Chapter Twenty-Three
Logan went off to work mid-afternoon, leaving Hana alone in the huge old house with Phoenix. She rattled around it feeling lost until she remembered the diary upstairs still in her case.
Hana knew enough to know she shouldn’t put her bare hands on the delicate pages and managed to sort out a pair of new cotton gloves which came with some hand cream. She slipped them on and turned the pages with care, trying not to do any further damage. The writing was childlike and lapsed into unfamiliar dialect. It was highly unlikely Māori women were given schooling in the early 1900s, apart from that informally gleaned but Hana sensed the woman through her writing, despite the poor English grammar and the glaring spelling mistakes. “What are you trying to say to me, Phoenix Du Ro
