“We had several days,” she said, “but we were expecting just a tropical blow, nothing to get excited about. The storm was supposed to hit land about two hundred kilometers north of here. That changed in a matter of hours. Even then, the force of the wind caught everyone off guard. No one was expecting a big one.”
Archer came alongside Hannah as the path widened down toward the beach. “So Len’s murderer didn’t have a lot of time to plan.”
Though his voice was low, carrying no more than a foot or two, Hannah looked around hastily to make certain no one could overhear.
“Don’t,” he said.
“What?”
“Keep checking to see if anyone is nearby. You’re just showing your partner the storm damage so I can assess what can be salvaged and what’s junk, remember? Why would you care if anyone overheard us?”
“But what if—”
“No worries,” he cut in ironically. “I have eyes in the back of my head. If people are watching us, they’re doing it at a distance.”
Hannah hesitated, then strode forward again, matching strides with Archer’s longer legs. “We could see better in daylight,” she pointed out.
“We do that tomorrow, if necessary.” And if they were still at Pearl Cove, which Archer doubted. But he didn’t want Hannah to know they were leaving until they left. April Joy’s warning had been quite clear. Don’t trust anyone. In any case, he didn’t want people to know Hannah was going until she was gone. “We can see things in darkness that full light hides.”
“You sound like you’ve done this before.”
“Done what?”
“Look for murderers.”
“I’ve looked for a lot of things.”
When he said nothing more, she glanced up at his face. Moonlight and the abrupt tropical night had turned his hair to absolute black and his eyes to silver. Beneath the short, sleek beard, the line of his mouth was hard enough to cut glass. He looked like what he was, moved like what he was, like Len once had been: a man trained to kill other men.
The ruined shell of the sorting shed appeared almost welcoming by comparison. She hurried forward, only to feel Archer’s hand wrap around her upper arm, pulling her to a stop.
“Wait,” he said, his voice as soft as the breeze lifting off the coal-dark sea.
“Why—”
A curt shake of his head cut off her words. “Talk in a normal tone about Pearl Cove, how it works, what you do. Don’t mention Len’s death.”
For a moment Hannah could only stare at Archer’s face, her thoughts scattering like moonlight on water. His fingers squeezed gently.
“Start with winter,” he suggested softly. “What do you do then?”
“I—we—” She took a breath. “Um, in June, July, and August, we harvest shell that was seeded two years ago.”
“Why do you harvest in winter?”
“Because nacre is laid down thin in colder water, and thin nacre has the greatest luster.” She fell silent.
“How was the harvest this year?”
“I don’t know. Len always handled that end of the job while I seeded new oysters. He didn’t trust anyone but me with his experimental babies. And sometimes Coco.”
Adrenaline licked in Archer’s blood. Experimental. Maybe those oysters held the secret of the extraordinary melted rainbows shimmering beneath black glass. But that wasn’t a conversation he wanted to share with whoever was cat-footing through the ruined shed right now.
“Two years from seed to pearl?” he asked, as though he didn’t know.
“Right. It can be done faster—some of the Japanese Akoya oysters are harvested after only six months—but to get a top-quality pearl, the nacre has to be thick enough so that ordinary use won’t dull the pearl’s luster. That means the ratio of nacre to the bead has to—”
“Bead?” Archer cut in, trying to slow the nervous rushing of her words.
“The round piece of American mussel shell we use to ‘seed’ the oyster is called a bead once it’s surrounded by nacre. That is, once it’s a pearl.”
He made a small sound of understanding and waited. Hannah didn’t take the hint and resume talking. He squeezed her arm again, silently asking her to focus on the here and now, rather than on whatever shadows haunted her voice, her mind.
“The ratio of nacre to the bead . . . ?” he invited.
“Um,” she said, distracted by the gentle pressure of Archer’s fingers on her arm. They felt firm, warm, almost caressing. The contrast between the tenderness of his touch and the remote mercury sheen of his eyes was disorienting. “The, um, the nacre should be ten to fourteen percent of the total diameter of the pearl. Natural pearls are one hundred percent nacre, of course, except for the original irritant. The finest, most costly cultured pearls have forty to fifty percent nacre. Those pearls are worth much, much more than a pearl of similar size and shape that lacks the fine orient that only many layers of nacre can give.”
Lightly Archer stroked his fingers over Hannah’s smooth skin, telling himself he was only soothing her and at the same time reminding her to keep talking.
He didn’t believe it. Fooling himself was something a smart man didn’t do. But his fingertips kept on moving anyway, sipping lightly at the silk and warmth of her skin.
“If an extra eighteen months in the water makes for high-end pearls,” Archer said calmly, “why doesn’t everyone just leave the oysters in the drink and make a lot more money?”
“The longer you wait to harvest, the greater the chance that you’ll get a pearl that is blemished or off round in shape. Two years is what Len decided was the best return on our investment.”
“Which still makes Pearl Cove’s harvest a very high-end product,” Archer said.
“The—” her voice hitched “—best.”
Gooseflesh rippled up Hannah’s arm and shivered down to the pit of her stomach. Archer was making tiny, tiny circles on the sensitive underside of her arm. She would have pulled away, but she couldn’t move. She was having enough trouble just breathing. It had been a long time since a man had touched her so gently.
Even as the thought came, she knew it wasn’t true. It hadn’t been a long time. It had been forever. She hadn’t even guessed a man could have such tenderness in him.
Breath held in something that was closer to anticipation than anxiety, Hannah looked up to Archer’s eyes. He wasn’t watching her. He was watching tropical night sweep over the land in a dark, silent rush of extinguished light. The intent stillness of his body told her that he was waiting for . . . something. If it hadn’t been for the slight, continuous caress of his fingertips, she would have said that he didn’t even know she was there.
“Keep talking,” he said very softly.
Hannah filled her lungs as though she was going to dive below the warm surface of the sea to the shadowed depths. “After we seed and harvest, and even during, we’re constantly turning all the oysters in their cages.”
He made a sound that meant only that he was listening.
She didn’t doubt it. She just wondered what he was listening to, because she didn’t think it was her. At least, she hoped not. In the darkness and reflected light, Archer’s eyes looked predatory.
Then Hannah heard a small noise from the shed she had turned her back on. Fear raced icy over her skin and slicked her spine with sweat.
Eight
“No,” Archer said softly.
But even before he spoke, his hands clamped around Hannah’s upper arms, preventing her from turning toward the sound.
“There’s some—”
“I know,” he cut in, his voice still soft. “Talk to me. Tell me about Pearl Cove. Or else I’ll have to kiss you. Either way will work as a cover for standing around out here, but it’s your call.”
Hannah realized two things at once. The first was that Archer had known a prowler was in or around the shed from the moment he asked her to talk about Pearl Cove. The second was that the idea of kissing him sent heat chasing
after the chill of fear. She told herself she was losing it, that the last thing she needed in her life was another Len.
Yet she wanted Archer’s kiss. She wanted the heady combination of his gentle touch and dangerous eyes, his cool restraint and a body that radiated vital heat.
I’m crazy. Absolutely crackers.
Hannah took a deep breath and began talking. Fast. “We turn the oysters to improve our chances of getting a round pearl. We also clean the shells to get off whatever is clinging to them. Later, in October, we move the rafts so that the water temperature will stay as close to ideal as possible.”
“How big are your rafts?”
“Standard size.”
He gave her a look that reminded her to keep talking or start kissing.
“A raft is made up of ten parts,” she said hurriedly. “Um, each part is about twenty by twenty feet, and has a hundred separate baskets which hold a thousand oysters total. Ten per basket.” She swallowed and thought quickly. “The rafts are held in place by anchors and kept afloat by big metal drums.”
“A regular farm,” he said, telling himself that he wasn’t disappointed by her choice of talking over kissing. It was better this way, much better. He forced himself to look past her to the shed. “Do you feed your oysters, too?”
“The ocean takes care of it for us. The huge tidal shifts send a lot of water over the oysters. That’s why the west-coast oysters are so big. Lots of nutrients. Oysters are filter feeders. All they have to do to eat is suck the tasty bits out of the big saltwater smorgasbord that rushes by them as the tide moves in and out.”
Archer smiled slightly, a white gleam in the night. Hannah thought of the kiss she had turned down and told herself she didn’t regret it.
“After the operated shell—um, the oysters we just seeded—rest for about a month,” she continued huskily, “we move the survivors to the growing-out area.”
“Survivors? Do you lose a lot?”
“The norm is somewhere between twenty and thirty percent, but Pearl Cove loses only eleven percent. Coco and Tom are very, very skillful. It’s rare for them to injure the tiny pea crab that lives inside each healthy oyster.”
“So you’ve seeded and the crabs are happy. Now what?”
“Prayer,” she retorted. “Oysters would much rather reject foreign bodies than make pearls. That’s why we slip in a tiny bit of living mantle tissue from a donor oyster of the preferred color. It grafts onto the mantle near the seed and—”
“You lost me. Color?”
Hannah doubted she had lost Archer, but she wasn’t going to argue the point. Not when his eyes were narrowed, intent on something over her shoulder. She cleared her throat against the fear that kept crowding in.
“The pearl’s color reflects the inner shell color of the oyster.” Her voice frayed, then steadied. “Some oysters make silver-white gems. Some pink. Some gold. Some black, and so on. The mantle—the outer surface of the living animal—is the nacre factory. Mantle from an oyster with pink nacre on its inner shell will produce a pink pearl, even if it’s put into an oyster with a black shell. Len also did some biogenetic sleight-of-hand with the mantle so that—”
“Right,” Archer cut in, heading her off from dangerous territory. “So we have a seed and a bit of mantle that is actually a biological work order for a certain color of pearl.”
“Close enough,” she muttered. “Most people lose about twenty percent of the grafts. We lose just over seven percent.”
“Good hands?”
“The best.”
Silently Archer doubted if even a fantastically skilled technician could lower the odds that much. Waving the flag of skill and biogenetics was a way of explaining how a medium-sized operation such as Pearl Cove ended up with more than its share of pearls. But he didn’t get the feeling that Hannah was lying. Wherever the truth lay, she believed what she was saying.
Len had always been a very smooth liar. Where he came from, it was a survival skill.
“We also do well on the quality of the pearls,” Hannah said. “More than sixty percent of our pearls are good. The average for other farms is thirty-five percent. Another ten percent produces junk. Our percentage of junk is just under six.”
Archer grunted. Len must have loved throwing his pearls on the table and daring any of the other farmers to prove that they were the result of anything other than exceptional skill.
“Len was always working on our percentages,” Hannah continued. “He said they were good, but not good enough. Even for us, pearl farming wasn’t a sure thing.”
Absently Archer nodded, but his eyes were looking past her. She took another breath and tried to think where she had left off in describing the yearly cycle of pearl farming.
“Growing-out area,” he said so softly that she barely heard.
“Oh. Um. Growing out. That’s where we have long lines snaking through rows of buoys. Panels of oysters hang down off the lines. They dangle there and grow while we begin the year fishing for wild shell—oysters—in January and February.”
“Wild oysters.” He smiled slightly. “You make it sound like something you have to chase down and lasso.”
Hannah’s laugh was as soft as the air. And like the air, it rippled over Archer, bringing all of his senses alive.
“Almost,” she said. “Behind a ship the men dangle off long ropes, towed only a few feet off the bottom. The trick is to stay close enough to the bottom to see the wild shell—and oysters could teach a chameleon how to hide—but not so close as to stir up the silt because then you can’t see anything at all.”
“So you just go out there and grab what you can?”
This time her laugh wasn’t soft or amused. “Not a chance. The government licenses growers to take a certain amount of wild shell and to raise a certain amount of domestic shell. Some growers get a higher quota than others, according to a formula only the government can understand.”
“Politics.”
“It’s a government, isn’t it?”
“Which, translated, means that the licenses can be used to reward or punish.”
“The bureaucrats will deny it to the last breath.”
“Did Pearl Cove have trouble getting wild shell licenses?” he asked.
“We didn’t get quite enough to survive, much less to grow. That’s why Len had to find other ways to bring up our production in relation to other pearl farms.”
“Why was the government giving you a hard time?”
“They thought Len was holding back the best of his pearl production and selling it outside the Australian-Japanese cartel.”
Silently Archer wished he had never raised the question. But having done so, it would seem odd to an eavesdropper if he just let the matter drop.
“Was he?” Archer asked, but the sudden pressure of his fingers on Hannah’s arm said, Be careful.
“No.”
He relaxed his grip and returned to the tiny, hidden movements on her skin that pleased his fingertips. “Governments are always suspicious.”
“They had reason to be. Less than half of our oysters were for normal sales. The rest were experimentals. Experiments fail a lot more often than they succeed.”
“After you collect wild shell, what do you do?” Archer asked, wanting to move on to safer topics.
“We let it ‘rest’ for a month or two, to recover from the trauma of being handled and moved to a new place. The shells have to be watched and cleaned. And the shells we seeded the previous year have to be X-rayed to see if the bead has been rejected. If so, we seed again.”
“One shell, one bead, one pearl?”
“Some of the farmers use several beads, but the result is almost always inferior to just one.”
“What’s wrong with them?”
“The pearls or the farmers?” Hannah asked dryly.
“The pearls. I’ve given up trying to understand people.”
She smiled and laughed softly. Archer’s fingers stilled for a moment, then began
moving again, enjoying. Caressing.
“The Japanese started multiple seeding with their little palm-sized Akoya oysters.” Hannah’s voice hitched at the feel of his hands moving lightly on her skin. “They can get lots of pearls from one shell, but the pearls just aren’t good. Even big oysters like the ones we have in the South Seas don’t seem to be able to produce more than one quality pearl at a time. The nacre gets too thin or the shape is off or the beads are rejected by the oyster. Len was working on the problem. So is the government. As far as I know, no one has found a solution.”
“So you’ve lassoed wild shell, pampered it, seeded it, pampered it some more, repeat as necessary. Now what?”
“Now it’s around April, the water temperature is dropping with the onset of winter, and we’re letting the shells rest. That’s when engines are overhauled, hulls are cleaned, rafting equipment is checked out, and whatever has to be built or repaired is taken care of. In May it’s back to the grindstone, cleaning shells, turning them, checking the long lines and the cages for damage, gearing up for the harvest and seeding time, and so on. Before you know it, it’s June again, harvest time. Full circle.”
“Sounds intense.”
“It is.”
“You like it?”
Hannah hesitated. She had never thought about liking or not liking; it was just the way life was. “Pearl farming is relentless, but it kept me sane. Yes, I guess I like it. I know I needed it.”
Archer heard the emotions tightening her voice, felt them in the tension of her arms beneath his hands. He wanted to pull her closer, soothe her, and then kiss her blind.
Slowly he lifted his hands from her tempting flesh and looked past her to whoever was prowling through the ruined shed. Or had been. The sounds had slowly receded, as though someone had used their voices to cover any small noises he made retreating from the shed.
Archer had heard that kind of furtive shuffling too many times before, in too many places where violence prowled in the shadows of civilization. He had vowed never to go there again.