I am thrilled to announce the local launch of The Trouble on Highway One at the Garden District Book Shop, on Tuesday, November 20, at 6pm! If you are in town, please stop by.

Garden District Book Shop has some very positive associations for me. Shortly after I moved back to New Orleans, in the early 2000’s, I went there to meet Greg Iles. I had just read The Footprints of God, and saw that he would be in town, signing copies of Blood Memory at Garden District Book Shop. It was such a great opportunity to meet an author I had just discovered, and pick up a signed copy of his next book.

And just two years ago, my friend Kristen’s publishing company released a book of poetry, I Am One of You, by Nicole Eiden. (That’s Kristen at the podium in the picture above.) The event she held there was a real success. I’m so excited New Orleans readers will get to pick up their copy of The Trouble on Highway One at Garden District Book Shop!

I plan to read an excerpt during the event. Last week, I mentioned that I would publish the second part of Chapter 1, so here you go:

1

. . .

Birdie hummed along, until the last passage. Then she sang aloud, her voice like salted honey. A warm, earthy, resonant note.

“When we’ve been there ten thousand years, bright shining as the sun, we’ve no less days to sing God’s praise, than when we first begun.”

Birdie didn’t see the man standing in the road until it was too late. Too late for her.

She swerved to the right, the opposite side from the bayou. In less than an instant, the steep embankment rose up, and her truck ended its collision course against a tree.

Her eyes opened, and her face felt wet. Something obscured her vision. She thought she’d gone into the bayou.

She drew the back of her hand across her forehead. Holding it out to the dim light of the dashboard, it was coated in a thick redness.

Help.

She would need to get help. It was too far to walk back to Galliano, and too far to walk forward home to Larose.

Home. Morris. He’d be angry about the truck. But he’d be more worried about her, she knew.

None of it would matter if she couldn’t get out of the truck and flag down help from the road.

She turned toward her driver’s side door, and focused her effort on the door handle. The front end of the truck was crumpled, and it kept her door from opening.

Looking through that window, a familiar figure appeared.

Help is coming to me, she thought.

As the figure grew larger in her view, she saw him. It was a man dressed all in white. Why did he look familiar?

That was the man in the road. What was he doing walking in the middle of the road? Can he help?

As the man came closer, her blood ran cold. He had a man’s face, but there was something unnatural about it. Birdie thought of a picture book she had when she was a child. A picture book of Bible tales. One page showed the devil’s face, when he appeared to Jesus during his forty days in the desert. He had bloodshot eyes, and a rapacious mouth.

That picture terrified her. And that’s what the man’s face looked like.

Now, he stood right outside the truck. Her limbs felt heavy. He held his palm up to the glass of her driver’s side window. All she wanted was to turn away. But she couldn’t.

She was transfixed.

She saw his palm pressed against the glass, but felt an invisible, icy pressure just above her heart.

Terror enveloped her. The pressure escalating to an inexorable conclusion.

In an instant, she was released. No more horror, no more pain above her heart. She could finally turn her gaze. She looked at the passenger seat, and Momma was there. The light of her smile made the devil disappear from Birdie’s thoughts.

Birdie couldn’t feel her own body anymore, but she could feel Momma take her by the hand. They left the truck through the passenger’s side, and someone was waiting there for them. A warm, distant memory made concrete. It was Birdie’s father.

The three of them made their way to the woods.

Like in a dream, Birdie could see her form in the truck, the blood on her face. The devil was nowhere to be seen.

Her heart ached a little for the Becnel children, and more so for Ronnie and young Cecil. Morris made her stop in her tracks. He couldn’t live without her. She tried to turn around. To go back.

Birdie felt herself shrinking. She looked up, and her parents were on each side of her, towering above her. Gently, they each put an arm around her and carried her until she was whole again.

The woods never looked more peaceful. The cicadas sounded otherworldly, heavenly. The smell of eucalyptus enveloped them as they crossed the threshold.