OUT OF THE SHADOWS: Who said life was fair? (Hannah Tree: Detective Book 1) Read online

  PRAISE FOR D M MACDONALD

  “Long Shadows is a fabulous marriage of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Hannah has trust issues, making her vulnerable, but is fearless in her quest for justice. Gloria is also a strong character with an underlying sadness. The two of them explode from the pages, making a well plotted novel a page-turner.

  I loved this book and highly recommend it to mystery/crime drama fans…” - Laura Hartman

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  Long Shadows is my favorite. I just love the snark and humor.- Beth Hale

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  Long Shadows is really well written. You nail the midway point between comedy/grimness, the characters pop out, the dialogues are great and the plot is really good. I loved Hannah, and I love your voice and your humor.- C B Moore

  OUT OF THE SHADOWS

  WHO SAID LIFE WAS FAIR?

  D M MACDONALD

  Copyright © 2021 by D M Macdonald

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This book is entirely a work of fiction. The characters and incidents are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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  https://www.dmmacdonaldauthor.com

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  Could you please take a quick minute to go to Amazon and leave this book an honest review.

  Reviews are very important for authors, as they help us sell more books. This will in turn enable me to write more.

  I promise it doesn’t take very long, but it can help the book reach more readers just like you.

  Thank you for reading, I really appreciate your joining me in this journey. - D M Macdonald

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Also by D M Macdonald

  1

  I was, as usual, staring down the stew of the day when a loud male voice rang out across the cafeteria.

  `Jesus, these shrinks are stupid!'

  Always on the lookout for anything to relieve the stultifying boredom of the place, my eyes lit up. I swung around searching for the source of the eruption.

  It was a woman. She had white-blonde hair in a towering pompadour, black-rimmed eyes, and luminous pink lipstick. Her face was craggy and lantern jawed, and I reckoned she must have been a fairly ugly man back in the day. The image was softened by the pink ostrich feathers that floated around her neck over one of those peignoir things.

  She was sitting at a table surrounded by much smaller people who were looking on in awe as she continued. `Bastards, they know nothing! That stupid prick that I actually pay keeps telling me that I'm depressed because I'm transsexual. The clown has not heard a word I've said. I’ve told him countless times that I am not depressed because I am transsexual. I'm depressed because I can't afford the fucking operation. And when I told him today that he's fired, do you know what he said? He said I have an anger issue.’

  I was just stopping myself from rolling around on the floor in hysterics when after a low murmur from her companions, she started again. This time her voice was so low that I had to edge my chair closer towards her table to hear her.

  `Anger issue, I said. Anger issue? No, pet, I said—' Her voice rose again to full blast. `I don't have an anger issue, I have a fucking stupidity issue!'

  With that, she rose out of her chair like a rampant bear looking for a fight. Nearly everyone immediately scuttled out of the room. Speaking above an apologetic monotone in a flash private psychiatric clinic like this one usually got you escorted to the euphemistically named ‘Intensive Care Unit’. That was a bleak, featureless hole where any connection with the living was purely accidental. The only thing less connected would be the inside of a coffin.

  The set up was like a timeout corner in a boarding school. Or solitary in the public wards, or jail. Believe me, I'd been in all of them.

  Raised voices disturbed the gossip sessions in the nurses’ office. Since their only job was to hand out drugs three times a day, getting up off their arses between times stretched them too far.I often pointed that out so the nurses hated me. They would loved to have sent me back to Her Majesty's Corrections Centre but they couldn't. My auntie was on the hospital board. My only solace was that she was forking out a thousand bucks a day to keep me there instead of jail.

  As a result I was at war with a bunch of po-faced people who couldn't do a thing about it. Baiting them was the only pleasure I had back then. Then I met Gloria, a six-foot five transsexual drag queen. Unlike me, Gloria originally chose to be there, but by this time she was clearly profoundly disillusioned.

  Angry as hell and too big for the nurses to do much about as well. Not without risking sending the patients, nice suburban ladies on the whole, shrieking from the place in hysterics. By the time two male nurses arrived only Gloria's entourage and I were left.

  `Oh dear,' she bellowed, `speaking of stupidity, here comes Tweedledum and Tweedledee.'

  She turned back to her audience with a giant grin, tossed her head, and gyrating her hips, slithered towards them. It was brilliantly obscene, and by then my smile was wrapped around my ears. The nurses flapped their hands as she backed them up against the salad bar.

  `Hello, boys, wanna dance?'

  `Now, Gloria, you know this is not—' said one of the nurses.

  It was Colin, a soppy bugger whose answer to almost everything, including the darkest despair, was, `Would you like a cup of tea?'. He was sliding backwards into the salami and coleslaw as Gloria leaned across him, still rotating her hips. The other fellow, a particular enemy of mine, ducked sideways. But by then I was in front of him, pressing my breasts up to his chest.

  `Not going, were you, Horst, baby?' I said. `Just when we're about to have some fun for a change?’

  He grabbed my arm hard. `Cut it out, you—'

  I snatched it away and rubbed it. `Slut? Is that what you want to say?'

  I'd heard him say exactly that about me to another nurse recently, after I ticked him off for a particularly authoritarian order. He was the kind of German who gave his countrymen a bad name. Aggressive, self-righteous, and superior, like Colonel
Klink in Hogan's Heroes. He hated me because I called him out on it. Only the day before I'd played a recording of `Springtime for Hitler' from The Producers movie to him in front of everyone.

  I pressed against him again. `You know, Horst,' I said, `you really aren't allowed to manhandle the patients. It could get really nasty for you when I tell Auntie how I got this bruise.'

  By this time Gloria and Colin had noticed the tension between us. Colin stammered something about tea as Gloria put her arm around my shoulders and very gently steered me away from Horst, whose face was as close to purple as you could get and still be alive.

  I looked up into Gloria's face and she smiled, very gently for a large, ugly, once-upon-a-time man. `Hey, sweetie, come with me. Let's leave these bozos to enjoy the salad.' She waved and beckoned to her audience. `Come on, lovies. These guys ain't paying, and we all know I only do my best work for the paying customers.'

  As she stepped past Horst, she raised a very big hand in front of his face. `When it comes to you, dearie, there isn't enough money in the world for you to see my talents. Now leave the little girl alone, forever. Okay?' She smiled straight at him, but that smile wasn't gentle.

  I let her lead me out of the cafeteria and into the lift. During the ride up nobody said anything, but I could feel everyone staring at me. I was going to snap out my usual `What are you staring at?', when Gloria's arm tightened slightly. I tried to shrug it away, but her grip tightened even more.

  `Let me go,' I hissed.

  `You going to be good?'

  `What do you care?' I snapped.

  She shrugged and let me go. When the lift doors opened, I charged out straight into the main foyer. It was full of people milling around for the afternoon walk with Lucy, an aggressive Chinese nurse, who was barking out orders like a screw. I was just about to start loudly apologising for Lucy's bellicosity to the other patients, something I often did, and that infuriated her, when Gloria gripped me again.

  `Cool it, kiddo,' she whispered, and leaving her retinue behind, her long strong arm took me around the crowd and into the corridor. I snatched my arm away and she stepped back, her head on the side like a cockatoo eyeing off a particularly appealing nut.

  `What's with you?' I snapped.

  `Nothing, love, just trying to help. Loved what you did downstairs and wondered if you'd like to visit me. I'm bored to tears and it’s nice to meet someone in this hole who's actually alive. That's all. But if you're not interested, that's cool.'

  She turned and swayed down the corridor stopping at a door. She turned back to me.

  `Room twenty-three,' she said and winked before closing it behind her.

  I stared after her for a while then headed for my own bolthole. The crowd, led by Lucy the Nazi, was gone but Horst was back in the office. He gave me the evil eye, so I threw him a Nazi salute and a `Sieg Heil'.

  One of the other nurses followed me towards my room. She was a short, heavy woman whose burning desire to help me made me feel that jail would have been the better option. I don't know why, but she'd decided I'd be her special project. It didn't matter how rude or offhand I was, she followed me about like a deranged stalker. I'd tried everything short of vomiting on her shoes to keep her away but was seriously considering that today.

  As I reached the door, I turned and said into her face, `No, Narelle, I do not want a little chat.'

  It didn't stop her for a second. In fact, I think the challenge whetted her enthusiasm. What a feather in her cap it would be if she, the most useless of the staff, got through to me, the most difficult patient in the place. Wasn't going to happen, of course. In less than a week, my sentence was up and neither Auntie dearest nor Corrections Victoria would have a hold on me anymore. I'd be out of there so fast I'd leave rubber.

  The door handle was snatched out of my hand by my ancient roommate's husband as he strode out of our room. His name was Gerald. A pompous little turkey cock of a man with a bristly grey moustache and white hair aggressively arranged into a sparse comb over.

  He staggered against the wall, looked me up and down, and stalked off in a stiff-legged strut. How his poor old wife had tolerated him for forty-five years, who knew? But then, she was in here.

  `He's not supposed to be in the bedrooms,' I said to Narelle. She gave me a wide-eyed look then legged it after him. She knew about Auntie. When Gerald was level with the office I yelled, `Visitors are not permitted in the bedrooms.' He hunched his shoulders and missed a step in his swagger.

  I shut the door behind me and dropped onto my bed behind my permanently closed curtains. It was a small, bare space but it was mine and mine alone. Plugging in my iPod, I lay back, savouring the memory of Gloria's rampage in the cafeteria. In spite of my total ban on any and every interaction in the clinic, personal, institutional and administrative, she intrigued me. Maybe I would visit her, maybe I wouldn't. I was surprised I even considered it. After three months, she'd be the first non-combative contact in my war against Auntie’s interference in my life.

  I blocked her out and tuned in to the music. It was `Morning Mood' by Edvard Grieg and was the only thing I took from my family. I wouldn't have had even that it if hadn't been for my roommate in jail who loved the piece and said I shouldn't let the bastards ruin everything.

  I was drifting away into the sea and sky when just as the music swelled, my roommate's sobbing shattered my peace. She often cried after the turkey cock's visits, but it was only a sniffle or two and then she went quiet. I was debating whether to tell her to shut the fuck up when I got a bit alarmed. This time was different.

  2

  Dawn, her name was, a poor old stick who, unlike most of the ladies, wasn't one of the `respite-from-hubby' crew. She genuinely seemed to like the little turd. Hard to understand because he didn't visit often and when he did, he either ignored her or bit her head off. But she always made excuses for him. He was `a bit stressed at work,' or `worried about me', like it was her fault he was a prat.

  I never want to know other people's problems. I keep mine to myself, so I expect everyone else to do the same. But this time the old biddy, Dawn, her name was, was really upset with huge gulping sobs in between howling like a wounded dog. The idiot nurses were useless. All they'd do was shove pills down her throat. I choked back my regulation disinterest and sat down next to her on her bed.

  The sobs stopped mid gulp as she stared at me. Her mouth opened and closed like a codfish's. Then the sobs returned, and she mangled her words as she struggled to speak through them.

  `I'm so sorry, I can't—I'm sorry...' Her red-rimmed eyes showed a panic I'd never seen in her.

  `Stop apologising, Dawn,' I said, `and tell me what's happened.'

  She handed me a form. A hospital consent form for ECT.

  `That's shock treatment, isn't it?' She nodded, still gulping. `And you don't want it?' She shook her head vigorously. `Then you don't have to have it. Ignore it.'

  The sobbing returned with a vengeance. I thought of putting my arm around her, but I figured that was going too far. I just sat there, waiting for the kerfuffle to slow down. It did.

  `Can you talk?' I asked.

  She nodded and through sobs and hiccups she told me about threats and coercion by the nurses, her doctor, and her husband. All to force her to have a treatment that terrified her. I'd seen the results of it when I was in a public ward one time. After it, people were sort of not there.

  `So, you don't sign the form. They can't make you unless you do. That's it.'

  `But I must. Gerald told me that if I don't, he'll put me in a home. We've been together for forty-five years. I can't go into a home. What will I do?' She started wailing again.

  `Really.' I said it to myself because she was too deep in her panic to hear me. Panic that dear Gerald and the staff had caused. I took both of her hands and peered closely into her face.

  `Dawn,' I said loudly. `Dawn. Listen to me.' She stopped wailing and looked at me with brimming eyes. `You are not going to have shock treatment. Y
ou are not going to be bullied by the nurses or your doctor or your husband to do anything you don't want to do, and you are certainly not going into a home.'

  Even as I said it, I had no idea how I could stop any of it except the imminent shock treatment. That bit was easy. I tore the form up right under her nose then together we flushed it down the toilet. She managed a very shaky smile.

  `Thank you, dear, but I'm so afraid they'll still make me do it.' The tears started streaming again and she dropped back onto her bed.

  `When did they give you the form, Dawn?'

  `Gerald gave it to me this afternoon.'

  So the turkey cock was blackmailing her with the threat of a home. Why? He wanted a zombie wife or he'd put her in a home? Or he'd get the zombie wife and put her in a home. Out of his way, anyway.

  `Did he say when they wanted it back?'

  `This afternoon, then the first treatment could be tomorrow. Oh, Hannah, I can't. I can't do it.' She broke down again. I seethed. Some nasty people needed a lesson for what they were doing to this nice old lady. I took her hands again.

  `It's not happening tomorrow, Dawn. Do you have children?'

  I'd never seen any visitors other than the revolting Gerald, and I was a bit ashamed that after sharing a room with her for a month I knew nothing about her. But it was only a bit. I don't do shame in my life. I can't afford to.