Chapter Forty-Three
At first, Liv tried to chart her experience of CareFree scientifically, consulting her watch every thirty seconds and waggling
her bare hand in front of her to check if her perception had changed. But after four minutes, she decided she didn’t have
time for that. Her skin felt refreshed, as if the cream had peeled back some of the stress of the past twenty-four hours.
And all her fingers appeared to maintain their proper proportions.
She looked up to where the others were staring at the breakfast they’d made but had yet to touch. Big Pete must have broken
the news. They looked numb and scared. They wouldn’t want hard questions, terrifying truths, or a plan to find the killer
in their midst. They would want reassurance or, at minimum, the semblance of it. They would want a lie.
And Liv? She wanted Mandy. But she felt almost loose enough to emulate her sister. She was ready to throw out the book. Burn
the ships.
She decided to start with a small act of liberation: destruction of evidence. Liv took Mandy’s note out of her pocket and
wadded it up. Then she paused. It wasn’t enough to bury it in her bag or under the sand. She’d memorized its contents and
didn’t want anyone else to see it.
What would her sister do in this situation?
It was obvious. And disgusting.
Liv stuffed the note into her mouth and chewed the paper gummy, letting the sandstone dust grit her teeth. One hard gulp,
and it was gone.
It was surprisingly satisfying to fully commit to the obstruction of justice.
Liv felt lighter now. She was on the CareFree path.
She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and marched up to the group with their perfectly sliced pineapples.
She resisted the urge to scan their knives for traces of blood.
She opened her mouth—so empty, so full of possibility—and began to speak.
“I have an announcement to make,” she said. Her voice sounded unnaturally buoyant, as if she were conducting a circus instead
of a murder investigation. “As you know, sadly, we lost our dear friend Stefan Eriksen during the night.”
Dear friend? Where were these words coming from? And why had she placed her right hand against her chest? But it seemed to
be working. Everyone was paying attention to her, and they looked, if not happy, not angry either.
“I have sworn an oath to tell the truth.” She could feel her heart beating under her fingers. “And the truth is that Stefan
was murdered.”
Honesty: That was in her wheelhouse. But here came the lie. A lie to encourage everyone to let their guard down and, hopefully,
let her in. The best way to find a killer among them, she’d realized, was to tell them the killer wasn’t there.
“The harder truth is that we know the person who murdered him.” A twitchy murmur rippled across the group. Fiona took a step
back, and Devon switched the grip on her fork to a decidedly stabby position. Even Lucinda, who had been placidly peeling
an apple, stopped moving.
Liv imagined a lonely scapegoat, cast into the wilderness under the burden of human sins. She’d never liked goats, but they
had their uses. She took a breath and dove in.
“It was Thor. He killed Stefan Eriksen before dawn. Then he took Charlie, my dad, and my sister hostage in one of the rafts.
Thor stranded us here with Stefan’s body, no radio, and not enough supplies to get help. At least, that’s what I think happened.”
She’d added that final caveat on a whim. It was a risk. It undercut the story she was trying to sell. But it was also an opening, an invitation for others to join her in discovery instead of cursing her for the terrible certainties she’d presented.
“A guide?” Devon said. “My brother was right?”
“How do you know it was Thor?” Fiona asked. She sounded worried, not confrontational.
“Stefan’s throat was slashed. From the wound, I could see that the blade that cut him had an unusual pattern, an irregular
notching that matched the bowie knife Thor carried.”
This was a bald-faced lie. Liv had only gotten the barest glimpse of Thor’s knife sheathed in the holster on his belt, and
she had spent even less time looking at Stefan’s throat. She waited for someone to call her out on it, but not too long. Silence
was the tool of the investigator. Nonstop talking was the tool of the liar.
“I spent four months training on exotic street knives with the State Department in Thailand,” she said. Liv had never been
to Thailand. “If you know what to look for, every blade has a fingerprint all its own. That first day on the river, Thor couldn’t
resist showing me every feature of his knife, how he’d carved a tiny notch near the blade-tip to help him break lines quickly
when he was fly-fishing. When I saw Stefan’s throat, it was all right there.”
“Mandy told me Thor left her in that slot above Surprise Valley for a while,” Fiona said. “Maybe he snuck down and killed
Babette too.”
Liv was momentarily frozen. Mandy had shared information with Fiona that she hadn’t told her own sister. It stung to realize
that, but more importantly, was it true? Could Thor have actually—no. She was inventing a killer, not investigating one.
“That fits,” she said, nodding at Fiona.
Big Pete frowned. “Why the heck would Thor have any reason to—”
Liv cut him off. “I don’t know. But my family’s heading down the river with a killer while we speculate about his motives.
We have to do something. We have to save them.”
“She’s right,” Devon said. “My brother’s with them too. We have to protect them.”
The older woman drew her into a tight hug from the side.
“We’re going to get them back,” Devon whispered. She turned toward the rest of the group and stiffened her spine. “With my
siblings gone, I am responsible for the company and this Essence Quest. We will move as quickly as possible to rescue my brother,
and her family, from Thor. We’ll call the police, then we’ll get in the boats and go find them. We will find them alive. We
will do what needs to be done.”
There was nothing to add to this, so Liv settled for nodding enthusiastically. Her heart was beating faster now. She felt
warm—too warm—and she wondered if it was possible she’d overdone the CareFree and put herself in danger. But the pleasure
pulsing through her felt too good for that to be the case. It was one thing to get others to listen when she was telling the
truth. It was a thousand times more satisfying to get them to believe a story she’d made up. She felt powerful. And hot. She
took off her sweatshirt and didn’t even feel embarrassed when she realized she only had a river-stained sports bra on underneath.
“Nice speech,” Big Pete said to Devon. “One problem. Two, actually. Your brother and the rest of the desperadoes took our
radio and sat phone. So we won’t be calling anyone. Also, they took all the PFDs and paddles.”
“Can we go downriver without them?” Liv asked.
“Rafting without PFDs is against Park Service regulations. It’s also a recipe for drowning.”
The old Liv would have stopped right there. But the new Liv batted away the threat of a watery death and stormed ahead.
“And paddles? Can we raft without paddles?”
“Raft? No. But the supply boat has fixed oars. We could all pile on there, but . . .”
“But what?” Fiona asked.
“Stefan’s body is on that boat,” Liv said.
“So we take him off and leave him on the beach,” PK said.
When no one answered, PK doubled down. “What? It was okay to abandon Babette on the rocks, but Mr. Eriksen gets to go with
us?”
“It’s illegal to move a body in the Grand Canyon,” Big Pete said. “And Stefan died on that boat. We have to keep him with
us.”
“No way I’m riding on the supply boat, then,” Imogen said.
“Me either,” Fiona said.
Big Pete looked like he was reaching the end of his rope. “Well, unless any of you have secret rafting paddles packed in those
coolers full of eye cream—”
An opportunity. Liv saw it, shiny as a gold-plated ring on the carousel, dangling there for her to grab. “Great idea,” she
said. “Let’s get the bags and open them up. Between all of us, there’s got to be something we can work with.”
She felt Devon stiffen next to her. Was there something in her luggage she didn’t want others to see?
“I do have an extendable tripod,” PK said doubtfully.
“Sounds like a paddle shaft to me!” Liv wasn’t sure where this chipper maniacal energy was coming from, but she was riding
it. “My family and her brother are relying on us. Come on.”
She clapped twice, like a kindergarten teacher. It worked. Even before the echo shot back off the canyon walls, people started
to move.
Katy laid out a tarp on the sand, and it started to fill with luggage. There was too much motion for Liv to pick out the subtleties
of who brought their bag willingly to the tarp and who seemed uncomfortable with the proposition. The important thing was
that the beach was soon empty, the tarp full. Big Pete even unloaded the supply boat, or everything he could that wasn’t directly
under Stefan’s body.
All the material possessions the group had were now laid out in front of her. Now what?
“You two start looking for things we can use to make paddles,” Liv said, pointing to PK and Fiona. She turned to Imogen and Lucinda next. “You work on anything we can use for emergency flotation. Devon and I will look for any other useful equipment.”
Bag after bag exploded under the others’ hands. The frenzied activity reminded Liv of a team bonding exercise she’d been subjected
to by the head of station in Beijing, a man with a passion for suspenders who believed his employees’ fullest potential would
be unlocked by constructing towers out of dry egg noodles. That had been one of the longest mornings of Liv’s life. But maybe
he’d been on to something. A group effort—a real project, not a noodle-gluing exercise—could bring people together. The crew
on the tarp was working through their stress and fatigue. PK even cracked a hopeful smile when Fiona lashed one of her light
therapy masks to a pole with strips of a battered Babette kimono, creating a totemic glowing scarecrow that could possibly—whoops,