Chapter Forty-Two
It took three melted protein bars for Mandy to decide she needed to make a plan. It wasn’t her strong suit—not by a long shot—but
if she didn’t do it, no one else would. They were drifting. Her dad was paddling sloppily in the front of the raft, guarding
the radio at his feet as if it were a flighty girlfriend he suspected of cheating on him. Charlie was silent, his paddle seemingly
propelled by a windup toy jammed under each shoulder blade. And Thor only seemed to care about the frequent reassurances he
sought from Guy that he’d be paid for his services.
The morning light sluiced over the North Rim, slapping the waves with brightness that alchemized the whitewater into foamy
diamonds. Mandy tried aiming her fake engagement ring at the sun, hoping it might create a flash of light she could use to
signal a plane or helicopter. But cheap tricks wouldn’t help them now. The discount ring just bit at her tired hand.
What was her goal? To reunite with her sister. Scratch that: to safely reunite with her sister. Which meant she had to do two things: figure out what was really going on with the murders and stop
the raft’s forward movement.
Which was more important?
Mandy thought about how her sister would evaluate the question.
Liv would know which information was crucial and what could be ignored, and if she didn’t, she’d invent a nine-dimensional prioritization matrix to figure it out.
Meanwhile, here Mandy was, sorting through scattered marbles rolling across the floor and hoping she might pick up the right one at random.
She had to do better. She had to think like her sister.
“It’s time to call for help,” she said to her father.
“Give me a few more minutes,” Guy said. “This is delicate. Gotta get the right people on the bus.”
“Raft.”
“Can’t we just call the police?” Charlie said.
“No cops,” Guy responded. “That’ll only add to our problems. They’re tied up in red tape, and they’ll ask questions we can’t
answer. This will be faster. Better.”
“Better for you,” Charlie grumbled.
“It’s not like the park police jumped to the rescue last night,” Guy retorted. “And now that we’re a bunch of fugitives, if
they do show up, it’ll be with handcuffs. We need our own team now.”
Mandy bit her lip. Her dad did have a knack for charming people into helping him, and she knew he cared about Liv. But she
didn’t love the fact that they kept paddling further away from her.
“Sounds like we should stop,” she improvised. “You can focus, and we need a rest. We’ve been paddling all morning on barely
any sleep.”
“She’s got a point,” Thor said. “Upset Rapid’s coming up in a few miles. And I’m starting to see double.”
“Then we’ll pay you double,” Guy said.
“Dad. If we could just stop for a bit—”
“Can’t stop,” he said.
Why? she wanted to scream. But that was a Mandy impulse. Liv would keep the question from coming out. She would turn it over in
her own head first.
Why was her dad so insistent on barreling down the river? Was he racing toward something, or away from someone?
Away, she decided. He didn’t know anything about the Grand Canyon or what lay ahead.
But he knew what he was escaping. She wondered if he planned to tell his contacts that a world-famous entrepreneur and her lead investor had been murdered, whether dropping Babette’s and Stefan’s names would sweeten his ask or make it harder to secure help.
Stefan. If they couldn’t get help or stop yet, she’d work on her other goal: securing information. She put down her paddle
and leaned forward.
“How long did you work with Stefan Eriksen?” she asked Charlie.
He didn’t even turn his head. “A year.”
“And the business he was in?”
“The Regent Group is a private equity firm.”
“Based in the Netherlands?”
“Their investments are global. I don’t know where the home office is.”
This interrogation was going nowhere. Charlie was boring, and Mandy didn’t waste her time on boring people. But then she remembered
whom she was trying to emulate. Liv wouldn’t see Charlie as boring or not-boring. Liv would see him as useful.
She tried another way in. “You know, when I got that email from PK inviting me to be your first outside investor, I thought
it was a joke.”
Charlie kept paddling.
“It was a dream, totally,” Mandy continued. “I just never imagined she’d consider an investment from someone like me.”
“That was Babette,” Charlie said. “She wanted our first outside investor to be a fan. Picked you out of her DMs. She was always
doing things her own way.”
“What made you take on investors in the first place?”
“CareFree.”
There was a pause, and Mandy feared she’d hit another dead end.
But then Charlie kept talking. “The first twelve years, it was just her and me, bootstrapping the business with money we’d inherited from our parents.
Then social media and direct-to-consumer blew open our industry, and Babette’s dreams got bigger.
The last four years were breakneck. The Fierce line. Raw. Her book.”
“She became a star,” Mandy said.
“A supernova. Shining so bright it blinds you, pushing our team to the max. She’s one of those people who makes an absurd
ask, and even if you know it’s impossible, you still want to hunt it down and bring it back to her wriggling between your
teeth. We all want to do that.”
Wanted to, Mandy thought. She didn’t have the heart to say it out loud.
“Babette was making promises we couldn’t deliver on,” Charlie continued. “We needed more of a science foundation behind her
claims of transformation. So I roped Devon in. She told me about datura. That’s when everything tipped.”
His eyes brightened, and a wisp of a smile graced his face.
“For the first time,” Charlie said, “I was the one with the dream. I was the one who saw the potential for CareFree. This isn’t just another face cream for us.
CareFree is the next Xanax. It’s the next CBD. But we didn’t have the cash to live up to that opportunity.”
“So you decided to raise investment,” Guy piped up.
“Right. But Babette insisted on doing it backward. No banks. No consultants. She wouldn’t even go on Shark Tank. Instead, she put out a wide open call on her socials, inviting anyone who wanted to to get in touch. No screen for qualified
investors. No screen at all. We were flooded with ridiculous offers, kids with their piggy banks, fans with the Babette logo
tattooed on their thigh.”
“She sought investors who really care about your company,” Mandy said. “What’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing’s wrong with it,” Charlie said. “It’s brilliant, really. Amateurs are easy to control, and they make for great press.
Look at you—wide-eyed high school teacher, aspirational customer—socials eat that up.”
Mandy bristled at the idea that she might be nothing more than a prop in Babette’s campaign. But it was her dad who came to
her defense.
“Not everyone who got involved was an amateur,” Guy said.
“Oh, right,” Charlie said. “There were criminals too.”
“Hey,” Guy objected. “I connected Babette to Stefan.”
“True.” Charlie searched her dad’s eyes for the answer to a question he didn’t ask. “And look how that turned out.”
“I’m not the one who killed her,” Guy snapped back. “Or him.”
“Neither am I.”
A note of tension hummed in the air between the two men. But Charlie’s story wasn’t over. Mandy still didn’t understand how
everything was connected. She needed to loosen the wire.
“How did the investments change things?” she asked.
“It meant more money, of course. The investors we brought in—and yes, Stefan represented the biggest—turbocharged our development
of CareFree. Renovated labs, bigger marketing budgets, more sophisticated supply chains. We went from growing fast to growing
huge. But investors have expectations. Babette’s seat-of-her-pants management style wasn’t as popular in the boardroom as
it was on the internet.”
“Stefan wanted a more conventional captain, didn’t he?” Guy was smiling now. “And you saw an opportunity to take a spin at
the wheel.”
Charlie stiffened.
“I get it,” Guy continued. “Your sister gets the sunshine while you’re sweeping up broken glass in the back alley. Then you
get this billion-dollar idea for CareFree. And she takes all the credit.”
“I didn’t care about credit,” Charlie said.
“Of course not,” Guy said. He could be generous when he needed to be. “You just wanted to protect what you were building.”
Mandy could see what her dad was doing, and still she was taken aback by his glib adaptability.
Guy had admired Babette. Mandy remembered how he’d raved about CareFree, and her, and how this time, a CEO truly appreciated his skills.
They were both risk-takers, and Babette had been the rare businessperson who met Guy’s maverick energy with her own unorthodox methods.
Just yesterday, he’d hiked down into the middle of the earth to help her fend off a threat to her business.
And now here he was, commiserating with her backstabbing brother about how she’d blocked him from achieving his dreams.
“There was nothing secretive about my work with Stefan,” Charlie said. “His firm made a major investment in our company. And
yes, he preferred a more data-driven approach. Like me.”
“So you suggested you might do a better job running the show than your sister.”
“Not the show. Just the shop. Frankly, at first, Stefan wasn’t interested. Then he called me a few weeks ago, talking about
a succession plan and a smooth transition so Babette could still have a role as spokeswoman.”
“What changed his mind?”
“Can’t say. Maybe it was because Babette switched the launch location to align with the position of the moon? Or when she
fired our marketing director two days before the campaign was set to start? Whatever his exact reason, Stefan said it was
time for the business to mature. He drew up the papers and brought them on this trip, so we could break it to Babette here,
far from cameras and media. To give her time to acclimate before the rest of the world found out. Between Stefan, me, and
Devon, we had the board votes to push it through.”