The Mammoth Book of Best British Mysteries (32 page)

If that were the case, I thought, then we had better get used to drinking lake water, after all.

Peter Robinson

The strangers came to live on the island at the beginning of summer, 1969, and by the end of August my best friend Mary Jane was dead. The townsfolk blamed the Newcomers and
their heathen ways, but I was certain it was something else. Not something new, but something old and powerful that had festered in the town for years, or perhaps had always been there.

I remember the morning they arrived. We were all in chapel. It was stifling hot because the windows were closed and there was no air-conditioning. “Stop fidgeting and listen to the
Preacher,” hissed Mother. I tried my best, but his words made no sense to me. Flecks of spittle flew from his mouth like when water touches hot oil in a frying pan. Something about Judgment
Day, when the dead would rise incorruptible.

Next to me, Mary Jane was looking down at her shoes trying to hold back her laughter. I could see the muscles tightening around her lips and jaw. If we started giggling now we were done for. The
Preacher didn’t like laughter. It made him angry. He finally gave her one of his laser-like looks, and that seemed to settle her down. He’d never liked Mary Jane since she refused to
attend his special instruction evening classes. She told me that when he had asked her, he had put his face so close to hers that she had been able to smell the bourbon on his breath, and she was
sure she had seen the outline of his thing pushing hard against his pants. She also said she had seen him touching Betsy Goodall where he shouldn’t have been touching her, but when we asked
Betsy she blushed and denied everything. What else could she have done? Who would have believed her? In those days, as perhaps even now, small, isolated communities like ours kept their nasty
little secrets to themselves.

Across the aisle, Riley McCorkindale kept glancing sideways at Mary Jane when he thought she couldn’t see him. Riley was sweet on her, but she gave him a terrible run-around. I thought he
was quite nice, but he
was
very shy and he seemed too young for us, no matter how tall and burly he was. Besides, he was always chewing gum and we thought that looked common. We were very
sophisticated young ladies. And you have to understand that Mary Jane was very beautiful, not gawky and plain like me, with golden hair, delicate soft skin and the biggest, bluest eyes you have
ever seen.

At last the service ended and we ran out into the summer sunshine. Our parents lingered to shake hands with neighbors and talk to the Preacher, of course. They were old enough to know that you
weren’t supposed to seem in too much of a hurry to leave God’s house. But Mary Jane and I were only fifteen, sophisticated as we were, and everybody knew that meant trouble. Especially
when they said we were too old for our own good. “Precocious” was the word they used most often to describe us. I looked it up.

And that was when we saw the Newcomers. I think Mary Jane noticed them first because I remember seeing her expression change from laughter to wonder as I followed her gaze to the old school bus
pulling into the parking lot. It wasn’t yellow, but was painted all colors, great swirls and blobs and sunbursts of green, red, purple, orange, black and blue, like nothing we’d ever
seen before. And the people! We didn’t own a television set in our house, but I’d seen pictures in magazines tourists left on the ferry sometimes, and I’d even read in
Father’s newspaper about how they took drugs, listened to strange, distorted loud music and held large gatherings outside the cities, where they indulged in unspeakable practices. But I had
never seen any of them in the flesh before.

They certainly did look odd, the girls in loose dresses of pretty, flowered patterns, the men with their long hair over their shoulders or tied back in ponytails, wearing Mexican-style ponchos
and bell-bottom jeans and cowboy boots, the children scruffy, dirty and long-haired, running wild. They looked at us without much curiosity as they boarded the ferryboat carrying their few
belongings. I suppose they’d seen plenty of people who looked like us before, and who looked at them the way we must have done. Even Riley, who had clearly been plucking up the courage to
come over and say hello to Mary Jane before his ferry left, had stopped dead in his tracks, mouth gaping open. I could see the piece of gum lying there on his tongue like a misplaced tonsil.

Once the Newcomers had all boarded the ferry, the regulars got on. There was no chapel on the island. Only about thirty people lived there, and not all of them were religious. The Preacher said
that was because most of them were intellectuals and thought they knew better than the SCRIPTURES. Anyway, the ones who weren’t businessmen, like Riley’s father, taught at the
university in the city, about forty miles away, and commuted. They left their cars in the big parking lot next to the harbor because there were no roads on the island.

Just because we had the ferry, it didn’t make our little town an important place; it was simply the best natural harbor closest to Pine Island. We had a general store, a rundown hotel with
a Chinese restaurant attached, the chapel, and an old one-room schoolhouse for the children. The high school was fifteen miles away in Logan, the nearest large town, and Mary Jane and I had to take
the bus. The sign read “Jasmine Cove, Pop. 2,321” and I’d guess that was close enough to the truth, though I don’t think they could have counted Mary Jessop’s new baby
because she only gave birth the day before the Newcomers arrived.

Over the next few days, we found out a little more about the Newcomers. They were from inland, a thousand miles away, according to Lenny, who ran the general store. There were about nine of them
in all, including the children, and they’d bought the land fair and square from the government and had all the right papers and permissions. They kept to themselves and didn’t like
outsiders. They shunned the rest of society – that’s the word Lenny used, “shunned”, I looked it up – and planned to live off the land, growing vegetables. They
didn’t eat meat or fish.

According to Lenny, they didn’t go to chapel. He said they worshipped the devil and danced naked and sacrificed children and animals, but Mary Jane and I didn’t believe him. Lenny
had a habit of getting carried away with himself when it came to new ideas. Like the Preacher, he thought the world was going to hell in a hand basket and almost everything he saw and heard proved
him right, especially if it had anything to do with young people.

That day, as we wandered out of the general store onto Main Street, Mary Jane turned to me, smiled sweetly and said, “Grace, why don’t we take a little ferry ride tomorrow and find
out about the Newcomers for ourselves?”

Mary Jane’s father, Mr Kiernan, was the ferryman, and in summer, when we were on holiday from school, he let us ride for free whenever we wanted. Sometimes I even went by
myself. Pine Island wasn’t very big – about two miles long and maybe half a mile wide – but it had some very beautiful areas. I loved the western beach best of all, a lonely
stretch of golden sand at the bottom of steep, forbidding cliffs. Mary Jane and I knew a secret path down, and we spent many hours exploring the caves and rock pools, or lounging about on the beach
talking about life and things. Sometimes I went there alone when I felt blue, and it always made me feel better.

Most of the inhabitants of Pine Island lived in a small community of wood-structure houses nestled around the harbor on the east coast, but the Newcomers had bought property at the southern tip,
where two abandoned log cabins had been falling to ruin there as long as anyone could remember. Someone said they’d once been used by hunters, but there was nothing left to hunt on Pine
Island any more.

We saw the Newcomers in town from time to time, when they came to buy provisions at Lenny’s store. Sometimes one or two of them would drive the school bus to Logan for things they
couldn’t find here. They were buying drugs there, and seeds to grow marijuana, which made folk crazy, so Lenny said. Perhaps they were.

Certainly the Preacher found many new subjects for his long sermons after the arrival of the Newcomers – including, to the dismay of some members of his congregation, the evils of tobacco
and alcohol – but whether word of his rantings ever got back to them, and whether they cared if it did, we never knew.

The Preacher was in his element. He told us the Newcomers were nothing other than demons escaped from hell. He even told Mr Kiernan that he should have nothing to do with them and that he
shouldn’t use God’s ferryboat to transport demons. Mr Kiernan explained that he worked for the ferry company, which was based in the city, not for the Preacher, and that it was his job
to transport anyone who paid the fare to or from Pine Island. The Preacher argued that the money didn’t matter, that there was a “higher authority”, and the ferry company was as
bad as the Newcomers; they were all servants of Beelzebub and Mammon and any other horrible demon names he could think of. In the end, Mr Kiernan gave up arguing and simply carried on doing his
job.

One bright and beautiful day in July around the time when men first set foot on the moon, Mary Jane and I set off on our own exploratory mission. Mr Kiernan stood at the wheel,
for all the world looking as proud and stiff as if he were piloting
Apollo 11
itself. We weren’t going to the moon, of course, but we might as well have been. It was only later, in
university, that I read
The Tempest
, but had I known it then, Miranda’s words would surely have echoed in my mind’s ear: “O brave new world that hath such people in
it!”

The little ferry didn’t have any fancy restaurants or shops or anything, just a canvas-covered area with hard wooden benches and dirty plastic windows, where you could shelter from the
rain – which we got a lot of in our part of the world – and get a cup of hot coffee from the machine, if it was working. Through fair and foul Mr Kiernan stood at the wheel, cap at a
jaunty angle, pipe clamped in his mouth. Some of the locals made fun of him behind his back and called him Popeye. They thought we hadn’t heard them, but we had. I thought it was cruel, but
Mary Jane didn’t seem to care. Our town was full of little cruelties, like the way the Youlden kids made fun of Gary Mapplin because there was something wrong with his spine and he had to go
around in a wheelchair, his head lolling on his shoulders as if it were on a spring. Sometimes it seemed to me that everywhere Mary Jane and I went in Jasmine Cove, people gave us dirty looks, and
we knew that if we spoke back or anything, they’d report us to our parents. Mr Kiernan was all right – he went very easy on Mary Jane – but my father was a bit of tyrant, and I
had to watch what I said around him.

Riley McCorkindale was hanging around the ferry dock, as usual, fishing off the small rickety pier with some friends. I don’t think they ever caught anything. He blushed when Mary Jane and
I walked by giggling, and said hello. I could feel his eyes following us as we headed for the path south through the woods. He must have known where we were going; it didn’t lead anywhere
else.

Soon we’d left the harbor and its small community behind us and were deep in the woods. It was cooler there, and the sunlight filtered pale green through the shimmering leaves. Little
animals skittered through the dry underbrush, and once a large bird exploded out of a tree and startled us both so much our hearts began to pound. We could hear the waves crashing on the shore in
the distance, to the west, but all around us it was peaceful and quiet.

Finally, from a short distance ahead, we heard music. It was like nothing I’d ever heard before, and there was an ethereal beauty about it, drifting on the sweet summer air as if it
belonged there.

Then we reached a clearing and could see the log cabins. Three children were playing horseshoes, and someone was taking a shower in a ramshackle wooden box rigged up with some sort of overhead
sieve. The music was coming from inside one of the cabins. You can imagine the absolute shock and surprise on our faces when the shower door opened and out walked a young man naked as the day he
was born.

We gawped, I’m sure. I had certainly never seen a naked man before, not even a photograph of one, but Mary Jane said she once saw her brother playing with himself when he thought she was
out. We looked at one another and swallowed. “Let’s wait,” Mary Jane whispered. “We don’t want them to think we’ve been spying.”

And we waited. Five, ten minutes went by. Nothing much happened. The children continued their game and no-one else entered the shower. Finally, Mary Jane and I took deep breaths, left the cover
of the woods and walked into the clearing.

“Hello,” I called, aware of the tremor in my voice. “Hello. Is anybody home?”

The children stopped their game and stared at us. One of them, a little girl, I think, with long dark curls, ran inside the nearest cabin. A few moments later a young man stepped out. Probably
only three or four years older than us, he had a slight, wispy blonde beard and beautiful silky long hair, still damp, falling over his shoulders. It was the same man we had seen getting out of the
shower, and I’m sure we both blushed. He looked a little puzzled and suspicious. And why not? After all, I don’t think anyone else from Jasmine Cove had been out to welcome them.

Mary Jane seemed suddenly struck dumb, whether by the man’s good looks or the memory of his nakedness I don’t know, and it was left to me to speak. “Hello,” I said.
“I’m Grace Vincent, and this is my friend Mary Jane Kiernan. We’re from the town, from Jasmine Cove. We’ve come to say hello.”

He stared for a moment, then smiled and looked at Mary Jane. His eyes were bright green, like the sea just beyond the sands. “Mary Jane,” he said. “Well, how strange. This must
be a song about you. The Mad Hatters.”

“What?” I said.

“The name of the band. The Mad Hatters. They’re English.”

We listened to the music for a moment, and I thought I caught the words, “Mary Jane is dreaming of an ocean dark and gleaming.” I didn’t recognize the song, or the name of the
group, but that didn’t mean much. My parents didn’t let me listen to pop music. Mary Jane seemed to find her voice and said something about that being nice.