The Price of Love and Other Stories (12 page)

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 travelled 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 even 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, a 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 towards his parents’ house, but west, towards 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, but 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 neighbours. 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 had 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 towards 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 towards 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 away 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 honour, 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 cheeks. 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. What ever 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 apple cart. 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, oceanfront, 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.

T
he dog days came to the Beaches in August, and the boardwalk was crowded. Even the dog owners began to complain about the heat. Laura Francis felt as if she had been locked in the bathroom after a hot shower as she walked Big Ears down to the fenced-off compound on Kew Beach, where he could run free. She said hello to the few people she had seen there before, while Big Ears sniffed the shrubbery and moved on to play with a Labrador retriever.

“They seem to like each other,” said a voice beside her.

Laura turned and saw a man she thought she recognized, but not from the Beaches. She couldn’t say where. He was handsome in a chiselled, matinee-idol sort of way, and the tight jeans and white T-shirt did justice to his well-toned muscles and tapered waist. Where did she know him from?

“You must excuse Big Ears,” she said. “He’s such a womanizer.”

“It’s nothing Rain can’t handle.”

“Rain? That’s an unusual name for a dog.”

He shrugged. “Is it? It was raining the day I picked her up from the humane society. Raining cats and dogs. Anyway, you’re one to talk, naming dogs after English children’s book characters.”

Laura felt herself flush. “My mother used to read them to me when I was little. I grew up in England.”

“I can tell by the accent. I’m Ray, by the way. Ray Lanagan.”

“Laura Francis. Pleased to meet you.”

“Laura? After the movie?”

“After my grandmother.”

“Pity. You do look a bit like Gene Tierney, you know.”

Laura tried to remember whether Gene Tierney was the one with the overbite or the large breasts. As she had both herself, she supposed it didn’t really matter. She blushed again. “Thank you.”

They stood in an awkward, edgy silence while the dogs played on around them. Then, all of a sudden, Laura remembered where she had seen Ray before. Jesus, of course, it was
him
, the guy from the TV commercial, the one for some sort of male aftershave or deodorant, where he was stripped to the waist, wearing tight jeans like today. She’d seen the advertisement in a magazine too. She had even fantasized about him, imagined it was him there in bed with her instead of Lloyd, grunting away on top as if he were running a marathon.

“What is it?” Ray asked.

She brushed a strand of hair from her hot cheek. “Nothing. I just remembered where I’ve seen you before. You’re an actor, aren’t you?”