A Nancy Droog, Ultraviolent Girl Detective Mystery
Chapter One
“What’s it going to be, then, eh?” Nancy asked herself.
She was zipping fastlike down the road in the dark blue kabriolet avtomobil her father had bought her for her eighteenth birthday.
Nineteen now, and world weary, she cut that car through the countryside. Cheerfully grim, she was. She had seen too much but had come around to smiling about it anyway. The top was down.
The car was outfitted with a fine stereo so Beethoven’s 4th pounded fast around the dangerous young sleuth then fluted in dreamy and slow then fast and mad once more. With one gloved hand responsibly on the wheel, Nancy flung her other hand up, stabbing the air ultrapreciselike to the music, conducting the darkened pines.
She jabbed the old air just like she had seen the Italian conductor do, back when her friend Allison Hoover took voice lessons with the famous music-lover who’d retired to their pleasant town of River Heights.
But that had been a long year ago, before Alison was murdered, before Nancy took her revenge and Nancy’s father, the respected advokat Carson Droog had checked his daughter into a home of rest and reabilitatsiya for her dark thoughts and darker actions.
Under those fitted gloves were a pair of well-manicured hands, tidy and capable of unspeakable things.
.
It was a pleasant night for a drive. She reflected on all that happened in the past few years: being attacked by a dog, finishing high school, solving mysteries but relying too heavily on underaged slurps of Moloko Plus down by the picturesque Muskoka River to quiet the screeching nighttime truths of small-town crime. Nancy had never really known her own mother. They never talked about this at home.
She remembered the burglars locking her up in the cabin on Moon Lake last year, tossing Nancy in a closet there and leaving her for dead with the mothballs. The missing letter could still be there. Allison’s death had interrupted Nancy’s investigation.
.
After Allison’s murder junior year, Nancy got to know the seamy underbelly of River Heights firsthand, beyond her father’s lawyerly dinner-table gossip, and made new acquaintances. She joined a fine gang of bloodthirsty young women, maybe not as bent on justice as Nancy herself but always ready for the knockdown dragouts. Nancy’s chickclik were no students of opera, though when they went about their business Nancy was known to have an earbud filling her skull with old Ludwig Van between her efficient kicks and jabs.
She was excited for a reunion. It was a fortunate thing that her father had paid to have her car tuned up after she’d had a wreck. It drove almost the same, a little slower to rev. The smart convertible was an old friend, and always in for a fight.
Out of habit she’d put an attractive, pearl-handled pooshka in the glove compartment, along with a tool set, a small bottle of narcotikes disguised in an empty bottle of her kindly housekeeper Mrs. Gruen’s smelling salts, an extra pair of clean white perchatkas just in case she’d need to nicen up her appearance for polite company or conceal her prints in a hurry.
In rehab they had given young Ms. Droog a diploma, detailing her Upstanding Accomplishments. She wrapped this now around a stick of TNT, secured the tight tube of paper with a spare hair elastic (always prepared was Nancy) and lit the fuse end off her cigarillo. She conducted a last crescendo with her explosive wand before flinging it into an orchard of fruit trees to go BOOM seconds later.
She smoked, patted her head scarf and laughed.
“Muzyka!” she yelled into the night.
With notes crashing around her and the wind in her normally neat blonde hair she planned to viddy her old stomping grounds, the nameless saloons where they’d planned and the scenes of her grimiest crimes so to speak, dear reader, and decide where she’d go from here on out now that the doctors promised her dear respectable father that they had fixed her naughty old mind up right.
It was good to be back in the old driver’s seat, she was anxious to rejoin her friends. Young Miss Droog took matters of justice into her own manicured, horrorshow hands, this was going to be a dynamite evening.
Meredith Counts is a Michigan writer and archives student with an MFA from the Fiction Writing Department at Columbia College Chicago. Her writing and reviews have recently appeared in Foreword, Portage Magazine, Quail Bell, Traverse, the Detroit Metro Times, Chicago Literati, and BUST. She is one of the founding editors of Dead Housekeeping and is co-editing a book by Detroit poet Jim Gustafson, who was her uncle.