#TeaserTuesday - 1/9

 

The cabin, when they reached it, had been eviscerated. Izzy had found it spooky and unnerving, but the sight of it now, as the boat arced around the final corner, dropped the bottom out of her stomach.

The roof was gone, as was all the time-silvered siding, and the tarpaper beneath. The windows had been removed and laid out on the clipped lawn, by the looks of it, the wink of glass in the now-short grass. The slope leading down to the water, where honeysuckle had grown in thick tangles, was now a mess of churned-up mud and exposed roots, laid over with piles of timber, stacks of shingles, big pink hanks of fiberglass insultation: all the detritus of a house pulled apart.

The dock was still there, had in fact been reinforced with fresh boards. The house had been reduced, though, to the porch, its now-roofless support posts, and the studs of the interior. People milled about in their windbreakers, snapping photos, dragging more trash along on makeshift litters made of tarps.

It was a bit like a construction site in reverse, the skeleton of a house – but sight of it filled her with a cold, clammy dread the way a new-build house site never had. These were the skeletal remains of a place, rather than the frame that would be the base of one. Tearing down felt so very different from putting up.

Unbidden, an image of Felix Lécuyer popped into her mind. The driver’s license photo Boyle had slapped up when he’d arrived the first time. She thought she’d done a decent job of not looking at Alex when she caught sight of it – they weren’t exact duplicates of one another. Felix was older, long-haired, his face both more weather-lined, and easier at the same time. Alex carried a weight across his brow that Felix didn’t, like Felix was quietly settled in his own skin.

Though the cabin had left the skin on the back of her neck crawling before, it had been easy to envision the man from the ID photo moving through its single room; washing his big hands at the lone sink; eating the protein bars lined up in boxes on the shelves. A rough and ready, outlaw sort of man who didn’t mind moving through the wilds of the swamp, content with his own company. 

For me at least, Knoxville feels like the setting of the Dartmoor Series, and New Orleans feels like another character. I have - admittedly, by design - written it as an almost parallel dimension. A magic place that operates outside of the normal bounds of settings, a place which only Mercy has the tools to know and to navigate. It's a notoriously haunted place - they run ghost tours and cemetery walks on the daily - and it's always felt right that it's cloaked in a kind of veil. Mercy can pass through unharmed, because his bones and blood were formed there, but anyone else who crosses the border has a hard time seeing their way. 

That's a theme I'm definitely going to feature heavily in Part III: Rising Sun.
("There is a house in New Orleans / They call the Rising Sun.")

Part II: Fortunate Son is now available for purchase!