Hana Du Rose Mysteries Boxed Set: Books 1 - 4

by Bowes, K T

  Logan could hear Jas in the background asking questions and the noises of a busy, well-peopled place. Bodie was at the police headquarters in Hamilton. “Amy’s gone on shift and I’m taking Jas to McDonald’s. But I’m ringing because I found something out. I just called in to see an old mate in the investigation unit and mentioned the name Laval in the course of the conversation. I told him about all the incidents with Mum. He acted real coy but I’m telling you, his eyes were out on stalks at the mention of that guy’s name so it looks like the link to Ethel Bowman’s ‘boyfriend’ is a solid one.”

  “Perhaps the guy did use his real name after all. Bit of an idiot to do that, unless the intention was to take money off Mrs Bowman. Then he’d need his own name, or a name relating to a kosher bank account.” Logan mused out loud. “That would be a good enough reason. It’s got too hard to get cash or open cheques off people nowadays. Most people are too scam-savvy, although there’s always the odd one.”

  Bodie was unnerved by Logan’s in-depth knowledge of money laundering but kept his opinion to himself. For now. “I gave the detective enough to whet his appetite anyway, knowing he’ll come back for more once he starts making the links and if they’re founded. But I don’t think it’s a good idea for my mother to be gadding around the country.”

  Logan wholeheartedly agreed, balancing the roll of calico against the chair and wincing as the weight shifted suddenly against his broken arm. He told Bodie what they were doing and the younger man laughed heartily. “I never had you down as a sucker. Good luck with that one, mate.”

  Hana wandered around the side of the shelf, trailing a tired looking shop assistant and giving her husband a beatific smile. “I’m going to make them all myself,” she announced happily, “on my sewing machine, it’s going to take me ages.”

  Logan sighed, whipped out his visa card and paid the bill, hoping to goodness it did take her ages, weeks in fact, if it stopped her wanting to go out and do this again for a while. It seemed as though Bodie might be finally getting somewhere and Logan intended to keep Hana out of trouble while the mystery unraveled.

  The Honda pulled up the driveway without mishap or incident, but it took Hana a good half hour to unload the huge packets of material, wallpaper and paint. She saw Logan’s exhaustion in his pale face and lackluster grey eyes and sent him inside for some codeine, refusing to let him help. “I’ll be fine,” she lied. “I’d rather have a cup of tea so it would be great if you could do that.”

  The wallpaper was heavy and the rolls slid around inside the huge carrier bag, but Hana hefted them up the front stairs and left them at the top. Then she brought up the paint and extra brushes and packets of paste, before dropping the Honda down the slope and into the garage. Back upstairs she felt thrilled with her purchases and desperate to get on with everything. She wished she could temporarily clone herself and then she could be making curtains, painting and wallpapering all at the same time.

  As it was, Logan was in no fit state to do any of it. Hana looked guiltily at the pile of marking by the side of the sofa and squashed her overflowing enthusiasm for the project, even if it was only temporarily. “Hey come out of the way,” she said gently, shoving him with her hip and taking the kettle out of his hand. She set out to make a hot drink for him as he stood leaning against the kitchen bench trying to swallow his tablets without water. “Idiot,” she murmured, pushing him gently in the ribs affectionately.

  The way he jumped away from her and the grey look that came instantly over his face, alarmed Hana. Suspicious, she carefully moved the plaster cast out of the way and lifted his sweatshirt. Logan tried to stop her, but not before she saw the awful black and red bruising on his skin, reaching around his back and now covering the side of his stomach under his ribs. She looked at him intently, before setting down the kettle and pointing towards the door. “Go,” she ordered him, “and get back in that car!”

  Hana Du Rose

  Chapter 10

  Hana got half way to town before she realised her phone was still in Logan’s jacket pocket, back at the house. It also occurred to her she was being stupid, belting through Ngaruawahia at dusk in her easy to spot vehicle, not giving a damn as long as Logan was ok. The wait-time was an hour in the doctors at Ngaruawahia, which ran its own emergency department. They still had the paperwork from the cast they did the previous weekend, but when Hana wrenched up Logan’s shirt for the benefit of the receptionist, much to his dismay, the girl called instantly for a doctor and Logan skipped the queue.

  Hana asked the receptionist, by that time highly sympathetic, to ring the police station and ask them to track down Bodie or Amy. Stupidly she realised she didn’t know Amy’s surname, but in a short while the receptionist returned with good news. “Your son’s been contacted, Mrs Du Rose. I’ve rerouted him straight to the Waikato Hospital.”

  “Hospital?” Hana looked bemused, until the doctor appeared.

  “I’ve given your husband an ultrasound scan. I’ve rung the emergency room and they’re waiting for him. If you’d rather,” he invited, his face concerned, “we can call an ambulance.”

  Hana could see Logan’s face between the curtains and his look of don’t-you-think-you’ve-done-enough-already, meant she drove him there herself. While Logan collected up his clothing, the doctor chatted to Hana. “Broken ribs and a ruptured spleen, that’s my educated guess.” The doctor shook his head at Hana. “I don’t know how he remained upright, the mess he’s made of his insides. Your husband must have an inhuman pain threshold!”

  Hana didn’t enlighten him as to the real cause and let him think Logan really did fall down some stairs. “What about the scar on the other side of his body?” the man enquired and Hana quailed.

  “I think it’s from a childhood hunting accident.”

  “Bit accident prone, your husband,” the surgeon replied and Hana couldn’t tell if he was joking or not. “He should have got plastic surgery on that long scar. It’s a mess.”

  “He grew up on a farm,” she said feebly, “in the bush…somewhere,” aware she sounded more pathetic with every sentence. “That’s where he was when he…fell.”

  The doctor eyed her gravely, before saying without humour, “Then I would keep him away from there.”

  Hana wholeheartedly agreed deep inside herself. She fully intended to.

  It was not a pleasant drive. Feeling thoroughly guilty for dragging him around the shops, Hana recalled odd little details which merged into a pretty damaging list. “I should have noticed you didn’t actually manage a full plate of food in a week. This is all my fault. And I knew you were in pain. I should have done something.” Hana writhed uncomfortably in the driver’s seat.

  “It’s fine,” Logan grunted, gripping his side with a white knuckled hand. “I’m a big boy. I’ve had worse.”

  Hana parked badly what seemed like miles away and almost lost the piece of paper the doctor gave her for emergency admission to the hospital.

  Logan was quiet, knowing he was in disgrace but also desperately not wanting to go inside the rectangular, threatening building where last time, at Auckland General, they asked his mother awkward questions about the gaping wound in his side and not liked her answers. A week later they sent him home with a leaflet to explain what to do. Barry put the paper in the fire, which was a shame as it contained the date for a follow-up appointment with a consultant. It didn’t matter. He was never taken back to see him anyway. Jack took out the angry stitches in the barn with a scalpel to save them the journey back to Auckland at calving time and treated the subsequent infection with blobs of Manuka honey under swabs of cloth. Logan knew it was probably on his medical records still, with a big notice saying, ‘Mother insane - refer to Child Youth and Family Services.’

  “He burned it. Barry burned it.”

  “What? Burned what, love?” Hana shot a look of alarm at Logan as she made the tight turns around Pembroke Street and entered the multi-storey car park underneath the hospital.

  “
My discharge notice. He put it in the fire. He hated me.”

  Hana opened her mouth to speak and then thought better of it. Logan sounded distressed and she had no desire to compound his misery.

  It’s funny, Logan thought to himself wryly, the things that return to haunt you in your middle years. He always bled heaps when he hurt himself. He was used to it. It took longer for him to heal than anyone else. But he did eventually, especially if he used the nasal spray. He tended to stay away from hospitals and use medical centres for his accidents. Hana scotched that this time. “Let’s not do this?” Logan begged his wife, dragging his feet after she wrestled the Honda into a narrow space on the fourteenth floor.

  “Don’t be daft,” she admonished him. “I’ll stay with you. We need to get this sorted, it sounds really bad.”

  “I’ll be fine, I always am.”

  “Logan,” Hana’s brow creased in concern at his obvious reluctance. “Whatever’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” he said and the shutters came down over his emotions, blocking them from view once again. Hana held his hand and led him into the emergency department, feeling his fingers flexing stiffly in her hand.

  Despite the busyness of the hospital, Logan was triaged as an emergency and disappeared into surgery quickly. He was gone for a long time. The surgical ward shut for visitors at eight that evening and Bodie and Amy left to get Jas into bed.

  “Perhaps you’d like to go home too?” the nurse suggested to Hana, as she sat next to the empty space where Logan’s bed was. “Visiting time’s over. You need to leave.”

  “I’m going nowhere until I’ve seen my husband’s ok,” Hana replied, incensed, responding far more aggressively than she intended. She muttered with a tremble in her voice as the woman turned away from her, “I’m appalled you’d even ask.”

  They left her alone after that and she sat, tired and overwrought, watching out of the enormous windows as the lights came on over Hamilton and traffic became more sporadic. After a while, darkness left little of interest to look at on the unchanging landscape. Hana felt angry at Logan for disguising such a serious injury, but even more livid at Tama for causing it in the first place. She decided when Logan came out of this, she would ask Bodie to arrest Tama. If Logan didn’t come out of this…well, she was going to find Tama herself and singlehandedly do him some serious damage.

  Logan came out of surgery after midnight and Hana was so relieved to see him, she shed tears all over his face and chest. He held her hand and smiled lopsidedly but wasn’t really awake enough to communicate properly. As Hana stood back from the bed, the ward staff made it abundantly clear it was time for her to go, tipping her out without ceremony into the deserted hospital. Hana drove back to Culver’s Cottage to find the lights on and Bodie’s BMW parked on the driveway.

  Pushing her way through the front door, Hana met Bodie and Amy staring at her from the kitchen doorway, both desperate for news. “I’m so relieved you’re here,” Hana gushed in her tiredness. “I would have hated being alone.” Grateful for the gentle and reassuring presence of Amy, Hana felt frighteningly near to tears again. Bending down to unlace her trainers, Hana spotted Logan’s jacket, probably with her phone still in the pocket lying on the floor next to the pile of paint tins, wallpaper and fabric. Her tears spilled over to such an extent, her visitors seriously feared poor Logan was dead.

  The thing Hana discovered about being distressed in the company of police officers is they automatically reached for the kettle. They were genuine in an observant way but wanted the facts and not the feelings. Hana ended up telling her son the full unadulterated story about Logan’s injuries, following it up with her own observations about the increasingly strange Du Rose family. Bodie knew Tama reasonably well, mainly from social occasions at Anka’s, where Tama was ‘hanging out.’

  A loose cannon was Bodie’s label for him and Hana had to agree.

  “You certainly seem to know how to pick dysfunctional families to belong to,” chuckled Bodie, as he slurped his drink of orange juice noisily. Amy slapped him hard on the arm.

  “Thanks! Me and Jas have been a dysfunctional family by the world’s standards!” she chastised him. Bodie had the decency to look ashamed. He tried to improve the slight, by including Hana in his generalisation.

  “I guess we were too really,” he said looking at her for support, “you were a solo mum.”

  “Not by choice!” His mother blasted him too and pinned between the two annoyed women, he decided to check on his son, who slept in the double room again, beating a hasty and welcome retreat with his head still intact.

  Amy smiled at his disappearing back, waiting until his feet padded down the hallway into Jas’s room. “You’re doing really well, you know. It must have been a terrible shock.”

  Hana exhaled loudly, thinking of a saying she once heard, ‘To lose one husband is an accident, to lose two is careless.’ and felt desolate. She decided to change the subject, interrogating Amy instead about her relationship with Bodie. He told her the nuts and bolts, factual stuff, but Hana wanted to know the unadulterated truth. Amy was also factual but Hana got a little more understanding of how she felt about Bodie and recognised in the younger woman, something of the attraction she felt for Vik all those years ago.

  “I always loved Bo,” Amy said and there was a glow about her when she said Bodie’s name. Hana felt reassured; maybe this relationship was actually built to last. She was surprised to learn Amy was older than her son, by six years. Amy looked at her with challenge in her pretty face when she admitted she was thirty-one, but found Hana wasn’t bothered. After all, she had her own ‘toy boy’ as Logan called himself to annoy her. “You don’t look it.” Hana replied with kindness, feeling ancient herself. “And if you’re happy, why should it matter?”

  Before bed, Hana rang the hospital to check on Logan and they assured her he was fine and sleeping still, on regular observations and progressing well. Comfortable was the word they used a lot. Hana chatted with Amy a while longer, also discovering she was on fairly good terms with her ex-husband, in a Christmas-card-sending kind of way. Amy acknowledged he was a good man and hadn’t deserved the hurt she inflicted on him. “The split wasn’t amicable, but it was less damaging than it might have been.”

  “Why didn’t you find Bodie and tell him?” asked Hana. Amy pulled a face.

  “I wanted to, but I’d already chosen my marriage over him and sent him away and I know how it broke him. I didn’t want to take the risk he wouldn’t want me…us. I think I got safe in my little life, with my boy and was too scared to take a chance. Sad really, isn’t it?”

  Amy looked at Hana with an air of question but found understanding instead of the expected condemnation. Hana shook her head emphatically and smiled. “Not sad; just life. It’s called hiding. And we’ve all done it!”

  Early Sunday morning Hana was awoken by a deafening knock on her bedroom door, followed by a lot of noise. “Shhhhhhhhh!” she heard from the safety of her duvet.

  She sat up and pulled her nightdress straight. “Come in,” she called, greeted by Jas bounding in happily. He carried a cup of hot tea which had a nauseating floaty scum on top and Amy followed him, brandishing a piece of kitchen roll. The kitchen roll was wet, so already there was heavy duty spillage along the hallway. Jas placed his burden on the bedside table, which Amy carefully mopped after he climbed onto the bed.

  “Morning Granny!” he beamed with enthusiasm. Hana’s heart sank. The issue of what her grandchildren should call her was never discussed. As much as Hana was falling in love with Jas, every time he called her ‘Granny’ she cringed. Doctors told Izzie and Marcus it was unlikely Elizabeth would speak at all, so even with her first grandchild, the issue of name would be unlikely to arise. So far, the dreaded word had received no airtime.

  The bouncy, four year old seemed to be making up his own rules. Hana held her arms out to him and he snuggled into her with a groan of pleasure. “How about,” she said, putting excitement into
her voice, “how about we have a competition to find the best ever name for you to call me? Everybody has a ‘granny,’ but we could have something different.”

  Hana saw the cogs turning in Jas’ little brain and his dark curls bounced as he wiggled his head in concentration. “Yeeeeeessssss,” he said, slowly, “and we could have prizes and a naming party and I could ask all my friends.” He got up and bounced around the room, singing, “Granny, Nanny, Nonie, Oma, there’s heaps!”

  His imagination was captured and he was off and running to tell his father. Hana rubbed her eyes wearily, finding Amy still standing next to the bed. “This has been hard for you,” she said, with feeling, “but I wanted you to know I really appreciate how you’ve been so amazing about it all. You haven’t judged us and I’m grateful.”

  Hana felt humbled. She didn’t feel all that great actually and probably had judged, just inwardly and thus silently. She didn’t quite know what to say. “Oh,” she started on a different track, “I know I’m a ‘granny’ but it makes me feel old, I guess. It’s such a well…an ancient kind of word. It makes me feel like a creaky hundred year old.”

  Amy patted Hana’s shoulder reassuringly and started to leave the room, turning back quickly to say, “Don’t drink your tea, he said it was Breakfast Tea and I think I saw him put peanut butter in it. I’ll get you another one.”

  Hana sank down into the covers, sliding her hand across to Logan’s cold, empty side. After a week of sharing a bed with him she adjusted to his presence as though it was always that way and already she missed him terribly. She hoped he felt better and fleetingly wished she hadn’t ditched his phone into the gully so she could text him. But then she remembered the message from Caroline and was glad, her only regret being she didn’t ditch the woman in there too.