Hana Du Rose Mysteries Boxed Set: Books 1 - 4

by Bowes, K T

  When Logan appeared to be napping, Sunita whispered gossip in hushed tones and Hana’s chest involuntarily tightened at her chosen topic. The air became fraught with tension and instinct told Hana it was not only her own. “Dreadful about Anka and that student isn’t it? Don’t know how Angus kept a lid on it! I don’t think many people know though. I heard it from Angus’ personal assistant.”

  Hana didn’t comment and tried hard not to betray anything through her body language. Sunita looked guilty and tried to reassure Hana she wouldn’t repeat it to anyone else. Poor Hana was unbearably uncomfortable but tried not to move, lest she accidentally give anything away in that single action. She was dismayed when Sunita continued in a hushed voice, “Must have been hard for him too,” she pointed at Logan, “really embarrassing!” Without meaning to, Hana looked surprised and Sunita stopped momentarily and then qualified her line of gossip. “You know, with the boy being his nephew. He’s been paying to keep him here and now the little git has gone and done this.”

  The information was a bombshell and it showed in Hana’s face along with her inability to control her bottom jaw, which fell unattractively downwards. The whole drama slotted into place like an oiled machine to make a particularly unpleasant scenario. She shook her head in dismay, deliberately not looking across at Logan. Something told her he was not napping, but perfectly awake and looking straight at her. Damn Anka! No wonder she hadn’t wanted Hana to mention it to Logan that night.

  For a moment, there was silence and then came the awful sound of Pete farting in his sleep. The most dreadful smell like pure slurry leaked slowly across the room, making the women gag and hold their noses and mouths. Logan leapt to his feet with a roar of disgust. The three battled it out to get to the door and hammered for all they were worth, desiring escape more than ever as the fog of death drifted towards them.

  The small boy would live to regret being out of class when he was not supposed to be. He would also live to regret opening the stock room door with the muffled code being yelled at him from inside the cupboard. He would later regale his avid and gullible listeners with the tale of the three shrieking banshees leaping from the cupboard at him, accompanied by the nauseating stench of death - fit to make a person sick. The most chilling sight was the cadaver lying slumped on the floor of the cupboard already rotting, its eyes rolled back in its head. Past-all-medical-help. More mysterious was his return to the room accompanied by the school nurse, only to find it locked and empty and absolutely no trace of the body. The nurse went back to the sick bay with her arm around the blithering boy and eventually growing tired of his tall stories and ramblings, rang his mother to come and fetch him.

  Logan was in trouble for the missed set of classes and had to grovel to Alan Dobbs, who was livid. “The first class of Year 12s talked for the whole bloody hour, but the second class of Year 9s made the damn classroom into an assault course and in the process, broke the legs off a desk and ripped down the curtains from the long windows facing the courtyard. They turned the whole lot into a pirate ship!” Logan stood his ground as Dobbs ranted furiously.

  “We’ve been reading Treasure Island,” he offered. “I’m glad it’s got them...thinking.” He made the mistake of smirking and Dobbs flipped his lid.

  “This is a private school, Du Rose, not a bloody kindergarten. The parents who pay our bloody exorbitant fees have certain bloody expectations.”

  Logan entertained himself counting the expletives in his superior’s sentences. Every time he swore, the blonde wig on Dobbs’ head moved a little further to the left. Logan wondered how many more ‘bloodys’ before it turned into a beard. Very little fazed Logan Du Rose, except Hana. The thought of losing her terrified him.

  “The whole incident was so unnerving, one of the thirteen year olds left the room and was found wandering around the school by the nurse, having had some form of mental breakdown and babbling about a cupboard and a body.” Dobbs finished his tirade and Logan held his gaze with grey eyes the colour of grit. Realising he was raising his blood pressure for nothing, Dobbs dismissed the English teacher with a warning. “I’m watching you!”

  “Fair enough,” Logan replied with a smile. “Fancy going hunting this weekend.

  Dobbs sat back in his chair and observed the teacher. “Yes,” he said in a calm tone. “That would be wonderful.”

  Sheila had been teaching for a full two periods and hadn’t noticed Hana’s absence, although Hana stayed back after hours to make up for it and found she got much more work done without the constant interruptions. Nobody ever missed Pete, who spent the next hour in the toilet anyway and Sunita seemed to have suffered no ill effects.

  Each decided independently that the incident was perhaps better not recounted, but the stink of Pete’s fart stuck in Hana’s nose for the rest of the day and she shuddered each time she passed the cupboard. Lying awake later that night she decided if she ever had to go into it again, which was inevitable, she would take off her shoe and leave it in the door jamb.

  Chapter 27

  Logan’s truck proved a blessing, even if it was particularly difficult to start first thing in the morning. As term one neared to a close the weather became colder, reaching down under ten degrees some mornings and although there were no frosts to speak of, Hana knew they were imminent.

  Wrestling with the ignition key on this particular Monday she felt tired and worn after a long conversation the previous evening with Ivan, who rang to let her know that Anka had left him. Hana was forced to admit she had recently discovered the affair and Ivan was not placated by the fact that she hadn’t seen Anka since the meeting at Chartwell. He felt, quite rightly, that she should have told him. “How Ivan?” Hana argued. “How could I start a conversation like that with you? I hoped she would to come to her senses after we spoke and I’m sorry she didn’t.”

  They talked for an hour about his plans and how the children were coping. It seemed Anka’s resignation was so the student could stay at school, which created a bigger problem in that her son, Gareth was also in Year 13. “There’s going to be repercussions from this,” Ivan predicted, “and I don’t know how to deal with it. Gareth is livid. He reckons if Tama comes near him, he’s going to smack the snot out of him. I told him he’d get stood down and that would be the end of his school life but I know how he feels. Apart from the fact that Tama is little more than a kid and he’s sat at my table and eaten my food, I would smack the snot out of him myself!”

  The conversation ended with neither of them any the wiser about how it was all going to turn out. People just didn’t realise. When they set off after their own desires, they imploded many other lives in the process. Hana thought about the row it caused with Logan. Although they had been at crossed-purposes, it caused so much trouble. As yet, they hadn’t spoken about it.

  “Keep the truck keys, please?” Logan had said, running his fingers up Hana’s forearms with a feather light touch. “I don’t go back on favours, that’s not who I am.”

  “I just kind of assumed...” Hana began and he looked hard into her green eyes with a serious expression on his face.

  He faltered for a second and then after running his tongue across his bottom lip he said, “You can’t make assumptions about me. Sometimes things won’t be as they seem. Just ask me if you need to know something and I’ll tell you. Ok?” He had exacted a promise from her with a heated kiss in the car park and Hana blushed at the memory. She cooled herself off by running her fingers along the cold metal of the steering wheel, enjoying the vicarious contact with Logan through driving his truck. Traffic was busy but gave Hana time to think.

  Logan had still wanted to make up with her even though he doubted her loyalty. When he kissed Hana, he believed she knew Anka’s new love interest was his nephew. Hana felt heartened by that fact. It meant he was serious about her. The issue had smashed something very fragile and new, but he had been willing to try and work it out. “I was the hasty one,” she whispered, knowing she had almost thrown
away something precious. The sense of self-righteousness in Hana still felt the need to plead ‘not guilty’ to the knowing Tama was Logan’s family, but to do that she would have to reopen the issue and the staff room was not the place. Maybe there would be a chance that night when Logan came over to help her sort out the garage.

  In the absence of her car, stuff had crept outwards from the walls and taken up residence on the garage floor to the point where she now couldn’t get Logan’s truck in at all. Vik’s tools were still arrayed all over the walls, rusting and unused. Hana’s repertoire of tools included a hammer, some nails and the ability to run up the street and summon one of her poor male neighbours. If she was going to put the house up for auction, all the junk had to go. Izzie didn’t want it but Bodie had been unsure. “You need to come and look fairly soon,” Hana told her son on the phone the previous evening. “It has to go somewhere...and soon.” She heard Bodie’s sharp inhale on the other end of the phone and tensed. He didn’t like change, or rather, he wanted his mother not to change anything.

  “I’ll come down soon,” he promised. Hana sighed as another set of traffic lights went against her. He’d been saying that for years, but had so far only ever turned up unexpectedly on his way to somewhere else.

  Hana’s thoughts turned to the garage sale she had planned for the weekend. Turning the space out would be difficult with so many family reminders. She had the signs ready, proclaiming ‘Garage Sale’ for the following Saturday, so she needed to get sorted fairly quickly. Logan was going to help her after work.

  The agents from the local real estate offices had paraded through in their numbers over the past weekend, trying to impress and get her to sign so they could list the property before the holiday. Hana had asked Angus to look over their proposals with her before she signed anything. He had a good head for business and besides, he had offered.

  Hana tried not to worry about the car parked periodically across the street from her house. It was there again as she pulled out of the garage that morning; a black sedan with a white male driver. She wanted to tell Bodie, but he was wrong footed by news of her selling the house and it hadn’t seemed appropriate. Besides, Hana reasoned, the occupant hadn’t yet approached her and always parked on the other side of the road. Hana rang her police case officer, but she never seemed to be available and hadn’t yet returned her voicemail messages.

  The day was long and frustrating. Every year the school hosted a Careers Expo for students. Held in the evening during August, the event was usually a success but involved endless administration for Hana and the other school admin staff who usually mucked in. It hailed the start of hundreds of messages left on voicemail for prospective visitors, emails dashing forwards and back, notes made about who needed what on the night; frustration and success all rolled into one.

  “Thank goodness we started early this year,” Sheila sighed. “But it doesn’t seem to lessen the stress does it, it just drags it out longer somehow.”

  At interval, Hana went down to see Angus with her pile of agreements from the real estate agents and they went through them together. One by one he poured over them, checking out the small print and the terms. “Mmnn, even though we’re in the middle of a recession, some of them seem to have good terms but want to list the house at far too low an asking price. Others are higher, but I suspect once they get the listing, the price will be lowered after a few weeks to your detriment.”

  Finally, Angus made a call to an old friend in real estate to ask his advice. The friend was expected back in the office at any moment and while they waited for a call back, Angus ordered tea from his personal assistant and sat back casually in his large chair. “The business of Mrs van Blerk, really was most distressing,” he said without preamble, looking carefully at Hana over the top of his bifocals, “I would be saddened to think you had known about the situation and not seen fit to inform someone, even anonymously.”

  Hana felt instantly on the defensive. She was sick of taking the blame for this. “I found out by accident the day before Anka resigned,” Hana began, a barbed edge to her voice. “I met with her that night to get her to see sense, but she left after we argued. I haven’t seen her since and I don’t know where she is. Ivan’s angry at me too. And the whole thing nearly cost me my...” Hana stared at her hand resting in her lap, concentrating overly hard on her nails, which were in need of some serious filing and moisturising.

  “I see,” said Angus. And that was it. The tea arrived and the matter was not mentioned again. Hana wondered what it was that Angus did actually see, suspecting it might be the one thing she didn’t want him to know about. Her relationship with Logan was not for public discussion. Relationship. Had it made it to that level yet? When did a friendship and a decent amount of kissing become a relationship? Hana recognised the plummeting in her stomach when she thought about Logan’s kisses and steered her mind elsewhere, unable to disguise the flush on her cheeks and neck. Angus studied her with predatory calm and Hana diverted her attention to the photos in his office, sipping her tea as though engrossed in the horrid tan colour and peculiar floaty bits.

  The friend called back and after a lengthy chat with Angus, was given Hana’s address and phone number. He agreed to meet her at the house when school ended to do an independent appraisal. The whole thing suddenly seemed ridiculous to Hana. She hadn’t even got anywhere to go and had no idea what the house was worth. She left after thanking Angus for his time and upon entering the anteroom to his office, walked straight into Ivan.

  Angus came out behind her and there was little time for Ivan to do more than raise his eyebrows and give Hana a look that said it all. Gareth had smacked Tama.

  Chapter 28

  “Rent it out?” Hana’s voice went up a tad at the end of her sentence, short as that sentence was.

  “Yes dear,” replied the agent, oblivious, flicking through his pages of notes and ending up back where he started after a minor reshuffle, “It’s definitely the way to go for you at the moment. If you own the house outright, which I understand you do, then let it out as a rental. Pay your new mortgage from the rent you get on this one, less upkeep obviously. It’s the best way to get out of here at the moment I’m afraid. Nothing’s shifting in this area as you may have noticed.”

  Hana hadn’t noticed. She hadn’t paid the slightest attention to the housing market prior to last week. Her face oozed frustration in a knitting of her brows and a valiant attempt at keeping her trademark redheaded temper in check. It was the closest she had come in eight years to leaving the past behind her and summoning up the courage to make a clean break. And where had that got her? Nowhere.

  The agent was delicately boned, precise and careful in his movements as he closed his neat, black leather pad and placed it back into his briefcase. His hair was white at the front and dark grey at the back and he seemed fragile. Hana wondered if he was ill in perhaps a permanent kind of way. Leaving numerous brochures and a copy of the prospective rental contract, Angus’ agent-friend made his escape, stopping on the threshold to hand Hana his card. A surprisingly young and pretty female smiled out from a professional photo which showed her and this man, head and shoulders next to each other. The card bore the words, ‘Eric and Ingrid Tanner – Real Estate and Letting Agents.’ Hana wondered momentarily if Ingrid was his daughter, until he inclined his head towards her. “Call me, or my wife, once you’ve decided what to do.”

  Hana waved him off politely and then leaned against the inside of the closed door, sighing in annoyance and disappointment. She turned the business card over and over in her fingers. She could let the house go to auction cheaply enough. Vik’s life insurance paid off the mortgage instantly, but she would then be saddled with debt for any new purchase which she honestly didn’t want. Hana enjoyed being debt free. It would help if she had some idea of what she wanted and then she could plan. If she downsized, then maybe she wouldn’t need a huge mortgage and the profits from Achilles Rise would cover it. Then again, if she rented Ac
hilles Rise out, she could still keep hold of it in a way and…

  No, she told herself roughly. She was trying to avoid letting go. That was the road to ruined plans and another eight years holding her breath, instead of living her life.

  She was still in turmoil when Hana arrived at school the following morning. Her mind bounced between letting and selling and then back again. Logan was encouraging, having left his own past behind at the start of the year and offered some useful advice. They cleaned the garage until just before midnight, boxing up most of the floor contents but giving up before they reached the tools hanging on the wall. Logan had flatly refused to let her hold a garage sale. “Why on earth would you?” he asked, astounded. “Particularly when someone has already shown a special interest in you and the contents of your vehicle! Think about it, babe. It’s ask asking for trouble, opening the garage door and inviting perfect strangers to pick over your stuff. You don’t know who these guys are. Why give them free access?” He was right of course, even without knowing that Hana suspected she was being watched. There was little in the garage of value. The golf clubs and other saleable items, Logan took away and promised to sell. He also loaded up the back of the truck with bags full of rubbish and agreed to dump it at lunchtime the next day. The garage looked decidedly clearer.

  Rushing into the staff morning briefing, Hana seated herself amongst the other support staff seconds before the bell rang. As Alan Dobbs banged on about litter and detention supervision, Hana looked around the room, people watching. There had been new faces at the start of the year but the staff turnover at the school was unusually low. People came and inevitably stayed. Some worked their entire careers in the set of elderly buildings.