We are delighted to be revealing the cover and an excerpt for Libby Cudmore’s Negative Girl! Releasing on September 10th 2024 from Datura Books, Negative Girl is an evocative, moody, neo-noir thriller that explores obsession and people dying across America’s forgotten spaces.
Read on to discover the cover, synopsis, and an excerpt, plus be sure to pre-order your copy here!
Martin Wade lived hard in his youth, but unlike many of his former bandmates and roadie friends, he didn’t die young. Instead he hit the recovery path, cleaned up his life, and became a private investigator in a dying city in upstate New York.
When his heavily tattooed and scarred assistant Valerie sets up an appointment with a young woman who needs help keeping her biological father away from her, none of the three realize that the father is Martin’s old bandmate, still using, and on a destructive path that will soon be headed straight for Martin’s clean life.
As Martin struggles, Valerie becomes increasingly obsessed with their new client’s life. Then the client is found dead in a riverbank, and duty, nostalgia, and lifetimes of regret find Martin and Valerie on the case for the young woman’s killer. As Martin struggles to hold onto his sobriety, Valerie becomes increasingly obsessed with their dead client.
EXCERPT
3
Valerie
We sometimes joked that the Red Top Diner was our other office. We were there frequently enough, and sometimes I even let Martin pretend like he discovered the place. When I first started working for him, he frequented Danny’s, a greasy spoon where the cockroaches were such a common sight that they might as well have been busboys. I brought him to the Red Top and changed his mind. Well, maybe not so much me as Joan, the owner. I suspected he had a thing for her and I wouldn’t blame him. Joan was the kind of woman a pulp writer might have described as a broad, a big redhead with a wide mouth and a hearty laugh and a heart to match all of it. There wasn’t a man who came in the Red Top who wasn’t in love with Joan.
She came by our table with the coffee pot and didn’t even ask if we wanted coffee before she filled our cups. She knew the answer was yes, it was always yes when it came to coffee at the Red Top Diner. Though a whole series of high-end coffee shops had sprung up by Raines College, there wasn’t a barista in Perrine who could make a cup as good as the one you got for $1.25 – with unlimited warm-ups, of course – at the Red Top.
“Haven’t seen you in a few days,” she said. “Was starting to think you’d gone back to your old ways at Danny’s.”
He laughed a little. “Valerie would never let that happen.”
She reached over one manicured hand and smoothed a mess of stray silver hair off his forehead. “Big case?”
I could hear his heart pounding over Christopher Cross warbling “Arthur’s Theme” on the radio behind the counter. “As big as cases get around here,” he stammered.
“Then I guess I’d better get you guys fed,” she said, pulling out her notepad. “What’ll it be?”
Martin ordered breakfast. I ordered lunch. I watched her walk away, wondering if that wiggle was how she had always walked or if that was just for him. “When are you going to ask her out?” I asked in a low voice when I was sure she was out of earshot.
“She’s not saying anything to me that I’m sure she doesn’t say to all her other regulars,” he said, pretending to be very interested in the yellow legal tablet in front of him. “Besides, it’s generally not my policy to date married women.”
“Her husband left her two months ago,” I said. “Affair with one of his flight attendants. Surprised she didn’t put you on the case. Could have racked up those frequent flyer miles.”
Martin looked surprised at this revelation. His eyes darted towards the clock, then to the specials on the board, then to her left hand to see that, sure enough, she wasn’t wearing her wedding ring. “Sorry to hear that,” he said. “I’d hate to think of anyone hurting her.”
That made two of us. Joan was always protective of the kids of Perrine, especially the ones like me and Deacon when we were growing up, kids who had seen some shit. I took a sip of my coffee. “How’s your head?” I asked.
“Coffee helped,” he said. “Meds are starting to kick in too.”
“So talk to me about the case.”
“It’s not quite a stalking case,” he explained. “Non-custodial parent, trying to make up for lost time. She might be having second thoughts, wants to make sure he’s not just trying to get money out of her.”
“Seems a little low-stakes for hiring a private eye.”
Our plates came momentarily between us, set down by a waitress with a face too old for the rest of her body. I wondered if she was another of Perrine’s seemingly endless supply of junkies; cash tips were a good way to fix up, and there wasn’t a kitchen in Perrine that didn’t have at least one dealer supplementing his income with the hard stuff. But more than a theory, it was the way Martin avoided looking at her that told me my hunch was right. He had just passed nineteen years of sobriety and it didn’t take a PI license for him to spot a fellow zombie. “You think Joan knows?” he asked.
“Doubt it,” I said. “She wouldn’t keep her around if she did.”
He looked back at Joan one more time and gave her a sweet, sad little smile. “C’mon, Martin,” I chided. “Just ask her out. You don’t have to marry her. Just take her to dinner. She clearly adores you.”
“We’ll see,” he said in a tone that told me the conversation was, for the time being, over.
With nothing left in that line of inquiry, I hit him with the big question. “It sounds like it’s just a telephone call,” I ventured. “Why are you so anxious about it?”
He stopped like I’d thrown a bear trap on his plate. “Because I can’t shake the feeling that I’ve seen her before,” he admitted. He loosened his tie like he was trying to cheat the hangman, rolled his skinny shoulders slightly forward, mopped up egg yolks with a piece of toast and ate a little before he answered. “But I don’t know where, and it’s chewing me up inside.”
I ran through scenarios in my head: a con artist; a wronged party from an old case now seeking revenge; an illegitimate daughter, conceived on a bender or a backstage fling, waiting to reveal her identity until she was sure he was her Real Dad before she put the squeeze on him. For all of what Martin refused to talk about, I wondered how much of it he even remembered. Heroin had got him fast and held him hard, haunting him even now. The track marks were long since gone, but there were scars on his soul that time would never heal.
“I could look into it,” I said. “Make the call, keep you out of it, just in case.” I couldn’t help but be protective of him. Somebody had to be, and he’d bounced me out of trouble plenty enough. I owed him one. Hell, I owed him a couple if we were really keeping score.
He waved me off. “Thanks for the offer,” he said. “But it’s my name on the door. I’ll make the call.”
He didn’t sound happy about it.
He paid the check, we said goodbye to Joan and he drove us back to the office. He dialed the hotel number Ms Archwood had given me, putting the call on speaker. “Vanguard Hotel, how may I direct your call?”
“I’m looking to speak with a Lem Chesterfield,” he said.
The desk manager didn’t answer right away. “I’m sorry, sir, there’s no one here by the name,” he finally said.
An alias, perhaps? And why? I’d learned early on that the client could be just as shifty as whoever they wanted investigated, as if they were testing to see if we’d really put it all together. We always did. No sense trying to trick the brilliant mind of Martin Wade, Private Investigator.
“Did he check out recently?”
“There’s no one has registered under that name,” he repeated. “Is there anything else I can assist you with?”
I knew that look. Something had just clicked inside Martin’s head. He ran the tip of his tongue across his upper lip and cleared his throat softly. “Maybe he’s registered under a different name,” he said. “Try Ron Carlock.”
“One moment, please.”
The phone began to ring. A man picked up. “Ron Carlock speaking.”
Martin went as white as a wedding dress. “Ron,” he said slowly. “It’s Martin.”
4
Martin
There are names you hope you never hear again. Voices you want to leave in the past. Nineteen years ago, another lifetime, one sometimes I imagined I dreamed. But unlike dreams, life has consequences. A dream can be forgotten. A life cannot be outrun.
The line got so quiet that I thought maybe Ron had hung up. I was hoping he would. He was the last person on this goddamn planet I wanted to hear from, now or ever. But after a moment, he spoke. “Martin,” he said softly. “It’s good to hear from you.”
The pieces were all coming together, almost too quickly for me to catch hold of. I should have known it was Ron the second I heard that name, the same name he used to check into hotels under. And that meant that Janice Archwood was really Janie Carlock, Ron’s daughter. I could have kicked myself for not recognizing her. Now all grown up, she looked just like I remembered her mother, Sharon used to look. But where did Archwood come from? Even that had the faintest taste of familiarity. “What are you doing in Perrine?” I asked.
“I came in to see some friends,” Ron said. “I didn’t know you lived here.”
“Those friends include Janie?” I said.
Ron didn’t respond right away. Valerie looked like she wanted to shrink out of the room. I wished I hadn’t put the call on speaker. I wish I’d never taken the case. She gestured to a legal tablet just past my left hip. I shook my head. No need to take notes. No need to have any record that any of this ever took place. “I just wanted to see my daughter,” he finally said. “Is that so wrong?”
“It is if she told you she needs a little space to think.”
“How are you involved in this?” Ron asked. “Why now, after all these years, do you even give a shit?”
“Because she hired me,” I replied. “She asked me to mediate, to tell you she needs a little time to respond to your offer.”
I was shaking, but I wasn’t sure if it was from surprise or rage or fear. Why had she lied to me? Did she even know who I was? I was always Basil to her, the middle name I used on stage, the name I left behind.
The life I left behind.
Ron let out a sound that was more a bark than a laugh. “Sure,” he croaked. “Sure, Martin, whatever you say.”
He hung up. I set my phone down as gently as a baby in a crib. “Care to fill me in on what that was about?” Valerie asked.
“Not especially,” I said, sinking into my chair. The room was spinning. Sweat was beading up all over my body like condensation on a cold beer. I had to hold it together long enough to get her out of the room so I could collapse into my own thoughts like a dying star. “Do me a favor and set up an appointment with Ms Archwood for tomorrow. I’m going to close out this case. We’ll give back her deposit and destroy all the records.”
The worst part wasn’t the lie. Lies were the core piece of my business – hell, I’d told enough of them in my life to not take them personally. The worst part was how good it was to hear my partner’s voice, as though the last nineteen years had been dust, easily blown away by a whistle. No, I told myself. You put each other through hell. Do not go down that road again.
Valerie read me well enough not to argue with me. She left the room and through the half-opened door I could hear her on the phone with Janie. I opened up my laptop. Janie had mentioned last seeing Ron at her mother’s funeral. I did a quick search and sure enough, Sharon Lovette had died two years ago at her home in Santa Monica. Ovarian cancer, just shy of her fifty-first birthday. I wish I had known. I wish I had sent flowers. I wish I’d said a real goodbye nineteen years ago instead of just packing my piano into a U-Haul and disappearing to Minneapolis with a new phone number and no forwarding address. Like a fugitive. Like a coward.
Valerie knocked and let herself back in. “Ms Archwood will be in tomorrow at 11 am,” she said, arranging herself in the blue chair, one foot slung over the arm. “Are you going to be OK?”
I wanted to tell her. She knew little fragments of my past; that I was in recovery, that I had been a musician, but I was always hesitant to let out too much of myself. Just like I made her cover her tattoos so she wouldn’t be recognizable in the field, I kept my own identifiers hidden. Anything that could hurt me. Anything that could be used against me somewhere down the line. “I’ll be fine,” I said, and changed the subject. “Plans for the evening?”
“Tacos at Topsy’s,” she said. “It’s been a while since I’ve been over there. Besides, I’m too tired to cook. You want to come with me? We can drink Dr. Pepper and fill up the jukebox. I got a hook-up.”
I liked Topsy’s – Valerie’s aunt Gina booked good bands and we swapped stories from our previous lives as touring musicians, but tonight was the last night I wanted to spend toe-to-toe with temptation. “Think I’ll go to a meeting and call it an early night,” I said.
She did a quick tap-dance on her phone before I could even reach for mine. “There’s a 6 pm at the First Presbyterian Church,” she said. “You could still make it. Or there’s a 6:30 tomorrow morning.”
I glanced at my watch. Time enough so that I could run home and get changed beforehand. Better than cutting my morning coffee short, and having to wait out a long evening. I lifted myself to standing once I was sure the shaking had settled. “You’ll close up?”
“Of course,” she replied with a decaffeinated smile. “Call me,” she added. “If you need anything.”
