Pocketful of Pearls

by Shelley Bates

  I’M HERE FOR you, the river whispered.

  Dinah made sure the windows were locked so she couldn’t hear its siren call, and then, for the first time in years, locked her bedroom door as well.

  She stood on the hooked rug in front of the bed and stared at the white chenille bedspread with loathing.

  What good was prayer?

  She didn’t want to talk to anyone, especially not God. God was a big angry man in a toga, sitting on a cloud and throwing lightning bolts and disaster at people. No matter how often you crawled to him, no matter how often you begged for some good thing, you never got it. He just kept dishing out the punishment until finally there was only one thing left to do.

  She was going to take her life away from him.

  Sheba had been practically the only thing tethering her to the earth, anyway. And now that Sheba had been murdered and served up to the one person whom Dinah hated in all the world, there was absolutely no point in staying.

  But first, she had to do something.

  “Dinah?” Aunt Margaret tapped on the door. “It’s time to go to Mission, dear. Are you ready?”

  Dinah glanced at the clock and realized she’d been standing immobile on the rug for fifteen minutes. “I’m not going, Auntie.”

  “Why not, dear? Are you sick?” Sickness or death were the only reasons for not going to Mission. Anything else was self-indulgent and sinful. “Elsie isn’t going,” her aunt went on. “A migraine, poor dear. She can’t even lift her head.”

  Dinah’s mouth thinned. “No, I’m not sick.”

  “If it’s about your chicken, dear, Uncle John is very sorry. But think of it this way: you gave of your best to the Lord.”

  She’d been giving her best to the Lord her whole life, and it had netted her nothing but the demand for more. She’d offered her pearls to the swine again and again, and all they’d done was dash them from her hand and trample them in the mud. Well, it was time to pick them up and, if she couldn’t wear them openly, at least she’d put them in her pocket where they’d be safe.

  “I understand you might be angry at your uncle, but Mission is a good place to forgive and find forgiveness.”

  The platitude scraped Dinah’s feelings like fingernails on a blackboard. She gripped her self-control. “Give my greetings to Melchizedek, Auntie.”

  “You’re sure you’re not coming?”

  “I’m sure.”

  A silence. Maybe Aunt Margaret didn’t know how to deal with such obvious sin. “All right, dear. I’ll think of you in my prayers.”

  Sinful people needed to be prayed for. Dinah refused to feel guilty at the gentle rebuke. She waited, as motionless as the rock standing guard over Sheba’s grave, until both Phinehas’s car and her aunt and uncle’s sedan pulled out of the driveway and hummed off down the road to town.

  Then she went down the hall and pulled open her mother’s bedroom door.

  Elsie peeked out from under the cloth over her eyes. “Dinah? Why are you still home? Are you sick?”

  “Neither of us is really sick, Mom.”

  Her mother groaned and let her head fall back on the embroidered pillow. “You can’t even imagine how awful these headaches are. Sometimes I don’t think I’ll survive until morning. The pain is just blinding.”

  “Blinding. That pretty much describes it.”

  Elsie pulled the cloth away and frowned at her. “What’s the matter, dear? If you have one, take one of these pills Dr. Archer prescribes.” She indicated the bottle on the night table.

  “I don’t want a pill. I need to talk to you.”

  “If it’s about that chicken, I have nothing more to say. We did the right thing in God’s service, and if you weren’t so selfish, you’d see that.” Elsie shook the cloth out and refolded it lengthwise.

  “Serving up my best friend to Phinehas was the right thing?”

  “Chickens are not meant to be friends. They’re farm animals. You set your affections too much on things of this earth, Dinah, and then you get upset and blame other people when you have to sacrifice them.”

  “When other people sacrifice them for me, you mean.”

  “Can you run cold water over this for me, dear?”

  “I need you to listen to me.”

  “Dinah Miriam Traynell, I don’t like your tone.”

  “Sorry, Mom, but I’m at the end of my rope. You know why you have these migraines?”

  Her mother eyed her with dislike. “I suppose you have medical training, do you? If Dr. Archer couldn’t tell me, I don’t suppose you can.”

  “How about willful blindness, Mom? Maybe you’re getting blinding headaches because you’ve blinded yourself to what’s going on.”

  “What?”

  “Oh, come on. Don’t tell me you don’t know. That you haven’t known for years.”

  “Know what? Honestly, Dinah, I don’t know what’s wrong with you. This chicken business has unhinged you.”

  “Maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe some hinges need to come off some closed doors around here.”

  Her mother moved fretfully. “I don’t understand one word you’re saying. If you’re not going to help me and get me a cold cloth, then go back to your room until you can talk sense. Goodness knows I don’t want you behaving this way when John and Margaret and Phinehas get home.”

  “Mother, look me in the eye and tell me you don’t know what Phinehas has been doing to me. That he’s been using me as his mistress for years. Tell me you didn’t know.”

  Elsie stared at her. “What?”

  “Tell me why you never once came to help me. Tell me that you never heard him in my room. Or saw him touch me.” Her voice shook.

  “You are saying wicked, wicked things,” her mother hissed. “How dare you say such things about a man of God?”

  “He isn’t a man of God. He puts on that holy face on Sunday and you’d never know how much he hurt me Saturday night. He raped me for the first time when I was fourteen, Mom. And he’s continued to do it every time he visited. You keep inviting him back and he keeps doing it. I don’t set my affections on the things of this earth, Mom, but I sure wish you would.”

  Elsie clapped her hands over her ears. “I will not allow you to say such things!”

  Dinah pulled her mother’s soft hands away and hung onto them. “You’re going to put a stop to it now. I want you to send him away and never let him stay here again. I want you to stand up for me for once in your life. Please, Mom.”

  “You are a wicked, sinful girl. You should be praying for him, not saying such horrible things. If you let things like that into your mind, you let them into the Kingdom. Think about that, Dinah!”

  Dinah flung Elsie’s hands to the coverlet. “It’s already in the Kingdom. You’ve known about it right from the start. You never stopped him when we had our private little Bible studies together, did you? You and Dad never let yourselves hear him going down the hall to my room at night.”

  Her mother’s mouth worked, but no sounds came out. Her eyes were wide with shock and betrayal.

  “It hurts, Mom.” Dinah fisted a hand over her heart. “It hurts worse than anything, to know that you could have stopped it and didn’t. What I’d like to know is, why?” She dragged in a breath and said it at last. “Why didn’t you act like a proper mother and protect me? Do you hate me that much?”

  Elsie’s eyes bulged, and her skin, normally pale from too much time indoors, drained of color even further and turned gray. “You—woman—stop it—” she croaked.

  “First you send Tamara away, and now it’s my—Mom?”

  With a groan that sounded nothing like the invalid moan she’d pretended to make earlier, Elsie toppled sideways. Her head clunked the nightstand with a dreadful sound that brought Dinah out of the red haze of rage.

  “Mom?”

  Staring, horrified, at her mother’s awkwardly bent body, Dinah found the phone by touch alone and dialed 9-1-1.

  Chapter 6

  FOR THE SECO
ND time that evening, a screaming sound brought Matthew up off the bed. He dashed over to the window that overlooked the yard. This time it wasn’t a human. The ambulance skidded to a stop in the gravel and EMTs leaped out, prepared their equipment, and hustled up the steps.

  Not Dinah.

  Then he saw her silhouetted in the light from the kitchen doorway as she let them in. He watched and waited, wondering what in the world was happening, wondering if he should go and offer his help. Ten minutes later they came out again with someone on a gurney.

  He had no idea who it was, but it wasn’t Dinah.

  Matthew wasn’t quite sure what made him think she’d need an ambulance. She’d seemed calm enough after they’d buried Sheba’s . . . well, after they’d buried Sheba. But he knew enough about fear and grief to believe that a calm exterior could hide towering agony, made worse because it couldn’t be shown. Oh yes, he knew all about that.

  But it wasn’t just the volcano of emotion he’d seen inside a woman who looked fragile enough to be damaged by a single touch. No, it was this whole ranch. Anxiety and rage seemed to hover over it, even when the sun came out from behind the cloud cover that bumped up hard against the mountain. Look at the last few days. There had been a death, a funeral, a wake, a murder of sorts, and now some other tragedy in the form of a medical emergency.

  He was getting a little tired of hiding while hell broke loose all around him. He pulled a jacket off a nail in the tack room—probably her father’s—and crossed the yard to the house.

  “Dinah?” He knocked gently on the screen door, and when no one answered, pushed it open. “Are you here?”

  No reply.

  He entered the kitchen cautiously, though he knew her relatives had not returned yet. “Dinah?”

  Moving more quickly now, he looked into the dining room, the living room, and even the bathroom and the spare bedroom. Then he climbed the stairs, worry blooming under his breastbone with each step into the upper darkness of the house. A quick look in all the rooms proved them to be empty, but the disarray of the fussy embroidered pillows and the quilted coverlet of the one in the back told him that it might have been her mother who had gone in the ambulance.

  He was positive she had not gone with it. The car was in town with her aunt and uncle. That meant she had to be here somewhere.

  In the front bedroom, where a single suitcase lay on the floor, its contents as orderly and neat as a shop window, he glanced out at the view. The moon had come up, and by its light he saw a small, dark figure march across the road in the direction of the river.

  In just that way—grimly, a woman on a mission—she had walked away from him across the field, and mayhem had been the result.

  “Oh, no,” he breathed. “Lord, what is she doing? Help me get there first, dear Father.”

  He took the stairs three at a time and burst out the front door without bothering to close it behind him. He made a few seconds’ time on the asphalt of the road, but the trees that stood between him and the river, though sparse and thin, held him up. The tussocky grass and the uneven banks where the river had changed direction deceived and tripped him.

  He was still fifty yards away when, in the hard, silver moonlight, he saw her kick off her ugly, low-heeled shoes and toss her barn jacket on the sandbar.

  “No, Lord. Don’t let her. Please don’t let her do it.”

  His breath scraped in his chest like shards of ice, and he heaved and gasped as he staggered toward the sandbar. He wasn’t going to make it in time.

  “Dinah!”

  The rushing of the river drowned out his voice, and she waded in without glancing back, totally focused on whatever dreadful thoughts were in her mind.

  The water burst around her knees and then her thighs, pulling relentlessly on her dress. She could hardly keep her footing. Then she spread her arms wide and dropped into the current as gracefully and inevitably as a tree falling.

  There was no room in his head for a thought of his own danger. Matthew dragged in as much air as his lungs could hold, and plunged in after her.

  DINAH HAD A split second to hope that her head would hit a big rock right away before the underwater roar of the river filled her ears and somersaulted her like a rag doll. Something whacked her ankle, hard, and she fought the temptation to curl into a ball to minimize the damage.

  It didn’t matter what happened to her body. Should she breathe in, was the question. She was holding her breath by instinct, but that defeated the whole point.

  Ouch! Her shoulder scraped the gravel on the bottom and she felt a sudden freedom that meant the sleeve had given way. Her skirts had reversed up over her head.

  Can’t breathe. Need air.

  No. Breathe water. It will be over soon.

  Something grabbed the fabric wrapped around her neck and jerked violently. Oh, good. A snag would hold her down.

  Over soon.

  Alive. Whatever was holding onto her was alive. Animal?

  She pushed at it and it pushed back, and suddenly her head broke the surface, but fabric was pasted to her face like a mask. With a groan, she tried to drag in a breath and got a mouthful of wet material instead.

  “Dinah! Stop it!” somebody said, and suddenly she was upended face down, her cheek mashed into cold gravel. The sopping mask was torn away and she gasped and coughed, heaving on the ground, sucking in sand and pine needles with every breath.

  She coughed and spat out a mouthful of water.

  “Are you all right? Can you speak?”

  Matthew.

  A burst of anger so hot it was like a blood transfusion rocketed through her, and she pushed herself up on both hands. On all fours like an animal, she glared at him.

  “What did you do that for?” She’d meant to scream, but it came out as a hoarse whisper. “Leave me alone.”

  She pushed herself to her feet and staggered toward the water. Rocks. That’s what they did in the old days, didn’t they? Weighted themselves down with rocks. She should have thought of that before.

  She glanced around to choose a couple of likely ones, but he tackled her around the waist and dragged her back. He sat her forcefully on a beached log.

  “I will not allow you to do this!”

  She’d never seen him angry. He had seemed so gentle and unassuming and hopeless about life. She hadn’t known he had it in him.

  Well, well. Hinges were popping off doors all over today.

  “If you can’t think about yourself,” he said, “at least think about your poor mother. And your relatives. What do you think they’ll do with you gone?”

  She rolled her eyes. “I don’t care. And they don’t care about me.” She slid off the log, but he grabbed her and sat her down on it again.

  “Don’t touch me!”

  “Don’t go near the river again, and I won’t.”

  “Who do you think you are, telling me what to do?”

  That stopped him.

  And then she was sorry. His eyes filled with pain.

  “I thought I was your friend. If you don’t care about your family, at least spare a thought for me.”

  “Why should I? I never knew you before this week.”

  Pain flickered over his face. Turning away, he crossed the sandbar and retrieved her shoes and barn jacket. She pushed sopping hair out of her face and realized that her underwater journey had only been a matter of twenty or thirty feet. The river took a curve around the bar, and the eddy had probably been the only thing that had prevented them both from washing all the way down to Hamilton Falls. It had pulled them in here and allowed Matthew to find his footing.

  She hadn’t thought about the geography. She should have planned it better and gone upriver a bit, to the canyon and rapids. All those big rocks would have done the job properly.

  Matthew crunched and squished his way back to her and wrapped the jacket around her shoulders. The contrast between the heavy fabric and her clammy skin made her realize how cold the night was. The air fell into her lungs l
ike snow.

  “Come on. We need to get you dry and warm.”

  Next time, she’d make sure he was out of the way, and then she’d walk to the canyon.

  It felt good to have a backup plan.

  THEY LEFT A twin trail of puddles on the kitchen floor.

  “In here.” Matthew pushed open the guest bathroom and turned on the shower. “Get out of these clothes.”

  Panic exploded under her ribs, and she wrenched away. “No!”

  “Dinah, I’m only trying to—”

  “Get away from me.” She slammed the bathroom door in his face.

  “I’ll be right out here if you need me. Just don’t try any funny business in that tub.”

  She locked the door and stood in the middle of the room, holding her elbows and shivering. She’d felt such a sense of freedom when the river carried her away. No more feelings. Just the calmness of impending death. And now? Hot, angry tears pooled in her eyes as she peeled her dress, slip, and underwear away and dropped them in a pile that smelled of river weed and despair.

  Stupid man. If she’d wanted to drown in the stupid bathtub she’d have done it ages ago.

  Her aunt’s shampoo and lavender-scented soap were in the shower caddy, so she used them. She caught herself inhaling the crisp scent with a sense of surprise. She’d always thought Aunt Margaret smelled like an old lady. Now she wondered if her aunt took this quiet pleasure in lavender soap, and that was why she used it.

  Not the kind of thing you asked Aunt Margaret. She would never admit to pandering to her flesh in such a way.

  Dinah rinsed and dried off, and then realized she had nothing to put on.

  Was he gone?

  She put her ear to the door. Silence. “Mr. Nicholas?”

  A voice came from at least a room away. “I would think that the depth of our acquaintance, if not its length, would allow you to use my given name. I went and got your robe. It’s on the door handle.”

  She unlocked the door and kept her body behind it while she felt the handle outside. Her fingers encountered soft cotton and she dragged it into the bathroom. She re-locked the door and wrapped the pink-and-white sprigged dressing gown tightly around herself.