by Ruby Loren
I giggled. Dogs could be such drama queens. I hoped one day I’d be able to have a dog of my own. At the moment, I simply didn’t have the time to spend with them. Cats were more independent and also liked to spend most of the day sleeping. I had high hopes that Lucky would love life on the road with me.
“Hey, are you busy tomorrow?” Luna asked.
“You mean for the village party?” I wasn’t even sure why the village was having a party. In France, there always seemed to be a celebration going on. However, I wasn’t complaining. I thought it was charming that the village had events which brought its residents closer together.
“No, before then," Luna said.
“I haven’t made plans," I replied, thinking of the lack of time spent with Lowell and feeling a bit guilty.
“There's an errand I need to run and I could really do with some help. Could you meet me by the bridge out of the village first thing tomorrow?”
“Sure,” I said.
“Great! Thanks.”
I thought about asking what we were going to be doing but I had my suspicions it wasn't entirely above board. Otherwise Luna would have surely already told me. I’d just have to hope that she wasn’t trying to trick me into coming to the edge of the village alone so she could kill me.
A couple of weeks ago, that would have been funny. Now I wasn’t so sure.
The sun was shining the next morning when I set off for my rendezvous with Luna. Preparations for the village dinner and party that night were already underway, and I walked beneath several strings of bunting that were being put up. The square itself was a sea of activity with long tables being brought in and a bonfire set up right in the middle of it all. I couldn’t help but be reminded of the scene at the end of every Asterix and Obelix comic, where the whole village gathers for a feast of roast boar. Tonight’s menu was more of a potluck affair, but I had no doubt it would be wonderful. After all, Lowell and I had already sampled the culinary talents of one of the village’s homespun chefs.
I walked past the preparations and it wasn’t long before I arrived at the bridge on the way out of the village. Luna was already waiting next to her car.
“So, what are we doing?” I asked, curiosity getting the better of me. Why had she needed to drive out of town to meet me?
“There’s just something I want to figure out,” she began. “The police don’t seem to be doing much but I’m fed up of all this. First Pascal, then Constantine, and now Justin. I’ve been thinking about it and I thought if we can just figure out how Pascal came to be in the paraglider, we might learn something. At least, it may give us a hint as to who was responsible.” She shrugged and looked away. “I asked you because you know a thing or two about investigating.”
“Lowell’s the private detective, not me,” I warned her. “But, I have been known to dabble,” I confessed.
Usually at my own expense.
“Great!” Luna’s face lit up and I realised she’d been expecting me to say it was a stupid idea.
“I don’t know if we’ll find anything. I don’t even know where to start looking,” I confessed looking up at the surrounding mountains. Which way had the paraglider come from? I tried to remember.
“Don't worry, I’ve already figured out where to look. I think the police have been so caught up with the new attacks, they haven’t put any time into this. I know they tried to find the spot where the other paraglider landed but I don’t think they thought much about where they jumped from. They might even have jumped from the paragliding school,” she said.
I frowned. “You think? Surely they have someone watching everything all the time.”
Luna nodded. “Well, probably… but that’s what we’re going to find out. Now get in!”
I opened the car door and sat in the passenger seat, wondering how this was going to work. Luna started the engine and her car chugged its way up the side of a mountain. Sign posts let us know that the paragliding school was at the top, and it wasn’t long before we pulled in to a gravel car park.
Luna killed the engine and turned to me. “I’ve lived here my entire life and this is the only mountain with a road leading all the way to the top. Perhaps whoever killed Pascal Devereux managed to get him to walk up one of the other mountains, carrying the paragliding gear, but…”
“… They probably met up here. Or he may have been killed elsewhere and brought up here,” I finished and looked around the car park. There were relatively few vehicles around and plenty of scrubby bushes for cover, but I still couldn’t imagine the murder taking place in such an open space. “I bet he was already dead when they went up the mountain,” I mused, wondering if we were currently sitting in the same spot as Pascal’s killer.
“Yeah, exactly,” Luna agreed.
“If this is all true, it means that dropping the body into the zoo was definitely supposed to send a message,” I said, having all but confirmed that in my mind anyway.
“Yeah,” Luna said again, looking worried for a moment. “Do you think it has something to do with Constantine and Justin? Do you think they knew something and it was like a warning?” Luna shook her head. “I could imagine Constantine hiding something, but not Justin. We’ve known him for years! He moved out of Paris to get some rural peace and quiet. Then he met Adele and they fell in love.” She sighed, happily.
I nodded but inside I wondered… was Justin the person in witness protection? Or did he know the identity of the person who was? What about Constantine? I shook myself. None of this made any sense and going round in circles wasn’t getting me anywhere. It was time to give Luna’s idea a shot.
“What’s the plan?” I asked, realising she'd skipped that part.
She gave me a smile I didn’t much like and popped the boot open. We both walked round to back of the car and she lifted the lid to reveal…
The largest sack of dog food known to man. It was probably a little shorter than your average person, but definitely more squat.
“Are you stocking up for when you take your puppy home?” I was confused.
“Nope. This is one of the bags for Matti, Justin brought over. It’s about 40 kg, so not as heavy as a body would be, but I figured it would give us an idea.”
Luna’s plan started to take shape in my head.
“We're trying to find out if it’s possible to get past the staff and launch yourself off the cliff with a dead body?”
Luna nodded. “Yep! The paragliding booth looks out over the jump site, but I bet they don’t watch it all the time. As soon as September starts, they lay off their summer staff. It’s just Sage’s father, Alex, running it at the moment. Sage works in town during the autumn and winter,” she explained. “So, I’ll go in and chat to Alex. He loves to gossip. You try to get this bag to the jump spot and pretend you’re about to jump off.”
“Right,” I said, not failing to notice that I was the one stuck lifting the stand-in body.
“I would have flipped a coin for it, but Alex doesn’t much like to speak English. Also, I’d have to look at the drop and you know I have an issue with heights. Okay, good luck!” Luna said, waltzing off to chit-chat with the paragliding school owner.
I scanned the area before making my move. There were signs that people had come up to the top of the mountain this morning, but no one was around right now. There was a small shed and a rack full of gear that seemed to be for hire. I wondered about tandem jumps, which were often offered by instructors. I didn't know for sure, but I guessed Sage usually worked as an instructor, but must not be booked anytime soon. I shrugged. That wasn't part of this test anyway.
With a sinking heart, I looked down at the big bag of dog food and seized it by its plasticised corners. I grunted and tugged and the bag flopped out onto the floor, nearly making me fall over backwards. I grumbled for a couple of moments about Luna picking the easy job. Unfortunately, complaining didn't get the job done. I sighed and started dragging the bag across the car park.
By the time I reached the buil
ding, I was sweating. The sun had decided to drench the valley and mountains in a final burst of summer warmth and I was suffering for it.
I tried to imagine someone dragging a body all the way up a different mountain to a private jump site and couldn’t see it. However, there was still the possibility they’d tricked Pascal into going up to the top himself.
I shrugged and kept pulling, dragging the bag of dog food past the hut where Luna was chatting away animatedly. I wondered what her contingency plan was if Alex turned around right now and saw me with a bag of dog food. I sincerely hoped it wasn’t to pretend she didn’t have a clue who the crazy dog food lady was.
I kept dragging and pretty soon I neared the outcrop of rocks, between which people ran and flung themselves into oblivion. I tried to imagine it, but found my legs were starting to turn to jelly. The breeze whipped up over the rocks and provided a welcome relief from the heat but it did nothing to distract me from the long drop just a few feet away. Figuring I should do the job properly, I moved the food bag so that it was just a metre back from the edge and then risked a peek over the brink.
I pulled back, feeling dizzy. I didn’t share Luna’s fear of heights, but we were a heck of a long way up. What made it even worse was the thought that someone had not only flung themselves over the edge, they’d strapped themselves to a corpse when they'd done it.
I sat down with a bump, the dog food bag standing more or less upright - a sentinel watching over the orange roofs of the village and zoo at the bottom of the valley. Now I was up here, the whole happening seemed even more surreal. Someone had planned to drop a corpse into the zoo. While I now felt sure Luna and I had the execution all figured out, I still had no idea why they’d done it.
I used a hand to push myself to my feet and experienced a strange feeling of shifting gravity. Too late, I realised the bag of dog food was teetering away from me. I lunged and then thought better of it at the last moment. Instead, I was forced to watch as the 40kg bag of dog food pitched forwards and flopped over the edge of the precipice.
I closed my eyes and stayed with my hand outstretched for a second. A treacherous voice in my head whispered ‘at least you won’t have to carry it back to the car’.
I walked back towards the vehicle, pausing by the booth to give Luna the thumbs up from behind Alex’s back.
A minute or two later Luna joined me.
“How’d it go?” she asked.
“I think you were right. The jumper definitely could have taken a corpse right by here, put on their gear and jumped, if Alex was distracted. Perhaps they even put the gear on in the car park and rushed straight by,” I hypothesised.
Luna nodded. “Well, I asked him if he saw anything and he said he hadn’t. He said the police had been by and asked that, too, and he’d told them the same. I did find out one interesting thing though.” Her eyes sparkled. “Pascal Devereux was the one who hired the tandem gear. He did it over the phone a few hours before. Alex said he thought it was a little odd because Pascal hadn’t jumped for years, but he figured friends or family must be in town and they wanted to have a go and Pascal had agreed to take them. He left the gear on the rack for him to collect. A few hours later, it was gone, and Pascal fell from the sky above the tiger enclosure.”
“He must have lost the gear, I guess,” I said, thinking about the sabotaged parachute cord and then what had happened in the tiger enclosure.
“Yeah, he’s not best pleased about that. Tandem harnesses and the ‘chutes themselves are expensive. They’re a small, family run business, so it's a blow. But, Alex said Detective Girard let him into the evidence locker and he looked over the ‘chute and it’s not actually in bad condition. The lines just need to be replaced.”
“Well, that’s something at least. What about the killer’s gear?” I said, thinking of the ‘chute that had popped up from the backpack they'd been wearing.
“The police actually asked Alex’s view on that and passed on the descriptions we all gave. It was his daughter, Sage, who figured it out. She said it had to be a BASE jumping parachute. They fit in small backpacks and it’s kind of a given that you’ll open them close to the ground. That’s how the killer was able to jump ship so late. It also means they’d have known they’d be able to make a precision drop,” Luna said and bit her lip. “Madi, do you think they were targeting the zoo on the whole, or was that body meant to end up in the tiger enclosure?”
I shook my head. I thought if we knew the answer to that question, it would be half the mystery solved.
“I don’t suppose anyone around here knows someone who does BASE jumping?” I asked, knowing it was too much to hope for.
“Nope, but visitors have been known to come in and do it from near here. According to Alex, with paragliding, you don’t free fall, so you jump from a place that’s high up, but it doesn’t have to have an immediate vertical drop. With a BASE jump, the real thrill seekers want to fall for as long as possible before deploying the ‘chute. I don't know if you looked down, but there’s quite a drop off here. Some people do BASE jump off the ledge, but mostly they go elsewhere to jump.” Luna brushed her fine hair back from her face. “Anyone can get hold of the gear to do it and even train themselves. It’s a dangerous hobby, but that’s part of what draws people to it.”
“Too bad no one in the village is boasting about being a secret BASE jumper.”
“Is it ever that easy?” Luna asked with a grin.
“Not in my experience,” I confessed.
We leant against the blue car in silence for a couple of moments.
“So, did you already load up the bag of food?” Luna asked.
“No,” I replied, knowing I was about to face the music for the accident I'd had.
“Oh, well where is it?”
“Waiting for us about halfway down the mountain,” I confessed.
In the end, Luna saw the funny side and was happy I hadn't followed the bag over the edge. We both kept out eyes peeled on the drive back down to the village and lo and behold, halfway down, a flash of white caught my eye. Luna stopped the car and we got out to investigate.
“Well, it doesn’t look damaged,” I said.
Luna nodded. “Too bad it’s halfway up the only tall tree on the entire mountain.”
We gave the bag of food up as lost. Although I offered to replace it, Luna let me off, saying it had been her idea to run the little experiment in the first place.
On the way back to the village we lapsed into silence. I knew we were both thinking through what we’d learnt that morning and how it hadn’t been the light bulb moment we’d been expecting. The only grain of information gained was that Pascal Devereux had been the one to hire his own corpse’s unorthodox method of transportation.
I wondered if when he’d been forced to make that phone call, he’d known he was going to die.
It was nice to finally have time to properly catch up with Lowell. The extra work I’d been drafted into doing and Lowell’s new penchant for long walks had meant we’d hardly seen each other. Fortunately, today he’d decided to take it easy and we'd managed to meet up for a long lunch.
“Lowell, have you ever seen anyone BASE jumping on your walks?" I asked, suddenly inspired.
“No, I haven’t,” he replied, much to my disappointment.
I'd told him what I’d done that morning, including the inadvertent mountainside littering with a 40kg bag of dog food. I wondered what would happen when it eventually fell out of the tree. Perhaps some lucky dog owner would gain free meals for their pooch. I thought it more likely that the local fauna would work their way in. With the winter approaching, having a big bag of food lying around could be a big help to them. That was what I tried to tell myself, anyway.
I’d also told Lowell about Pascal being the one to hire the gear and my theories on how the perpetrator had grabbed the paragliding gear, returned to the car park, and then walked right back past the kiosk with a corpse attached to them. It still sounded so grisly I couldn’
t imagine why anyone sane would want to do it. But then, when you considered the frenzied attack on Constantine, and what had befallen Justin, it hardly painted a sane picture. That was, if you assumed the same individual was responsible for all of the happenings.
“What are you wearing tonight?” I asked, tired of thinking things over and getting nowhere. I would focus on something I could work out in a logical manner.
“My dark blue suit trousers and a white shirt with my red paisley tie,” Lowell said.
I racked my brains to think of something that would go with that combination and came up blank. Perhaps logic wasn’t going to help me after all.
“Madi, I know you’ve been busy with work and I’ve been off, well… having a great time, but it’s going to be really nice to spend this evening together. I’m not sure if I’ve already said it, but thank you for inviting me to come out here with you. It’s the best holiday I’ve ever been on,” he said.
“I’m glad you’re here. I don’t know what I'd do if you weren’t!” I told him, first thinking about the murder and then about how nice it was to have someone to share my days with - someone who was interested to hear about them. I’d been single for a long time but even when I’d been in relationships, they’d never been like this. What Lowell and I had was attraction rolled into a friendship. I thought it was the perfect mix.
“I’m sorry it's coming to an end,” I said and filled him in on how little work I had left to do.
Lowell smiled and shrugged. “Don’t worry about it yet. Let’s enjoy it while we’re still here. Where are you planning to work next?” He shot me a curious look.
“I’m not a hundred percent sure,” I confessed. “Snidely and the zoo here were the only two big jobs I had on the cards. I think I may be hopping up and down the country for a bit to help some of the smaller zoos out with echidna breeding.” My success with Avery Zoo’s echidnas was what had garnered so much interest in my services as an animal breeding and welfare consultant in the first place.