Part 3 (1/2)
”My wife lives in Kuala Lumpur.”
”I don't care if she lives on Jupiter. I'm not in the market for a married lover. Nothing personal, Ian. It's just the way I am. It won't change. I value your friends.h.i.+p, but not enough to have this conversation every time we talk. Change the subject.”
”b.l.o.o.d.y nun,” Chang muttered under his breath.
”Yes.”
Neither said another word until they were in the shade of the verandah. The storm had done little damage to the house: broken windows, ripped screens, one corner of the roof torn away, plants snapped off or whipped to rags by the wind. Small things, compared with death.
”Who replaced the windows?” Chang asked.
”Christian's brother-in-law is a glazier. Christian did all the screens. The verandah was a mess.”
Chang's full mouth thinned. He didn't like the thought of the s.e.xy, shrewd, young Aussie hanging around Pearl Cove, even if he was living with the type of blonde most men only dreamed of getting their hands on. ”Why didn't you call me?” Chang asked. ”I would have sent workmen over.”
”Thanks, but Christian was here when the storm hit.”
”I suppose he fixed the roof, too.”
”Tom did. Since he stopped diving, he's made himself invaluable as a handyman.”
Chang tried to imagine the bent old j.a.panese man scrambling up a ladder and nailing tin sheeting in place. He shook his head. ”Nakamori is too old for that kind of work.”
”He's only sixty.” What Hannah didn't say was that Chang was fifty-three. And Len had been forty-five. Too young to die.
”A sixty-year-old former diver is an old man.” Chang looked at his watch. ”I have ten minutes. Fifteen at most.”
”Tea? Beer? Water?”
”Nothing.”
Hannah rinsed off her dive gear, dumped it in a basket on the verandah, and waved Chang toward the wicker chairs. She went to her favorite place, a hammock chair suspended from a bolt in the slanting roof. The airy netting of the sling let a breeze swirl around her with every gentle push of her foot against the wooden floor. The verandah's new screening s.h.i.+mmered and rippled in the sun, making the world beyond look dreamy, unreal.
”All right, Ian. What does the Chang family want from me?”
”We're willing to a.s.sume Pearl Cove's debts.”
”Any particular reason?”
”The usual.”
”Which is?”
”Business,” Chang said curtly.
”I see. What do I get out of this business?”
”A partner who can rebuild Pearl Cove.”
”Partner.” Hannah toed the floor and swung gently. If Chang knew she had a partner already, he wasn't letting on. She wondered if that made him more or less likely to be Len's killer.
”I give you fifty percent of Pearl Cove and you a.s.sume all debts, is that it?” she asked.
”Seventy-five percent.”
The hammock chair paused in its swing. ”We give up seventy-five percent?”
”There's no 'we' about it. Len is dead. Pearl Cove is just you, Sister McGarry.”
”I'll think about your family's offer.”
”Don't think too long.”
”Is there a time limit?”
Abruptly Chang stood up. ”Mother of G.o.d, you can't be that naive!”
For a time there was only the soft squeak of the hammock chair against the ceiling bolt as Hannah swung back and forth, back and forth.
”I guess I am that naive,” she said finally. ”Explain it to me.”
”Do you really think Len died because of that cyclone?”
Every muscle tensed. She wanted to get up, to scream, to run Since it would be stupid to do any of those things, she did nothing at all.
”I could list Len's friends on one finger,” Chang said bluntly. ”I don't have enough hands to list his enemies. It's not only his charming personality I'm talking about. It's pearls and double crosses. He b.u.g.g.e.red one too many big players.”
”How?”
”Don't waste my time. You're his wife.”
”Yes. His wife. Not his business partner. I run the house, keep the payroll, collect rent from the workers who live on site, order equipment for the farming operations, and have the final say on color matching the harvest. That's it.”
”What about the black pearls?”
”What about them? The 'big players' you mentioned know how to make silver-lipped oysters produce black-toned pearls or gold-toned or pink or all three in the same oyster. Members of the South Sea Consortium developed the technology. And they kept it to themselves. It has nothing to do with Pearl Cove.”
”I'm not talking about the normal run of black pearls. I'm talking about the rainbows.”
Stillness crept through Hannah's blood like ice forming on an autumn pond. Though no one was supposed to know about the extraordinary pearls, word had inevitably leaked out. Rumors thrived like termites in the emptiness of Western Australia. Yet no one had actually seen those special pearls, except Len and herself. And his killer. Len had died because he knew the secret of producing extraordinary black pearls. People a.s.sumed she knew the secret, too. But she didn't.
Her husband had trusted no one. He always opened the ”experimental” oysters himself. And he was careful to have ordinary oysters in among the special ones, just to have some pearly junk to show the curious. He never would have told her about the rainbows at all if he hadn't needed her hyperacute color perception to find the best matches among the iridescent, seductively colorful black gems.
Despite all Len's care, despite his paranoia, in the past few years, some of the special black pearls had been stolen and found their way to the marketplace. Yet Len wouldn't share the secret of producing the black rainbows.
He had been killed for it. As soon as the murderer discovered that she knew nothing about producing them, her life would be worthless. She would be all that stood between the killer and owners.h.i.+p of Pearl Cove, home of the oysters that produced fabulous, unique black pearls.