Chapter Forty-Five
“We did it!”
Imogen leapt off the tarp, arms raised triumphantly. Her waist was ringed with empty Babette water bottles strung together
with yellow paracord, punctuated by three Babette soft coolers duct-taped to her back.
“Watch this.” The girl strutted down the beach, her waist-belt jangling. She pressed her phone into Liv’s hand. “Take a video,
okay?”
Liv gamely held up the phone. The effect of the CareFree was fading, and she could feel her good cheer melting in the prickly
heat. Imogen gave a theatrical shriek, slid her feet into the cool mud, and lowered herself into the river. She slipped all
the way under the water, shooting Liv a dazzling smile as she descended.
Then the teenager started to rise. The bottles around her waist came up first, bobbing in a yellow circle, giving the impression
of a last-minute Halloween costume of the floating island of plastic waste in the middle of the ocean. The zipped-up soft
coolers on Imogen’s back kept her aloft, but she kept flopping from side to side like a dead fish.
“Ta-da!” The girl popped back up to standing and flipped her hair dramatically behind her. “I floated!”
“You floated,” Liv said. Sort of. For a few seconds. In calm conditions. One of the Babette coolers taped to Imogen’s back
unpeeled itself and started drifting.
“So we’ll just make six more of these, and we’ll be good to go!”
“Imogen, I don’t think—”
“And we’ve got paddles now,” PK added. He waved something in the air that looked like a junkyard snow shovel. Upon closer
investigation, it was the skeleton of a camping chair, stripped of its fabric and lashed into a bundle of poles, a baking
pan duct-taped to one end. PK and Fiona had five such chair paddles assembled, each with a different kitchen implement secured
to its head. The cast-iron skillet had a promising shape, but it was so heavy Fiona could barely lift it. The last three paddles
were outfitted with a matrix of spatulas and wooden spoons. They looked like the world’s worst pitchforks, and try as she
might, Liv could hardly imagine them propelling a raft anywhere but ruin.
The CareFree had definitely worn off. Now she could see the situation for what it was: a disaster. Liv had done the first
part right, selling them a story that pushed them from terror into action. But it was useless action. Even Imogen, the internet’s
poster child for radical honesty, had deluded herself into embracing the color yellow. If Liv told the truth now, it might
crush them. Their frenzied hope would sour and flip. They wouldn’t just go back to fear and uncertainty about Babette’s and
Stefan’s deaths. They would go lower, into raw anger, paranoia. Terror. The crash would be worse than where they started.
“This isn’t going to work.” It was Lucinda. She didn’t sound upset about it. Just matter-of-fact.
Devon agreed. “We’re stuck here,” she said. “We’re stuck on this beach while my brother gets paddled to his death—”
“Maybe Thor isn’t the murderer,” Liv impulsively blurted out. “Maybe they were going for help.”
“I thought you told us it was his knife,” Lucinda said.
“You were so confident,” Devon added.
Terrific. Now Liv had broken the cardinal rule of lying. She’d smashed her own story for no good reason but panic.
“I’m just saying we can’t give up hope,” Liv said.
It sounded weak even to her own ears. Liv thought of all the times her sister had spun up an audacious whopper of a dream and sold it to her, all the times she’d gotten fed up with Mandy for skirting the truth and taking the easy way out.
But Mandy’s way wasn’t easy. Conjuring up a world better than the one they were stuck in, fabricating and finagling her way into that dream—that was no shortcut.
It was a survival tactic. And Liv had failed miserably in trying to execute it.
She had to find another way to survive.
Big Pete came striding up from the beach before she could come up with any brilliant ideas of how.
“There’s something I have to tell you.”
No good conversation ever started that way.
“While you all were playing dress-up, I used a crowbar to lever open the gang box.” He grimaced. “It wasn’t there.”
“What wasn’t there?” The question came from Lucinda, who was gathering up dislodged bottles from the failed flotation belt
experiment.
Big Pete glanced uneasily at Liv, the question of whether to answer written plainly on his face.
Liv weighed her options. She looked from Big Pete to Lucinda Duvray. Both were competent. Both had no prior connection with
the Babette empire that Liv knew of. If she was going to trust anyone here with the truth, it was going to be these two.
“You can say it,” she said.
“The gun,” Big Pete said. “It’s missing.”
Liv remembered what Big Pete had said earlier, about how he’d locked it up but made sure to give the guide on overnight watch
the key.
“That means Thor has it?” she asked.
Big Pete nodded. “I’m sorry.”
Lucinda put a hand on Liv’s arm. “We’ll find them. They’re going to be just fine.”
“You don’t know that,” Big Pete said. “Thor’s a funny one. He knows his way around a gun. And he’s burned bridges before.”
“What do you mean?”
“Nine years ago, I met him down here in the canyon. He was alone, wearing a sheepskin loincloth he processed himself. He had a pistol, a fishing pole, a bunch of old books, and a laminated guide to desert leaves and berries that are safe to eat. He made it a whole year before he wandered into our office looking for a job. He’s a skilled wilderness guide, but he’s not big on following the rules.
Start of every season, I’m half surprised he comes back. ”
“Where was he before the canyon?” Lucinda asked.
“Wherever it was, he wasn’t going back there. We got certified mail for him once from Virginia. He taped it to a beer can,
took it out to the desert, and unloaded a full clip into it.”
Liv felt a little rip inside her chest. “We have to go after them. Now.”
“No can do,” Big Pete said. “Not without PFDs.”
“He has the gun,” Liv said. “And my sister. We have to take the risk. How dangerous is the stretch of river ahead?”
Big Pete looked toward the looming cliffs to the west. The obsidian rocks were lit by the sun, shining like mirrored skyscrapers.
“A couple moderate rapids ahead. Then there’s Upset thirteen miles downriver. It has a hole at the bottom that can flip a
boat and tear it to pieces. A guide, Shorty Burton, died there years ago. With a life jacket.”
Maybe Mandy’s raft wouldn’t get that far. Maybe they’d have the good sense to stop before Upset Rapid. Or not. Liv pushed
on.
“But the supply boat can hold all of us, right? And you’ve got lots of experience on these rapids.”
Big Pete sighed. “It’s possible.”
“The boat wouldn’t be too heavy?” Lucinda asked.
“Not if we take out anything we don’t absolutely need.”
They all glanced at the tarp holding Stefan. In the gathering heat, his body was going to become harder to ignore. In just
a few hours, Liv imagined the smell would be unbearable.
“Well, then,” Lucinda said. “We will leave Stefan on the beach, and we’ll all get on the supply boat.”
“We can’t make people get on a boat without life jackets,” Big Pete said. “And we can’t move a dead body.” He was emphatic. “That’s bigger than PFDs. It’s a serious crime.”
“Ferrying him down the river might also be a crime,” Liv pointed out. “We don’t know which would be worse according to park
police standards.”
Even as she said this, she cringed. Liv did know. Moving Stefan from the exact place where he was killed was likely to destroy
evidence. Let alone what would happen if they left his body on the beach for the mountain lions and turkey vultures to find.
“No,” Big Pete said. “Babette was in the gray zone, because she hadn’t yet joined the trip. But Stefan Eriksen is squarely
my responsibility. I have to stay with the body and wait for the police. We’ll just have to wait here and flag down another
party to use their sat phone.”
But no other boats had passed them all morning.
“You have a responsibility to all of us,” Lucinda said. “Not just Stefan. Leave Katy here with a raft, and food, and anyone
who doesn’t want to take the risk of getting on a boat without a PFD. You can take the rest of us in the supply boat to try
to catch up with the others.”
“And Stefan’s body?”
“We’ll bury it,” Liv said.
“That’s a crime,” Big Pete said. “I won’t—”
“I’ll do it,” Liv said. “I’ll move him. If the cops ask, I give you and Katy full authority to say I forced your hand. That
you had nothing to do with it at all.”
Big Pete stared at her. Liv stared back. Swallowed hard. She was about to commit a crime. She was signing her own pink slip.
No more State Department. No more global jet-setting. But this decision would take her to the one place she needed to go.
“Fine,” Big Pete said.
Liv turned to Lucinda. “Do you think those paddles PK and Fiona made could be used as shovels?”
“I’ll find out,” Lucinda responded.
Liv nodded. “Okay. We need to dig a hole. A big one. Then we’re getting out of here.”
It took forty minutes before they had an acceptable trench. No one said anything when they pushed Stefan’s body in. The whole
affair was silent and horrible, everyone’s eyes sliding away from the tarp as soon as it was covered by sand.
“I’m sorry. You deserved better,” Liv finally said. She was speaking to the fresh mound on the beach, to the big sky, to all
of them.
The quiet held them for one more minute, and then they had to make their choices. Devon and Liv were the first to commit to
going, but in the end, all the guests chose to climb on the supply boat beside them. No one wanted to stay and wait with Katy
and Stefan’s dead body on the beach. Katy stood at the helm of their mountain of discarded gear, saying nothing. It was impossible
to know if she was angry to be left behind or glad to be rid of them.
Imogen let out a single whimper when she saw her phone battery bank and all the Babette products they were abandoning. “Couldn’t
we—”
“Come on,” PK said. For the first time, he spoke gently to Imogen, a sad half smile on his face. “When we get home, I’ll send
you so much CareFree you won’t remember any of this.”
“I can’t imagine there will be a CareFree without Babette,” Fiona said.
Devon looked at her sharply but said nothing.
Big Pete launched them into the water, working the giant pair of oars at the top of the supply boat. Katy watched them blank-faced
from the shore. No one waved. No one talked. Whereas the rafts were small and nimble, the supply boat was more like an inflatable
barge, rising high above the Colorado on its massive tubes, with everyone huddled close to the center. The spray barely reached
Liv’s sneakers, but the distance from the water didn’t make her feel safe. Quite the opposite. She had no flotation device,
and her bench was a wobbly plastic cooler that threatened to chuck itself into the water with every ripple.
Even in the slow sections, the Colorado never stopped roaring.
Liv had thought she’d tuned it out, but that was a lie.
Its growl was constant and unrelenting, unbothered by their frenzied decisions and crimes.
She was trapped in its capricious violence, its ability to surge without warning.
It soaked the edges of her thinking, dousing her surety in fear.
When she looked down at the water, at the muddy rush below her, all Liv saw was how hard and far she could fall.