Page 70 of Safari Murder Party
“What is wrong with you?” Fletcher asked, breathless as she grabbed hold of a sturdy rock outcropping and spat out a mouth of mud-water.
Waylon appeared next to Fletcher, a firm hand against her waist. He said her name like a warning. “Fletcher, we have to keep moving.”
“Don’t—” Deepti bubbled, barely breaking the surface.
It hit Fletcher like a NYC heat wave. Deepti couldn’t swim. She didn’t step within eight feet of the infinity pool at the estate, and her stories from the Maldives involved beachcombing and basting herself in tanning lotion.
The CFO bobbed in the center of the watering hole, panic seizing her limbs. There was no coordination in her movement. Desperate, weary motions that turned knives in Fletcher’s stomach.
“She’s going to drown,” Fletcher said, but Waylon only tugged harder.
“We have togo.” His knuckles caught the fabric of her shirt and hauled her back. “Now.”
Fletcher’s fingers tightened around the rock. Obviously, Waylon didn’t kiss the ground upper management walked on, but she didn’t think he’d actively endorse leaving someone for dead.
That was, until the rock…blinked?
Very much not a rock at all, actually.
A hippopotamus reared out of the water with a wide-open mouth. Waylon reeled Fletcher against his chest, dragging her to the far shore. Deepti flailed, too busy fighting for her next breath to escape, and the hippo’s massive jaw clamped down around her. Her torso disappeared into its mouth.
Fletcher scrambled up the grassy bank, terror weighing down her bones. Wet and shaky, she flopped onto her back while the hippo was preoccupied with spitting out Deepti’s legs. Her dismembered body parts floated around the pond. It clearly wasn’t interested in eating her, just territorial.
Distantly, Fletcher was aware of Waylon settling down next to her. Both of their chests heaved in uneven tempos. Waylon smoothed the hair away from her face. “You okay?”
An auto-responseyescrawled toward her lips. But then, the wheeze of the hippo, the splash as it sank into the watering hole, and the chilling silence that followed held her words captive.
Even if they didn’t kill each other, the island would do the honors.
18
Fletcher was thirteen the first time she held a camera. She’d been bored out of her skull while her dad and brothers fussed with one of the tractor engines, and her mom handed it to her to keep her busy. Fletcher gladly accepted the offer. Anything to avoid spending the afternoon as a half-inch drive socket conveyor belt.
It wasn’tniceby any means. A slim silver point-and-shoot that made a god-awful groaning noise every time Fletcher zoomed in. It stamped the date in little yellow numbers on the corner of all her photos, which was how she remembered that August 12, her life changed.
A series of flash photos captured snapshots of her redheaded family craning their necks over the engine block, followed by a blur of her oldest brother plucking the camera out of her hands, and then one of a pre-braces Fletcher stuck in a sweaty headlock. Those photos lived in a scrapbook gathering dust on the mantel, only brought down at Thanksgivings for reminiscing over sweet potato pie. The first photos of many.
It went with her everywhere, that camera.
Grainy snapshots of the drought-ridden football field during her brothers’ games. Dewy early mornings on the farm. The Manhattan skyline from the back seat of her dad’s beat-up F-150, so out of place as they crossed the Jersey turnpike. Her camera was her security blanket. It made looking at the world a little less scary.
Which would have been really freaking helpful right about now.
Next to her, Waylon’s downturned gaze paid entirely too much attention to her and not nearly enough to the unfamiliar jungle terrain. The earth was denser here, stodgy with moss and mud, sticking to Fletcher’s shoes as if saying,Stay away.
Every snapping branch sounded sinister, every animal a predator.
Their first half hour in the jungle involved encounters with a curious orangutan dribbling leaf tannins on Waylon’s head, a slug the kind of putrid green that could only mean poison, and a boa constrictor squeezing Fletcher within an inch of her life until Waylon looped the leather cord of his compass around its jaw and forced it off.
Now, as they walked, the only thing keeping Fletcher from teetering over into full-blown panic was imagining how she’d frame this moment through her 55 mm lens.
Jungle greens shawled Waylon’s shoulders, and his face craned toward her so she could see the sharp outline of his profile. His mouth slanting. The humidity wiping a sheen over his cheekbones. She’d position him just off-center enough to capture the curve of the river they walked alongside, darker here, and the low-hanging branch behind him where two toucans huddled. If only he’d scoot a little bit to the—
“Why are you looking at me like that?” he asked.
Fletcher chucked her mental Canon back into its imaginary camera bag. A hot flush crawled up her neck like a millipede. “Like what?”
“Like…” His hand rose, like he might smooth the creasebetween her brows with his thumb but thought better of it. Instead, he brushed his knuckles against the stubble on his jaw. “Like I just jammed your copy machine with bologna.”
