Page 12 of The Followers

“Do you know when he’ll be back?”

“Are you, like, interested in booking a trip?”

Liv deflected. “Scott Wander... he’s the owner, yeah?”

“One of them.”

“Do you know where he’s from?”

The girl’s eyes narrowed. “Why?”

Liv’s stomach flipped over. Get it together, she told herself. She was a twenty-seven-year-old professional with an advanced degree. There was no reason she couldn’t lie her way through this conversation.

“My family is interested in doing a trip later this summer,” Liv said. “I wanted to talk about availability. And safety features. We have little kids. My niece and nephew.”

“We have trips that kids as young as five can go on,” the girl said, relaxing. “Are you looking into a day trip or an overnight?”

“Not sure yet. Do you have a brochure?”

The girl searched through a drawer and handed Liv a pamphlet. She scanned it. There, on the back flap: a three-inch photograph of an orange raft filled with smiling tourists, plunging into white water. On the raft perched a big, blond man with a giant oar in each hand, his face partially obscured by a blue visor. Yes, it was him. Liv could make out a faint smile on his face, and the sight of it felt like a railroad spike in her chest. How dare he smile? How dare he make a life for himself when he had ended Kristina’s?

Her sister had been beaten, strangled, and ultimately died from trauma to the head. And her murderer was alive and smiling.

“Is that Scott?” she asked, pointing.

The girl leaned over the desk, grinning in a knowing way. “Yeah, that’s him. But he just got married, so don’t get any ideas.”

Liv’s cheeks warmed. “That’s not what I meant. I—” Anxiety fluttered through her stomach, and she said the first thing that popped into her mind. “My sister died.”

The girl’s face paled. “Oh. I’m sorry.”

“That’s why I’m here,” Liv said. She racked her mind for some way to fit her outburst into the conversation. “She went to high school with Scott. I’m trying to let people know.”

Which made no sense, but the girl nodded anyway and said, “I can leave him a message, I guess.”

“And you don’t know when he’ll be back?”

The girl called toward an open door behind her, “Hey! When’s Scott coming back?”

“He’s guiding the three-day,” a man shouted from the back room. “Why?”

“Just a customer question.” The girl smiled at Liv, sympathetically this time. “The trip goes until Sunday, and he takes Mondays off. He should be in the office on Tuesday.”

“I’ll come back then,” Liv said. “Thanks for your help.”

She turned to go, disappointed she hadn’t found out more.

“Hang on,” the girl said.

Liv turned around. “Yeah?”

“I didn’t think Scott went to high school around here. I thought he was from back east.”

The hairs on the back of Liv’s neck stood up. “Like where?”

“I don’t know. Ohio? Somewhere like that.” The girl waved her hand behind her, as if dismissing the entire eastern seaboard, and hollered again toward the back room, “Hey—isn’t Scott from Ohio?”

Liv smiled as she headed out the door. Gotcha.