Call Me Gertrude: True Name Series, #2

By Niz Thomas

She is a tornado of trouble. A drifter, a grifter, a rebel.

A woman with a lot more than just the attitude she wears like a stiletto dagger.

She's got a new name in every city. A true name – the very essence of a person or thing.

An almost mystical property bestowed from the universe when she invokes the true name.

 

This time, you can call her Gertrude.

Needing to get gone and clear her head, Gertrude wanders the darkening evening inside the Francis Marion National Park outside of Charleston, South Carolina.

All alone with just her thoughts, the road ahead looks far better than the one behind.

But the wilderness has other ideas for Gertrude.

And it ain't southern hospitality.

When she encounters someone else in the wild who also covets seclusion, Gertrude finds a dangerous test she wants no part of.

Get lost with another thrilling entry in the True Name series and see what noir drama the dame of danger confronts!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Throughplace Publishing
• Release date: Nov 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223855484

Book preview

Photo of a woman lost in the woods’s hiding a flashlight on a dark and mysterious scene.

CALL ME GERTRUDE

TRUE NAME SERIES

BOOK 2

NIZ THOMAS

Throughplace Publishing

COPYRIGHT

Call Me Gertrude

Made in the USA

Published by Throughplace Publishing

throughplace.com

Text copyright © 2023 by Michael Nisivoccia

All rights reserved.

Cover and Layout copyright © 2023 by Throughplace Publishing

Cover design by Michael Nisivoccia / Throughplace Publishing

Cover art copyright © breakermaximus / thriller illustration / Depositphotos

Cover art copyright © sozon / aged paper / Depositphotos

This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

COPYRIGHT

Family Tree

Made in the USA

Published by Throughplace Publishing

throughplace.com

Text excerpt copyright © 2023 by Michael Nisivoccia

All rights reserved.

Cover and Layout copyright © 2023 by Throughplace Publishing

Cover design by Michael Nisivoccia / Throughplace Publishing

Cover art copyright © Robert Adrian Hillman / Shutterstock

This text excerpt is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

CONTENTS

Also By Niz Thomas

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Family Tree

Chapter 1

Also By Niz Thomas

About the Author

ONE

The dual scents of peaty swamp bog and sprayed skunk told her she was finally, totally, and at last lost out here in the wilderness area of the Francis Marion National Park.

Hallelujah.

As if to drive the point home, she stood before a tangled undergrowth of hair-clump ferns, cypress knees, and waist-high pine bushes thick enough to be a hedgerow befitting Buckingham Palace. About as impenetrable as the little soldier boys dressed up in their red coats, too. Impossible to see beyond it. Could be anything on the other side. A traveling carnival, maybe. Or even more lush, abundant vegetation. Hell, even the Queen herself sunbathing her pasty crumpets.

All Gertrude—as she was calling herself now—knew was that the natural barrier before her blocked any clear trail forward.

The first indication, in fact, that she hadn’t actually seen a trail in quite some time.

It took her a while to realize it, she supposed. How long ago had the familiar indications of civilization recessed? Had to have been hours on foot since the tar-paved roads and car exhaust at the park’s entrance gave way to thicker and thicker vegetation—what a man she once dated for a week out in Wyoming might have called country, using the word with so many definitions in the only true way that called to mind some menace.

That was how she thought of it now, with the country closing in around her and choking out any semblance of fresh, breezy air.

Charred burgers and boiled hot dogs no longer hung on the heavy air, either. They’d been her steady companion on the hour drive up from Charleston—first along the highway as she passed Cookout and McDonald’s and all the rest of the bulging, rotund Meccas of the South. There were no shortage of fast-food joints dotting the major arterial roads leading away from the city, all waiting expectantly like vultures lining up to watch the roadkill finally expire. No question about if. Just of when.

Off the highway, past the fast-food joints, it was the campgrounds inside the park itself that exuded the same smells. Charcoal-finished beef, mixed with easy conversation, and cold beer, all of which had long-ago fallen away behind her with each step deeper into the wilderness.

All of it now gone.

Gertrude turned back around. No way she could continue forward without a team of strapping, machete-wielding ruffians. Perhaps a pack of donkeys or pack horses, too—just to keep her ankles free of annoying critters and snake bites. And if she were going to start making wishes, Genie, she wouldn’t mind a litter carried by a few more of those strapping ruffians. And a fan to keep her cool, too.

But wasn’t that sort of daydream that got her out here, lost in the first place? She’d been so much in her own head that she’d walked right on through a surprisingly sparse clearing of longleaf pines that stretched up overhead like multiple-story tenement buildings. Unlike the hedgerow, she could actually see daylight. But along with the change in perspective came an intense rush of loneliness that told her three things:

One—there had been a lot of steps between