Chapter Fifty-Two
The sky was black, the water darker. Twenty hours of caffeinated energy bars had left Mandy exhausted and wired at the same
time. At sunset, they’d called in their theory to the park police. While the voice on the other side of the radio sounded
skeptical, they were convinced to send a helicopter to the stranded group at Deer Creek Falls. If that beach was empty, they’d
keep flying downriver to Bloody Ledges.
As night descended, the canyon reverberated with strange movements. A parade of bats emerged from a crevasse near the water’s
surface, crisscrossing the river in a fluttery jumble. There were hoots and scratches. Yips and howls. A scream, high and
sudden, rattling down the walls before drowning in the Colorado.
Mandy clutched her water bottle a little tighter.
She sat on the lowest set of sandstone slabs, using two life vests as cushions against the crumbly rock. Her bare feet kissed
the river, and she let the cool air and colder water keep her just on the functional side of conscious.
Behind her, Guy and Charlie talked in low voices, their conversation unraveling in clumsy circles as the night went on. Farther
down the beach, Thor was still whittling coyote willow, a steady shuck-shuck rustling the air.
“Got any CareFree?” Guy asked Charlie.
“Sorry. Didn’t think to pack it when we were running for our lives this morning.”
If Guy took offense at Charlie’s tone, he didn’t let it show. “I was just thinking it would hit the spot right now.”
“Maybe that’ll be our new marketing campaign. CareFree: for when you’re stranded in the middle of the earth escaping a murderer.”
“Niche market,” Guy said.
There was a long silence, and a splash. Mandy craned her head upriver, where something—a hunting bird? a fish?—was scrabbling
in the water. Then her father’s voice rose again.
“Just between us,” Guy said. “Is it addictive?”
“It’s legal,” Charlie replied.
“Not what I asked.”
There was another splash.
“The line between attraction and addiction is hard to measure,” Charlie said. “Take lip balm. There’s no ingredient in it
you can become dependent on, like nicotine. But it’s habit forming. Some people fall in love with the feeling of it. And then
they can’t stop buying it.”
The splashing was closer now, cut through with sharp cries, like a dying bird.
“The better something works, the more you want it,” Guy said.
“Shh,” Mandy said. “Listen.”
Two voices, people, shouting something. She stood up. A boat was coming toward them, illuminating the river with a reedy beam
of light from a headlamp a few feet above the water.
“Hey!” Mandy shouted. She didn’t care if it was the police, a pleasure cruise, or another group of knife-wielding weirdos.
She was done. “Over here! We need help!”
“Swimmer!” the voices called back. “In the water! Help!”
The splashing was not a bird. It was a person. A flailing, fading person. There was no bright life vest keeping them afloat
as they rose and fell in slivers illuminated by the thin light from the boat. Just strands of hair. A crescent of pale skin.
The headlamped person was yelling down, jiggling a thin line of cord attached to a floating bag tossed in the water. But the swimmer didn’t grab the rope. Didn’t even seem to know it was there. They were just a flutter of fingers, a billowing dark shirt.
Thor crashed past Mandy, grabbing a life vest from behind her.
“Come on!” he yelled.
His long hair streamed behind him as he leapt into the river. He swam hard, churning through dark water, grabbing for glimpses
of the drowning person. Mandy hastily clipped the other PFD around her and started swimming out behind him.
The river was chaos, everything in motion: the body, the swirling water, the tiny light blinking erratically across the surface.
Something brushed Mandy’s hip, and she screamed. She tried to kick it away. But it wasn’t a fish. It was too big. She scissored
her legs around it, feeling its weight threaten to sink past her.
“Thor!” she yelled. “Under here!”
The guide flipped, reaching down as deep as his life jacket would allow.
“Got him!”
Thor popped up with an arm around the swimmer’s torso. Mandy reached down and grabbed for a hip, a foot, whatever she could
find. Thor tugged the person onto their back, but still, Mandy couldn’t see a face. The head kept slipping below the black
water.
They hauled up onto the beach, Thor sputtering, Mandy’s eyes streaming with silt. Even before she could make out the swimmer’s
face, she knew.
It wasn’t a man.
It wasn’t a killer.
It was Liv.
They lifted her sister onto the first set of ledges, and Thor swept her mouth with his finger while Mandy hunted for a pulse.
Nothing. Liv wasn’t coughing. She wasn’t breathing.
Thor started chest compressions. Mandy watched as if in a dream, a nightmare, though the thing that flashed in her brain was the first time she’d gotten her CPR certification, which Liv had insisted they do as teenagers, because Liv was already a million years old, even then.
The mannequin they were assigned was so janky that its head kept popping off.
Liv had her fingers laced together, her hands driving into the self-decapitating piece of plastic, and Mandy kept making jokes about how Liv was killing the patient and Liv kept scowling at her, and was she never going to see her sister glare at her like that again?
Were they never going to perform their stupid duet, their push and pull, thrust and parry, hug and throttle, again?
Thor kept pumping. Mandy administered the rescue breaths, shoving air into her sister’s body, praying for it to come out again
as carbon dioxide, as river water, as anything close to hope. She was vaguely aware of the supply boat coming to shore, other
people crowding the ledges, her dad putting his hand on her back. But they were all just paper cutouts, shadows in the dark.
The only thing she could feel, the only thing she could hope for, was Liv.
On the twenty-fourth breath, her sister’s eyes flashed open, just for a second, the whites around her pupils shining over
the dirty water smearing her face.
They fluttered shut again.
Thor kept pumping. Mandy kept counting. Every time he got to thirty, she gave Liv two more breaths. Two more chances.
Six breaths later, one of Liv’s legs started to shudder. She groaned and twisted. Mandy looked to Thor, unsure what to do.
“Keep going,” he said.
Finally, on the thirty-sixth breath, Liv shot up to a seated position, coughing and puking river water everywhere. She looked
wild, ragged and raw, streaked with mud and God knew what else. But she was alive.
“Ashhhh.”
The sound creaking from her sister’s mouth was more ragged exhalation than word. It was the sweetest thing Mandy had ever
heard.
“Breathe, Liv. Just breathe. You’re okay. You’re okay.”
“Cashhhh,” Liv said. She shuddered and jerked in Mandy’s arms.
Then Liv retched again. “You know what the best cash business is?” she croaked.
“Shhh.”
But her sister wrenched around and grabbed Mandy’s wrist.
“Drugs,” Liv rasped. “She’s using it to make drugs.”
“What?” Charlie asked.
She whipped her head around and pointed at Lucinda. “She poisoned me. She poisoned Babette. With the hats!”
Lucinda shook her head calmly and stepped forward, unfurling a sleeping bag to put over Liv’s shoulders.
“You’re delirious, dear,” she said. “Here. Poor thing.”
“Get away from us,” Mandy hissed.
“I’m just trying to help.”
“Like you helped Babette and Stefan?”
Lucinda held her ground. “What on earth are you suggesting?”
“You’re the one who killed them,” Mandy said. “You’re the lady. The secret lead investor behind CareFree.”
“It’s true,” Guy added. “We figured it all out.”
“Oh really?” The older woman looked almost bemused, as if Guy was a colorful moth flitting around her garden.
“You’re the one who made those threatening messages in the hats,” Mandy said. “Imogen said you got to the lodge a day early,
and that box of hats was in your room. You had plenty of time to sew in those threats. I think you wanted to make us all believe
Babette was out to get us. But really it was you, out to get her.”
“And then there’s the knife you used to kill Stefan,” Guy said. “Charlie saw Marc give it to you, your first day on the beach.”
Mandy looked over at Charlie, hoping for verbal affirmation, or at minimum, a nod. But Charlie shrank back, staying silent.
Lucinda cocked a puzzled smile. “I’m sorry, but I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about. Who is Marc? What knife?”
Guy motioned to Mandy, who passed him the old-fashioned knife, latched shut.
“This knife,” Guy said. “My daughter found it in the water near Stefan’s dead body. It belonged to Marc, the guide you hired
to hike down with me and Babette to the river. The guide who killed her on your orders.”
“This is all very interesting,” Lucinda said. “But I recall spending our extra day at the museum, not messing around with
hats. I don’t remember hiring a guide, or him giving me a knife. It seems like you’re the one with the knife. You, and your
daughter.”
Liv jerked in Mandy’s arms.
“Lying,” Liv rasped out.
“Yes, dear,” Lucinda said, “I’m sorry but I’m inclined to agree. It seems you’ve done your best to avoid the family predilection
for deceit. But your father and your sister continue to tell their tall tales, don’t they?”
“Lying,” Liv repeated. “I hate it.”
Mandy stiffened. But she didn’t pull away from Liv. She could feel her sister’s heartbeat right up against her own.
“Unfortunately, I fear lying is the least of your family’s offenses on this trip,” Lucinda said. “Your dad got one thing right.
I am the investor behind the Regent Group, the chief backer of CareFree. No one here is more committed to this product, and
this company, than I am. No one had more to lose from Babette’s and Stefan’s untimely deaths. But someone had something to
gain.”
Mandy was vaguely aware of Charlie and Devon drawing closer to each other on the beach.
“You,” Lucinda said. But she didn’t point at the Sauvage siblings. She was staring straight at Mandy. “You and your dad.”