The Price of Love and Other Stories by Peter Robinson Page A

most of them older than the young man, and several of them lovely women in bright dresses with flowers twined in their long hair.
    “I’m Jared,” said the young man, then he introduced the others: Star, Leo, Gandalf, Dylan – names we were unfamiliar with. They sat cross-legged on the floor and smiled. Jared asked us some questions about the town, and we explained how the people there were suspicious of strangers but were decent folks underneath it all. I wasn’t certain that was true, but we weren’t there to say bad things about our neighbours and kin. We didn’t tell them what lies the Preacher had been spreading.
    Jared told us they had come here to get away from the suspicion, corruption, and greed they had found in the city, and they were going to live close to nature and meditate. Some of them were artists and musicians – they had guitars and flutes – but they didn’t want to be famous or anything. They didn’t even want money from anyone. One of them – Rigel, I think his name was – said mysteriously that the world was going to end soon and that this was the best place to bewhen it happened. In an odd way, his words and his tone reminded me of the Preacher.
    Someone rolled a funny-smelling cigarette, lit it, and offered it to us, but I said no. I’d never smoked any kind of cigarette, and the thought of marijuana, which I assumed it was, terrified me. To my horror, Mary Jane took it and inhaled. She told me later that it made her feel a bit light-headed, but that was all. I must admit, she didn’t act any differently from normal. At least not that day.
    We left shortly after, promising to drop by again, and it was only over the next few weeks that I noticed Mary Jane’s behaviour and appearance gradually start to change.
    It was just little things at first, like a string of beads she bought at a junk shop in Logan. It was nothing much really, just cheap coloured glass, but it was something she would have turned her nose up at just a short while ago. Now it replaced the lovely gold chain and heart pendant that her parents had given her for her fifteenth birthday. Next came the red cheesecloth top with the silver sequins and fancy Indian embroidery, and the first Mad Hatters L P, the one with “her song” on it.
    We went often to Pine Island to see Jared and the others, and I soon began to sense something, some deeper connection, between Mary Jane and Jared; and, quite frankly, it worried me. They started wandering off together for hours, and sometimes she told me to go back home without her, that she’d catch a later ferry. It wasn’t that Mary Jane was naive or anything, or that I didn’t trust Jared. I also knew that Mary Jane’s father was liberal, and she said he trusted her, but I still worried. The townsfolk were already getting more than a bit suspicious because of the odd way she was dressing and behaving. Even Riley McCorkindale gave her strange looks in chapel. It didn’t take a genius to put two and two together. At the very least, if she wasn’t careful, she could end up grounded for the rest of the summer.
    Things came to a head after chapel one Sunday in August. The Preacher had delivered one of his most blistering sermons yet about what happens to those who turn away from the path of righteousness and embrace evil, complete with a graphic description of the torments of hell. Afterwards, people were standing talking, as they do, all a little nervous, and Mary Jane actually said to the Preacher that she didn’t believe there was a hell, that if God was good, he wouldn’t do such horrible things to people. The Preacher turned scarlet, and it was only the fact that Mary Jane ran off and jumped on the ferry that stopped him taking her by the ear and dragging her back inside the chapel for special instruction whether she liked it or not. But he wouldn’t forget. You didn’t cross the Preacher and get away with it. No siree. One way or another, there’d be hell to pay.
    Or there