Donovans 03 - Pearl Cove

that you like?”
    “That orange pearl. The one from a Vietnamese conch.”
    Teddy looked surprised, then laughed ruefully. “Damn. I was hoping to stump you on that one, too.”
    “Too?”
    “Like the black pearl.”
    Archer looked at the pearl, night-dark, yet brooding in all the colors of the rainbow. “Nothing is like that pearl.”
    It was the type of gem men killed for.

Two
    Know you, perchance, how that poor formless wretch—
The Oyster—gems his shallow moonlit chalice?
Where the shell irks him, or the sea-sand frets,
He sheds this lovely lustre on his grief.
    SIR EDWIN ARNOLD
BROOME, AUSTRALIA
    November
    S unlight hammered down on the land. Even the Indian Ocean lay flattened beneath the weight of the summer sun. The water was a shimmering turquoise stillness unmarked by any wind, any breeze, any stirring of air. Nothing moved but sweat sliding over flesh in oily silence.
    Hannah McGarry didn’t notice the brutal heat or the slickness of sweat on her own skin or the weight of the Chinese child she held in her arms. Len McGarry was dead. Victim of a cyclone.
    No one else from Pearl Cove had been killed, though a few other men had been hurt by flying debris and such. Qing Lu Yin had the worst of it: deep bruises, a nasty gash on his chin, a black eye. But he insisted on working anyway. So did the rest of the men. They knew that Pearl Cove was their living.
    Despite the ruin of the rafts and sorting sheds, only a few cottages had been damaged. No children had been so much as scratched. For that she was greatful.
    Shifting the child’s weight on her hip, she ignored the vague ache in her lungs and the lukewarm salt water leaking out of her short hair, residue of her most recent dive to the bottom of the shallow cove. Diving was hard work, but she loved it. Suspended in the shimmering, translucent water, she was free.
    She wasn’t diving now. She wasn’t free. She was trapped in sunlight, struggling to keep her face from giving away her thoughts. She couldn’t afford to show any fear, any anxiety, any of the violent emotions seething just beneath the fragile lid of her self-control.
    “Sad-sad?” the four-year-old asked.
    Terrified was the word that leaped into Hannah’s mind, but she smiled down into the child’s beautiful, innocent face as though nothing was wrong. “Just thinking, darling.”
    “Thinking,” he repeated carefully.
    “Good,” Hannah said automatically. Of the seven workers’ children she gave English lessons to, Sun Hui was the quickest. “The storm damaged—hurt—many things.”
    Hui nodded solemnly.
    From the direction of the workers’ cottages came a spate of Chinese. Hui turned, looked, and said, “Ma-ma.”
    “Okay, darling.” She kissed his golden cheek and was kissed in turn. Reluctantly she released his vital, eager weight. Of all the disappointments her marriage had brought, the lack of children was the most painful. “Off you go. Careful! There’s a lot of debris—junk—left by the storm.”
    “Junk. Storm. Yes!”
    Dark blue eyes narrowed, Hannah watched until Hui vanished into a cottage. Only then did she turn back and concentrate on the wreckage that had once been Pearl Cove. Broken things were hopeful; they could be fixed. There was a lot that needed fixing right here, right now.
    A ruined dock jutted out from the sand like broken teeth. Rafts that had once supported thousands upon thousands of pearl oysters in various stages of growth lay washed up on distant beaches or sunk where no eye could see. Boats for harvesting and seeding sat on the watery bottom of the cove.
    The damage wasn’t limited to Pearl’s Cove’s floating equipment. Flung by a savage wind, the main sorting shed’s door lay drunkenly alongside the path to the house. The metal roof gapped and curled around the edges. Wrenched, crumpled, useless, the windows’ remaining steel shutters guarded a gutted building. The shed itself sagged where footings had been undermined by the furious waves.
    Even Len’s “cyclone-proof” pearl vault hadn’t stood against the violence of the storm. The wind’s greedy fists had battered the metal until something exploded, strewing pearls everywhere. And everywhere, someone had been there to scoop them up. Or maybe many hands had grabbed the iridescent wealth. Hannah didn’t know. It was important that she not know. Or at least, not appear to know.
    Len was dead. But it wasn’t an accident.
    Whoever had killed her husband could just as