by Bowes, K T
Hana shook her head. “Doesn’t anyone know this is up here?”
Alfred shrugged and sniggered like a naughty boy. “I don’t think they remember.”
“But what about Logan? I thought he had the plans for this place.”
“This just shows as an empty space on the plans. The apartment belonged to my mama. She showed me this when I married Miriam and Ma moved downstairs to the ground floor because of her heart.”
“So Miriam knew?”
Alfred shook his head. “No. She had her secrets, so I kept mine.”
“So who maintained all the plants and the slabs?”
“Me,” Alfred said proudly. “But Leslie’s been bringing up seeds and plants to make the place look pretty. We raise ‘em in the glasshouse.”
“Ah yeah. And the marijuana too?”
Alfred nodded. “Yep and the shade cloth stops the cops seeing it when they do aerial sightings in the bush. It just looks like a covered skylight.”
“So have you always grown it?” Hana asked, uncomfortable with the realisation that her daughter spent a great deal of her life downstairs, metres away from a stash of illegal drugs.
“No, no, surely not. I came off the doctor’s pills when I married Leslie. It interfered with...things. I knew someone who took marijuana as pain relief and decided to grow it up here. It helps me.”
“Does Leslie use it?” Hana’s face betrayed her concern for Phoenix and Wiri, at the mercy of the woman at the wheel of her car.
“Never!” Alfred said with determination. “She don’t like it but she understands. And don’t be worrying about my moko. I come up here to smoke it, never near the babies. I don’t drive no more so I’m not a fool; my licence ran out last Friday.” Alfred looked sad at that. “End of an era. I won’t apply for it again. And I don’t take care of the children without Leslie anyways. I’m not a danger, I promise. I’m just in pain, Hana.”
“Alfred, how will this work if Ryan comes up here to live with you?”
The wily old man smiled and squinted in the daylight, like a man on top of the world. He shrugged. “I lived with Miriam for more than forty-five years and in that apartment downstairs for twenty of ‘em. She never knew about my secret wee garden. The boy won’t either.”
“Where do you dry the marijuana?” Hana asked, curiosity getting the better of her. Repeatedly saying the name of the drug might make it more acceptable, Hana reasoned. But it didn’t; it still felt wrong.
“In the passageway. There’s a bit to the left that’s higher. I string it up there. Wanna see?”
“Alfred, I already know too much,” Hana sighed. “Logan has a way of getting things out of me, without me realising.”
Alfred smiled and nodded, a regal motion filled with mana and nobility. “But not everything, Hana. Some cards you play very close to your chest.” The old man winked at her and she cringed, hating how that gave her away. Alfred laughed. “We need to go downstairs. Your baby will be home soon.”
“Alfred?” Hana had almost forgotten her question for him. He halted at the doorway and waited. “Have you ever smoked it up at our place?”
He pulled a face. “No, never. Only up here.” Realisation dawned. “Oh, those cigarette butts you found in your garden? Na, thems was different papers to mine. Thems was real thinly rolled and fine. I need the bigger, thicker stuff with my old hands. Want to see?” He turned back towards the glasshouse with eagerness in his face.
“No, it’s fine. How could you tell that? Weren’t they all trodden by the cows?”
“Not all of them. Logan just said that to stop you worrying.”
A sound like a wind chime came from just inside the open doorway. The area was sheltered from the wind and the sound carried easily.
“Girls are home,” Alfred said and hurried towards the stairs.
The downward journey was over in seconds and the pair emerged through the half door before the clattering of children’s shoes made it up the second of the wooden flights. “Mama!” Phoenix exclaimed, waving the wooden stick from an ice lolly in her face as Hana sat down at the kitchen table. She smoothed her red hair behind her ears and smiled at the child, receiving her on her knee with enthusiasm.
Hana glanced backwards at Alfred and Leslie, just in time to hear the loving wife ask her husband, “Are you feeling any better, makau?”
Chapter 52
“You took my bloody keys and wouldn’t answer my texts!” Tama raged, as Hana put the wiggling infant down in the hallway. “What are you playing at?”
“How’s the head?” Hana asked, sarcasm spilling from her tone.
“Painful!”
“Well it serves you right!” Hana watched Phoenix skip over to her carton of Lego and start building again, her dark fringe flopping into her eyes. The little girl bashed it roughly out of the way with a delicate hand. “And it means you’re still over the limit and not fit to drive.”
Tama gritted his teeth and rolled his eyes. “I needed to get back today.”
“No, you need to be ready to go on duty on Sunday. You can leave tomorrow.”
“I have stuff to do.”
Hana slapped a fat envelope on the table. “Well, I guess you can spend your wages,” she smiled, but it wasn’t a pleasant expression. Tama narrowed his eyes at the package.
“What’s that?”
“It looks like rather a lot of cash, from a grateful bunch of women numbering around ten apparently. They’d quite like to see you again, especially the bride - who wants her knickers back, please.”
Tama paled. “Oh.”
“So if the fire service doesn’t work out, you can always make a living as a stripper and a gigolo. You’re obviously very good at it.”
“Does Logan know?”
Hana turned to him with fury in her eyes. “I know! Doesn’t it matter to you what I think? Why does everyone care what Logan does or doesn’t know? Who made him the big kahuna?” Hana heard her voice take on an irritating screechy quality but couldn’t seem to stop herself. “Everyone tells me things and then says, ‘Don’t tell Logan.’ I should go into blackmail; I could make a fortune.” She stormed off towards her bedroom, ripping her jacket from her shoulders and hurling it onto the bed. It clipped one of the four posts and caused the voile to cascade down around her side of the bed, coming to rest on the carpet. Too tired to bend down, Hana walked over to it and flopped onto the bed, nestling into her pillows and turning on her side.
Tama’s face poked around the doorframe, misted by the pretty green voile that enclosed Hana. She sighed. “Go away. Your keys are in my bag by the door. Do what you want, Tama. I’m fed up of all of you.”
He ventured into the room, as though approaching an unpredictable filly, each footstep carefully planted and considered. “When you stormed out, Phoe said, ‘oops’ and giggled. She’s got your sense of humour.”
“Well, let’s just hope she’s got more sense full stop!”
Tama carefully pulled the green shroud from in front of Hana’s face and pinned it back to the corner of the four poster bed. “That’s wonky!” Hana grumbled.
“Tough!” Tama budged her with his hip. “Shift over, Miss Grumpypants.”
Hana humphed and moved backwards to the middle of the bed. Tama’s long frame settled next to her in a sitting position and he put his arm around her shoulders and pulled their bodies together. He ran his long fingers through her hair, massaging Hana’s scalp and making her want to purr. “I’ll leave tomorrow,” he agreed. “You’re probably right.”
“I’m always right. It’s just that nobody ever listens to me.” Hana’s attitude of ugly self-pity was intoxicating, her voice muffled with her face pushed into Tama’s hip.
“Yep. True dat.” His fingers rubbed and stroked absentmindedly, soothing a headache that Hana hadn’t even realised was there in the background. He stopped as his mind wandered and Hana slapped his hand to make him start again.
“Did you ask Bobby to leave?” It had been bothering h
er. Tama shook his head.
“Flick? No, you told me not to. I get the feeling he shot through of his own accord.”
“Ok,” Hana sounded grumpy.
Tama spoke in a conciliatory tone, “Seeing as I was stuck up here with no car keys and a banging head, I went for a little walk through the bush. I started where you found that cigarette. Wanna know what I discovered?”
Hana turned to face him, her green eyes reaching into his grey ones eagerly, “Yeah. What?”
“Well, somebody’s tiny gumboot steps had overwritten everything from the fence to a point a few metres in. She’d moved around a bit and stomped about and ruined most of the evidence there.” Hana groaned. “But fortunately, Poppa Rueben could track like the bushman he was. So he passed on his considerable skills to moi...”
Hana slapped his leg and Tama laughed. “Ok, so I tracked someone away from the house, two people actually. There’s been a fair bit of traffic that way and they’ve worn a track.”
“Two people?” Hana’s voice sounded small, remembering another time when two men had hunted her without mercy. One of them was Bobby.
“Yeah,” Tama pulled her in closer. “One overwrites the other and vice-versa. So they either come together or at different times. But then this is what’s interesting. There’s actually three tracks down the mountain. There’s the central one, with both sets of shoe treads, and then there’s one either side, far enough away from the central one to be undetected. One side has one set of treads, but the other side shows the other ones. It’s weird.”
“So they come up together, but then they also come up separately and stick to their own track? That’s bizarre.”
“It is, hey?” Tama conceded. “Thing is, as you stand at the top and look down, the footprints in the central track are the same as the ones I followed in the track to the left and that track, is old. It hasn’t been followed for maybe a week. It’s overrun by animal prints and bush debris. There’s stuff growing back over it. The prints in the track to the right, do show up in the central path, but underneath, fainter and only partial. But the track to the right is fresh.”
“So what are you saying?” Hana’s brain whirled from the information, going round in a washing machine-type cycle and staying dirty.
“I think that at first, maybe two people came up together or separately and used the same central track. Then for some reason, they came up on their own and didn’t want the other person to know and created different tracks simultaneously either side. The person using the track to the right, has kept coming up but carried on using their own track. But the other guy, used the left hand track for a while and then for some reason, reverted back to the central one and overwrote that man’s tracks.”
Hana groaned. “That’s too confusing. What if they came up together and walked side by side and liked to walk on a particular side of their friend? Like a habit?”
Tama shook his head. “Na. Definitely not. There’s about ten metres between the left track and the central one, and about thirty metres between the central and right tracks. The right one goes through some really dense supplejack and deep undergrowth.”
“How did you find them?” Hana asked, her voice betraying a new found respect for Tama.
He glowed under her admiration. “Just by sweeping the area and knowing what was there before. I’ve been hunting up here with Logan since I was a kid, before there was a fence or a house. There’s not many landmarks in there but I know most of them. Tracking’s in our blood.” He said the last wistfully, missing a previous life and pastimes that were pleasurable once. Hana heard the longing in his voice.
“Have you left tracks?
“Of course,” Tama replied with confidence. “But whoever uses the tracks won’t care. They don’t deviate, they just come up and down. They won’t see mine. I was smart.”
“So both tracks lead from down the mountain straight here, to our house?”
“That’s the interesting thing.” Tama settled, like a man with a decent tale. “The track on the right, comes up the mountain and mainly comes here, but I followed a fork to a different location further in. Then there’s a definite track from that location to here, but not to where you found the cigarette. That person goes to a different observation point near the cliff and he stands and watches the back of the house. That’s quite well used.”
“No!” Hana buried her face in Tama’s hip and put her hands over her ears. “This is too scary!”
“It’s gonna be fine. I’ll talk to Uncle Logan and he’ll sort it out.”
“You can’t!” Hana protested. “Because he’ll go looking for whoever has the marijuana and I promised!”
“What?”
“No, no, the person who has it, didn’t leave it there. He...they don’t smoke it up here. But if Logan goes looking, he’ll find the same person I did. And they aren’t our stalker. But it will cause so much trouble, it’s not worth it.”
Tama sighed in exasperation and ran his hands through his hair. “Why do you never leave things alone, Hana Du Rose? You’re like a one-woman-car-pile-up!”
“What’s at the other location? You said that the track on the right went somewhere else and then back to our house. Like a triangle? So what’s at the end?”
Tama raised his hand. “This is why we need to tell Logan. There’s an old wooden hut that we used to camp in years ago, when we hunted for more than a night. It’s ancient and just about had it now. It’s got sides and a roof but a good wind could blow it over.”
“So one of the people watching the house has been there?” Hana asked.
“No, they’ve been living there!”
Hana’s eyes widened in terror. “What? How far away?” She pushed herself up in the bed, her hair cascading over the pillows behind her. “What are we going to do?”
“We’re going to do nothing. I’m going to tell Logan.”
“How do you know they’re living there?”
“Were living there. He hasn’t been back for a few days. Put it this way, Ma, he has a liking for pig roasted over a spit and he hunts with a crossbow. There’s marks in the dust inside the hut from a very large shotgun being leaned up against the wall, but he would know not to use it up here. The sound would echo off the ridges and we would all hear it. Remember?”
Hana’s mind drifted back to Phoenix’s birth. She recalled Tama’s panic and his whispered words as he pulled the trigger. ‘Three quick shots in succession. Hunter in distress.’ The sound had rolled and reverberated around the mountains, deafening Hana as she laboured in the dirt. Logan had found them. Her hand strayed to her son and fear lit her eyes. “I don’t want to do that again,” she whispered. “I want to be in hospital; with midwives and lots of drugs.”
Tama laughed. “Then you need to stop lying to your midwife about still living in Hamilton,” he chided her. “Or else that’s exactly what’s gonna happen. How come she hasn’t visited you at home yet? That’s hardly gonna work is it?”
“She keeps texting me and I told her I was on holiday,” Hana hung her head.
“Ma!”
“I don’t want to have the baby in Auckland. I had my heart surgery in Auckland!”
“It’s hardly the city’s fault! Get real, Ma. You must be about due to pop soon!”
“Ages! I’ve got ages!” Hana raged. “It’s just a big baby, they said. Paris, I conceived him in Paris! I do know when I...”
“Enough!” Tama raised his hand and screwed up his face. “I have a good imagination and I really don’t want to know why that one time sticks in your mind, thanks.” He kissed Hana’s forehead and smoothed out the angry lines with his odd shaped thumb, Alfred’s gift of genealogy. “I won’t ask if Logan knows, because I don’t want to see you go up like a firecracker!” Tama laid down fully and pulled Hana’s head onto his broad, fireman’s chest. “Now shut up and relax, or I’m telling.”
Chapter 53
“That damn midwife keeps ringing the house. You need to call her back.”
“Oh, I didn’t know that.”
Bodie picked at fluff on his uniform shirt and shrugged. “She turned up and Amy told her you didn’t live there anymore. She asked you to call her.”
“No! Why would you do that to me?” Hana raged and Bodie jumped back in surprise.
“What did we do?”
“You just got rid of my midwife for me. Now I’ll have to start again and find another one!” Hana ran her hands over her face in irritation and tried to bring her redheaded temper under control. She took deep breaths and tried to count to ten.
“Oh, she said there was nothing wrong. You’re fine, the baby’s fine, she just needed to speak to you. She told Amy that it’s nothing to worry about.”
Logan took that moment to walk into the family dining room, his perceptiveness picking up the tension in the room within a heartbeat. He strode over to Hana and took her in his arms. “What’s wrong sweetheart?” He glared at Bodie sideways.
“Nothing!” Hana pushed his arms away in frustration, suspecting that the two men tied to her by blood and marriage were working up to a fight. “I’m going up to see Alfie,” she snapped and left the room quickly. Half way down the corridor, her heels clicking on the quarry tiled floor, Hana remembered why she went into the dining room in the first place. “Damn,” she swore. In search of the drink she had promised herself, Hana walked back the way she came, passing the door to the dining room and the males she suspected were already arguing. She entered the kitchen via the main door and snuck past the wide archway, catching sight of Logan’s rigid back as he faced her son. Bodie leaned against the windowsill, side on to him, ignoring whatever spewed from Logan’s mouth.
Hana sipped from the glass in her hands, trying not to slurp and draw attention to her presence. She stood in a relaxed pose, one leg bent at the knee as she contemplated the difficulties in her life. Bodie’s sneering laugh brought her back to a miserable reality. “Are you even sure that baby’s yours?” he asked. Hana froze in shock. “She’s a bit adamant about her dates. Amy says that’s what the midwife is panicking over. Maybe Mum’s got something to hide.”