The Price of Love and Other Stories

by Peter Robinson

  Donovan smiled. “I don’t know how you know about that,” he said. “I suppose I shouldn’t underestimate small-town gossip. We know she wasn’t wearing the locket on the day she died, but we don’t know when he stole it.”

  “He didn’t steal it! Jared’s not a thief.”

  Donovan coughed. “I beg to differ, Grace,” he said. “David Garwell has a record that includes petty larceny and possession of dangerous drugs. He should have been in jail to start with, but he skipped bail.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “That’s up to you. I could show you the evidence if you want to come to headquarters.”

  “No, thank you.”

  “It’s your choice.”

  “But why would he hurt Mary Jane? He told her he loved her.”

  Donovan’s ears pricked up. “He did?” He toyed with his coffee cup on the saucer. It still had an old lipstick stain around the rim. “We think they had an argument,” he said. “Maybe Mary Jane discovered the theft of the pendant. Or perhaps she told Garwell that she was pregnant, and he wanted nothing further to do with her. Either way, she ran off down to that cozy little beach the two of you liked so much. He followed her, maybe worried that she’d tell her parents, or the police. They fought, and he strangled her.”

  “But then he’d know for certain that the police would suspect him!”

  “People aren’t always thinking straight when they’re mad, Grace.”

  I shook my head. I know what he said made sense, but it didn’t make sense, if you see what I mean. I didn’t know what else to say.

  “You’re going to have to accept it sooner or later, Grace,” Donovan said. “This Jared, as you call him, murdered your friend, and you’re probably the only one who can help us make sure he pays for his crime.”

  “But I can’t help you. Don’t you see? I still don’t believe Jared did it.”

  Donovan sighed. “They had an argument. She walked off. He admits that much. He won’t tell us what it was about, but like I said, I think she confronted him over the gold pendant or the pregnancy. He followed her.”

  I squirmed in my seat, took a long sip of soda and asked, “Who else was on the island that day? Have you checked?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You must have asked Mr. Kiernan, Mary Jane’s father, who he took over and brought back that day. Was there anyone else who shouldn’t have been there? Have you questioned them all, asked them for alibis?”

  “No, but…”

  “Don’t you think you ought to? Why can’t it be one of those people?”

  “Like who?”

  “The preacher!” I blurted it out.

  Donovan shook his head, looking puzzled. “The preacher? Why?”

  “Was he there? Was he on the ferry?”

  “You know I can’t tell you that.”

  “Well, you just ask him,” I said, standing up, “because Mary Jane told me she saw him touching Betsy Goodall somewhere he shouldn’t have been touching her.”

  The preacher was waiting for me after chapel the following Sunday. “Grace, a word in your ear,” he said, leading me by the arm. He was smiling and looked friendly enough, in that well-scrubbed way of his, to fool anyone watching, including my parents, but his grip hurt and his clawlike fingers dug deep into my flesh. He took me back inside the dark chapel and sat me down in a corner, crowding me, his face close to mine. I couldn’t smell bourbon on his breath, but I could smell peppermint. “I had a visit from the police the other day,” he said. “A most unwelcome visit. And I’ve been trying to figure out ever since who’s been telling tales out of school. I think it was you, Grace. You were her friend. Thick as thieves, the two of you, always unnaturally close.”

  “There was nothing unnatural about it,” I said, my heart beating fast. “And yes, we were friends. So what?”

  His upper lip curled. “Don’t you give me any of your smart talk, young lady. You caused me a lot of trouble, you did, a lot of grief.”

  “You’ve got nothing to worry about if you’re pure in heart and true in the eyes of the Lord. Isn’t that what you’re always telling us?”

  “Don’t take the Lord’s word in vain. I swear, one day…” He shook his head. “Grace, I do believe you’re headed for a life of sin, and you know what the wages of sin are, don’t you?”

  “Did you go to Pine Island that day, Preacher? The day Mary Jane died. Were you on the ferry? You were, weren’t you?”

  The preacher looked away. “As a matter of fact, I had some important business there,” he said. “Real estate business.” We all knew about the preacher and his real estate. He seemed to think the best way of carrying out God’s plan on earth was to take ownership of as much of it as he could afford.

  “Why haven’t they arrested you?” I asked.

  “Because I haven’t done anything wrong. I am a man of God. The police believe me. So should you. There’s no evidence against me. I didn’t strangle that girl.”

  “Mary Jane told me about Betsy Goodall, about what she saw.”

  “And just what did she see? I’ll tell you what she saw. Nothing. Ask Betsy Goodall. The police did. Your friend Mary Jane was a wayward child,” the preacher said, his voice a sort of drone. “An abomination in the face of the Lord. She had a vile imagination. Evil. She made up stories. The police know that now. They talked to me and they talked to Betsy. I just want to warn you, Grace. Don’t you go around making any more grief for me, or you’ll have more trouble than you can imagine. Do you understand me?”

  “Betsy was too scared to say anything, wasn’t she? She was frightened of what you might do to her. What did you do to Mary Jane?”

  There. It was out before I realized it. That’s the problem with me sometimes: I speak before thinking. I felt his fingers squeeze even deeper into my arm and I cried out. “Do you understand me?” he asked again, his voice a reptilian whisper.

  “Yes!” I said. “You’re hurting me! Yes, I understand. Leave me alone. Let go of me!” And I wrenched my arm free and ran out of the chapel over to the ferry dock. I wanted to be by myself, and I wanted to walk where Mary Jane and I had walked. There was really only one place I could go, and I was lucky, I had only ten minutes to wait.

  The day had turned hazy, warm and sticky. There’d be a storm after dark, everyone said. Mr. Kiernan seemed worried about me and told me if I wasn’t on the next ferry home he’d send someone looking for me. I said that was sweet but I would be all right. Then he said he’d keep an eye on the weather to make sure I didn’t get stuck out there when the storm came.

  I walked past the houses and through the woods to the southern tip of the island, where the Newcomers used to live. They had been taken away so fast they hadn’t even had time to grab what few belongings they had. Nobody seemed to know what would happen to their things now, whether anyone would come for them. I stood behind the cover of the trees looking into the clearing, the way Mary Jane and I had done that first time, when we saw Jared come out of the shower. And there it was again, faint, drifting, as if it belonged to the air it traveled on: Mary Jane’s song. “And Mary Jane is dreaming / Of oceans dark and gleaming.”

  But who was playing it?

  Heart in my mouth, I ducked low and waited. I wanted to know, but I didn’t want to go in there, the way people went into basements and rooms in movies when they knew evil lurked there. So I hid.

  As it turned out, I didn’t have long to wait. As soon as the song ended, a head peeped out of the doorway and, gauging that all was clear, the young man stepped out into the open. My jaw dropped. It was Riley McCorkindale.

  Some instinct still held me back from announcing my presence, so I stayed where I was. Riley stood, ears pricked, glancing around furtively, then he headed away from the cabins—not back toward his parents’ house, but west, toward the cliffs. Now I was really puzzled.

  When I calculated that Riley had got a safe distance ahead of me, I followed through the trees. I couldn’t see him, bu
t there weren’t many paths on the island, and not many places to go if you were heading in that direction. Once in a while I would stop and listen, and I could hear him way ahead, snapping a twig, rustling a bush as he walked. I hoped he didn’t stop and listen the same way and hear me following him.

  As I walked, I wondered what on earth Riley had been doing at the Newcomers’ cabin. Playing the record with the Mary Jane song on it, obviously. But why? And how did he know about it? He must have been eavesdropping. I knew he had been sweet on her, of course, but he had always been too shy to say hello. Had he made friends with the Newcomers? After all, they were practically neighbors. But Riley went to chapel, and he seemed the type to take notice of the preacher. His father was a property developer in Logan, so they were a wealthy and respected family in the community, too, which made it even more unlikely that Riley would have anything to do with Jared and the others.

  When I reached the cliffs, there was no one in sight. I glanced over the edge, down toward the beach, but saw no one there, either. I wasn’t sure whether Riley knew about the hidden path Mary Jane and I used to take. He lived on the island, so perhaps he did. I stood still for a moment and felt the wind whipping my hair in my eyes and tugging at my clothes, bringing the dark clouds from far out at sea. I heard the raucous cries of gulls over a shoal of fish just off the coast and smelled the salt air. Then, just as I started to move toward the path, I heard a voice behind me.

  “Hello, Grace.”

  I turned. Riley stepped out from the edge of the woods.

  “Riley,” I said, smiling, trying to sound relaxed, and holding my hair from my eyes. “You startled me. What are you doing here?”

  “You were following me.”

  “Me? No. Why would I do that?” I felt vulnerable at the edge of the cliff, aware of the golden sand so far below, and as I spoke I tried edging slowly forward. But Riley stood his ground, and right now he didn’t seem shy at all.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “But I saw you. Maybe it’s something to do with Mary Jane?”

  “Mary Jane?”

  “You know I loved her. Until that…that freak came and took her away from me. Still, he’s got what he deserves. Let him rot in jail.”

  “Now, listen, Riley. You don’t have to say anything to me.” The last thing I wanted was to be Riley’s confessor with a hundred-foot drop behind me. “Let’s just go back, huh? I don’t want to miss my ferry.”

  “I used to watch them, you know,” Riley said. “Watch them doing it.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that. I swallowed.

  “They’d do it anywhere. They didn’t care who was watching.”

  “That’s not true, Riley,” I said. “You know that can’t be true. You were spying on them. You said so.”

  “Maybe so. But they did it down there.” He pointed. “On the beach.”

  “It’s a very secluded spot.” I don’t know what I meant by that, whether I was defending Mary Jane’s honor, deflecting the shock I felt, or what. I just wanted to keep Riley talking until I could get around him and…well, getting back to the ferry was my main thought. But if Riley had other ideas, there wasn’t much I could do. He was bigger and stronger than me. Drops of rain dampened my cheek. The sky was becoming darker. “Look, Riley,” I said. “There’s going to be a storm. Move out of the way and let me go back to the ferry dock. I’ll miss my ferry. Mr. Kiernan will come looking for me.”

  “I didn’t mean to do it, you know,” Riley said.

  I had been trying to skirt around him, but I froze. “Didn’t mean to do what?” There I was again, speaking without thinking. I didn’t want to know what he had done, but it was too late now.

  “Kill her. It just happened. One minute she was…”

  Now he’d told me I just had to know the full story. Unless I could make a break into the woods when he wasn’t expecting it, I was done for anyway. I didn’t think I could outrun him, but with the cover of the trees, and the coming dark, perhaps I had a chance of staying ahead of him as far as the ferry dock. By far my best option was to keep him talking. “How did it happen?” I asked, still moving slowly.

  “They had a fight. I was watching the cabin and they had a fight and Mary Jane ran out crying.”

  The baby, I thought. She told him about the baby. But why would that matter? The Newcomers loved children. They would have welcomed Mary Jane and her child. It must have been something else. Perhaps she wanted to get married? That would have been far too conventional for Jared but just like Mary Jane. Whatever it was, they had argued. Couples do argue. I’d even heard my parents do it. “What happened?” I asked.

  “I followed her like you followed me. She went down to the beach. Down that path you both thought was your little secret. I went after her. I thought I could comfort her. You know, I thought she’d dumped him and maybe she would turn to me if I was nice to her.”

  “How did it go wrong?”

  “She did it with him, didn’t she?” Riley said, his voice rising to a shout against the coming storm. “Why wouldn’t she do it with me? Why did she have to laugh?”

  “She laughed at you?”

  He nodded. “That’s when I grabbed her. The next thing I…I guess I don’t know my own strength. She was like a rag doll.”

  There was a slim chance that I could slip into the woods to the left of him and make a run for it. That was when he said, “I’m glad I told you. I’ve been wanting to tell somebody, just to get it off my chest. I feel better now.”

  I paused before speaking. “But Riley, you have to go to the authorities. You have to tell them there’s an innocent man in jail.”

  “No! I ain’t going to jail. I won’t. Only you and me know the truth.”

  “Riley, if you hurt me they’ll know,” I said, my voice shaking as I judged the distance between his reach and the gap in the trees. “They’ll know it was you. I told Mr. Kiernan I came here to talk to you.” It was a lie, of course, but I hoped it was an inspired one.

  “Why would you do that?” Riley seemed genuinely puzzled. “You didn’t know anything about it until just now. You didn’t even know I existed. You didn’t want to know. None of you did.”

  “I mean it, Riley. If you hurt me, they’ll find out. You can’t get away with murder twice. You’ll go to jail then for sure.”

  “They say killing’s easier the second time. I read that in a book.”

  “Riley, don’t.”

  “It’s all right, Grace,” he said, leaning back against the tree. “I ain’t going to hurt you. Don’t think I don’t regret what I did. Don’t think I enjoyed it. I’m just not going to jail for it. Go. Catch your ferry. See if I care.”

  “B-but…”

  “Who’d believe you? The police have got the man they want. There sure as hell’s no evidence against me. My daddy doesn’t know where I was, but he already told them I was home all day. Last thing he wants to know is that his son killed some girl. That would surely upset the applecart. Nobody saw me. The preacher’s with us, too. He was at the house talking real estate with Daddy. I don’t know if he knows I did it or not, but he don’t care. He was the one told me about Mary Jane and that freak, what they were doing and how it was a sin. That’s why I went to spy on them. He told me he knew she was really my girl, but she’d been seduced by the devil. He told me what that long-haired pervert was doing to her and asked me what I was going to do about it. Said I ought to act like a real man. The preacher won’t be saying nothing to no police. So go on. Go.”

  “But why did you tell me?”

  Riley thought for a moment. “Like I said, I knew I’d feel better if I told someone. I’m truly sorry for what I did, but going to jail ain’t going to bring Mary Jane back.”

  “But what about Jared? He’s innocent.”

  “He’s the spawn of Satan. Now go ahead, Grace. Catch the ferry before the storm comes. It’s going to be a bad one.”

  “You won’t…?”

  He shook his head. “Nope. Don�
��t matter what you say. Go ahead. See if I’m not right.”

  And I did. I caught the ferry. Mr. Kiernan smiled and said I was lucky I just made it. The storm broke that night, flooded a few roads, broke a few windows. The next day I took the bus into the city to see Detective Donovan and told him about what Riley had said to me on the beach. He laughed, said the boy was having me on, giving me a scare. I told him it was true, that Riley was in love with Mary Jane and that he tried to…I couldn’t get the words out in front of him, but even so he was shaking his head before I’d finished.

  So Riley McCorkindale turned out to be right. The police didn’t believe me. I didn’t see any point running all over town telling Mr. Kiernan, Father, the preacher, or anyone else, so that was the end of it. Riley McCorkindale strangled Mary Jane Kiernan and got away with it. Jared—David Garwell—went to jail for a crime he didn’t commit. He didn’t stay there long, though. Word made it back to town about a year or two later that he got stabbed in a prison brawl, and even then everyone said he had it coming, that it was divine justice.

  None of the Newcomers ever returned to Jasmine Cove. The cabins fell into disrepair again, and their property reverted to the township in one of those roundabout ways that these things often happen in small communities like ours. I thought of Mary Jane often over the years, remembered her smile, her childlike enthusiasm. The Mad Hatters became famous and once in a while I heard “her” song on the radio. It always made me cry.

  After I had finished college and started teaching high school in Logan, the property boom began. The downtown areas of many major cities became uninhabitable, people moved out to the suburbs and the rich wanted country, or island, retreats. One day I heard that McCorkindale Developments had knocked down the cabins on Pine Island and cleared the land for a strip of low-rise, ocean-front luxury condominiums.

  I suppose it’s what you might call ironic, depending on the way you look at it, but by that time the preacher and Riley’s father had managed to buy up most of the island for themselves.