Pearl Cove

by Elizabeth Lowell

And here he was.

  Full circle.

  “Show me the shed where all this hard work paid off,” Archer said.

  Hannah stared at him for an instant, then turned away quickly. If she had felt cool when he took his warm hands from her arms, she was thoroughly chilled by the quality of his voice. It was Len’s voice, the voice of her nightmares, utterly neutral, inhuman in its absence of emotion.

  She stumbled over a piece of debris, caught herself, and hurried on. She didn’t have to look over her shoulder to know that Archer was following her. He was like Len. Nothing would turn him away him from what he wanted.

  And what Archer really wanted was Len’s killer, not Len’s widow. She would have to remember that the next time she found herself close enough to feel Archer’s heat, close enough to taste his breath, close enough to see his pupils dilate when her breasts brushed against his chest. Way too close.

  Not nearly close enough.

  Rather bitterly Hannah wondered if she shouldn’t have used Coco’s approach to sex—screw Archer on the ground, then jump up and dust herself off, ready to go back to whatever she had been doing before she was distracted by a clitoral itch. But it was too late to acquire the years of experience and nonchalance that Coco had. Hannah was stuck with being what she was, a woman who had had sex with only one man, and only for a few years.

  Her choice, she reminded herself. She paid her way out of the rain forest with her virginity. And while sex was exciting at first, it wasn’t worth the rest of it.

  Nothing was worth the rest of it.

  She stumbled over a broken board, recovered, and wished that she had thought to bring a flashlight.

  “What’s the rush?” Archer asked behind her.

  Only then did Hannah realize that she was all but running through the darkness toward the ruined shed, fleeing as though every mistake she had ever made was chasing her. She forced herself to slow down.

  “The door was here,” she said, pointing toward a gap in a wall.

  Silently he measured the distance from the shed to the place where the steel door lay crumpled next to the path. “That was one hell of a blow you had here.”

  “It was as big as I ever want to see. Actually, seeing is the wrong word. Once the rain hit, I couldn’t see beyond the porch. But I could feel it. The house shivered and jerked like a Tahitian dancer.”

  Hannah stepped through the gap that had once been a door leading into the shed. Even though almost half of the roof was gone and one of the corner pilings had sheared off, taking down most of the two walls nearest the door, she felt like she was stepping into a coffin. The claustrophobia that had begun with Len’s death rose up and filled her throat with raw fear. She froze, unable to take another step into darkness.

  To Archer, her sudden stillness was like a warning scream. Swiftly he pulled her behind him. It wasn’t much protection, but it was all he could do until he knew the source of the danger. Legs slightly braced, body relaxed, weight poised on the balls of his feet, he waited for whatever might come.

  Nothing came but the silent, intangible blending of tide and time and night. No movement, no furtive scuff, no rush of breath held too long.

  “It’s all right,” Hannah said, belatedly realizing why he had shoved her behind him.

  “The hell it is. You froze like you had been shot.”

  “Just nerves. Since Len died . . . claustrophobia, that’s all.”

  Archer heard what she didn’t say, all the things that had come crashing down around her in a few short hours. The devastation of the cyclone tearing Pearl Cove out by its roots. The horror of finding Len’s ruined body. The certainty that his murderer would kill her as soon as he discovered that she didn’t know the secret of the experimental pearls.

  “Can you take a few more minutes in here?” Archer asked softly.

  “Of course.”

  Her voice more than her words told him that was how Hannah faced life: whatever was required of her for as long as she could give it. He turned, touched her cheek for an instant, then stepped back before she could do more than take a startled breath. His penlight switched on, slicing through the tropical night. Everything the light touched was broken, bent, battered, and water stained.

  “Describe the shed for me, the way it was,” Archer said.

  Hannah let out the breath she had taken when he touched her face so unexpectedly, so gently. “There was only one door. Tables with trays of pearls went down the center aisle. The pearls are sorted for shape, color, size, and surface. We do the color sorting with natural light. Fluorescent light for orient and spotting blemishes on the surface. Indirect light, of course. With pearls, direct light hides more than it reveals.”

  While she spoke, the blade of light Archer held moved slowly across the interior of the shed.

  “Where did you work?” he asked.

  “Over there.” Hannah’s narrow, elegant hand flashed through the beam as she pointed toward a missing wall. “There were windows. Screens, actually. I worked with the best of the pearls, matching colors for necklaces or brooches or bracelets.”

  “Were the pearls left out or locked up at night?”

  “Locked up.”

  “Where?”

  “There.”

  With her hand over his, she moved the flashlight toward the place where the roof had collapsed. When Archer realized what he was looking at through the jackstraws that had been lumber, he whistled. Poured-concrete base, steel walls, tumbler locks and industrial-strength handles on all the locker doors. Ten feet high if it was an inch. Even with the outer door ripped off and the drawers yanked out and strewn around, the safe still looked as intimidating as the inside of a bank vault.

  “That’s a hell of a lockbox,” he said.

  “Len wasn’t a trusting kind of man.”

  Archer gave an odd crack of laughter. “I take it the pearls were in the drawers when the storm hit?”

  “Not all of them. Not even most of them. When the storm hit, pearls must have scattered all over the place.”

  “You weren’t here?”

  “No. Len kicked everyone out, locked down the storm shutters, and then did whatever he did when he was alone.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Hannah sighed and wondered how she could explain in a few words the husband she had never understood in ten years. “Len was forever pulling security checks, sending everyone outside and searching them for pearls. Sometimes, for no reason anyone could discover, he would just throw them out and spend an hour or two in here alone. He ate here, slept here, lived here.”

  “Sounds like he was worried about something being stolen.”

  “Pearls. And he was right. They’re gone.”

  “Stolen?”

  “The insurance people said the storm hit before Len could close up the safe. Everything was washed out to sea. An act of God. Uninsured, of course. So sorry, luv, and your next premium will be due on the twelfth.”

  Archer’s mouth curled. “Sounds like every insurance agent I’ve ever known.” Then, in a low voice, he asked, “What about the chisel marks on the door?”

  “It’s hard to find what you’re not looking for.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I thought.” He swept the light from side to side, looking for a fugitive glimmer of pearl. Nothing came back but shades of black. “How did they explain all the open lockers and drawers?”

  “Simple. Obviously Len was checking the inventory when the cyclone ripped the place apart. A lot bigger things than pearls went missing in the wind.”

  Part of Archer’s mind enjoyed the symmetry and utility of the explanation: whatever happened, the cyclone did it. If he hadn’t seen the chisel marks on the door and felt the ease of his knife’s passage between a dead man’s ribs, he would have been tempted to accept the explanation himself.

  “A variation of the SODDI defense,” he said softly.

  “What?”

  “A defense lawyer’s favorite explanation. Some other dude did it. I
n this case it’s a storm, not a man. No worries, mate. Certainly no murder. No insurance money. Just an exhausted widow, a destroyed farm, and shrugs all around, because what else can you do? Life’s a bitch and then you die.”

  Hannah wanted to laugh but was afraid she might not be able to stop. He had caught the man’s tone so exactly. “Sure you aren’t an insurance adjuster?”

  “Dead sure.” Archer waited for her to ask what he did. When the silence stretched, he smiled thinly. She assumed he was like Len had been before he was paralyzed—employed by people who didn’t want to know his real name and sure as hell didn’t want him to know theirs. “Occasionally I work in my father’s business, Donovan International. It’s an import-export business with emphasis on raw materials. My brothers and I have our own business, Donovan Gems and Minerals.”

  “You’re not what Len used to be?”

  “A mercenary? No, I never was.”

  “Len said you were.”

  “Len hired out to the highest bidder. As long as that was Uncle Sam, we sometimes worked in the same vineyards. When Len went freelance, I stayed behind. After a few more years I got out entirely.”

  “Why?” she asked.

  “Why did Len leave?”

  “No. Why did you?”

  “I wasn’t strong enough.”

  This time Hannah couldn’t help laughing out loud.

  Archer didn’t laugh. He had told her the exact truth. He hadn’t been strong enough to survive the covert game.

  Silently he played the flashlight over the jumble of lumber that covered the vault, and wondered if the flanking walls would stand up if he started moving debris around. He wanted to take a closer look at the drawers. Somehow they didn’t look quite right.

  “You’re serious,” Hannah said, no longer laughing, watching Archer’s face. In the bleak flare of the flashlight, his eyes were clear, polished crystal.

  “Some men can work in a sewer and come out smelling like roses,” he said evenly, running the blade of light over the ceiling. There were gaps, rips, open seams. It wouldn’t take much to bring another section down. “I’m not one of them. Every day, every lie, every double cross, every seductive, addictive rush of adrenaline . . . ” He shrugged. “It was eating away at me. I knew one day I would wake up, look in the mirror, and see something that turned my stomach.” Something like his half brother had become, but Archer wasn’t going to say that to Len’s widow. He turned and looked at her. “I got out. End of story.”

  Hannah didn’t know she was going to touch Archer until she felt the smooth pelt of his beard beneath her fingertips, then the surprising heat of his lips. She snatched her hand back. “That wasn’t weakness. That was strength.”

  “Len didn’t see it that way.”

  “Why would you care what Len thought?”

  “Didn’t he tell you?”

  “What?”

  “He’s my brother.”

  For a moment she was too shocked to say anything. She had wondered about the bond between the two men, but she hadn’t suspected a blood tie. Other than their size and way of moving, they hadn’t had much in common physically. Never once, not once, had Len so much as hinted at a blood relationship with Archer Donovan.

  Archer used the silence to listen to the sounds of night. He thought he had heard a scuffle, as though a foot had nudged into a stray piece of wood. But it could just as easily have been the wind shifting the precariously piled debris.

  Letting breath slide from his lungs, he listened intently, using every sense. He heard only the random movements of wind.

  “Your brother?” Hannah managed finally. “I didn’t even know Len had any family. The first time I asked about his parents was just after the wedding. He sliced me up with a few words and walked out, leaving me in Shanghai with no food and no money in a room I couldn’t pay for. I couldn’t speak the language. I couldn’t even read the signs. He didn’t come back for six days. I never asked about his family again.”

  Archer hoped the impotent rage he felt didn’t show in any way. That kind of rage was as corrosive as it was useless. Yet he couldn’t dodge a truth that was even more corrosive: by leaving Hannah with Len, he had doomed her as certainly as if he had stripped her naked and sold her on a street corner in Rio.

  He hadn’t been good enough to keep his own attraction to Hannah hidden from Len. That had made her a perfect target, a sideways kind of vengeance for the bastard half brother to take on the legitimate son. And if an innocent girl got chewed up in the process, well, too bad, how sad, and nobody asked to be born anyway. Len sure as hell hadn’t.

  Yet Len hadn’t always been vicious. That was what had hurt Archer then and still hurt him now. All those bittersweet memories of the first few years he had known Len, the quiet conversations about how to size up a man or a situation, his patient demonstration of survival skills, his deep laughter and easy silences, the smile that could melt glaciers, like his brother Lawe’s smile, and Len a blond Viking just like Archer’s other brother Justin . . . Even Len’s way of raking his fingers through his hair was like his father’s, just like Archer’s, a genetic echo rolling down the years between generations.

  “My father didn’t marry Len’s mother,” Archer said neutrally. “Dad was sixteen and in full rebellion against his father, who was a wild man by the name of Robert Donald Donovan. Layla was eight years older than Dad and going for the Donovan bank accounts.”

  “Sixteen.” Hannah’s smile was as bittersweet as Archer’s memories. “Must be something dangerous about that age. I was wild to get away from my parents. I would have done anything, even marry a stranger. Three years later I did.”

  Archer’s mouth turned down at one corner. He knew all about being a teenager and determined to get out from under the old man. The good news was that most kids survived it, and the dumb choices they made. The bad news was that some of them didn’t live and learn.

  He walked back toward the safe, drawn by its massive bulk in the midst of ruin. How like Len to pour concrete and raise steel walls and defy the gods of sea and storm. Had he lived to see his metal roof rolled up like the top of an anchovy tin?

  “Dad wasn’t desperate enough to marry a stranger,” Archer said, probing pools of black with his flashlight. “Life in the Robert Donovan household was loud and overbearing, but it was also warm and full of love. Probably a lot like what I grew up in.”

  “So Layla made her play for the gold ring and got turned down, is that it?”

  “Even if Dad wanted to marry her—and I doubt that he did—he was too young to do it without his father’s permission. Grandfather certainly wasn’t stupid enough to give that permission. Layla thought Dad was nineteen, not sixteen. She was furious. Then she was pregnant and demanding money. When the blood tests came back with Donovan written all over them, my grandfather offered Layla thirty thousand a year until the kid was eighteen, or a cash settlement of a quarter of a million. She took the cash and ran.”

  “And that was that?” Hannah asked from just behind Archer.

  “Until I was born, yes.” He stood on tiptoe and shined the light through a break in the tangle of smashed tables, broken chairs, and other less identifiable debris. “Dad was about twenty-five then. Seeing me grow made him think about the son he had never known. He hired people to track Layla down. It took seven years to find her. She was dying of alcoholism. She didn’t have Len. He had run away.”

  “How old was he?”

  “Fourteen,” Archer said absently. There were scratch marks on the drawers. No surprise there. The vault had taken a hell of a hammering from flying metal chairs, among other things. “Dad started looking for Len. He was still looking when I graduated from college with a lot of language skills and a restlessness that could only be satisfied by roaming.”

  “You found Len.”

  “Did he tell you?”

  “No. I just can’t imagine you not getting what you want.”

  “Imagine it. It happens five times a day.” An
d it had been happening a hell of a lot more frequently since he had landed in Broome and seen Hannah McGarry’s haunted eyes and long, bare legs. “Who opened the top drawers for Len?” Archer asked.

  “I did. He hated that, having to ask me. Just like he hated having to depend on my eyes for color matching.”

  “Len always was hell-bent on standing alone. Sometimes that’s the best way to get a job done, especially some of the jobs he did. But it’s a lousy way to live. Have you checked the top drawers since he died?”

  “Yes. There were some pearls in them, but not the best. Len kept those within his reach.”

  “What happened to the best pearls?”

  “Nothing left but the drawers. Empty.”

  “That was one busy cyclone.”

  “Greedy, too.”

  The corner of Archer’s mouth turned up. “Where’s the ladder you used to reach the high drawers?”

  Her hand closed over his wrist, pushing the flashlight in another direction. “There, along what’s left of the wall, behind that stack of shutters I thought might be saved.”

  Though the feel of her fingers sent heat licking through Archer, all he said was, “I assume Len had a room somewhere in the shed.”

  “Yes. It’s over there. Or was.”

  Archer looked at the emptiness of a destroyed wall. He could just make out twisted bits of plumbing sticking out of the floor. Turning away, he concentrated on what the storm had left behind rather than what it had taken.

  He crossed the shed, examined the shutters leaning against the ladder, and began shifting them to the side. There was no way to do it quietly. That made him uneasy, like the rising kick of the wind. Soft, furtive sounds would be buried in the background noise.

  The wind gusted in a long exhalation that made the shed creak and debris settle in a slightly different way. Archer froze, listening. He would have sworn he heard footsteps rushing with the wind.

  “Get out,” he said to Hannah.

  “But—”

  “Now.” Archer grabbed her and began running for the door.

  It was too late. A wall buckled and the metal roof came hammering down.