risk-taker, a feral wolf in the wilderness. And he had—
“Where’s the gun?” Liv asked.
Big Pete looked at Katy. “I locked it in a gang box yesterday after this one’s Annie Oakley routine.”
“I should have fired it,” Katy grumbled. “Maybe then no one would’ve—”
“That box?” Liv asked, pointing to the rusted metal case she’d spotted on the beach.
Big Pete nodded.
The case was scuffed and heavy. Liv tried to leverage open the lid, but it didn’t move. “Where’s the key?”
“When I came off watch at two thirty a.m. and woke Thor to take over, I gave it to him,” Big Pete said. “Just in case he needed
it.”
Liv shook the box and heard muffled clanks, but nothing she could confidently identify. “We’ll have to pry it open. See if the gun is still there.” She tried to keep her voice even, shoving away unwanted images of Thor holding a pistol to her sister’s head.
She looked up the hillside, to where all the other guests were stirring on the other side of the rocks. They hadn’t figured
out what was wrong yet, but they would if they ventured over. She needed more time.
“Do we have supplies for breakfast?” Liv asked.
Katy nodded. “They didn’t take the eggs. Or the fruit.”
“Why don’t you get that going with the group. In the meantime”—Liv turned to Big Pete—“we should take a full inventory of
everything that might be missing.”
Big Pete looked uncomfortable. “We can’t go into people’s bags without permission. Pretty sure that’s in the Constitution.”
“We’re not cops,” Liv said. Though she did have a fleeting worry about what her boss at the State Department would say when
this was all over. She shook it away. The only priority now was to get to that conversation alive. “We have no idea when the
police will get here. We don’t know where the gun is. And somewhere there’s a knife that was used to murder Stefan.”
“Thor has a knife,” Big Pete said.
“I assume you have one as well.”
The look he flashed her was shocked and angry in equal measure.
Liv kept her voice calm. “We just need to know if there are any more surprises traveling with us.”
She looked up the hillside, where Katy had distracted the rest of the group with various fruit-salad-related tasks. It was
what she’d asked for, and it was a nightmare. Each and every person had a knife in their hand. Fiona was stabbing a cantaloupe,
Imogen slicing bananas, Lucinda using a paring knife to peel an apple in a continuous spiral. Liv had a fleeting vision of
the beach blanketed in deadly knives, blades under every rock, in each of Devon’s zippered pockets, hiding in PK’s faux-hawk.
She swallowed hard and blinked it away.
“What is it?” Big Pete asked her. “Do you know who did this?”
“No. Not even close. I don’t know if the killer is here with us or if they’re paddling down the Colorado with my family. But
if we’re going to have a chance at figuring it out, we’ve got to open everything up. Every locked box. Every crumpled pillowcase.
Every secret in every bag.”
“You aren’t in charge, you know.”
Liv didn’t like the challenge in Big Pete’s voice. “We’ve been working together.”
“No. My priority is keeping people safe. Not finding a murderer.”
“Isn’t that the same thing?”
“Can’t say. Not anymore. You told those men they’d be safest lashed to a boat. Now Stefan’s dead and a raft is gone. If you
go commando now, tear through everyone’s stuff . . . I wouldn’t be surprised if they tie you up next.”
At that, Big Pete headed up toward the kitchen area. Another betrayal. Soon enough, he’d break the horrible news to the others,
and gathering evidence would get trickier. Liv wondered if Pete had something to gain by resisting her suggestion. Maybe he
had a secret that he didn’t want exposed. Maybe all of them did.
But it didn’t matter. Big Pete was right. She’d taken a gamble the night before and lost. It was impossible to say now what
might have happened if they hadn’t tied up Stefan, Guy, and Charlie. It could have been better. Could have been worse. But
it had been her idea, and now Stefan was dead.
A new feeling was hitting her: guilt. Her brilliant plan to keep everyone safe had done the opposite. She’d pushed Mandy away,
into their feckless father’s arms. She’d restrained Stefan so someone could slash his throat with ease. She’d sent her sister
running—or hostage—on a raft downriver, moving deeper into the dark heart of the canyon.
She heard Stefan’s voice again, reciting that eerie poem. What pleasure can we have to war with evil? She needed to turn things around.
She headed over to the relative privacy of her campsite and fished out the note she’d found in Mandy’s hair tie.
She could see her sister’s fingertips imprinted in the whorls of red dust on the tightly folded paper, and for a moment, she resisted opening it.
As long as it stayed shut, she could tell herself it contained everything she needed.
The name of the murderer. Forgiveness from her sister. A way out of this nightmare.
Of course, it revealed so much less than that. It was Mandy’s baseball sketch, with a quick message scrawled on the back.
I’m sorry. Watch out for the lady. I didn’t want to leave you. But I know you’ll figure it out.
Liv swallowed and cursed herself for imagining the impossible. She scanned the baseball sketch, the tiny horrible messages
lettered on the figures’ caps. PK had received the vaguest one: Everyone is replaceable.
Mandy’s seemed to refer to her investment, and perhaps their father’s crimes: Money can’t protect you.
Devon’s suggested an executive power struggle—This is my company, not yours—and finally, there was Charlie’s, simple and brutal: Cross me and you’re dead too.
Each message suggested a rift between its recipient and Babette, giving Liv the impression she was looking at a laundry list
of motives and suspects who might have killed the CEO. But she couldn’t ignore the possibility that someone else had sent
the threats, a killer trying to cast suspicion on others. She, Stefan, and Imogen all had blank ball caps, and Fiona and Lucinda
claimed not to have needed theirs. Could one of their hats be hiding a threat they didn’t want the others to see? She wondered
if she should push to look inside Fiona’s and Lucinda’s hats, but that didn’t feel like the top priority now. Everyone was
at risk at this point. And if one of the two women was the killer, it seemed too obvious to conveniently ditch the item that
could have enabled them to masquerade as victims alongside the others.
There was one more person in Mandy’s drawing whose hat was blank. Front and center, smiling enigmatically: the magnetic, elusive
Babette. Liv dug out the white ball cap she’d found by Babette’s dead body the day before. In the hubbub since then, no one
had asked her for it, and she hadn’t had time to examine it.
Babette’s hat looked like the others. Liv rubbed dirt against the inner crown, hoping against hope that a message inside would reveal the answer, or a hint in the right direction. But she found no embroidery. No threat. The red dirt clung to the empty fabric, mocking her.
Liv turned back to Mandy’s note. Watch out for the lady. Who was she referring to? Did Mandy have information about the killer concealed behind this riddle? She felt a flash of anger
at her sister for abandoning her with this terrible puzzle, as if she was a rat and Mandy the mastermind of a maze of granite
and whitewater, dangling cheese in the form of cryptic notes and sketches. But that was ridiculous. Even if she did run away,
Mandy was just as trapped in this nightmare as she was.
Trapped. Liv had constructed her life to never feel that way. Every other investigation she’d been part of, she’d worked methodically,
gathering evidence—often for months—and lining up the resources to take down her target at the exact right moment, showing
her work meticulously so no target could come back at them on appeal. But here there was no due process. Here there would
be no appeal. She was on a beach with a dead man. Her sister and dad had disappeared. She prayed they were alive and simply
doing what they did best—improvising a way forward, dancing over coals, whether toward greater danger or away from it.
Liv had to think like them now. Mandy and Guy wouldn’t be caught dead waiting for authorities or hoarding enough redundant
data to make the highest-percentage decision on what to do next. She had to move like them: fast, half blind, without all
the information she needed. She had to be willing to conceal the information she had, or even—though it was hard to imagine
how she’d pull this off—twist it into something else.
She looked down at her backpack. Inside it was the unwanted gift from PK, a foreign object she’d intended to hand back to
him this morning. Now Liv regarded the little tub with its silver-on-white logo and nearly invisible seal. It was everything
she abhorred. A crude shortcut around responsibility, trumped up in bogus claims about what it meant to lead a fulfilling
life.
Liv screwed open the container and regarded the lavender cream inside.
She could almost hear the whispered promises emanating from the jar: a life free from hyperanalysis, a billion-dollar market potential, a blissed-out, destressed world.
And then there were the other voices: Mandy chastising her for prioritizing work over family; Fiona’s warning that the substance might be more reactive in the hot sun; Stefan reciting Tennyson and raving in the dark.
She thought of all the times in the Odyssey the boatman took what he wanted and suffered the consequences, until he staggered naked into the arms of Nausica?, burner
of ships, to tell his strange survival tale.
No sensible person would choose to forget right now. No rational person would want to. But deliberate, considered action wasn’t
working for Liv anymore. She needed to unleash something wilder, to tap into the energy her sister would bring to an unprecedented
situation like this.
Liv scooped up a tiny crescent of CareFree and dabbed it experimentally on her cheekbone. Then she plunged her hand in, like
a bear discovering honey, and smeared it all over her face.