Call Me Betsy: True Name Series, #1

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 Betsy.

 

Hitching a ride along the freight rails, Betsy is on a high after ditching a complicated situation back up the line.

 

All alone, she's on easy street now.

 

But one thing about Betsy is that nothing in her life is ever easy.

 

And everywhere she goes, trouble is there. Not because it finds her, though. Because she finds it.

 

Catch a ride with Betsy for a twisty romp with danger that will have you whistling with relief once the train pulls back into the station!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Throughplace Publishing
• Release date: Oct 13, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215641170

Book preview

Photo of a woman’s legs, between which stands a dangerous man with a gun, a train barreling down toward them both.

CALL ME BETSY

TRUE NAME SERIES

BOOK 1

NIZ THOMAS

Throughplace Publishing

COPYRIGHT

Call Me Betsy

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 / noir illustration / Depositphotos

Cover art copyright © DELstudio / train / 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

If you boiled her down to two distinct elements—the core of what she was—they would be these:

First, the steady, slapping patter of keyboard iron springs against platen on her daddy’s Hermès Rocket typewriter. The sounds of fiction being created out of thin air like an alchemist turning common metals into gold. Daddy had gone another route—turning thoughts into stories. Gold always seemed to elude him.

But the typewriter’s percussive action was woven into her like hidden seams on a dress.

Second, the steady, ferocious tumult of the Hudson River—known to the Native Americans as the river that flows both ways. Able to drag anybody wading in unsuspecting off into the Atlantic. They’d be halfway over to Africa before they knew what hit ‘em.

There’d been a cabin upstate, just beside the banks, where the Hudson got choppy and white-capped. Where Daddy could get some peace and quiet for his writing. A place he could afford, since keeping it warm meant mostly keeping logs in the wood stove and ignoring the soot seeping into the air.

The closest thing she ever had to call home. The mix of warm milk, a rocking chair, and the open window of their one-room cabin—her only companions in sleep for those first few years.

She knew all this because her daddy had said it was so. And because she could still feel the ink-laced family yearning for myth and scrapping and danger running through her veins.

Right now, she almost had to laugh at herself for embodying all of that at once. The walking cliché that she was. Or sitting cliché, since that’s what she’d been doing for the past sixty hours.

She was tucked in tight to a tin-rattling boxcar she hopped the day before yesterday. Seated directly between two crates of potatoes the size of hog pens. Surrounded by maybe a hundred more of them (though she was waiting for hour eighty before deciding she was bored enough to count). Her once-lithe body fitted in a space big enough for only a dog’s crate and probably half as comfortable. It was approaching rigor mortis.

The entire boxcar smelled like raw spuds ready for slicing, dicing, and hot oil baths. The only salve was the constant rush of air as the train cut down the eastern artery of the country. The slatted sliding door off to her right provided just enough air flow to eliminate the possibility that the men unloading the car wouldn’t turn up a dead body along with their delivery of potatoes. And just enough morning light so she could see the few feet in front of her if she needed to. Once the sun got over the horizon, the whole car would be lit up