Donovans 03 - Pearl Cove

couldn’t change.
    “Len taught me to dance,” she continued after a few moments. “He had a penny whistle and an ancient Asian flute. When he was pleased with a project, he would play jigs on the whistle and we would dance until we were breathless, laughing . . . . He had a wonderful laugh, big and free.” Her breath squeezed. It had been years since she had heard Len laugh, really laugh. “When he played the Asian flute, I knew that he was almost sad.”
    “Almost?”
    “Melancholy, but not really depressed. More like . . . gently haunted. As though he was thinking about things that he had never seen or done and never would, but it was all right. He accepted it. And he played so beautifully, conjuring dreams with just breath, wood, and fingertips.”
    “Yes,” Archer said, smiling and sad. “The first time I heard Len play, I thought of Lawe and Kyle. Lawe especially. Put a harmonica or a flute in his hands and he’ll make you laugh and weep and yearn for everything that doesn’t have a name.”
    “That was Len.” Hannah made a soft, aching sound and looked around the cemetery that was both empty and full. After Len was paralyzed, he had never played again. He had never laughed again, not his real laugh. He had never touched her again.
    But Archer had asked her to remember the good times, and that was right. Thinking about the bad times didn’t solve anything. Remember the good, accept the bad, and walk on, because there wasn’t another damn thing she could do except hate herself for not being what Len had needed.
    “He could dance me into the ground,” she said huskily, “wipe the sweat off his forehead, and start all over again, laughing out loud, loving just being alive. That’s when I loved him the most, when I could all but touch the life pouring through him. He was . . . incandescent.”
    “I saw Len like that, but it wasn’t dancing. It was hell’s own bar brawl in Kowloon. Len and I fought back to back against a roomful of strangers. I fought because it was the only way to get out of the place in one piece. Len fought because he simply, fiercely, enjoyed the physical contest of man against man.”
    Hannah nodded. “That was Len. He really loved a good fight. He’d come home grinning with a shiner the size of a pie plate and his arm around the bruiser who had given it to him.” She smiled slightly. “Are you sure Len didn’t start that bar riot?”
    Archer smiled even as he realized that Len undoubtedly had done just that. “I’ll bet he did it as a way to test his newly discovered half brother.”
    She looked at Archer curiously. Her eyes were a blue so dark it made him think of twilight sliding into night.
    “I didn’t let him goad me into a fight with him, one on one,” he explained calmly. “He called me a coward. I just laughed at him and said I didn’t fight with family that way, no holds barred. I think the bar brawl was his way of finding out what I was made of.”
    “Did he try to get you to fight him after that?”
    “No.” Though Archer didn’t say any more, he was remembering the few times Len, without trying, had come real close to getting a brawl. All of those times had involved Hannah.
    “Guess he figured out real quick that you weren’t a coward,” she said. Despite the sadness that clung to her memories like cold to ice, she smiled.
    “Guess so.”
    “You don’t hold it against him?”
    Archer shook his head. “It would be like holding thunder against lightning. Len was what he was. Strong. Tough. Reckless.”
    “You sound like you admired him.”
    “Some of Len was worth admiring, worth remembering.” The rest wasn’t, but Hannah knew that even better than Archer did.
    She hesitated, then sighed and laced her fingers more deeply with Archer’s. “Yes, some of Len was worth remembering.” She lifted his hand and brushed her lips over his knuckles. “Thank you.”
    “For what?”
    “Giving the best of Len back to me.”
    Archer lifted Hannah’s chin, kissed her very gently, and hoped that both of them lived long enough to enjoy the gift.

Thirteen
    A rcher opened the small duffel bag that some nameless agent had left in the rental car while he and Hannah walked through Chinatown’s windswept graveyard. If April had followed directions, there should be at least two changes of clothes for them.
    “This should do it for the first round,” he said.
    He pulled out uncrushable white slacks and a colorful floral shirt of the kind