Pocketful of Pearls (27 page)

Tonight, if she could find a connection in his things, she would have her proof and he could never hurt her again. If she
confronted him with the birth certificate, maybe he would even agree to leave them alone and not punish them all for her refusal
to cooperate.

Maybe pigs would fly, too, but it was worth a try. She could no longer sit and let this happen to her. She may not have the
most effective weapons to fight him, but she had to do something to defend herself.

Armed with a sense of purpose, she was able to greet him when he arrived just before supper as if there were nothing wrong.
Just as she always did, she shook his hand and took his coat, then offered him a cup of coffee. And just as he always did,
he sat in her father’s easy chair with his Bible on the end table beside him and allowed her and Elsie to serve him.

At dinner, they made conversation about the number of strangers in the last mission he’d preached in Spokane and what their
prospects might be for conversion. While Matthew looked from one woman to the other in confusion and growing disbelief, Dinah
fed Tamsen her cereal while Elsie handed Phinehas the potatoes and urged him to another helping of Irish stew.

Dinah caught Matthew’s eye and shook her head, the smallest of motions, which caused him to drop his gaze to his plate and
sigh.

She’d explain later.

After dinner, she picked up Phinehas’s suitcase and took it upstairs, just as she always did. He and her mother were talking
in the living room, where, it seemed, he had just noticed nothing was the same as it had always been.

Get used to it, Phinehas.

In the front guest room with its view of the river, she put the suitcase down on the window seat. But instead of fluffing
the pillow and going away as she had always done, she popped the case’s latches open. She’d have to be quick.

With shaking hands, she rifled through his belongings. Slacks, shirts, ties, a sweater, all of the finest quality. A toiletry
kit, a couple of books, socks, underwear. The ministers of God traveled light, with only the necessities of life in a single
suitcase. Everything else was provided by the Elect as part of their service.

Ears straining for the sound of a footstep on the stairs or a change in the tenor of conversation, Dinah ran her hands along
the pockets lining the sides of the suitcase.

Aha.

She reached in and pulled out a passport. The room below had gone silent. Hurry. Fanning the passport’s pages, she found the
one bearing his name and photograph.

Philip Arthur Leslie. Date of birth April 21, 1946. Place of birth Fraser, Michigan.

Bingo.

The fourth stair from the bottom creaked like an alarm, and Dinah slipped the passport back in the pocket, glanced hastily
at the contents of the suitcase to make sure it looked the way she’d found it, and closed it. The latches snapped when she
pressed them, but with the footsteps on the stairs, chances were good the sharp sounds wouldn’t be heard.

She whirled as the footsteps reached the landing. It was Phinehas. She knew that step intimately, knew the pressure the weight
of his elegant body put on their wood floors. After ten years of listening with despair for that very sound, oh yes, she knew
it. And now she’d waited too long. He’d reached the landing and if she tried to leave his room, he’d see her.

She whirled and ran to the bed. Bending over the pillow, she was straightening the bedspread like a well-mannered chambermaid
when he pushed open the door and came in.

“Well,” he said with a mix of greeting and gratification.

She straightened. If it was a greeting, she wasn’t going to reply to it.

“Getting it ready for me, I see.” He looked her up and down, as if looking for the same kinds of changes in her as he’d found
downstairs.

“Yes.” She rounded the bed and made to move past him. “Enjoy your rest.”

He put a cool hand on her arm, crumpling the black batiste of her sleeve. “I’d enjoy it more if you shared it with me. Since
I find you in my room, I take it you’ve gone before the Lord and begged forgiveness for your unwillingness the last time I
saw you?”

“I came to make sure the room was ready,” she said steadily. Only Phinehas would read
sex
into someone coming in to make up the bed. “Nothing else. Let go of my arm, please.”

He did, as though he’d meant to all along. “Still unwilling. Dinah, what does this say about your spirit? What happened to
the girl I loved who was always so willing to serve her God?”

“I’m perfectly willing to serve God.” She stepped away, but he still stood between her and the door, well dressed, well fed,
and predatory. Her heart pounded and she felt the hot blood of desperate courage flood her cheeks. “But it’s not going to
be by letting you rape me any more.”

He gazed at her for a long moment. Shock at her unexpected defiance fought with sadness and a kind of calculation, as if he
were planning how to counter an opponent’s bold move. “Is that how you see your service to God? Calling your wonderful, loving
service that awful thing?”

“It isn’t loving. It isn’t even service. You raping me has nothing to do with God and everything to do with you. I want it
to stop, Phinehas. Now.”

“Do you?”

She took a deep breath. “I found out who I really am. I found out you had sex with my mother and my sister, too. And you want
to know what else I found out?”

Oh, it felt so freeing, saying the dreadful words to the one who had spoiled her life. Throwing them back in his face where
they could sit there, dripping with bile, making him as ugly as she had felt for years.

“I’m your daughter, Phinehas. You’ve been raping your own daughter all this time. Just imagine what the judge will say when
he hears
that
.”

She didn’t know what she’d expected. That he would shudder and collapse somehow, fold up and beg her not to tell anyone. That
he would be surprised, at least, that he had been committing an even worse crime than rape all this time without knowing it.

But he just stood there, in his tasteful wool suit and his shiny designer shoes, and gazed at her with sad affection.

“Poor Dinah,” he murmured. “What dreadful wickedness have you allowed to take root in your soul?”

They always blame their victims,
she heard Matthew’s voice say in her memory.

“The only wickedness here is you,” she retorted, keeping her voice as steady as she could. She took one step to the left,
hoping he would move, but he did not.

“I am a servant of God, Dinah,” he said gently. “And who are you? A deluded, isolated spinster under a lot of strain. It’s
obvious your father’s death and your mother’s illness have affected your mind.”

“There’s nothing wrong with my mind. You haven’t answered me.”

“About what? You’ve said so many things.”

“You’re never coming to my room again. If you do, I’ll—”

“What? Tell me, I’m very interested.”

She’d give anything to be a man, and smack that look of gentle amusement right off his face. But then she’d be dragged down
to his level of physical violence, and she was too good for that.

“I’ll go to the police. I have Tamsen’s birth certificate with your name on it as the father,
Philip Leslie.
”

“Tamsen? That bastard child of a Silenced girl? Why would the police be interested in that?”

“Because it’s proof you raped her, too,” Dinah said furiously. “Me, my mother, my sister. How dare you, you beast!”

Her barely contained rage had no effect on him at all. “The ramblings of a spiteful runaway teenager. Who would believe it?”

“The police would believe it.”

“And how can you prove it?”

Dinah thought fast. “DNA testing.”

He stared at her as though she were speaking a foreign language. Perhaps, to him, she was. “What?”

Thank goodness for the Internet and their forbidden laptop, out in the barn. Thank goodness for Matthew, whose research skills
turned up all kinds of helpful information. “A simple blood test can determine that you’re Tamsen’s father and mine, too.
And then your career as senior Shepherd is over. You’ll be disgraced and sent to jail,
Philip.
You’ll be the one who loses everything, not me.”

“Are you threatening the Shepherd of your soul, Dinah? What does that say about you, exactly?”

He was doing it again. Turning the ugliness on her. She batted it back at him. “I’m just telling you what the consequences
of your actions will be if you don’t leave me alone.”

“And if I do? If I allow you to flaunt your unwillingness in front of your family, and disobey the commandments of God?”

“Not just me. If you’re abusing anybody else, that has to stop, too.”

“And in return, what?”

“In return, nothing. You stop, or I go to the police. It’s as simple as that.”

He gazed at her the way one would gaze at a puppy, idly wondering if it will bite. Then he shook his head.

“Think carefully, Dinah. Think what your behavior will mean to the Kingdom. How it will affect me and my service. How it will
affect you and your service. How it will endanger your salvation.”

She knew better now. She knew that accepting his abuse wasn’t going to earn her anything but more abuse. And he . . . he had
no control over the salvation of her soul. In a blinding moment of clarity she saw him as he really was. Not as the Shepherd,
guiding lost souls to the heavenly pastures, standing in the gate deciding who would and would not come in. But as a power-hungry
man who was willing to manipulate and hurt to get and keep that power.

She owed nothing to that man.

“I have every confidence in my salvation,” she told him. “It’s God’s to give, not yours.”

“But is he going to give that precious gift to someone so unwilling and disobedient?”

“You just don’t get it, do you, Phinehas? Salvation can’t be earned. It isn’t a prize to be handed out to the person who works
the hardest. It’s a gift. Jesus made it possible, not anything I can do. Or anything you can do, for that matter.” A strange
feeling bloomed under her breastbone, like the feeling she got when the clouds split over the mountain and the sun came beaming
through. Joy and awe and a heady sense of freedom. “You can’t take my salvation away from me. No one can. Because God has
given it to me freely and I’ve accepted it.”

His eyes were cold and blue and very sad. “I’m sorry you feel that way, Dinah. I’ll pray that you won’t be deceived by a world
that makes the heavenly prize sound so easy. And now, if you don’t mind, would you please leave my room?”

He stepped aside and she darted out the door without a second’s hesitation.

Now she knew. He wouldn’t come to her room any more. He didn’t control her, either physically or spiritually.

Now she was truly free.

M
ATTHEW LEANED ON
the doorjamb of the hired man’s suite and listened as Phinehas’s sedan purred down the gravel drive and onto the road that
led to the highway. A few minutes later, he heard Dinah talking to the chickens as she made sure they were secure for the
night.

“Do you think she’ll want a cup of tea?” he asked Schatzi.

The hen fluffed her feathers, making herself comfortable on the threadbare pillowcase he’d laid on the back of the chair for
her to sit on, and made her bubbling-water sound in reply.

“Yes, I thought so, too.”

In a moment he heard Dinah’s quiet knock and let her in. “Did Phinehas have other plans for this evening?” he asked.

Dinah took off her barn jacket and subsided onto the couch. Schatzi clucked softly in greeting. “Hello, darling. Aren’t you
pretty up there. No, he decided not to stay. He’s gone to Blanchards’ for the night.”

“And what brought that on, I wonder?” When the kettle boiled, Matthew filled the teapot and set it and the two mugs they usually
used on the coffee table in front of her.

With a sigh that seemed to come from a place deep within, Dinah leaned over and let him fill her mug. “Me. I found Tamsen’s
birth certificate this afternoon. Her father is listed as Philip Leslie.”

“Who on earth is that?”

“Phinehas. I rifled through his suitcase to find something to confirm it, and found his passport. Of course, he then proceeded
to catch me in the act.”

“Oh, dear.” Matthew wasn’t sure he wanted to hear what happened next. “What did he do?”

“He assumed that since I was in his bedroom waiting for him, I’d come to my senses and was ready to take up where we’d left
off.”

“Oh, Dinah.” Dread pooled in his veins. “He didn’t—tell me he didn’t—”

If Phinehas had come within touching distance of her, Matthew could not bear it. Something inside him, some slowly tightening
tension that had begun to build after the other man’s phone call, would snap.

“No.” She shook her head and took a sip of tea. “I confronted him. Told him I wouldn’t let him do that to me any more. And
to make sure of it, I told him if he touched any of us again, I’d go to the police with my proof of what he’d done.”

The strain inside him released in a wave of relief and admiration. “Well done, Dinah. That’s brilliant.” With the last ounce
of his self-control, he stopped himself from hugging her. Now was not the time.

Could her long nightmare finally be over? Could it be possible that this girl who had been through so much might actually
have a chance at a normal life? So what if she had used blackmail to extract the promise. In this case, Matthew was sure the
end justified the means.

“You’ll be safe, then,” he said.

“For now. You just never know with Phinehas. He’s angry, but I’ve seen him angry before. And he always comes back expecting
to take things up just where he left them. Maybe he took me seriously. Maybe not.”

He took a seat beside her, and set his mug on the coffee table. “The point is you’ve set the boundaries. You’ve stood up to
him, told him no.”

“I’ve told him no before and it never did any good.”

“But it’s different this time. This time you don’t need him. He has nothing to offer you spiritually, so that means he has
no hold on you any longer.”