"Follow Me Down"

When not writing, Sherri Smith spends time with her family and two rescue dogs, and restores vintage furniture that would otherwise be destined for the dump. She lives in Winnipeg, Canada, where the long, cold winters nurture her dark side.

Smith applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, Follow Me Down, and reported the following:

From page 69:

I sat down. “You found her body?”

Liam nodded, tucked his greasy chin-length hair behind his ears, picked up the joint, and inhaled deeply, then flicked it into the grass. “Yeah, I can’t get it out of my head. Seniors were let out early to join the search parties. A lot of people were just, like, happy to get out of school, but I really looked, y’know?” His bloodshot eyes flickered over me; he stroked the corner of a very wispy mustache with his thumb.

I pushed him to tell me more. It didn’t take much. It was obvious Liam liked telling it since he’d parked himself here looking for new people to tell it to. Never once did he ask me who I was.

“That morning it was already really hot, and after a couple of hours, the guy I was with said he was getting heatstroke and had to take a break. Total pussy. So I kept going, and I ended up by the river. And yeah, I was gonna take a piss. I drank, like, four bottles of water at this point.”

I nodded, tried to look impressed.

“I was close to the river, just behind the tree. I unzipped, and when I looked down, there was something next to the tree, tangled up in the leaves.

On page 69 of Follow Me Down, Mia is at the scene (a sprawling wooded park) where her twin brother, Lucas, allegedly murdered his student. She needs to do this because she is still locked up in that bubble of shock when everything feels unreal. On page 69, she is talking to a seedy teenager who discovered the murdered teen’s body and is clearly hanging around the park looking for new people to share the gory details with. I think page 69 is representative of the entire book, since it captures the did he or didn’t he question that Mia struggles with, the way the town is quick to believe that Lucas is a twisted killer, and brings Mia closer to confronting a past she wanted to forget.

Visit Sherri Smith's website.

--Marshal Zeringue