Pocketful of Pearls (7 page)

As if to remind himself that he had to answer the question before he could eat, he spread one hand over the plastic. “No.
I’ve been reading all afternoon. Shall I help you look?”

Dinah frowned. “No, I’ve searched all over already. You don’t suppose she got out of the pen, do you?”

“She might have. But the fencing seems very secure.”

“I’m going to look. You stay here. My mother would have a fit if she looked out the window and saw a strange man rambling
around the place.”

“I did shave,” he said, straightening. “I look relatively human.”

But she was in no mood to trade gentle jokes with him. Sheba was missing.
Please, God, don’t let her have been eaten by something. Help me find her. I’ll be good, I promise. Just help me find her.

A search of the yard that extended out to the edge of the woods proved fruitless, but she didn’t find a heap of feathers inside
the tree line, either. That was a positive sign. Maybe Sheba had gone broody and was hiding a clutch of eggs somewhere.

A second search of the barn turned up some stray eggs, but no Sheba. Someone had to have seen her.

“Mom?” Inside, she pushed open her mother’s bedroom door and found her lying back on the pillows, a cloth over her eyes. “Have
you seen Sheba anytime today? I can’t find her anywhere.”

Elsie stirred and moaned. “Keep your voice down, dear.” Her voice was weak. “I did a little too much this afternoon. My head
hurts. Who or what is Sheba?”

“My alpha hen. The big black-and-white Wyandotte. She seems to be missing.”

“You have names for them?”

“Mom, of course. They all know their own, too. Chickens are smart. But have you seen her anytime today? Like when you went
outside?”

“If it’s that big black-and-white one,” her mother sighed, “yes, I’ve seen it.”

“Oh, good. Where did—”

“I had Uncle John butcher it for dinner. The Bible says we’re to provide our best for the Lord. That bird was so big and fat,
and you know how Phinehas loves a nice roast chicken.”

THE SCREAM FROM
inside the house pierced even the walls of the barn.

Alarmed, Matthew dropped the ancient issue of
Western Cattleman
he’d found in the tack room and leaped off the bed. In the open area of the barn, the chickens were standing up on their
roosts and murmuring uneasily.

The back door slammed and he ran to the nearest window, being careful to keep out of sight in case the person running down
the steps was not Dinah.

But it was. Her arms flapped, her legs pumped, and her mouth was frozen in a silent scream as she tore across the yard and
around the corner of the barn. He dashed to the door that opened on the side facing the mountain and yanked it open in time
to see Dinah fall to her knees on the rubbish pile with a howl that made the hair stand up on the back of his neck.

She vomited violently on the ground. She didn’t even bother to wipe her mouth as she reached over the rubbish heap and picked
up a limp object with both hands, cradling it as if it had been a child or a small creature.

He stepped outside and moved closer to get a better look. With a jolt, he realized what she held.

It was the head and neck of a chicken. Black-and-white feathers covered it. Feathers that were still glossy and thick.

Sheba.

He had known she was attached to her birds. But he hadn’t known that attachment went this deep. This was the grief of a mother
for her child. Or of a lonely child for her only friend.

Oh, God. Oh, dear God. Tell me what to do.

He moved without thinking, putting himself between the unknown threat and the trembling, weeping woman in the rubbish who
was stroking the bird’s head with gentle fingers. The warm, sharp smell of vomit and rotting vegetables billowed into his
nostrils as he knelt beside her. He hesitated, then placed an arm around her shoulders.

“Dinah.”

With a shriek, she jumped to one side and scrambled to her feet, clutching the limp object to her chest with hands that were
streaked with its blood.

“They
killed
her! They killed Sheba, my sweet girl, the only thing in this whole world that I care about—they killed her and served her
up to him for dinner!”

“I’m so sorry. How is it possible?”

She glared at him, wild eyed. “Why didn’t you stop them? Why didn’t you do something? You must have heard them catch her and
take her away!”

The last thing he wanted was to be shoved into the enemy camp. “I must have been asleep. I did nod off this afternoon while
you were out. And even if I hadn’t been, I’m not supposed to show myself, am I?”

“Who cares?” she shouted. “You could have saved her life!”

He couldn’t explain the futility of a homeless man attempting to stop a property owner from butchering one of her own chickens
in her own yard. But neither could he say such a thing to Dinah.

“I’m so sorry,” he said again. “I should have done something.” What else could he say? He’d had his moments of feeling inadequate
and voiceless in the past, but not like this.

“No,” she moaned, the fire dying as suddenly as it had roared into hysterical life. “I should have been here. It’s my fault.
I let myself be tempted by the apartment and this is what happened. My poor, poor darling. She was punished instead of me.”
She stroked the pitiful remains of her pet, and even though he didn’t quite understand what she meant, Matthew’s heart squeezed
with compassion.

“Come,” he said. “We need to give her a decent burial. She deserves better than the rubbish heap.”

“Yes,” she whispered. “She does.”

As Dinah sat on a fallen log and crooned over her lost bird, Matthew dug a deep hole near a big rock in the trees, where no
one at the house could see what was going on. When he finished, he leaned on the shovel and took a brief inventory of his
vital signs. His strength must be returning. He wasn’t even panting.

Dinah wrapped Sheba’s remains in a cloth she’d found in the barn and laid the little bundle in the hole with careful tenderness.

“Would you like to say a few words?” he asked. “Or shall I pray?”

“No,” she said, still on her knees. “Even though she was more human than those people down there.”

“I think that might cover it.” His smile was gentle and sad, and she held his gaze. Sorrow and anger fought with a newborn
sense of recognition in her eyes. Recognition of what, he wasn’t sure. Companionship, perhaps? Complicity?

He held a hand out to her, and she took it and got to her feet. Then her face seemed to waver and dissolve and she began to
cry, with the huge, heaving sobs of a small child who has not yet learned control, hugging herself and rocking back and forth.

Matthew filled the hole in much less time than it had taken to dig it, tamped the soil down hard, and leaned the shovel against
the rock. Then he stepped over to Dinah and wrapped his arms around her. He wasn’t sure whether she would accept his comfort,
but something in her complete abandonment of control made him offer what little he could.

She sobbed against his chest for a few seconds, then seemed to recollect where she was. With a gasp, she jerked away. She
would not meet his eyes. Wiping her cheeks with the heel of her hand, still hiccuping a little, she set off across the field
to the house and did not look back.

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.”