Hana Du Rose Mysteries Boxed Set: Books 1 - 4

by Bowes, K T

  Hana ran her hand over her face, feeling the wetness drying and becoming sticky and unpleasant. She felt cried out and exhausted. “He took me to see the Triads and they were so scary. I couldn’t cope in his world and I felt a failure. I’ve sent him away and he’s gone. He’s left me and it’s all my own fault. They always leave me, Maihi. Why? Am I such a bad person?”

  A sharp jab in her stomach reminded her t she had bigger problems still and she rubbed a hand over her belly. “I can’t do this again, Maihi. I can’t do all this alone again. I’ve messed up once already. I’m not doing the solo parent thing again. I don’t have the energy and I’m too bloody old. I won’t do it.”

  There was a determination in her voice that alarmed her friend. Maihi put her hand gently over Hana’s as it rested on her stomach. It was an intimate gesture, kindly meant and it almost unpicked Hana from the inside. “You are whanau. Family. You will never be alone.”

  “Thank you Maihi,” Hana whispered, but Maihi sensed that depression and resignation reared their ugly twin heads. She tugged at Hana to get her moving and took her down to the bedroom. Hana baulked at the door, but Maihi forced her to go in and get into bed, pushing her down between the covers.

  “It’ll turn out fine, child. He loves you. Anyone can see that.”

  “No,” Hana replied, shaking her head. “I behaved like Caroline. He won’t forgive that. Even his father told me that at the start - to never push him away. I’ve done it now, so it serves me right.” Hana lay down in the huge empty bed and shut her eyes. “I need to start making my own decisions from now on.”

  Maihi drove back across the fields on the quad bike, the same way she came. She opened and closed the gates her husband had installed while the cattle were grazing in Hana’s paddocks. She felt deeply troubled. The small sight of movement on the bush line caught her eye and she pulled up sharply. A darkly dressed figure emerged and came towards her slowly, a quiet voice issuing from it. “You’re out late Aunty. Everything all right?”

  “No man,” she replied to her nephew, “stay some more. She’s all on her own for a while. Stick close and don’t take your eyes off her place from now on.”

  The figure nodded and blended back into the bush. Maihi drove home, cursing all the gates and catches as she went. She parked the quad bike inside the shed and kicked her gumboots off on the porch. Her husband and his guest sat watching a rugby game and sipping cans of beer. She went up behind them and kissed her husband lovingly on his bald patch and then raised her hand and clouted the other one hard on the back of the head.

  His drink wobbled and beer slopped onto the rug. Both men stood in an instant and whirled around to face her. “You are a complete egg!” she shouted at Logan. “You are a foolish, foolish man!” With that, she stomped off upstairs.

  Logan stayed standing, looking with bewilderment at his host. Hemi shrugged and sat back down, but Logan knew he wouldn’t be able to settle again. It had taken him long enough as it was. “I think I’ll go get a motel room,” he said and put his beer down on the table.

  “That would be dumb,” was all Hemi said.

  Logan was instantly angry. He sought sanctuary with his neighbours because he hadn’t wanted to go too far away and the Gordonton house was too far. For now anyway. Tomorrow he would see Angus and tell him he was quitting, without notice. Then he was going back up to the hotel to make a proper go of things. Sink everything into it. Forget women for a lifetime. And some. “No, actually I think coming south was dumb! I need to get back to what I know.”

  Logan went to the bottom of the stairs, intending to go up and retrieve his bag from the guest room which Maihi had given him. But she intercepted him, body blocking him on the first step. She had brushed her hair and was in the process of rubbing hand cream into the brown wrinkled skin on her fingers. Hands that had seen hard work in her lifetime. Out of respect for an elder, Logan stood back, waiting for her to pass. “Men like you,” Maihi said quietly, “you think you can have it all your own way, don’t you?” Logan gritted his teeth and didn’t reply. “You’ve destroyed her world today. Just like that!” Maihi’s fingers clicked soundly, in front of his face. “Now you will just leave, will you? Like a coward at the first sign of trouble.”

  Logan glanced across at Hemi for help, but the other man watched him with his arms folded and his face closed. He stayed quiet and if Maihi saw the vehement danger in her husband’s eyes, she chose to ignore it. “She deserved better than this. A man who loved her for years but isn’t willing to work through the hardships with her. You wanted a fairy-tale and they don’t exist!” Maihi spat the last two words at him and Logan felt her spittle hit his cheek. He resisted the urge to wipe his hand across his face.

  “Do you know what she said to me?” Tears glinted in the corners of the old woman’s eyes and she drew herself close to Logan, as close as she dared. “She said to me, ‘Maihi, Maihi, I can’t do this on my own again.’ And she meant it!”

  Logan blanched. His face paled so that his eyes stood out vivid grey, the firelight reflected as flickering flames in his irises. “What did she mean by that?”

  His voice was a whisper and hatred sat alarmingly near the surface. Maihi was knocked breathless by the power of it. Hemi felt the tension and laid his beer on the table, coming quietly across the floor to where the pair were locked in battle. Maihi’s voice was almost inaudible and Logan had to lean closer to hear her. “Desperate women do desperate things. It hangs over them like a shroud boy, always. So. Don’t. Make. Her. Desperate!” She dared to punctuate her last words with a succession of prods to the man’s hard chest with a gnarled finger.

  Logan’s face was unreadable. But he began to shake his head in denial of something unforeseen. “She wouldn’t hurt herself or…no, she can’t…”

  Maihi put a finger over his lips and saw him struggle not to recoil. Nobody ever touched Logan Du Rose without his assent and he couldn’t cope with it. She spoke to him in Māori, softly like his grandmother used to. Not Te Reo but the old Māori, unwritten, handed down as a taonga, a treasure. It washed over him like a breath of wisdom. “Your todays will shape all of your tomorrows. Shape today well.”

  Maihi took her finger gently away and heard Logan breathe out. “Go to bed,” she ordered him.

  Like a child, Logan scuttled up the stairs obediently but Hemi wondered if he would still be there in the morning. The old man shook his head slowly at his wife. Her past like everyone’s, forced its way into her present with amazing power and not always for good. The burdens and the baggage we carry, he thought to himself, it’s a wonder we can ever get anywhere. He reached over and touched his trembling wife’s shoulder, saying, “You go too far, woman.”

  Maihi’s brown eyes glistened with tears and she nodded in agreement. “E tohe i ngā tohe a Pōtoru,” she sighed. Stubborn as the stubbornness of Pōtoru, a man who rushed to his own destruction.

  Du Rose Legacy

  Chapter 17

  Logan lay upstairs in a small single bed. It was much too short for him and his feet poked out of the blankets at the end. He got up and put his socks back on. The image of Hana alone and frightened next door made his heart quail.

  Logan tossed and turned in the tiny space and tried to keep his past from haunting him. Caroline aborted her baby just after Logan’s twenty-first birthday and he was devastated. He still recalled the angry exchange with his brother, which had left them not speaking for years. “It’s not yours, dumbass,” Michael laughed. “She’s been sleeping with me for months. Did you not notice you weren’t getting any?”

  Logan broke Michael’s nose but it still didn’t wipe the smile off his face. Logan caught the next flight off the island. Michael visited him in London many years later to apologise, but Logan still didn’t trust his brother. It was a terrible thing to kill an innocent child. If Hana hurt herself or the baby because he isolated her, it would be his fault. He needed to go home but if Maihi had settled her for the night, his turning up in the darknes
s would be frightening. What could he say anyway? He was who he was and Hana couldn’t handle that.

  Logan mulled over the meeting with the Triad King and Queen. It was a mistake to take Hana. He had been trying to reveal more of himself to her, slowly and carefully, letting down his guard a piece at a time and dreading rejection with every revelation. She wanted more of him, but then didn’t like who he was. Logan squirmed with internal devastation, punching his pillow and trying to get comfy.

  When rejection came, Logan realised with stark familiarity he was waiting for it. Like putting on a trusty garment, he knew instantly what he would do. Run. Start again. But dream of what this time? Run towards what? He always dreamed at the start of a journey he might find his soul mate, the-girl-on-the-train. But now he ran from her. Perhaps he was crazy, like his mother. Logan recognised that unhinged trait in all of them, Michael and Liza. As his thoughts turned to Michael, he felt overwhelmed by sadness and misery, at things that weren’t as they should be. His brother wasn’t his brother. He heard Alfred’s laughter again, echoing through the old hotel. What the hell was there to laugh about?

  Logan lay on his front and pulled the pillow over his head to block out the world. He thought of Hana again. He wanted to go to her like elastic pulling him back. He offered his love and his loyalty to people and they always stamped on it, broke it into a million pieces. With her, it was different. He went over and over the awful conversation in the car, trying to drum up the anger and bitterness again, to ride on the easy tide of it, but it wouldn’t come back. Just an all-pervading sadness remained. They were both hasty. Logan remembered the pain on her face as he pulled on Hana’s broken joint. It was unforgivable.

  As Logan angrily jammed the Honda up against the curb, he spotted the dark sedan pull in at the start of the side-road and uncharacteristically panicked. They always followed him to the city limits, right since the first time he met Che, a lifetime ago, when they were both much younger and fitter. Always they followed. Buoyed up by the result of the casual business meeting, Logan sensed the tension in his wife. He wanted to make it up to her, not understanding that even this last time, he was expected to leave the city immediately. Hana looked so sick. He didn’t even ask her what old woman Che had said to upset her so badly. Logan listened to the night noises from the dense bush behind the house, wondering if Hana was listening too. He had seen something kicking off with Hana and the Triad queen and done nothing to help her. Shame blossomed in his chest.

  He sat up in bed and put both hands over his face. “God I seem to be talking to you an awful lot at the moment. Can you help me mend today, please? I want good tomorrows. I don’t know what to do.”

  Logan lay back down on the bed. No crack of thunder, no vivid, glowing writing appeared on the wall opposite him to tell him what to do. He pulled the rough blankets back around himself. It was cold in his boxer shorts. He pictured the strip of land that reached up high into the bush and overlooked the ocean. His land. His legacy. In his mind’s eye it was always bathed in sunlight. It belonged to him, left to Logan by name in his grandmother’s will, long before he owned the rest. He was still a child. She left each of them something, but the parcel of land to the west was for him alone. The old lady understood him in a way nobody else ever did.

  One line in her will denoted the gift. ‘Remember tangata whenua my grandson, Logan. They will help you rebuild your house.’

  In his mind, Logan pictured the house he would build there. Continually. It was as much a part of him as breathing. During all his time in exile the land had pulled at him, drawing him home to his birth-right. Perhaps it was time. He experienced a glimmer of hope when Hana seemed amenable to the idea of moving north but it all felt dashed to the ground now. Logan had never understood his grandmother’s cryptic message. ‘Rebuild your house.’ There had never been a house on that site, laying as empty paddocks forever, largely inaccessible. His conversation with his wife up on the hill made him wonder. Perhaps the kuia hadn’t meant his whare, his physical house, but his whanau, his family. Rebuild the family.

  Logan sat up in bed. After decades of having the message replay in the back of his head like static, it made sense. Like a coded cipher, it was always there but its meaning hidden. Rebuild the family and history and those who had gone before, would help him.

  “I can’t now!” Logan sulked, laying down. He fitted his hands behind his head, his muscular arms prickling with cold in the freezing air. “My wife asked me to leave so I left. I have no family. I blew it.”

  Growing up in the whanau taught him that when angry women said go, he went, as fast as his little legs carried him. Otherwise, he couldn’t outrun the myriad objects flying past his ear if he wasn’t quick enough on his feet. His dad was normally out front doing a hundred metre sprint to avoid the ‘Wrath of Miriam’ as he had called it. Maybe it wasn’t Caroline who messed him up; maybe he was messed up already. Hana had seemed pretty certain. And he felt so angry with her, so he did what she asked. He left.

  Logan felt peace come over him, bringing sleep with it. It was the kind of peace which promised everything would be ok. It was an external thing. He knew he hadn’t manufactured a sensation this powerful himself. Logan settled down in the bed and finally slept under the divine peace which descended on his troubled soul. He couldn’t name it because he did not know its author, but he felt the gentle hands and finally slumbered.

  Maihi woke Logan early while it was still dark. She didn’t do it nicely. She slapped him over the head with the flat of her hand, startling him awake like a douse of freezing water. Logan barely restrained his lifelong defence reaction. Maihi jumped back as he balled his fists and sat quickly, as though knowing he would be defensive but surprised at the voltage of it. “Get up bro. Go get your life sorted. Mend today.”

  “Piss off!” Logan’s heart raced with the shock of the rude awakening and his body shook as adrenalin dispersed itself through his blood stream. Maihi left the room as quickly as she entered, blinding him temporarily by turning the main light on full. “Bloody woman!” Logan hissed as he dragged himself out of bed.

  “I heard that,” she shouted from the stairs. “Respect for elders, taitamaiti. Youse not too big for another slap!”

  Logan smirked and reached for his trousers. Some Māori women definitely had more balls than the men.

  Hana slept badly, waking up at every creak and groan of the old house. Looking out of the window in the early hours, she spotted light in the bush high above the house and decided it was fire, causing her heart to constrict painfully in panic. The orange glimmer looked distant and tiny and she contemplated getting the fire brigade out, fumbling for the phone on her bedside table. In the darkness she missed it and the handset skittered down the back with a clunk. Hana groaned. “Marvellous!”

  The local fire brigade were all volunteers and her call would fetch them out of bed. Besides which, the light was higher than a fire vehicle could get to. Hana decided it was a torch and then fire and then a torch again. “Oh what the heck,” she complained. “I’ll burn in my bed if it comes to it. It’s probably what I deserve anyway. Save God throwing me into the fires of hell. I’ll beat him to it.”

  The baby kicked her in rebuke as Hana clambered back into bed and groaned, putting her hand in the spot where the foot came from. “Shh baby,” she said out loud, “I don’t want to think about you right now. I don’t want to think about anything.”

  Hana settled down in the cold bed and tried to sleep. She woke around six, aware of a presence in the room with her. Her mind jumped to Mrs Che’s veiled threats and she sat up abruptly, making her head swim. Logan stood by the bed and sat down as soon as he saw her struggling to surface. He looked a mess, his hair tousled and beard growth on his cheeks and chin. But his eyes sparkled with life, a sharp paradox to the rest of him. “I’m sorry,” he started to say, “about a lot of things, mainly...” but Hana shook her head.

  “No,” she said without compromise and pushed at his chest to mak
e him go away. “You left. You left me here! You made your choice, so go!”

  She saw Logan’s jaw tighten and realised if he walked away again, it was definitely not what she wanted. She couldn’t understand why she behaved this way. If she couldn’t understand herself, how could she expect her husband to? The words tumbled from her mouth, surprising her. “You’ll go, everyone always goes. I’m always the one left.”

  The words spewed out, filled with grudge and self-pity, falling over each other like foundation stones. Logan got it. He got her. He let out a gasp of realisation. He was always the one rejected. She was always the one abandoned. As though by some divine understanding which peeled away the layers of them both, he understood.

  “Hana listen to me.” Logan grasped Hana’s slender shoulders in his strong hands. Her slender fingers pressed his chest, pushing futilely, her cast useless against him. She began to cry, tears of a confused woman. Logan shook his head and bent to kiss her. She pushed him away. “Go, go away.”

  “No!” Logan set his jaw with determination, unable to explain but wanting to show her with his body. She still thrashed, even as she responded to his kisses, hating herself for always falling for him. Hana bit Logan’s lip spitefully as he kissed her, but he groaned and it spurred him on. There was a ripping sound from the one-sleeved-monkey pyjamas, clearly having their last outing.

  “It won’t make it better,” Hana tried to tell him as he finished undressing her and he shook his head to show he understood. That frightened her even more. What if he wasn’t staying? What if this was goodbye?

  Logan shed his clothing on the floorboards and covered Hana’s warm skin with his freezing nakedness. She gasped with shock, leaving her mouth open to his kisses. Logan loved her like his life depended on it, laying his heart and soul bare for her. His passion was unreserved and he held nothing back. They lay tangled together, exhausted and he carried on kissing her for a long time after. He smelled of toothpaste and Logan’s bristles caused a red patch on Hana’s chin. Tears rolled down her face as a tiny dam broke inside somewhere, wanting to believe she hadn’t driven him away, but too afraid to ask.