Hana Du Rose Mysteries Boxed Set: Books 1 - 4

by Bowes, K T

  The blue car was parked too close and made it incredibly tight. Hana squeezed herself in, pulling her jacket more comfortably around her as it twisted up behind her in the toothpaste-style-squeeze into the seat. She laid her handbag in the handy centre aisle and looked up in shock when she heard the click of the passenger door shutting and felt the slight movement of air on her face.

  Tama faced her, his grey Du Rose eyes drilling into Hana’s. He filled out in the last few months and his face had acquired a sullen hardness. The teenager’s gaze was cold and still like the water on a lake and he smiled a small, lazy expression at her. “Hey Miss,” he said, the ex-student still speaking to a school adult. “How’s it all going?”

  Hana didn’t know if the question was a serious one deserving of an answer or rhetorical, so she stayed quiet, wondering what this dangerous man-boy wanted. She felt the thump of her heart in her chest and her blood move quickly through her stomach, her raised blood pressure bombarding her child. The baby, kicking and turning happily on the way to the car, went still and quiet against the rush of blood. Hana felt sick. “What do you want, Tama?” she asked, her voice little more than a scared whisper.

  “Well, Miss,” he relaxed back in his seat, as though about to give her a synopsis of all his dreams and desires, but then when his answer came it was short and to the point. “Tell Uncle Logan, if he doesn’t stop with the lawyers on my family, I’ll tell my employer something he doesn’t know.”

  Hana didn’t understand. It sounded like a puzzle. Fear made her head foggy. “So, you’ll tell your employer something Logan doesn’t know?” Her voice shook and she felt angry with herself for betraying her terror. Tama leaned forward menacingly.

  “I’ll tell my employer something Logan doesn’t want him to know!” Tama said through gritted teeth.

  Hana couldn’t seem to sort the riddle out and pressed herself back against the driver’s door to get away from Tama’s proximity. “Tell me again?” she asked weakly, knowing the panic in her brain had already overwritten the message. Tama snorted with derision and turned to get out of the car, taking one last sneering look back at her.

  “I have no idea what Logan sees in you,” he said spitefully.

  The instant the door clicked behind him, Hana fumbled for the switch to activate the central locking and tried to calm herself down. White dots raced around in front of her vision and her hands shook madly as she inserted the key into the ignition. Her flight instinct overrode any sensible plans of waiting until the wave of nerves subsided and she pulled out onto the main road in quick, jerky movements without looking properly. It drew an angry horn blast from the lorry she cut up. Hana tried to breathe slowly through her pursed lips to regain control and by the time she passed Chartwell, had reached a better state.

  Her head began to process the riddle and she fumbled with the meaning. What secret could Tama possibly have to hurt Logan and who on earth was his employer?

  At the Wairere Drive roundabout, Hana developed a reluctance to go back to her empty house and did a full circle before heading back the way she’d come through the heavy rush hour traffic. It took a full twenty minutes for her to find herself parked on Amy’s street, feeling suddenly foolish, not knowing if the little family was even at home. Hana cut the engine and felt the sting of her vulnerability. After some internal debate, she restarted it and pulled the Honda onto Amy’s drive, carefully negotiating the threatening Sago Palm at the gate. She craned her neck, checking all around the vehicle as best she could for anyone following her, before clattering out and jogging towards the door at the side of Amy’s elderly home. “Please be in, please be in,” Hana begged.

  The calm return to normality in the previous few weeks seemed wasted and Hana felt on red alert. It was an unwelcome dose of reality; like a cold shower. She knocked rapidly on the door, waiting under the small porch and shuffling from foot to foot in fear.

  Amy opened the door with her blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail and a large paint brush in her hand. The smell of waterborne acrylic paint wafted out from behind her. Hana swallowed her fear, while the decorator in her silently admired the khaki green paint on the brush. “Oh hey, what a nice surprise,” Amy smiled when she saw Bodie’s mother. “Come in.”

  She disappeared down a narrow hallway into the kitchen where she began wrapping her paintbrush in cling-film and Hana closed the outside door behind her and followed. “No,” Hana protested, “please don’t stop on my account. I only called in.”

  “It’s fine, I need a break anyway. I’ve been doing this since before dawn. It’s a bigger job than I thought it was. It always is with old houses; you start something and realise you needed to do something else first. I was going to paint Jas’ bedroom, but then realised the gib had cracked in places, so I had to fill the cracks yesterday and wait for them to dry.” Amy filled the kettle and flicked the switch. “It meant I couldn’t start painting the walls until early today.”

  “Can I see?” asked Hana, her eyes sparkling with genuine interest. She used the distraction to still her threadbare nerves, knowing she was safe with the policewoman. Amy nodded and led her to Jas’ bedroom. The afternoon sun streamed through the window making the room light and bright. Jas’ furniture had been pulled into the centre of the room and tarpaulins covered the wooden floor. A rolled up rug lay on top of the bed, still in its plastic wrapper and Amy opened one end to show Hana the camouflage colouring on it. “He can set up his battlefields on it. That way he might keep them in one place.” Amy rolled her eyes, already hearing her son’s angry protests.

  One wall was in the process of being painted in the khaki shade and the other three walls had a single coat of a lighter green, which complimented the darker colour. Amy touched the wall nearest to her, examining the small blob of paint on her finger as she drew it away. “I’m doing it for Jas, but I wanted a colour that would be ok if I needed to sell up. I don’t want to have to redo everything in plain colours.” A wistfulness echoed in the way Amy talked about moving, making Hana feel suddenly uneasy.

  “Are you planning on going somewhere?” Hana asked, trying not to betray her selfish fear of losing contact with Jas and making it sound like a casual question. Amy shook her head as they entered the kitchen and went back over to the kettle.

  “Not really,” she answered with her back to Hana, “but you never know what’s going to happen. This house and all its various problems were my divorce settlement, so at some point it would be good to leave it behind. My parents are in Wellington. It might be nice to be near them.”

  “It is a nice house though,” Hana complimented her, but Amy shrugged.

  “It’s an old house, with old house structural problems. I don’t have the money or inclination to do what it needs.”

  She smiled at Hana, a tired grimace which looked more like an attempt at bravery than any semblance of happiness. Amy put a mug of tea on the table for Hana and ran herself cold water from the tap. Then she sat down. “So how come you have peace and quiet to decorate?” Hana asked, “I’d have thought Jas would love getting covered in paint.”

  Amy laughed. “Exactly, that’s why I’m doing it now. Bodie’s gone up north for a few days and taken Jas with him. I’ve done six days on shift, so now I have three off. Thought I’d get on with it while the house is quiet and I don’t have to keep stopping.”

  Hana nodded. She remembered the demands of small children who were guaranteed to interrupt even the simplest task and make it take twice as long. She tried not to feel bothered about the fact Bodie hadn’t mentioned his trip north, although it was hardly surprising based on their last few conversations. Hana sipped her tea sadly and wished things were different. She looked up to find Amy watching her intently. “How do you find Bo lately?” Amy asked.

  Hana put her tea down and rolled her eyes. “Difficult!” She realised she almost spat the word out and felt guilty, but to her surprise Amy nodded, suggesting unanimity between the women.

  “Same,” she said, he
r bottom lip wobbling with sadness. “I think he wants to stop seeing me but doesn’t want to lose Jas. I might have liked to have gone away with them...but I wasn’t invited.”

  Hana felt alarmed to see a big tear roll down Amy’s cheek and plop onto the table. Evidently the decorating was to take her mind off her personal life. It was a time filler until Bodie came back and dumped her. Hana got up from her seat and put her arms around Amy’s shoulders. How could her son not see how lovely Amy was and how much she cared for him? Stupid boy, Hana thought and not for the first time. Fear rankled selfishly at the back of her mind that Amy might just up sticks and move away, taking the small boy with her. Hana couldn’t bear the idea of meeting up with him as a teenager, having no memories of her or the fun they’d shared. Hana vowed that whatever happened, she wouldn’t be a stranger in his life.

  Amy made valiant efforts to pull herself together and Hana backed away after handing her a piece of kitchen roll to mop herself up. “What do you usually do?” asked Amy, after blowing her nose. “How do you work out what’s going on with him when he won’t tell you?”

  Hana leaned forward and put her elbows on the table, resting her chin in her palms and thinking hard. “I don’t know, Amy. I never understood my son...” Hana smiled and reached into her handbag, pulling out her cell phone. “But I know someone who does.” Raising one eyebrow at Amy, Hana dialled a number and waited for the person on the other end to pick up.

  A small and squeaky, “Helloooo,” issued from the phone, almost indiscernible from the cacophony of background noise. Squeals and grunts and yells made anything else almost impossible to hear. Hana held the phone away from her ear, pulling a face and wondering if she should hang up. Then she heard a great deal of shuffling and a clang and the background noise dimmed slightly. “Sorry Mum,” said Izzie with a giggle, “Marcus has organised a ‘Family Tea Night’ and it’s tremendous fun, but I couldn’t hear a thing.”

  Hana heard the clopping of heels as Izzie walked outside into the cool spring air of an Invercargill teatime. She resisted the urge to tell her daughter off for still wearing stilettos whilst heavily pregnant with twins. “I’m actually ringing about Bo,” Hana began, wanting to cut her daughter off before she launched eloquently into the wonders of her small community. She heard the footsteps cease and knew Izzie was suddenly afraid. “He’s fine, really,” Hana interjected, feeling guilty. “Nothing’s happened, Izz. Other than he’s being an idiot and I wondered if you might know why.”

  Izzie laughed with relief. “How long have you got?” she chuckled.

  The conversation was short and to the point. Izzie didn’t have long, having plonked Elizabeth on somebody’s knee in order to come outside and she needed to get back. Hana listened intently, giving nothing away to Amy, who tried to look as though she wasn’t hanging onto every syllable like her life depended on it. Hana rang off after telling her daughter she loved her when the sound of grizzling became suddenly louder and Elizabeth was dumped back on her mother and valiantly tried to snatch the phone out of her hand. Hana blew noisy kisses to the little girl, hearing giggles in return and rang off. She took a moment to settle her thoughts, despite the hungry look in Amy’s eyes and wondered how to go about repeating what Izzie had told her.

  “Basically,” Hana began, trying not to sound like a village gossip, “Bodie is in love with you and wants to settle down.” Amy gasped and leaned back, shaking her head in an instant challenge, but Hana pushed on. “He’s told Izzie he wants to get married but you don’t. You’re very independent and he doesn’t feel that there’s a place for him here. He’d like to be a family, but feels you...” Hana couldn’t work out how to say the next bit. Izzie actually said Bodie thought Amy just wanted a free babysitter, but Hana felt she had trespassed enough on the girl’s feelings already.

  Amy nodded, so Hana left the sentence unfinished. Amy could join up her own dots. “Why has he gone north though?” Amy asked, pulling the kitchen roll roughly across her eyes. “I thought he went camping, but I heard your daughter say something about a case.”

  Hana cringed, realising Amy must have heard most of the conversation. It didn’t help that Izzie always shouted down the phone. “He’s trying to find something out about Laval.”

  Amy leapt to her feet in sudden fury, the mother and the police sergeant returned and mingled in a heady mix of responsibility. “He’s conducting an unauthorised investigation! With my son!” She pounded around the small kitchen like a caged animal, “I’ll kill him!”

  Hana could see she had made things ten times worse. She stood up to leave, taking her handbag off the floor. At the kitchen door she turned to Amy, offering a final, parting piece of wisdom. “Amy...” The girl stopped pacing and looked at her, seeming almost surprised to find Hana on her way out. “Perhaps you need to put more trust in Bodie. He’d never do anything to hurt Jas. Maybe trust is the problem between you, love. You aren’t letting him into your life.”

  Hana felt sad as she made her way back to the front door hearing her own words come back to bite her. She was guilty of not trusting Bodie, sure he was dead set on discrediting Logan. It was something of a revelation that he did love Amy and wanted to do the right thing by her. It made Hana feel proud and relieved. Izzie said he felt like ‘the help,’ babysitting Jas when it suited Amy, but not allowed to make decisions about his upbringing. Hana recognised the signs of his withdrawal in the light of that and wondered if Amy would too now. Hana hoped Bo was having a good time away with the little boy but regretted telling Amy to trust Bodie, when she couldn’t trust her own husband.

  Hana paused in the driveway, wondering whether to go back inside. Amy might have a tendency to overreact, especially as Hana knew Bodie’s cell phone was switched off. She had tried it yesterday and that morning in an attempt to build bridges. Amy was a cop first and foremost. She could cause a lot of grief for Bodie’s precious career.

  Feeling she had already done enough damage, Hana got into her car, trying not to fall out with the Sago Palm again as she reversed back down the awkward driveway to the road. Rush hour was almost over, the last stragglers winding their way home before darkness settled heavily over the city.

  Hana swung away from the Flagstaff roundabout and headed into the countryside, aware of the Hakarimata Ranges calling from in front of her. Tama’s cryptic threat hung heavy on her heart and something else gnawed at Hana’s sensibility too, a familiar and unwelcome visitor. “Please God, no,” she whispered, desperation in her voice. “It’s just all the stuff about trust that’s upset everything. Please protect me from this? Please help me.”

  Du Rose Legacy

  Chapter 20

  Hana woke up next morning feeling upset and out of sorts. Logan arrived home late, falling into bed after midnight. Despite trying to be quiet, he disturbed Hana enough to wake her up and she lay sleepless for hours, turning things over in her mind and listening to him snore lightly next to her. She snuggled up to her husband, putting her leg across him and placing her hands on his body, begging for distraction. But Logan grunted sleepily and for once, ignored her advances. The sense of rejection was unfounded, but it made the heaviness in Hana’s chest increase.

  She felt the beginnings of the familiar cold hard lump in her stomach under her rib cage, spreading out from its origins of foreboding the night before. It gripped and pulled and sapped her energy, just like it always did. The threat of its hold petrified her and by the time the birds noisily roused the dawn, Hana was weak and shaking, her blood pressure going through the roof.

  Tired and uncommunicative, Logan got ready for work and Hana felt herself withdrawing from him, a strange distance growing between them even though she was often only a metre away. She needed to tell him about Tama’s threat but the fog in her brain made formulating her words impossible. “Dint mean to be so late,” Logan yawned as he reversed the Honda out of the garage and up the slope, “I called in on Mum and Dad. Heard they had some trouble.”

  Hana made no comment
, picking at a thread on her mitten. Logan glanced across at her and she felt his gaze staying with her as he waited to pull out onto the busy Hakarimata Road. The road became clear, but he sat watching Hana’s profile next to him. “Hana?” She looked up at him jerkily, as though pulling herself back from another world. “You mad at me?” he asked.

  Hana looked at him for a long moment, as though the question puzzled her and then went back to the thread. Logan looked thrown. There was something unsettling in her quietness. It reminded him of the eye of the storm. It reminded him of...no, he pushed the thought away. His mother was seriously unbalanced, especially without her medication. He shook his head to clear an unbidden image of Miriam throwing a large saucepan full of water and peeled potatoes at his father’s head. “I’m sorry, babe. It’ll all be over soon. I don’t want to keep leaving you like this; you do know that, don’t you?”

  Hana shrugged as though she didn’t care and placed her hand against her chest. Logan grew frustrated. “I’m doing this for us, Hana. I don’t want to be riding around the country in the dark, selling off assets and getting hate mail and nasty phone calls from board chairmen!”

  Hana pursed her lips and looked out of the window, trying to stop the buzz in her head. Her tired husband grew fed up and reacted with stupidity. “Fine! Whatever! Obviously I’m not on business at all. I’m actually whoring my way up and down the country and enjoying every second of it, not that you’re interested!” He slammed his foot down on the gas pedal as the traffic lights turned to green and didn’t see the look of horror cross Hana’s face. Her chest became tight and her breathing laboured.

  “You’re cheating on me?” Her eyes held a look of frenzy and Logan gaped at his wife.