A Wedding in the Sun

More from Leonie Mack

We hope you enjoyed reading A Wedding in the Sun. If you did, please leave a review.

Chapter One

‘You’re an odd duck, Luna Marie,’ she muttered to herself and allowed her forehead to fall to the steering wheel. That was what her mother used to say in her fond, exasperated tone. Luna had rarely disagreed with her, but that afternoon the description was particularly apt.

She’d reached the end of the road. Unfortunately, that didn’t mean she’d arrived anywhere. Her car had conked out at the end of a narrow road that stopped abruptly at a rushing river with snow-covered banks. There was an abandoned warehouse to one side.

And when she peered up out of the windscreen… her eyes couldn’t grow round enough to comprehend the other obstacle right in front of her. Thick forest powdered with snow rose steeply on the other side of the river and between two sloping hills, she glimpsed a jagged rock face, soaring into the cloudy, late afternoon sky. It wasn’t just a mountain. This was what geographers meant when they wrote about a ‘massif’ – a giant agglomeration of peaks, wild and impassable.

Luna shuddered. She wasn’t supposed to be here. Obviously, she wasn’t supposed to be here, at the end of this lonely road with nowhere to go but up. She’d taken a wrong turn somewhere while her phone had struggled to pronounce the French street names. But she also wasn’t supposed to be 600 miles from England on Christmas Day, in Chamonix of all places. Now, she was stuck here.

Over the past two days, she’d headed steadily east in her old Astra, spending hours on motorways and a night in a 500-year-old hotel in Troyes, disturbed by vivid dreams. She’d got confused at roundabouts and been too nervous to overtake anyone, driving on the wrong side of the road – or the wrong side of the car.

At some point in the last hour or so, as her distraction had increased with her proximity to the place she fervently hoped held some answers, she’d forgotten that the fuel light was broken – something else she hadn’t managed to deal with recently. When the car had made an alarming cough as she’d turned into this dead-end road, she realised she hadn’t filled the tank since Troyes that morning.

Her phone rang, startling Luna out of her misery. Her cousin’s name flashed up for the tenth time that day and she muted the call with a grimace. She’d have to call Lydia later and give her an explanation, but it was difficult, since she’d surprised even herself by making it all the way here, when she had been expected in Sheffield for Christmas lunch.

Taking another peek at the mountain and swiftly looking away again, she thought to herself in grim amusement that this definitely wasn’t Sheffield.

When the phone stopped ringing, she cancelled the missed call notification and flicked back to the maps app to find a service station. Locating one just over two miles away, she decided it could have been worse, although lugging a jerry can for forty-five minutes wouldn’t be fun. At least she could get herself out of this mess without calling a tow truck she couldn’t afford.

Well, technically, she could afford it. She had an unfathomable lump sum sitting in her bank account, so much that she didn’t want to look. She still didn’t know what to think about the fact that she’d been the beneficiary of a stranger’s life insurance policy. She’d benefited from someone’s sudden death. The thought of spending any of the money – especially without knowing anything about her unfortunate benefactor – was abhorrent.

It was absolutely quiet and Luna listened to herself breathe for a moment. The tightness in her belly that hadn’t gone away since she’d received the letter from a French insurance company was already easing. She’d had to come here. She’d had to know why a man called Robert Durand had died and she’d become €750,000 richer. If she found out who he’d been to her, visited his grave, perhaps she’d be able to use that money to set herself up for the future.

She’d been so distracted by the mystery in the three months since she’d found out, she’d neglected her few friends, done nothing about the imminent end of her teaching contract and completely lost track of real life – including keeping her car serviced. Lyd had accused her of searching out dead people instead of living.

Lyd would think it was just like her to take off with nothing but a suitcase of clothes and her mother’s ashes in the back seat. Luna glanced apologetically at the beautiful handmade urn that housed June Rowntree’s cremated remains. How many times had Luna been told to leave them in a cabinet at the cemetery? It had never felt right – something was unfinished, even though that thing was probably just Luna’s grieving.

She shivered as the car grew colder, the longer the engine was off. Opening the glove box where she’d stowed her gloves, she caught sight of the photo that was the other reason Luna had fled here instead of following the moving boxes up to her cousin’s house, where she’d planned to live until she sorted her life out. Holding the photo up, she smiled at the image of her mother, sunshine glinting off her blonde hair and the reflective ski goggles up on her forehead. If the face hadn’t been so dearly familiar, Luna would never have believed her mother had held a pair of skis in her life. June Rowntree had rarely left Kent. Driving on the M25 had been her idea of an extreme sport. And yet, there she was, looking casually comfortable at the top of a mountain, in a photo with the words Chamonix, 1992 written on the back.

‘I’m here, Mum,’ she murmured. ‘Why didn’t you tell me you’d been here? And who the heck was Robert Durand?’ Speaking to the photo was just as strange as speaking to the urn, which she occasionally still did, but it was more difficult not to say something when she saw her mum’s face. Tucking the photo back into the glove box, she pulled on her stripy gloves and opened the car door, ready to start out on her quest for petrol.

What she wasn’t ready for was the shock of the temperature. The ice in the air flew at her face and her nose felt as though it was full of liquid nitrogen. Her coat might as well have been riddled with holes, for all the good it did in protecting her from the cold. When she stepped onto the road in her ancient leather brogues, she could feel the frost through the soles.

Hauling herself upright like a clockwork toy that needed winding, she slammed the door shut and focussed on breathing and not panicking. Two miles. That was all she had to manage. Crap, her calf-length skirt and thin cotton tights with a hole in the knee were not appropriate for sub-zero temperatures.

Darkness was falling rapidly and she could only imagine the cold snap that would follow. Tiny flakes of snow swirled as she turned away from the river – and the mountain – to head for the main road. She’d just taken her first few, slippery steps, when a throbbing whump-whump started up in her head.

One gloved hand flew to her temple. Not now! She couldn’t handle a cancelled Christmas, a wild-goose chase, unemployment, lack of petrol, freezing temperatures and a migraine. But the pain didn’t shudder through her skull, as it usually did. In fact, there didn’t seem to be any pain at all, just a persistent throb – which she realised, a minute later, was not in her head at all.

A navy-blue helicopter swooped over her with a blast of wind, blowing her already unruly hair into her face and showering icy particles over her. The aircraft banked sharply and hovered over what she’d assumed was the old loading area of the warehouse. Floodlights blinked on and Luna noticed the squat buildings weren’t abandoned at all. She held her arms over her head as the helicopter descended, sucking the air out of her lungs.

As soon as the runners touched down, the door slid open and a man in a helmet and a blue uniform emerged, followed by another, heads down as they hurried out from under the blades.

The second man turned back and hesitated and it took Luna several heartbeats to realise he was looking at her. He changed directions and jogged to the fence near where she was standing, tugging off his helmet and goggles as he did so.

‘Madame!’

She picked her way across the icy road so she could hear him better over the throb of the helicopter.

‘Madame,’ he repeated, ‘vous ne pouvez pas rester ici.’ You cannot stay here, madame. Even if the uniform hadn’t suggested he was in the military, with a patch on the breast that read ‘PGHM Chamonix’, his posture gave him away as a gendarme. She wondered if he said ‘madame’ to every woman out of professional habit, or if she’d crossed over into ‘madame’ territory now she’d reached thirty.

‘I’m sorry – désolée,’ she corrected herself, cranking her French brain into action. ‘Je suis en panne d”essence,’ she explained, feeling heat rise to her cheeks. She must have sounded like an idiot to have run out of petrol and it would challenge more than just her French to explain that she’d left on a whim and driven across the country in a state of distraction, with her mother’s urn in the back seat.

The soldier regarded her blankly. His thick, straight hair stood up in unkempt spikes. He had a broad chin and ears that protruded just a little and Luna thought he looked like such a friendly, neighbourhood gendarme that she might get over her embarrassment sometime this century.

‘You… ’ave no petrol?’ he confirmed, switching to English.

‘I forgot to fill it,’ she mumbled. ‘I’m going to go to the station-service,’ she said, feeling even more of an idiot for not being able to decide which language to speak in.

‘You cannot stay here,’ he repeated. ‘This is an emergency street.’ He gestured behind him to the sprawling buildings, where she now read, ‘Section Aérienne Gendarmerie de Chamonix’ on a sign. ‘Why did you come here?’

Wasn’t that the question of the hour?

A gust of wind bit her skin through her coat and she glanced warily up at the mountain and the sky that was rapidly turning from purple to grey. As she watched, a wispy cluster of cloud dissipated to reveal a crescent moon, hovering next to a rocky summit as jagged as a tooth. The moon looked enormous, slowly taking shape in the dimming sky.

‘Have you ever thought about what happens after you die?’ Luna’s words slipped out so quietly the wind nearly whipped them away before the gendarme could hear them. It might have been for the best if it had.