LUCY BURDETTE: We are sad to report that our Julia is deathly ill with the return of Covid. (Sounds like a horror movie doesn't it? it is!) While she rests and recovers, she urges the rest of us to get vaccinated! I got mine last week and yes, I felt lousy for a couple of days, but nothing like she's suffering.
Meanwhile, here's her gorgeous new cover, and a page to pre-order, and here's a link to her last writing post in case you didn't get a chance to read it...
JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: I'm occasionally having to pinch myself, because it's been such a long time, but it appears AT MIDNIGHT COMES THE CRY is really, truly happening. I've had meetings about authors who might generously give a blurb, been assigned a publicist, and I recently got the copyedits to work on.
When I started in this business, the copyedits arrived as an actual printed manuscript, the same one I had sent in, with mark-ups in yes, you guessed it, red pencil. The author had to respond in blue pencil, and if you wanted to add anything, like a better turn of phrase or a bit of explanation, you had to handwrite it. Publishing has NEVER been a technology-forward industry (the Gutenberg press exempted.)
I was fine with the old way, but I have to admit, having the designer's and copy editor's notes in comments in Word, and being to make changes without trying to squeeze them in between double-spaced sentences, is a pretty sweet upgrade.
The first thing I did when I got my packet was read the Author Instructions, which carefully lay out how to respond to comments, make changes, etc. There were several places urging me to call or email with questions, leading me to suspect the average publishing company doesn't have a lot of confidence in the ability of writers to follow directions. Fair enough.
Then I read through the notes, to get an idea of how big a job I had in front of me, and what the larger issues needing fixing were. I tackled those first, and afterwards went through page by page, changing or agreeing or STETting. We don't actually STET anymore, and I have to admit, I did enjoy a large, slashing STET scrawled in the margins, conveying with my penmanship my incredulity that anyone would make this suggestion.
At this point, I've finished all the copy editor and designer's queries, so yay for me! The next task is to insert a few bits and pieces that will better prepare the audience for some events at the end of the book. Finally, I'll do a line edit, looking for places I have an awkward phrase, or use the same word twice in close succession, or just have an unnecessarily over-stuffed sentence. The edits are due back by April 4, and I'm very happy to say I won't have any issue getting them in on time! (That's a first for me...) Then it's on to the next book.
And now for something completely different! I'm one of some 250 authors participating in Crime Writers for Trans Rights, an online auction benefiting the Transgender Law Center. You can bid on fun crafts, character names, signed books, audiobook narration, professional research assistance, conference registrations, and in my case, a 30 page manuscript review and an in-person (or in-Zoom) coaching session! I hope you'll check it out and find something fabulous.
JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: It's been a big week for cover reveals - first Hank's, then Lucy's and now mine! I loved the design from the first time I saw it - the cover artist really leans into the Christmas feeling. No, that's not what Clare Fergusson's church looks like; hers is brick gothic revival. But the white clapboard says church to everyone, and it pops beautifully against the colors of the sky.
I'm also sharing my first run at the flap copy. I just sent this off to my editor for review. It's not that I consider myself wildly talented at flap copy, it's just that the stuff that's been written in-house has often been, well, less than satisfactory. Once, a then-assistant to my then-editor included, "The author has enriched her telling of this tale by drawing in episodes from Miller Kill -- and Jane Ketchem's past." Which is neither enticing to the reader nor, I believe, grammatical. She also added I won two Tony Awards on the back of the book. Finally, my youthful acting dreams realized.
Let me know what you think, and how I can improve this! (Oh, and P.S.: it's available for pre-order now...)
It’s Christmas time in Millers Kill, and Reverend Clare Fergusson and her husband Russ van Alstyne - newly resigned from his position as chief of police – plan to enjoy it with their baby boy. On their list: visiting Santa, decorating the tree, and the church Christmas pageant.
But when a beloved holiday parade is crashed by white supremacists, Clare and Russ find themselves sucked into a parallel world of militias, machinations and murder.
Single mom Hadley Knox has her hands full juggling her kids and her police work. She’s doesn’t want to worry about her former partner – and sometimes lover – Kevin Flynn, but when he takes leave from the Syracuse PD and disappears, she can’t help her growing panic that something has gone very wrong.
Novice lawyer Joy Zhà o is keeping secrets from her superiors at the state Attorney General’s Office. She knows they wouldn’t condone her off-the-books investigation, but she’s convinced a threatening alt-right conspiracy is brewing – and catching the perpetrators could jump start her career.
NYS Forest Ranger Paul Terrance is looking for his uncle, a veteran of the park service gone inexplicably missing. He doesn’t think much of an ex-cop and out-of-town officer showing up in his patch of the woods, but he’s heard the disturbing rumors of dangerous men in the mountains.
All roads lead to the forbidding High Peaks of the Adirondacks, where deep snows hide deadly plans and ancient trees shield modern hatred. As the December days shorten and the nights grow long, a disparate group of would-be heroes need to unwind a murderous plot before time runs out.
JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: So I do have some cool news to make up for talking about editing, which is, frankly, kind of dull. I have a publication date for AT MIDNIGHT COMES THE CRY: November 25, 2025.
This tickles me enormously, because the novel starts at almost that date, on the day of the Greenwich Lighted Tractor Parade, which is the Saturday before Thanksgiving. (The year I first say this wonderful event, it was on the 23rd. PS, it's not that Greenwich.) The 25th will be two days before Thanksgiving next year, which means you can all rush out and buy it during Small Business Saturday.
That is, of course, if I finish the edits. I have a combination: some in-depth changes that need a lot of work and some extremely small stuff. Examples of the latter:
9. the tumult was split...tumult? seems a bit fancy
51. bottom of the page. adult full grown should be full grown adult, yes?
106. You're missing the chapter number - 9
141. Absolutely not...who is talking?
And here's an example of the deeper stuff: I've been dealing with my female protagonist's alcohol/ pill addiction for three books now. I was sick to death of it, frankly, but I didn't know how to move on in a realistic way. My brilliant editor said, "It's okay to have her healing and going forward offscreen!" I never would have thought of that on my own. So now, instead of a bunch of scenes about her wanting to pop a painkiller - all of which seemed weirdly inserted into the real story - I have this conversation:
“How are you doing?” St. Laurent’s voice changed, became more, well, pastoral. She recognized it because she used the same tone herself.
“With sobriety, you mean?” Clare sighed. “Not going to lie. It’s hard. I seriously backslid around the time my husband quit his job and the police force was on the chopping block. So much pain and fear and I couldn’t…” she didn’t know how to complete the sentence.
“You want to help everyone, and when you can’t, you don’t know how to deal with it.” St. Laurent tugged on his knit toque. “I’ve been there myself, more than once. What got you out of it?”
“The next morning, the baby was fussy, so I brought him into bed with us.” She smiled at the memory. “I looked at him and my husband, all drowsy together, and I thought, I can have this, or I can have those pain pills hidden in my glove compartment.” She shrugged. “I walked to the car in my PJs and slippers, flushed the pills down the toilet and went to my first AA meeting that night.” She ducked her head. “I get my thirty day chip this Wednesday.”
Such a relief! Dear readers, what do you want to know about editing? And aren't you glad Clare is sober now?
JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: Like Debs, I'm also recovering from surgery; in my case a knee replacement. Will this mean you'll see a lot of fiction in coming years featuring post-procedure protagonists? Probably not, as it's difficult to make someone who can't sit properly or drive the exciting center of a story unless you're Alfred Hitchcock.
Fortunately, I handed in my first draft last month, so I'm feeling guilt-free and unencumbered. I told my editor and agent I didn't expect to be back to work until eight weeks after surgery, and while that seems to have been a pessimistic timeline, considering how well I'm doing, I'm still not able to sit at my laptop for more than an hour or get through the day without a nap, so I'm definitely not going to be knocking out revisions in the immediate future.
Which is fortunate because a few weeks after handing my ms in, my editor of many years, still dealing with a major cross-country move, lost a close family member. Naturally, he's going to be sticking close to home and family for a while, thus a longer timeline for getting my revision letter. Life and death happen, and in an industry which depends largely on a chain of individuals all putting their stamp on a work, slow-ups happen.
Thus, my answer when asked when readers can expect to see AT MIDNIGHT COMES THE CRY: I don't know. Mt publisher won't schedule the print run until after I've turned in the revision. This isn't JUST because I'm notoriously late; the whole process of physically printing books for major publishing houses is a bit of a bottleneck these days.
Publishers, you might be surprised to know, don't actually produce the object you buy in a bookstore - that thing with the attractive dust cover and paper pages you can riffle through. Those are created by book manufacturing companies, and over the last twenty years, the number of those companies has dwindled to three or five or seven, depending on what source you're reading.
This aren't the smaller, more nimble printing presses that run off ten books per year at one thousand copies each - these are mammoth concerns rolling out tens of millions of printed books annually. Their various "runs" are more tightly scheduled than D-Day: SENSITIVE LITERARY DEBUT, with a print run of 35,000 fits in one day and time, while A GAME OF MASSIVE FANTASY with an initial printing of 750,000 has another slot. They might be back to back for efficiency, or to save absolute quantities of paper, or to minimize ink usage.
Plus, they have to leave in some flexibility. In the publishing world, nothing is a sure thing, and if THE MODEST TALE OF AN ENGLISH SLEUTHETTE is unexpectedly featured on the Today Show and the original printing of 20,000 sells out overnight, you can bet the publisher is going to be screaming at the book manufacturer to get another 40,000 copies out STAT.
Which brings me back to AT MIDNIGHT COMES THE CRY. Once I have the revision letter, confer with my editor and agent, and work my way through the franken-manuscript, St. Martin's will be ready to add my novel to the queue of thousands. And the date will be well in advance of the time my editor says, "Okay, this is good." They need to leave time for copy edits, gallery prints, gallery edits and art and book design, the not-very-noticeable stuff that makes the book "feel right" when you read it: starting and spacing paragraphs, proper word breaks, avoiding widows and orphans, etc.
Thus the truism in the biz: it takes about the same time from conception to baby as it does from final draft to printed book.
JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: Once more, dear readers, we get to see that exciting once-every-four-years-or-so event, the triumphant entry of Julia Spencer-Fleming's latest completed manuscript into the sacred precincts of St. Martin's Press offices.
Yes, you heard it right.
I have handed in the first draft of AT MIDNIGHT COMES THE CRY.
I can guarantee you this won't be the actual last page when we're done.
Now, keep in mind, this is one ugly baby. It's another Frankenbook, written in pieces over the past four years, with, I'm sure, plenty of dropped plot threads, characters changing personalities and names, and sudden unexplained events occurring with no previous notice. In addition, I wrote in ending in an M&M fueled rush, getting a normal week's worth of work done in one day. (That happens with every manuscript. I always have to rework the ending.)
As of writing this, I haven't heard back from my editor, although we've been in contact and he assures me he's working on it. It's undoubtedly in even worse shape than I thought. But you know what? I don't care! I finally, finally reached the end of the story, and if I have to redraft every page, it's still easier than starting ab ovo.
And, of course, I'm recovering from knee replacement surgery! The best advice I've gotten suggests I won't feel like doing any creative work for about eight weeks after, and that's what I've told my agent and editor. Fingers crossed, I'll be at it earlier, but, as I tell my communications students, it's better to underpromise and overperform.
Here's what I don't know:
How much work the manuscript needs.
Any sort of marketing plan, including giveaways.
The date of publication.
Here's what I do know:
AT MIDNIGHT COMES THE CRY will be available at fine booksellers everywhere at some point in 2025. Yay!
The other thing I don't know is whether or not this will be the last Clare Fergusson/Russ Van Alstyne mystery. I don't think so, but for the first time in almost eighteen years I'm out of contract, i.e., I don't have an agreement with my publisher to write more. So, not to be crass, but get those pre-orders in when they become available! The more readers who sign up for AT MIDNIGHT COMES THE CRY, the more likely it is St. Martin's will sign me up for more adventures with our friends in Millers Kill.
Thank you all, sincerely, for your support. I couldn't have done this without everyone cheering me on and reminding me they were waiting for the book. I'm extremely fortunate to be part of such a great community.
Okay, let's have a brag-a-thon in the comments! Dear readers, share what makes you want to blow your own horn!
JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: May was a month of travel, travel, travel for me and not a lot of writing, writing, writing as a result. I was in DC to help my sister with some stuff, in Colorado to celebrate a dear friend's landmark birthday, and, importantly for this post, in East Hampton, where I joined in an artists' retreat at my friend Shari Goddard Shambaugh's house.
Shari is a painter, one of those seemingly effortless hostesses, and someone who draws all sorts of interesting and creative people into her orbit. I was there with Gail Donovan, who writes middle-grade fiction, and artist Meredith Cough, another painter.
We worked, we ate really well (another one of Shari's talents) we talked for hours every evening and we made a pilgrimage to see the Jackson Pollock/Lee Krasner House, where we got to put on disposable booties and walk ON the floor of Pollock's studio, which was a lot like walking on one of his paintings.
The visual artists went out for several plein air sessions, while Gail and I wrote. The Shambaughs live in the historic rectory of St. Luke's Church, which was built in the days when the residents were expected to have a half dozen kids and an attic full of servants. There was plenty of room for everyone.
Part of the pleasure of the retreat was hashing out ideas and issues with each other. I had been expressing my frustration at feeling stuck near the very end of the book - the big action set piece and climax of the mystery/thriller plot. These scenes are never easy for me, because moving characters through space and having them do action-y stuff like run, jump, shoot, fight - and keeping it all flowing and easy for the reader to visualize - is tough. (Sometimes I wish I could write 300 pages of my characters just talking. I'd be done in a month.)
This time, it was even more difficult than usual, because the denouement takes place in a real-world location and I've managed to collect six major characters and three side characters, all of whom do things, make decisions, affect the action, etc. Yes, I know I'm an idiot.
Part of the issue, as I explained it to the group, was having TOO much in my head - I had outlined the big strokes of the scene, but breaking that down into the granular moment-by-moment had me snarled and overwhelmed.
Shari suggested I try drawing a rough map of where the action takes place, and, using a different colored dot for each character, move them moment by moment through the scene. I'm not much of an artist (ie, not at all) but I figured I'd give it a try. She handed me a sheaf of sketch paper and a box of colored pencils and off I went to my room.
Reader, it was a breakthrough! I didn't cut out dots (I honestly figured I'd lose them at the first sneeze) and instead used the first letter of the characters names, each with its own color. Within sketching out the first two pages, I realized what had kept me jammed up was holding all the decisions each major player had to make in my head. Drawing the who-what- when-where, instead of thinking or even outlining, enabled me to break down the scene into it's component beats: decision -> action-> results-> next decision-> next action, etc., etc.
I spent all afternoon sketching (badly) and marking up the pages with notes, working my way through the scene and eventually positioning my characters for the second half of the climax, where they get spotlighted in their own individual/couple moments.
When I finished, I felt as if a 500 pound rock has been lifted off my shoulders. Illustrating the events, rough as it was, turned out to be a terrific technique for busting up that mental logjam. I've been using and expanding on the original sketches since then (well, since getting home from Colorado at the end of May,) much to the pleasure of my cat Neko, who really, really likes stretching out on sketching paper.
JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: I had really hoped I'd be posting a video of the Hallelujah Chorus and telling you all AT MIDNIGHT COMES THE CRY is done, but I've hit two, shall we say, bumps in the road.
The first is: the whole action-packed, (hopefully) thrilling finale, gathering together the entire group of good guys versus the baddies, take place in a very real location in upstate NY. A place I last visited about a decade ago - and I wasn't thinking of setting the most important part of a novel there.
Now, I've written about places I haven't been to before, or about places I haven't been for a while. Or I've made up locations based on the same. But there's a difference when you're using a location for a setting, aka background, and when you're using it to choreograph an action scene. (More than one scene! Practically the whole last act!)
To illustrate the difference, imagine you're setting a book in Boston. Your characters are walking and talking on Boston streets, riding the T, and eating at restaurants. Honestly, if you can recall some of the sounds and smells, or the way the wind blows in the winter, you can get by writing all of those character interactions with a street map and a bunch of Google images saved in a file.
Now imagine a sniper is shooting at your characters, who have to snag a car and careen through the streets to the waterfront. Where can the sniper set up? How far away? What's the angle? Can cars park there, or will your heroes have to run? How fast does the traffic move? One way? (trick question: it's all one way in Boston.) When they get out of a car, what things can they hide behind? Where would the bad guys have set up, anticipating our heroes next move?
Maybe other authors do it differently, but for me, producing a fast-paced, can't-catch-your-breath, slam-bang action sequence depends on meticulous planning and a deep understanding of all the physical elements involved. (This is why I think I would be VERY good at committing elaborate heists, btw.)
Even when I've made up the whole location, I still need a clear mental picture of geography, distances, structures. And it's SO MUCH WORSE when it's a real place. A real place tens of thousands of people see every year. I can already see the torrent of emails and Goodreads reviews taking me to task for my sloppy research.
So I'm ushering in the finale by constantly referencing maps, charts, photos, etc. etc. All while trying to write in such a way that the eventual reader has a seamless, emotional, and exciting time once the book is out in the world. Needless to say, it's slowing me to a crawl.
Oh, and the second thing. Stress/bad ergonomics/overwork has given me a burning muscle spasm running from beneath my scapula right up the side of my neck and down to my left bicep. It's been bothering me for a week now, and yesterday I finally took action by downloading Microsoft's free voice-to-text app. I trained on it, and trained it, and my first day's word count using it is... not good. I can tell this is going to be a steep learning curve for both of us. It doesn't help that it thinks my main characters' names are Ross and layer.
I'd like to get to the point where I can comfortably compose by voice, at which point I'd be willing to invest in Dragon, which everyone seems to agree is the bomb-diggity. I know I can change the way I interact with words and the page: I did it when I trained myself to do an initial draft on the computer keyboard, instead of longhand on paper. Of course, that was back in '86. I guess this is a chance to see just how much my brain has fossilized since then.
I guess I have two questions for you, dear readers: How do you like your action scenes to flow? Is authenticity important to you?
And I'm welcoming suggestions to get my back muscles to calm down...
JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: No, it's NOT done yet, dear readers. This is absolutely the worst part of the book for me - the ending. I swear, if I could just publish manuscripts that were 5/8 done and crowdsource the endings, I'd get books out - gosh, who knows, maybe every three years instead of four!
My issue with getting over the finish line is partly me, and partly the nature of the genre. For me - honestly, I don't know. I always slow down here, and we know, I'm not that fast to begins with.
Psychological barriers to completion? Fear of success or failure? Not wanting to let go? I've done a lot over the past years to improve my scheduling and organization; maybe now it's time for therapy.
The nature of the genre is such that the end of any sort of crime fiction is usually 1) the high point of action and 2) has to tie all the threads together. For the first, well, I'm known for my action sequences. I like them. The readers seem to like them. But they are HARD! Making sure the reader knows who is doing what, where in space and when in a sequence of events... sometimes it feels more like planning a multi-person jaunt through an unfamiliar city via public transportation.
As for tying the threads together - I can only point out I have more than one unfinished piece of very elaborate needlepoint. Oh, I just LOVE adding more and more and more threads. Figuring out what to DO with them... not so much.
However, I am progressing. In fact, if I didn't write such #$%& long books, I'd be done now, or close to it. Alas, I don't seem to have any more control over the length of my stories than I do anything else. Truly, writing is a mysterious process.
This is the place where I would usually put some hopefully interesting question that would stimulate lots and lots of backblog comments. Instead, I have a favor to ask. Will you, dear readers, be my accountability partners? I'm highly motivated by guilt (if you had met my mother, you'd understand) so if one of you asks "Julia, have you written today" EVERY DAY until I finish, I'll be too embarrassed not to write. Don't all do it, for goodness sake, that would be a nightmare. Just one person.
TIA, Julia
JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: I kid you not, dear readers. I'm now in the fourth and shortest act of AT MIDNIGHT COMES THE CRY, and there's just not that much left to go. Well, my heroes have to save the day, and tie up all the loose ends, and we have to see what happens - or doesn't happen - in the romance department. Honestly, if I hadn't basically taken off the entire month of December (please don't murder me, Hank and Jenn!) it would be done by now.
I'm feeling excited and impatient and more than ready to buckle down and put this baby to bed. We've got our first big snowstorm moving in tonight - six inches to a foot predicted for my area. Sounds like great weather for starting a roaring fire, keeping the tea kettle on, and writing!
Here's an excerpt from the beginning of that fourth act - Clare, Russ and Hadley are on their (unofficial) way to what may be a hostage situation...
“Could we please hurry a little more?” Clare looked out the window. “I swear I saw a one-legged man pushing a wheelbarrow pass us.”
“And this is why I'm driving.”
The chief resettled his hands in the classic two-and-ten position on
the steering wheel.
A good thing, too, Hadley thought. The last Sunday before Christmas was as busy a day for traffic as they'd see until the Fourth of July holiday. She had heard about Reverend Clare's lead foot, and she had no interest in seeing how fast she could speed through the bag- and package- laden vehicles around them.
“What's the plan?” she asked.
“You and I should go in first.” Clare twisted in her seat to talk to her. “He's never seen you, and you don't look like a cop.”
“So you want to give him two more hostages?” Van Alstyne shook his head.
“Just long enough so I can see if Tiny and the baby are there. Then you and Lyle can come in with guns blazing.”
“Oh, yeah, that would make the set-up even better. You and this woman and an infant caught in a crossfire. And what if March just shoots you on sight?”
“He doesn't want to kill me. At least not right away. He wants to humiliate me. He wants to see me scared and weak.” She turned around again to face Hadley. “Right?”
She sighed. “I know the type. Men who don't feel tall unless they're standing on a woman.”
 |
| My standing desk aka the kitchen counter |
JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: This month I've been grinding away towards finishing the manuscript for AT MIDNIGHT COMES THE CRY (Yes, Jenn and Rhys write three books in one year and I write one book in three years. It's called averaging, okay?!?) One of the issues with taking a long, roundabout route to the first draft, is starting out with certain locations, characters, or plot devices, only to realize once you've reached the 5/8th mark (which for me is between 65 and 70 thousand words) that you've forgotten, abandoned, or changed those things.
For instance, I made one character pregnant when we first meet her. (No, not Clare or Hadley.) I thought it would make her precarious position even more fraught. Then, I just sort of... forgot about it. I had to go back to check on something that occurred when we first meet her and surprise! She's six months pregnant. There was only one problem (besides the fact I hadn't mentioned anything about her being in a family way in any scene after the first two.) Now she was in some action-adventure-y scenes, and being an expectant mom was just TOO much of a pain to write around.
Fortunately, in Maine, it's legal to end a character's pregnancy at any time up to the last pass of the galley pages, so I went back, did a little rewriting, and taa-daa, she's no longer pregnant.
In another place, I had a scene with a character who just... doesn't show up again. Which is a problem, because I've learned that if there seems to be enough weight on a character, if they're TOO vivid or TOO important, the reader will feel as if they've been left hanging when that person doesn't reappear.
So I figured out what his essential business was, parceled it around to other characters, and got rid of him. (Writing is a ruthless business, don't let anyone every tell you otherwise.)
As Debs wrote about yesterday, I'm also dealing with weather constraints. I had characters picking up shells from the ground, only to remember that two days before, I had bedeviled everyone with a snowstorm. (Why was there a snowstorm? Because it's a Julia Spencer-Fleming novel. All my books have snowstorms. Even the ones set in summer.)
Well, I had made life harder for my characters, which was the point, but also harder for me. I had to go back and add in brooms, and sweeping, and snow removal.
Don't even get me started on the way I had Clare and Russ's dog, Oscar, in the opening prologue and then haven't written a word about him since. And it's been almost a month in the story! Poor Oscar! He's been waiting a long time for a walk and some kibble. I'll have to correct that before turning it in, or someone's going to report Rev. Fergusson to the ASPCA.
Here's an excerpt with the newly NOT pregnant Tiny March (whose last name may also change, we'll see...) and Clare fleeing trouble:
She let out a breath she didn't know she was holding when they reached the broader, two-lane stretch to the state highway. “Okay, it'll take us a little over an hour to get to Millers Kill from here. How about we pick up a few things for you and Rose at the a Wal-Mart in Fort – oh, shit!”
She and the driver of the pickup heading past her recognized each other at the same moment. Tiny twisted around in her seat. “It's Cal! Oh my God, what are we gonna do? Oh, God, oh God...”
Clare had already hit the gas. Her Subaru was no sports car, but it was a goer, and Cal March had to make a three-point turn before he could follow her. She swung onto the state highway without slowing and immediately accelerated to seventy-five. She split her attention between the road and her rear-view mirror. Sure enough, in the distance, she could see the pick-up turning onto the highway after her.
Tiny leaned forward, looking from side to side. “Is there some place we can hide? Take another route?”
Clare focused on the road ahead,
inching her speed up to eighty. “This is it. It's about fifteen
miles to the first town, and that's not much more than a cluster of
buildings along the highway. It's twice as far to the Northway.”
She wrestled the Adirondack atlas out of her side pocket without
taking her eyes off the road and handed it to Tiny. “See if there's
any place likely.”
“What about a police station?”
“I know the Essex county sheriff is up in Lewis, but that's got to be an hour from here.” Up ahead, an oil delivery truck lumbered along at a sedate five miles below the speed limit. Clare shifted lanes and blew past him. “State police Troop G is south of here. Somewhere around Brant Lake.”
Tiny bent her head over the map. “That's, like, thirty miles.”
The oil truck dwindled in her rear view mirror. Maybe...? Then the truck popped out from behind it and continued after them. That was the problem with Route 28N – it was a thirty mile long gentle curve, with stretched-out sightlines that made it very safe for tourists traveling into the mountains and very inconvenient when you wanted to disappear. She slowed slightly to scan the area ahead of the SUV in front of her, then revved up to pass it. The good news was, it was Sunday, and there wasn't much traffic on the road. The bad news was, it was Sunday, and where in this corner of the Adirondacks could they find enough people and vehicles to get lost in?
Have you ever read a book where one of these little "Ooops!" moments has been left in, dear readers? Do you ever return to an earlier part of a novel, brows furrowed, trying to make sense of something? (P.S., Tropical Storm Lee will be hitting my area with torrential rain and high winds today, so keep your fingers crossed I keep my power and internet!)
