New Du Rose Matriarch

by Bowes, K T

  Laval sat down, relaxing in the familiar environment. He watched Hana as she stood and moved around the room, unable to settle. Fields stretched for miles beyond the house and Laval studied Hana with amusement. “There’s nowhere to run, Hana. I told you that already.”

  “Just kill me then!” she bit in frustration, tossing her red hair and spilling whisky up her wrist. “Get on with it!”

  Laval sighed and observed her as though she was a collectible specimen. “No. We’re going to play a game first,” he said.

  Hana shook her head. “I’ve had enough of this.” She waved her arm around the dowdy room. “Just kill me and then we’re done.”

  “Find the connection first,” Laval said with an evil smile which showed his white teeth. “Find that, then I’ll kill you.” He straightened his trousers and crossed his legs; a man with time to waste.

  Hana sighed, fighting the tremble in her legs as she observed his calculating smile. “What connection?” she asked. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “I know,” he said, his voice sad. “He lies to you about everything, so find it and I’ll be kinder with you.”

  “Who lies to me?” Hana asked, frustration in her voice. She turned away from Laval’s amused gaze and discovered a wall of photographs behind her. Hissing through her teeth, Hana moved towards the myriad faces of people she didn’t know, figuring the elusive connection might be found in a photograph.

  “Warm,” Laval offered from behind her and Hana gritted her teeth.

  She moved along the wall, not understanding the framed snaps of people she’d never met. Pausing over a photo of a younger Laval with a white haired man, she pressed her finger against the glass. “Your father?” she asked and turned to see Laval’s snort of derision.

  “That’s right. You never saw him, did you?”

  “So this is pointless!” Hana whirled around in anger. “I’m fed up of you. Kill me, come on, do it!”

  “Keep looking!” The blonde man stood and took a step towards her, his brown eyes flashing with supernatural malevolence. Hana gulped, her courage failing her as she turned her concentration back to the photographs. “Getting hotter,” Laval said as Hana’s panicked gaze took in a series of photographs from the North Shore Grammar School in Auckland.

  She searched the faces looking for the man behind her, until one of the larger photographs took her breath away. Logan’s boyish face smiled woodenly at Hana from the front row of a team photograph. The title over the picture stated, First Eleven Soccer Team, Auckland North Shore Grammar, 1988. Her husband’s distinctive grey eyes stared through her and Hana held her breath. He looked older than he was when she saw him on the London train, but he’d already made the transition to an adolescent possessed of devastatingly good looks. A soccer ball sat on his knees, clutched between strong hands which Hana ached to feel on her body. Her heart appealed to the wooden figure in the garish yellow strip, help me!

  “Hot and getting hotter!” Laval laughed at his own joke and Hana’s stomach roiled with a combination of the whisky and anticipation of his nefarious intentions. Hana’s eyes raked the bottom of the photo for Logan’s name, as though even the typed letters might offer comfort in her last hours. Du Rose, Logan (Captain) was neatly printed at the bottom, reminding Hana of everything her stupidity would deny her.

  Laval chuckled behind her and Hana exhaled a ragged breath which competed for release alongside the bile in her stomach. “Is it clicking into place for you yet, my darling?” he intoned.

  Hana turned. “I don’t understand.” She bitterly regretted the wobble in her voice which betrayed her and Laval shook his head and shrugged.

  “Perhaps Du Rose did marry a bimbo then. That’s disappointing.” He sniggered unkindly. “We didn’t know what kind of girls he liked because he rebuffed them all. If he hadn’t been so handy with his fists, someone might have inferred he was gay!” He laughed at his own words like a regressed schoolboy telling a filthy joke. Hana turned back to the photo and stroked Logan’s face through the glass. You waited for me, baby.

  “Look harder!” Laval gripped the back of Hana’s neck and forced her face towards the photograph. It came without warning and she cried out as the grass cracked from top to bottom under her cheek. “Look!” Laval shouted, smashing her face into it again. The whisky glass hit the wall, discarding its contents down the garish wallpaper and Hana saw a chip in the outer edge of the rim. She managed to hold onto the crystal tumbler, her fingers aching with the effort.

  Another face next to Logan’s seemed familiar and Hana peered closer. It was a much younger version of her attacker. “You were there,” she said, her voice strained with tears. “You know Logan from school.”

  “Oh, he never said? Poor Hana!”

  “He doesn’t realise,” she protested, still defending her husband with her last breath.

  “Maybe not.” Laval pushed her face into the photo again and Hana felt the glass nip her cheek. “More Du Rose dirty secrets,” he whispered in her ear.

  Hana peered again at the names underneath the photograph. Du Rose, Logan (Captain); L’Huillier, Michel (Vice-Captain.)

  “You’re not Michael Laval,” she gasped, a catch in her voice. “If you’re not Michael Laval? I don’t understand.”

  Laval touched the cracked glass with his index finger, keeping the tumbler of whisky in his hand. “Oh, but I am. I changed my name after my dalliance with the Du Roses. Your husband made sure I couldn’t work again under my given name.”

  “You took your father’s name,” Hana said, relieved as Laval released her neck.

  He shrugged behind her, his chest close to her shoulder. “My father’s a silly old bugger,” he said. “He’s good with the ladies, but largely harmless. His business is small time stuff, enough to keep this old place running.”

  “But he lived in a retirement village,” Hana challenged, “not here, the cops said so.”

  “He worked in the retirement village,” Laval corrected her, a smile in his voice. “Where better to find silly old ladies?”

  Hana shuddered. How many more victims were there who the police didn’t even know about? How many penniless old ladies died without sharing their terrible betrayal because of shame? “He was hardly harmless.” Hana winced, remembering the decomposed body of Bobby’s stepmother which laid in a storm drain for most of a year. “Your father killed Bobby’s mother. He was a greedy, murdering conman!”

  Hana cringed at the hot breath on the back of her neck as Laval spoke. “Yes, he did get a little carried away with the woman from Northland. I think he actually liked her.” He paused and pressed his lips to Hana’s neck. “I like you, Hana. We could be good together.” Hana shoved her elbow backwards, catching Laval in the stomach. He laughed and shot out his arm, sliding it around her waist before she could repeat the movement and dragging her forcefully into his side. Hana whimpered, sensing the tug of her baby, knowing instinctively Phoenix was crying somewhere and needing her mother. It made Hana frantic.

  “Why are you doing this?” she groaned. “I told you,” her voice pleading as she struggled against him, “Odering wouldn’t let me retract my statement. He said it was too late. I tried. You saw me coming back from the police station. It’s the truth! I can’t help your father.” The last of the whisky slopped out of the glass and down Hana’s wrist as she tried to free herself from Laval’s iron grip.

  “But it’s not about that anymore,” he said, smiling sweetly. “It’s about your husband. I never thought threatening you could stop the trial but it was fun watching you try. The police detective always wanted me. It must have been a dreadful disappointment to find my bumbling old man standing at the lake with false teeth and his walking stick.” There was a spiteful edge to Laval’s laughter. “Pity my father didn’t dispatch your husband before the police jumped him though. It was, after all, the point of that little rendezvous. I knew Du Rose wouldn’t just hand over the documents but my foolish father didn’t know that.”

/>   Hana shuddered, thinking of her gorgeous husband drowning in the wintery waters of Hamilton Lake. It wasn’t deep, but his hands were tied behind his back and he concussed himself on the metal facings as he went in. If Bodie hadn’t jumped in after him, she could have been widowed a second time.

  Laval’s monotone churned in the background and and Hana tried to tune back in. “My mother raised me in Auckland. She married a rich businessman and I went away to school. I did well and proved myself and as you can see, excelled in sport.” He waved his hand in the general direction of the photographs.

  “Why are you telling me this?” Hana asked, her voice flat. “I’m not interested in who you were or are. If you want to kill me, get on with it or let me go home. Your confessions aren’t necessary.”

  “Logan and I were friends, you know,” Laval continued as though she hadn’t spoken, gripping her round the waist with both arms. Hana felt sick to her stomach, knowing with a sixth sense she would never make it out of the building alive. Laval played with her like a spider winding a fly in its web. “We were good friends, shared the same interests and hung with the same group. We were both raised in opulent backgrounds without love. I was L’Huillier then as you can see. My mother didn’t put Michael Laval on my birth certificate; she was so keen to get away from him. But he found me when I was in fifth form and introduced me to his way of life.”

  “If you and Logan were such good friends,” Hana said, curious despite her terror, “why do you hate him so much now? What did he do?”

  Laval’s fingers bit into the soft skin at Hana’s waist, his face so full of spite it stunned her “I hate all of them!” She felt his spit on her cheek and winced, trying to take a step backwards. Laval’s grip slackened, but he didn’t let go.

  “The more I learn, the less I understand.” Hana heard the pleading in her voice and it irritated her, like failure. Confusion swirled around her as a dreadful fog and she couldn’t see the road through it. The thought of Phoenix built to a steady pulse in her head and caused her rational mind to take a step back and primal instinct to pervade. Hana’s psyche burned like a lioness deprived of her cubs and nothing else mattered as it overtook the forefront of her thinking. The pressure built in her head and heart, infusing her with a painful, powerful ache which went through to the bone.

  “I’m Liza Du Rose’s husband!” Laval hissed in her face and Hana looked at him in amazement, shaking her head.

  “No,” she said, “you’re lying. Liza never married.” Staring into Laval’s eyes, Hana saw the agony of failed love. She’d seen it in the mirror every day for the eight years before meeting Logan again. She wasn’t enough for Vik. He cheated on her and then died - because she wasn’t good enough. She saw its dark trail in Laval’s eyes and it shocked her to the core.

  “Is this what it’s all about?” she yelled into his face. “You make my life a living hell, you kidnap me and take me away from my baby because Liza what? Did she divorce you, disown you, cheat on you, what? What justifies this?” Hana tore herself away from Laval, stepping back to create a small distance between them before the back of her legs hit a worn brown sofa.

  “Better than that!” he said acidly, “She chose her law career over me. I wasn’t good enough! I’d have disowned my father in a heartbeat if she’d ever given me the chance. But no. She came to collect her stuff with him! Logan Du Rose. And that was that - marriage over. Not only did she destroy me on paper, she got her mother’s fancy church to annul our vows like they never existed and her brother ruined me in any business circles I might have made. Liza tells everyone she never married. She believes her own lies but she was my wife!”

  Laval’s wounds were deep and raw; the un-healing kind. “I greeted Logan as a brother that day. That bastard stood by while she cut me out of her life. I’ll never forgive him! And as for my old man - he ruined my chances of ever being happy with his sickness for money and his criminal friends. He can rot in prison. I really don’t care!”

  Laval turned towards Hana and his brown eyes morphed into pieces of coal, black and impenetrable. There was something else in his face too, something deeply disturbing. Hana couldn’t decide whether Liza’s treatment of him caused the thing to snap inside his soul or whether it was already broken. The sickness spread into his smile and she took a sharp intake of breath as he opened his mouth again. “Now Logan will find out what it’s like to be deprived of a love. But I won’t just kill you, Hana. I’ll make sure all his memories of you are sullied for the rest of his life. Every time he thinks of you, he’ll be so sickened, it would be better he never met you.”

  The oxygen levels in the room seemed to deplete as Hana gulped in the face of demonic malice. She set her legs slightly apart to balance herself, feeling Laval’s breath across the small space between them. She drew her left arm back slowly so the movement was almost imperceptible and then smashed the glass full into his face. The dregs burned his eyes and he dropped forward, glass protruding from his forehead. “Geez!” he screamed, pain pitching his voice high and tight. Shards of glass drove into the heel of Hana’s hand and wrist and blood squirted from an open vein, making a mesmerising arc of colour in the air. Laval ran his hands over his eyes screeching in agony as his frenzied fingers jolted the embedded shards. Hana ran.

  Wrenching open the door, Hana bolted, listening out for Laval’s men. She heard the sound of smashing glass further into the house, followed by shouting and yelling. She panicked, hearing running footsteps and turned the key in the front door, yanking it open and tripping down the steps. Blood poured from the heel of her hand like a relentless river, every movement grinding the glass harder into the vein, but Hana Du Rose focussed on Phoenix with every laboured step.

  Outside in the warm southerly breeze, a loud, frantic male voice screamed at her, “Down on the ground, get down!”

  Hana’s feet grew leaden as though she ran through wet concrete, her body going into shock. Through the haze of panic, Hana saw shapes outlined in front of her; terrifying, ghoulish men in balaclavas surrounding her and herding her back to the house. Hana sobbed in frustration for not anticipating guards and her words of protest slurred as they left her lips. The shapes pointed long guns at her, moving nearer in a silky, deadly dance. Hana whirled on the spot looking for hope, blood draining from her wound and spraying in a spirograph circle on the driveway.

  “Down on the ground!” the voice screamed again. It was pitched like a baby’s cry, designed to make her comply through panic. It worked. Hana looked at the concrete driveway in her dazed vision, creamy white with inset pebbles covered in splatters of blood like a work of art. She swayed on her feet, unable to figure out how to get down there as the ground moved beneath her.

  She felt light headed and strange, the screamed order repetitive and jarring. Glancing down made bile rise into her throat and she clasped her forearm with her right hand. A piece of expensive crystal stuck out of her wrist, glinting in the evening summer sun and catching the light, garish and misplaced. Hana groaned as her brain fogged over, no longer sure whose body she was in as she listed like a drunk. Her legs woodenly refused to fold and the ground seemed a long way away.

  “Mum!” Hana heard her son’s voice in her head as she staggered, blood coating her chin and tasting metallic in her mouth. She mumbled her apology to him for ignoring every good piece of advice he gave her, his helpful voice in her head proving useless against her feeble execution of his lessons. She’d changed location, drunk alcohol from the hand of a madman and ended up dead.

  “Down on the ground!” screamed the voice again and Hana prayed, confessing her sins as the concrete dipped and swayed.

  “How?” she breathed and relief came. Hana sensed the overwhelming peace of her God as he overruled her legs, making the ground come up to meet her instead.

  Chapter 25

  Hana woke up in the Waikato Hospital resuscitation room, dazzled by the overhead lights and confused by the unfamiliar voices surrounding her. She recognised one and
it resonated like a memory. “Hana,” the male voice whispered. “Oh sweetheart, what happened? I’m so sorry. What did you do to yourself?” A light touch of his lips on her forehead felt damp and Hana sensed fingers brush across her cheek. Then the voice from her past was gone and she reached for it feebly. How did he get into heaven?

  “Get a line in!” the male voice came again and Hana felt a sharp scratch in the crook of her right elbow, adding its pain to the other competing hurts. Cold liquid soothed the vein and Hana felt herself sucked down a plughole into nothingness.

  When she woke again it was quieter and the lights weren’t so bright. She registered distant sounds, trollies and muted voices and wondered if she was being processed for heaven still. She drifted out feeling a cool, damp cloth on her forehead and returned to the dark place.

  The next awakening was painful and Hana moaned. Her left breast approached explosion point and she put her right hand up, feeling the tautness of the skin and the discomfort her clumsy fingers created. “Oh, God,” she pleaded with an agonised cry as pain sensors woke all over her body.

  Logan’s face appeared close and Hana feared for her vision. “My eyes are screwed!” she wailed as though cross-eyed, she saw two of him. Whispered voices sucked her back into the pit of nothing and she chastised herself on the way down. Not two Logan’s – just a Logan and a Tama. “You came to heaven,” she slurred and returned to the anaesthesia for comfort.

  A few hours later there was just a Logan, no Tama. Her husband’s head rested on the bed next to her right hand and he snored gently. Hana forced herself up from the nothingness, climbing a never ending ladder into the daylight and refusing this time, to be sucked back down. She struggled up feeling exhausted, certain she no longer wished to be in the empty pit. It wasn’t heaven and she didn’t want to be there alone.

  Hana moved her hand, feeling the wrench of the cannula in the vein inside her elbow. Using great concentration, she touched Logan’s hair with her index finger. He started up and his expression looked bleary with sleep and worry, but the light went on in his grey eyes as he focussed on her conscious face. “Hana! Babe, I’ve been...” Logan bit his lip and left the sentence unfinished. His beard growth and mussed hair betrayed the inner agony of the last hours.