Donna Andrews - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 130, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 793 & 794, September/October 2007

Even though we worked different gigs, we all managed to go hang at Bill’s, even though from time to time Bill and I almost got into fistfights. He never let us forget that he was the normal one, what with his good looks and his Yamaha motorcycle and all his ladies. We were three years out of high school. We’d all tried the community-college route, but since they didn’t offer any courses in the films of Mario Bava or Brian De Palma, none of us made it past the first year.

I guess — from the outside, anyway — we were pretty geeky. I had the complexion problem and Spence was always trying to make pharmaceutical peace with his bi-polarity and Bill — well, Bill wasn’t exactly a geek. Not so obviously, anyway. He was good-looking, smooth with girls, and he got laid a lot. But he was only good-looking on the outside... inside he was just as much an outcast as the seldom-laid Spence and I...

Do I have to tell you that people we went to high school with smirked whenever they saw us together? Do I have to tell you that a lot of people considered us immature and worthless? Do I have to tell you that a big night out was at GameLand, where we competed with ten- and twelve-year-olds on the video games? If Spence was off his medication and he lost to some smart-ass little kid, he’d get pretty angry and bitter. A lot of the little kids were scared of us. And you know what? That felt kinda good, having somebody scared of us. It was the only time we felt important in any way.

And then Michele Danforth came into our lives and changed everything. Everything.

Spence was the first one to recognize her. Not that we believed him at first. He kept saying, “That little blond chick that comes in here every other night or so — that’s Michele Danforth.” But we didn’t believe it, not even when he set three of her video boxes up on the counter and said, “You really don’t recognize her?”

Michele Danforth, in case you don’t happen to be into cult videos, was the most popular scream queen of all a couple of years ago. A scream queen? That’s the sexy young lady who gets dragged off by the monster/ax-murderer in direct-to-video horror movies. She screams a lot, and she almost always gets her blouse and bra ripped off so you can see her breasts. Acting ability doesn’t matter so much. But scream ability is vital. And breast ability is absolutely mandatory.

The funny thing with most scream queens is, you never see them completely naked. Not even their bottoms. It’s as if all the seventeen-year-old masturbation champions who rent their videos want their scream queens to be virginal. Showing breasts doesn’t violate the moral code here. But anything else — Well, part of the equation is that you want your scream queen to be the kind of girl you’d marry. And the marrying kind never expose their beavers except in doctors’ offices.

Couple of quick things here about Michele Danforth. She was very pretty. Not cute, not beautiful, not glamorous. Pretty. Soft. A bit on the melancholy side. The kind you fall in love with so uselessly. Uselessly, anyway, if your life’s work is watching direct-to-video movies. And those sweet breasts of hers. Not those big plastic monsters. Perfectly shaped, medium-sized good-girl breasts. And she could actually act. All the blog boys predicted she’d move into mainstream. And who could disagree?

Then she vanished. Became a big media story for a couple of weeks and then some other H-wood story came along and everybody forgot her. Vanished. The assumption became that some stalker had grabbed her and killed her. Even though she always said she couldn’t afford it — scream queens don’t usually make much more than executive secretaries — she had to hire a personal bodyguard because of all the strange and disturbing mail she got.

Vanished.

And now, according to Spence, she’d resurfaced fifteen hundred miles and three years later. Except that instead of being dark-haired, brown-eyed, and slender, she was now blond, blue-eyed, and maybe twenty-five pounds heavier. With very earnest brown-rimmed glasses sliding down her nose.

We had to admit that there was a similarity. But it was vague. And it was a similarity that probably belonged to a couple of million young women.

The night the question of her identity got resolved, I was starting the check-out process when the door opened up and she came in. She went right to the Drama section. I’d never seen her go to any of the other sections. Her choices were always serious flicks with serious actors in them. Bill and Spence had taken off to get some beer at the supermarket, the cost of it being way too much at convenience stores.

I’d agreed to the little game they’d come up with. I thought it was kind of stupid, but who knew, maybe it would resolve the whole thing.

It was a windy, chill March night. She wore a white turtleneck beneath a cheap, shapeless thigh-length brown velour jacket. She was just one more Midwestern working girl. Nothing remarkable about her at all. She always paid cash from a worn pea-green imitation-leather wallet. Tonight was no different. She never said much, though tonight, as I took her money, she said, “Windy.” She went under the name Heather Simpson.

“Yeah. Where’s that warm weather they promised?”

She nodded and smiled.

I rang up the transaction and then, as I handed her the slip to sign, I nudged the video box sitting next to the cash register out in front of me. Night of the Depraved was the title. It showed a huge, blood-dripping butcher knife about to stab into the white-bloused form of a very pretty girl. Who was screaming. The girl was Michele Danforth. The quote along the top of the box read: DEPRAVED to the Max... and scream queen Danforth is good enuf to eat... if you know what I mean! — Dr. Autopsy.com

“Oops,” I said, hoping she’d think this was all accidental. “You don’t want that one.” I picked up the box and looked at it. “I wonder what ever happened to her.”

She just shrugged. “I wouldn’t know. I never watch those kind of movies.” She took her change and said, “I’m in kind of a hurry.”

I handed her the right movie and just as I did so she turned toward me, showing me an angle of her face I’d never seen before. And I said, “It’s you! Spence was right! You’re Michele Danforth!”

And just then the door opened, the bell above it announcing customers, and in came Bill and Spence. They’d left the beer in the car. Video Vic would’ve kicked my ass all the way over into Missouri if he ever caught us with brew on the premises.

She turned and started away in a hurry, so fast that she brushed up against Spence. The video she carried fell to the floor.

Bill picked it up. He must have assumed that I had played the little game with her — bringing up Michele Danforth and all — because after he bent to pick up the video and handed it to her with a mock-flourish, he said, “I’m pleased to present my favorite scream queen with this award from your three biggest fans.”

She made a sound that could have been a sob or a curse, and then she stalked to the door, throwing it open wide and disappearing into the night. My mind was filled with the image of her face — the fear, the sorrow.

“She’ll never be back,” I said.

“I told you it was her,” Spence said. “She wouldn’t have acted that way if it wasn’t.”

“I wanna bang her,” Bill said, “and I’m going to.”

Spence said, “Man, she’s nobody now. She’s even sort of fat.”

“Yeah, but how many dudes can say they bopped Michele Danforth?”

“Wait’ll we get to La-La Land,” Spence said. “We’ll be boppin’ movie stars every night. And they won’t be overweight.”

Our collective fantasy had never sounded more juvenile and impossible than it did right then. In that instant I saw what a sad sham my life was. Shoulda gone to college; shoulda done somethin’ with my life. Instead, I was just as creepy and just as pathetic as all the other direct-to-video freaks who came in here and who we all laughed at when they left. Video Vic’s. Pathetic.