Donovans 03 - Pearl Cove

better than saying what he was thinking: he had been a fool for ever thinking that Hannah’s sweet innocence could neutralize, much less heal, Len’s bitter experience. “I’m here.”
    “Her passport shows a lot of action in the next three years. All over Southeast Asia, Malaysia, Philippines, every port I’d ever heard of and some I hadn’t. No credit record, though. They must have paid cash for everything, including the ten days she spent in a hospital in Kuching.”
    “Hospital? When? Why?”
    “About four months after she was married, she got real sick. The records just said something about a fever of unknown origin. They came within an ace of losing her, first to fever and then to bleeding. She’s A positive, by the way.”
    “Did she have one of those hemorrhagic fevers?”
    “No. She miscarried a seven-month fetus. Stillbirth. A boy. Hard to believe we had a little nephew and never knew it.”
    Archer didn’t answer. He couldn’t. He could barely breathe around the vise gripping his gut. Len had never mentioned Hannah’s near-fatal illness or the loss of their child.
    “Did you know about that?” Kyle asked after a minute.
    “No.”
    Though Archer said nothing more, Kyle knew his brother too well to be fooled by silence.
    “It got to me, too,” Kyle said simply. “I went and found Lianne and held her, just held her. When I felt our babies move, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.”
    The uncertainty of life and the finality of death haunted Kyle’s voice as surely as it haunted Archer’s mind. He forced himself to breathe, to talk, to reassure his youngest brother that their twins would be the lucky ones, the ones who not only survived but thrived.
    “Don’t worry about Lianne and your twins,” Archer said. “Len dragged Hannah through some of earth’s deepest hellholes. He didn’t live fancy, either. What the natives ate, he ate. What they drank, he drank. That didn’t change after he got married.”
    “I know. I rechecked the passport stamps after I found the hospital records. A week here. Two weeks there. Two days at the next place. Sometimes only a few hours. Flying all over the South Pacific with side trips to Japan or Jakarta just for variety. Was it a coincidence that every place Len went grew, traded, or smuggled pearls?”
    “No.”
    Kyle waited, but his brother didn’t say anything more. He started to snap at the lack of response; then he remembered that his brother had been up for more than twenty-four hours, had seen his half brother’s corpse, and had just found out about the baby nephew they would never get to nuzzle and tease and love.
    “I gotta say,” Kyle muttered, “our half brother had shitty taste in friends. I ran the names of some of the people he met with. Bad cess. Really bad. Right down there in the toilet with the Red Phoenix Triad. Different names, of course. Same slime.”
    “When you go looking for secrets, you make your bargains where you have to.”
    “Was he a spook?”
    Archer didn’t want to answer, but he did. Len had been Kyle’s brother, too. “He began as an officer in a U.S. foreign intelligence agency. He finished as a mercenary. Sometimes he worked for us. Sometimes for them. And always he worked for himself.”
    “I’m not sure I like the sound of that.”
    “You have good instincts. But remember—Len didn’t start out where he ended up. What else did you find out about Hannah?”
    “She keeps the books for Pearl Cove. She orders equipment locally and electronically. If she shops locally for clothes or cosmetics, she pays cash. The farm has open accounts at several places in Broome.”
    “What kind of payment record?”
    “Pretty good. Not great. Just okay. The last year must have been hard. Some of the accounts started dunning.”
    “How serious is it?”
    “Pearl Cove is on a cash-only basis with an outfit called Smithe and Sons Equipment. The Broome Green Grocer is a little more flexible, up to one hundred dollars Australian. She orders men’s and women’s clothes by credit card at a virtual store that specializes in casual tropical gear. She orders books at several virtual used-book stores and book exchanges. Reads everything from science fiction to philosophy, with stops in between for Chinese poetry and girl fiction.”
    “Girl fiction?”
    “Yeah, stories about family and marriage and love, that sort of stuff.”
    Archer grunted and drank more coffee. The breeze through the verandah’s screen door