Awesome, Dude and Sparky: Chapter Nineteen

This young man, half-obscured by splashwater, has just completed his turn on the water slide at the Pemberton Music Festival in July this year. 

This was just one of the many fine examples of advertainment at the festival and strikes me as worthy of mention only because I am so old.


Sparky's Funtime Summertime Murder Mystery
Chapter Nineteen 

Sparky here. This is Chapter Nineteen of my story about how Gerry Ringbold met his untimely end. The story starts here.

By now you might be thinking that, but for their rock solid alibis, Carol and Dubs did have something to do with Gerry's death. I have given you the reasons. They both had cause to hate Gerry. Dubs because of all the grief Gerry brought to both the Gardens and Dubs himself. Carol because of Gerry's dogged pursuit against both her boyfriend and her benefactress, Pea. And, because they were hooked up, Dubs' and Carol's separate reasons could have combined into something bigger and more motivating than the hatred they would otherwise have carried in their hearts alone.

Also, there's the whole business of the hog weed. It is possible that, while cutting down the Garden's specimens - maybe in response to a Ministry of the Environment order under the Noxious Weeds Act - Carol and/or Dubs collected some of the caustic sap, put it in a jar they had handy and thought, maybe, that there was a way to fool Gerry into applying it to his already photosensitive skin.

But that plan - if there ever was a plan - would have failed when Marriba found the jar Carol absent-mindedly left behind in the washroom, washed the contents down the drain and replaced the hog weed sap with her grapefruit-scented hand cream. That stuff would have been no more harmful to Gerry than tap water, unless he actually thought it was sunscreen. If he applied it and, thinking he was protected, then exposed himself to sunlight, the hyperphotosensitivity Marriba diagnosed could have caused the blistering they found on his corpse.

None of this explains what Gerry was doing in the area of the Gardens -- with or without grapefruit-scented hand cream on his skin -- or what happened to the truck with the balloon tires. 

I think there is a simple explanation for the truck. The Gardens are bounded by city streets on three sides. The fourth boundary of the park is a steep-sided, densely overgrown and heavily-treed ravine sloping down to one of the several rivers that flows through the city. Into this haven of natural hidey-holes was where the drug dealers and prostitutes went once the Gardens began to be restored. It's a nasty place, strewn with trash and human feces, treated as off limits by everyone except the people who go there to buy and sell drugs and sex.

I think this is where Dubs and Carol, easily avoiding the cameras and the foot patrols, drove the truck late in the afternoon of June 21, 2013. As often do all grown ups in love, they were looking for a fun, safe place to make out.

So they made a big mistake in going into the ravine. I think something bad happened to them that day. I had a hunch that at least two other people would have known about that bad thing: Gerry Ringbold and Marriba.

But to see if my hunch was right, I had to go into the ravine myself. 

You can read Chapter Twenty here.