THE NEXT DAY
I can remember the first time I saw J. Ross Nelson on the big screen. The uproar after her disappearance with Doug Fischbach was intense and predictable. His reappearance in the middle of the week following homecoming, accompanied by a smirk, but not by the 1969 homecoming queen, overshadowed schoolyard interest in the drowning of Butchie Pendergast. Wild stories surfaced everywhere.
Some thought Janelle had just run away. Others favored a kidnapping theory. One kid swore he'd seen her hitchhiking. He said she got into a semi-rig with Oregon license plates.
Occasionally a Midwest girl disappeared from school for a four- or five-month period, only to reappear as though nothing had happened—in those days, unmarried teenagers rarely kept their babies. But Del and I, and the rest of the cheerleaders, knew that was not the case.
Speculation reached its wildest point when a vocal segment of the student body became convinced that Janelle had actually drowned along with Butchie. The school administration tackled the problem in typical 1969 fashion.
Mr. Voltzman addressed the school over the loudspeaker. "It has come to my attention," he'd droned, "that a few irresponsible students have been spreading rumors around our school and in town. I am deeply disappointed in those gossiping students."
He went on to say that Mr. and Mrs. Ross had given him permission to announce that Janelle had transferred to another high school for personal reasons. He ended the announcement with a specific threat to suspend any students caught spreading stories to the contrary.
I don't suppose it was so much the threat as the fact that in Delphi there is always some new scandal to focus the attention, but interest in the whereabouts of Janelle Ross eventually died down.
I had forgotten her entirely when, a few years later, at the drive-in in Redfield, a familiar tenor of voice, and a certain tilt of head, caused me to put aside my tub of buttered popcorn and pay attention to the movie.
"Nick," I'd said, elbowing him in the ribs, "look at that girl."
"I am." He grinned.
"No, not her, the one with her blouse on, toward the back of the room."
"Which one?"
"The one who's making out with the frat guy, over on the couch. He's trying to put his hand up her shirt."
"Just searching for sweet Delphi." Nick laughed, making a grab for me.
"Yeah, her," I said. "Doesn't she look familiar to you?"
"Who cares?" he said. "I never look above the chin."
"Well, check out her face for a minute. Quick before she gets killed."
It was one of those schlock horror movies where only the virgin survived to make the sequel.
Nicky shrugged. "She sorta looks familiar."
"Sorta," I said emphatically. "Doesn't she look exactly like Janelle Ross?"
"Well. Now that you mention it..."
"That is Janelle Ross," I said, amazed.
I had been convinced, Nick less so. Her character was dismembered a couple of scenes later, so the last we saw of her that night was her severed head resting on a shelf in an open refrigerator, next to a bowl of potato salad.
There were no VCRs in those days, and the projectionist flatly refused to rewind the closing credits, so I was never able to prove that Janelle was in that movie. Of course, no one believed me, and after a while Nick joined the opposition, declaring that he'd never thought it was Janelle, anyway.
Vindication came a few months later. An article appeared in the Aberdeen paper heralding the advent of a new Hollywood star—a former South Dakotan (Delphi was not mentioned) whose on-screen name was J. Ross Nelson.
"I forget," Rhonda said, wolfing down one of the soyburgers she had badgered Aphrodite into putting on the menu. "Where did the 'Nelson' part come from?"
"She probably made it up." Ron blinked.
"I think Nelson was Janelle's husband's last name," I said, squinting to remember old magazine profiles. "She's divorced now, but he was her agent or manager or something like that, when she first started acting."
I had expected the mess between Doug and Stu to be the main discussion topic in the cafe. And it had caused some excited speculation and conjecture. I'd had to endure ribbing, and a couple of salacious blinks from Ron, but for the most part, attention focused on the reemergence of J. Ross Nelson. Though her appearance was supposed to be a parade surprise, word got out immediately, and conversation buzzed excitedly with the news.
"I hear that Crystal at the store is going to order in all of her movies so we can rent them." Ron blinked. "There's a couple I can't wait to see."
There had been a civic lifting of the nose about Janelle's career—she didn't acknowledge Delphi, and Delphi was happy to return the favor. Of course, we secretly kept track of her all along. Now that she was coming home, there was a public and avid interest in her oeuvre.
"It's kinda exciting to see someone you knew, up on the silver screen," Ron continued.
"You just want to see someone you knew naked on the silver screen," Del said scornfully.
Though there was a certain amount of nudity (most of it Janelle's) in every movie she made, and her roles were, at least at first, mostly horizontal, the movies themselves weren't porn. There were monster flicks, a few slasher movies, a couple of weepers, and a solid list of B action/adventures and made-for-TV movies. Janelle had built up a creditable resume of Other Woman, Best Friend, Trusty Secretary, and Murdered Rape Victim roles.
And in recent years, she had started to get some good notices in movies of a slightly higher caliber. Her voice had matured into a pleasant throatiness, and her looks and figure had survived the ensuing decades.
"She's pretty buff for an old chick," Rhonda said.
"Best body money can buy," Del said.
"No, she must have done it all naturally," Rhonda insisted. "She has one of those nutrition and exercise tapes out."
"Sure." Ron blinked. "Boobs of Steel."
"Boobs of Silicone, you mean," Del said.
"You think she's been enhanced?" I asked.
"Give me a break, Tory," Del said, sitting next to Ron in his booth. "We're all the same age—do we look like her?"
"I never looked like her," I said. "And they can do wonders with lighting and makeup."
"Well, good lighting isn't going to make her chest larger than it was in high school."
Aphrodite set out a roasted chicken and mashed potato special on the counter for me to pick up.
"So, is all this as fascinating to you teachers as it is to the rest of us?" I asked Hugh Kincaid as I sat his dinner in front of him. "Or are you above the fray?"
"Of course we're fascinated." He laughed. "We're human, aren't we?"
Though he was older, his blond hair was faded, and, like the rest of us, he was a bit heavier, the years had been kind to Mr. Kincaid, who was still the cutest teacher in the school. He sometimes slipped away to the cafe for lunch, rather than to his little house across from the school.
The place was nearly empty, except for regulars, who were perfectly capable of getting their own coffee refills if Del and Rhonda were too busy discussing body implants to notice empty cups. I sat in the booth opposite Hugh.
"The general consensus has teachers being some sort of cross between Superman and space alien," I said. "No one thinks you're really human."
"Oh, we're human all right," he said. "Human enough to be glad we have to supervise that damn parade so we can see our very own movie star in person. We're just as curious as everyone else about what she's been doing."
"I always thought you guys knew," I said, leaning back. "I figured that the teachers and administration had the whole scoop and just refused to pass the juicy stuff along to the students."
"Nope," he said, neatly buttering a bun. He pointed at me with his knife. "Well, I take that back. I can't speak for the administration. If any of the teachers knew what really happened, they sure didn't tell me."
"I always thought that Mr. Voltzman knew more than he let on," I said. "He seemed to have slightly more than the usual principal's interest in her."
"That's why they spell it P-A-L, you know." Hugh laughed.
"You think there was something going on between them?" This was a delicious bit of speculation—something that had never occurred to me before.
Hugh was slightly horrified. "No," he said, "no, no, no. That's not what I meant at all. The year that Janelle disappeared was only my second year of teaching, and I still had all of my ideals intact. It came as a great shock to me to discover just how much interest the teachers and the administration showed in the personal lives of the students.
"You kids would go about messing up your own lives, going steady, breaking up, getting pregnant, cheating on each other, and never realize that we teachers knew almost as much about the intimate details as you did."
"I don't know why the school should be any different than the rest of Delphi," I said. "We're all interested in everyone else's intimate details. Besides, it would probably surprise you to know how much the students know about the teachers' lives too."
It could not have been easy being the cutest teacher in school for more than a quarter of a century. For years, Hugh Kincaid's every social move was watched—we were thrilled when he finally became engaged to a teacher from another school district, we despaired over the incredibly long engagement, and we mourned the speedy demise of the eventual marriage. These days, Mr. Kincaid was either the most discreet, or the loneliest, guy in town. Opinion was evenly divided.
"Well, it takes some of the focus off me when the nicest widowed waitress in town is seen in public with a recently separated businessman." He grinned. "So how does Casa McKee look?"
"Like L.L. Bean exploded," I said, grinning. "I shouldn't be surprised that someone told you already."
"This is Delphi after all," he said. "But I didn't have to be told. I saw you two together last night."
"You were there?" I asked. "At the bar?"
"Yup, sitting in the back. We got the full scoop from our inebriated football coach."
"Jesus," I said, blowing my bangs off my forehead. "He's lucky Stu doesn't bring charges against him."
"There were plenty of witnesses who saw Doug take the first, and only, swing," Hugh said. "And several of us who heard what he said to Stu just beforehand."
"Oh?" I asked, curious. Stu hadn't wanted to talk about Doug at all, either last night or early this morning, in bed. Or later at the cafe when he came in for breakfast and faced the full community interrogation with a spectacular shiner.
"What did Doug say?"
"It was baffling, really," Hugh said, remembering: "I missed the first part of the conversation, but I did hear Doug's last comment before he decked Stu. It was not the sort of question one would expect to precede an altercation. He said, with an expletive or two deleted, 'You never change, do you?'"