Pocketful of Pearls (15 page)

DINAH KNEW THE
Barings only vaguely through . . . an uncle? . . . a grandfather? . . . who bought hay every October. A stop at the pay phone
by the Jiffy Market provided a phone book with an address, and fifteen minutes after their ignominious departure from the
Bells’ they pulled up outside a shabby ranch home on Front Street. The street had been so named because it fronted on the
railway line, back in the days when the railway had been more important than the interstate.

“It’s late,” Matthew offered. “Perhaps we should tackle this in the morning.”

But Dinah’s hands were cold and stark on the steering wheel, her mouth set in a grim line. “If she’s not coming back, somebody
has to be responsible.”

“What are you going to do if this Danny really isn’t the father?”

Dinah shifted the truck into Park and shut off the engine. “He has to be. There’s no one else.”

The worldly boy who answered the door wore wrinkled jeans and a black T-shirt advertising a rock concert. He eyed Dinah in
her black dress and coat as if she were a sideshow act at the midway.

Not that Dinah had ever been to a midway.

He leaned on the doorjamb and chewed on the pencil that hung loosely in his fingers. “Yeah?”

“Is Danny here?” Dinah asked.

“Maybe.”

“I’d like to talk with him for a minute, if he is.”

“You from his church?”

“I’m Dinah Traynell. He knows me.”

The kid heaved himself upright and swung the door shut without a reply. Beside her, Matthew shifted and reached for the baby
carrier.

“It’s no good. Let’s try another time.”

Dinah couldn’t quite believe a stranger had shut the door in her face when she was so desperate. This was what you got with
worldly people. She should have known better.

She turned away just as the door swung open again.

“Dinah?” Danny Bell flipped the porch light on and stepped out onto the mat. He wore no coat, though the air was chilly. “What’s
going on?”

Dinah had never seen him wear color before. He wore a green T-shirt with some kind of cartoon character on it, and his jeans
looked as though they’d been bought for a larger boy. About the size of the one who had answered the door.

A borrowed home. Borrowed clothes. What had happened to make Danny Bell leave his parents?

“We need to talk to you,” she said.

“We?”

Matthew stepped into the light, the carrier hanging heavily from one hand. Danny’s gaze glanced off it, dismissed it, and
returned to Dinah’s face.

“If my mom sent you over, I can’t talk right now. I’m doing homework.”

“She didn’t. In fact, she wasn’t very keen about me coming over at all. It won’t take long, and you can get back to your homework.”

He leaned on the wrought-iron porch rail. It gave a little under his weight, and Dinah wondered if the flimsy thing would
pop off altogether and dump him in the flowerbed, where a few cold daffodil shoots were trying to come up.

“What’s up?”

“Tamara came this morning from Spokane,” she began.

Under the porch light, Danny’s face seemed to thin, to pinch up and harden. “I don’t want to hear about her.” He pushed away
from the rail and reached for the doorknob.

“Danny, wait.” She’d never touched him in her life other than the formal handshake of fellowship after Gathering, but extremity
was pushing her to do a lot of things she’d never done before. She gripped his arm, just above the wrist, and pulled him nearer
to the shallow steps where Matthew stood. “This isn’t about Tamara. It’s about the baby.”

“What baby?”

“Hers. Tamara’s and yours.”

“There isn’t any baby.” His voice, which had started out sounding young and polite, hardened into something adult and unyielding.
Suddenly Dinah saw part of the reason for Linda’s pain. But it didn’t stop her.

“Yes, there is. Right there.” She nodded at Matthew and the carrier. “Tamara left her with me and disappeared—we don’t know
where to or for how long. But I’m not one of her parents. She should be with one of you. Not me.”

Danny stared at her, and to her surprise, he laughed. It was a soundless, disbelieving huff of air. “And you think I’m the
father.”

“Well, yes. You guys were dating. Sharing a hymnbook.”

“So who else could it be, right?”

“Right.”

“Even if I was, Dinah, how would I take care of a baby? I’m seventeen. I’ve got two more months of school, finals, and gee,
I’m living on a mattress on somebody else’s floor. I really know how to take care of things.”

“I don’t pretend to know why you’re not at home. But I’m sure your folks would help.”

“I’m sure they wouldn’t. I’m never going back.”

She stood there, helplessly waiting for him to change his mind, to admit responsibility for his daughter and take this problem
off her hands.

He crossed his arms over his chest. “You really don’t have a clue, do you?”

She shook her head. “I don’t have a clue about a lot of things.”

“For once in her life, my mother didn’t spill her guts?”

“About what?”

“About why I’m here.”

“No. I could see she was upset about it, but that’s none of my business. The only thing I care about is getting Tamsen back
to one of her parents.”

“Yeah? Well, you’d better talk to old Phinehas about it, then.”

She stared at him. “Why?” Phinehas was the last person she’d go to with a problem like this. Sure, he was the final judge
in serious problems among the flock, but this was a family matter. She could take care of it, if she could just get the baby’s
parents to own up and do the right thing.

“Tamara didn’t tell you, either?”

“Tell me what?”

“What I said. You want to talk to the kid’s father, you’d better go find Phinehas. It wasn’t me. We never even took our clothes
off. But Phinehas, now, that’s different. Only he doesn’t ask first. He just takes what he wants and leaves the girl to deal
with what happens.”

“What?” Dinah couldn’t form an intelligent sentence—couldn’t even get a breath to go into her lungs. She swayed, and the world
tilted.

“I’m sorry you’re strapped with his kid, Dinah. But life’s not fair. Not for Tammy, and not for me. One thing I’m glad about
though.” He spoke in a conversational tone, as if Dinah’s world hadn’t just torn itself apart and was drifting on the cold
air like ash. “It made me see the Elect the way they really are. Any bunch of people who could let that guy get away with
what he does deserves what they get. I tried to get Tammy to say something, but oh no, she’d rather let everybody hang it
on me. And if she doesn’t care enough to tell the truth, then I don’t, either. I’m done with all of you. As soon as school’s
out, I’m out of here. You can tell
that
to Tamara—if you ever see her again.”

He pushed into the house, and for the second time in ten minutes, the battered front door shut in Dinah’s face.

M
ATTHEW FELT AS
though he were walking in the pitch dark, on a path full of holes into which he could fall at any moment.

Somehow he managed to strap the baby’s seat into the truck and maneuver Dinah into the passenger seat without dropping either
one. If he hadn’t, Dinah would probably have stayed on the lawn all night, staring in that eerie, unfocused way into the middle
distance. He was beginning to have serious doubts about the young woman’s sanity. After all, how much abuse and how many shocks
could one person be expected to withstand before she broke?

He turned right onto the highway and pushed his foot down on the accelerator. She had broken once already. How could he have
forgotten that terrible scene in the compost heap, when she’d lost her pet? That had led her straight to the river.

She had just learned her only niece was the child of rape—rape by the same man who had been raping her for years. Two girls
in one family. And who knew how many others?

Grimly, Matthew fought down the un-Christian desire to throttle Phinehas, that white-walled hypocrite, with his bare hands.
Instead, he kept both wrapped around the steering wheel and concentrated on getting everyone home safely.

It was like something out of one of those southern gothic novels his friend Paolo’s wife was so fond of reading, full of incest
and betrayal and family secrets going back generations. Or worse, the whole situation in her church was a breeding ground
for this kind of thing. From what he had been able to gather, the Shepherds of these poor souls were accountable to no one—except
God, one presumed. And with no accountability and a congregation that catered to their every wish, it was only a matter of
time before human nature got the better of them and they became corrupted by their own power.

No wonder Dinah saw God as an all-powerful old man dishing out punishment. When God’s representative to her was exactly that,
how could she think anything else?

He glanced at her, but she was still staring straight ahead. Had she even blinked since he’d snapped the seat belt around
the slender span of her hips?

He pulled into the yard behind the ranch house and got out to open the barn doors, then parked the truck in its spot next
to the roofless Jeep in which they’d climbed the mountain—could it really have been just this afternoon?

With the baby’s carrier dangling from one hand and his other arm supporting Dinah, he got them both into the house and upstairs
to Tamara’s old room, where Tamsen woke and demanded food. Dinah sat on the bed and unbuckled the baby.

“She’s wet.” Her voice sounded hollow.

“I’ll make some tea and heat a bottle.” He paused at the door. “Dinah.”

She looked up.

“Change her,” he suggested gently. Then he went down to the kitchen. He wished there were something stronger to put in the
tea than milk. But of course there wasn’t. No alcohol, no cards, no jewelry, no color in the house. Just plenty of abuse,
lies, hatred, and hypocrisy.

How could any healthy thing grow up in such a place?

He plugged in the kettle, took a bottle out of the fridge, and put it in the microwave. And how could he stay, and be sucked
down into all this?

Because he could leave. It would take some time and a lot of humiliation, but eventually he could hitchhike his way back to
California, get his things out of Paolo’s garage, and cobble together some semblance of a life. He could thank Dinah for her
kindness, take his week’s pay, and go.

He could, but he wouldn’t.

It wasn’t gratitude that kept him here, or fear of hunger on the highway. No, there was only one thing that would make him
overcome his disgust at the ugliness of human nature—including his own—and force him to stay where it was manifesting like
mushrooms after rain.

Dinah.

He would stay because one after another, everything a woman could reasonably be expected to trust had been taken away from
her. He would stay because if he didn’t, the river might get the better of her again. And most of all, he would stay because
he wanted to surprise that smile, the one that illuminated her whole face—the one he’d only seen once in all the time he’d
been here—into existence again.

And, since he was examining other people’s motives, perhaps he should examine his own. He’d omitted a few pertinent facts
in his conversations with Dinah when he’d first come to the ranch. He’d fled California because of a girl’s accusations—not
because they were true, but because, despite the fact that his name had been cleared by the school’s investigation, everyone
still believed they might have been. He had been accused of sexual abuse when he was not guilty. Phinehas had been accused
of nothing, when he was guilty. If Matthew stayed, he might get the chance to even the scales a bit.

Not the most honorable of motives, but it would do.

When he came back upstairs with the bottle, the pot of tea, and two mugs carefully arranged on the cover of a flat book because
he hadn’t been able to find a tray, the baby was staring around in fresh horror at her surroundings and howling. Dinah was
gone.

He put the tea things down on the floor with a clank, and before the volume got much higher, he was able to get the nipple
into Tamsen’s mouth.

He balanced her on his left arm, held the bottle at the correct angle with his right, and went in search of Dinah. She hadn’t
gone far, if the retching in the bathroom were any indication. When she didn’t come out after a few minutes, he bumped the
door open with his shoulder.

“Dinah?”

She sat on the floor with her back against the bathtub. The tissue she’d evidently used to wipe her mouth was crumpled in
one hand, and her head was bowed.

He realized with a sense of inevitability that God had led him to this town, this house, this woman, for a reason. Maybe this
moment was that reason.

He folded himself into a comfortable position next to her on the chenille bath mat, taking care not to bump the baby. There
was plenty of room; the bathroom was a huge, old-fashioned one with a black-and-white checkered floor. Near the head of the
tub, partially concealed by a fern, were the sheared stubs of the old pipes—presumably relics of a claw-footed tub that had
stood here. At least there had been that much change over the years. Much of the rest of the house looked as it must have
at the turn of the century.

He wondered if the family’s values had changed at all in the interval. Likely not.

“I can’t believe this is happening.” Her voice was a whisper of sound in the silence, broken only by the baby’s energetic
attack on the bottle.

“I know,” he agreed. Best if he stuck to brief replies. He wasn’t sure what kind of emotional lava was bubbling under the
surface. Best if she did all the talking.

“It wasn’t just me,” she said in a wondering tone. “All those years of sacrifice, and it wasn’t just me. He said I was a vessel
sanctified unto him, but I wasn’t. I wasn’t.”

“No.”

“I thought if I gave myself, if I made myself a living sacrifice the way it says in Romans, it would save the others. Tamara,
girls in other cities, I didn’t know. I thought if I made him come back to me, it wouldn’t happen to someone else.” Her breath
hitched. “But it did. It still did.”