Donovans 03 - Pearl Cove

hours.
    When Hannah would have spoken, Archer swiftly bent and kissed her. Then he murmured against her ear, “Look exhausted, sweetheart.”
    She gave him a sideways look and settled her head against his sweaty shoulder to punish him. Exhausted women slept, didn’t they? A little thing like 99 percent humidity and a temperature to match wouldn’t stop a really tired woman from curling up against her man.
    Archer stroked Hannah’s hair and caressed her cheek with his fingertips. He watched the passengers and the view outside without seeming to do either. The other couples talked in fragments, too tired to finish sentences. Neither he nor Hannah spoke until the jitney left them off in the heart of Broome.
    “Now what?” she asked, turning away from the jitney’s ripe black exhaust.
    “We kill some time.”
    “Why?”
    “I’m waiting for someone.”
    “Who?”
    “I don’t know,” Archer said.
    “That will make it hard to meet him,” Hannah said dryly. “Or her.”
    “I don’t know that, either.” He glanced at his watch. If April Joy was on the job, someone was cruising the airport lot right now, looking for a white rental car with a broken left taillight. “We won’t be meeting this person in the flesh, but our car will.”
    Hannah blinked, tilted her head, and stared up into his gray-green eyes. “Want to run that by again?”
    “It won’t make any more sense the second time.”
    She sighed.
    He smiled. The speckled sunlight and shade from her straw hat made her look like she had white-hot freckles sprinkled across her face.
    Before she could ask another question, a trio of men dressed in the Outback uniform staggered toward them. Two of the men were drinking beer. The third was knee-walking drunk. They were staring at Hannah like she had a For Rent sign tied to her butt.
    “Time to go sightseeing,” Archer muttered. The last thing he wanted was to call attention to himself by brawling with three randy drunks.
    Broome’s Chinatown was a cluster of whitewashed corrugated roofs, red grates and trellises, and palm trees that had weathered any cyclones. The Asian cemetery, where so many pearl divers were buried, had the weary dignity and ageless power of a place where too many hopes had died.
    Hand in hand, silent, Archer and Hannah walked slowly through the cemetery. The hot, wet breeze felt heavy with the secrets of men long dead. Under other circumstances, he would have walked quietly through the cemetery, reading the markers he could and appreciating the mystery of the ones he couldn’t. How people chose to meet the darkness that came at the end of the lightning stroke of life had always fascinated Archer, but even if he had been able to read Chinese, the messages engraved on headstones would have remained a mystery. The complex ideographs had been worn to shadows across the faces of the slowly, slowly dissolving stones. Canted every which way, poignant, elegant, the headstones gleamed redly above their rough, untended graves.
    “Will Len be buried in Broome?” Archer asked quietly.
    “No. He wanted his ashes scattered at sea.” Hannah closed her eyes and let the sultry air flow over her face. “He didn’t want any kind of ritual or ceremony. Said he wouldn’t need it.”
    “But the living do need it.”
    Something burned behind her eyes, something she refused to recognize as tears. She was finished with crying. It accomplished nothing. The past was beyond redemption and the dead were beyond tears.
    “Tell me about him,” Archer said quietly. “Tell me about the good times.”
    “It was . . . a long, long time ago.”
    “Have you forgotten?”
    Hannah’s silence grew and grew until Archer accepted that she wasn’t going to say anything about Len. Then she sighed, laced her fingers more tightly with his, and began talking about the man they had both loved before they understood that he could neither accept nor give love.
    “Len was mad for lemonade.” She laughed oddly. “I don’t know why that pleased me, but it did. He would hover around like a big kid while I squeezed lemons, then he would drink so hard and deep he would have a sticky mustache and drops of lemonade on his chin. I’d watch his pleasure and dream of having a little girl or boy who would hug my knees and dance with impatience while I fixed lemonade.”
    Archer thought of the pregnancy that had ended in sorrow and agony for Hannah. His throat ached with all that he couldn’t say, couldn’t do,