A Fountain Filled With Blood by Julia Spencer-Fleming Page A

Everything is going to be perfect. It’s going to be a total fantasy come true.”
    “Yeah, well, that’s what Princess Di thought.”
    “Todd! That’s awful!” Her voice softened. “Someday you’ll meet someone—you know, someone special—and you’ll understand.”
    “Yeah? Well…maybe. Look, I gotta run. It’s almost closing time, and the store’s a mess.”
    “I love you, Oddball.”
    “I love you, too, Fish Face. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
    “With the candles!”
    “With the candles.”
    Todd MacPherson understood the power of fantasy. He had viewed every single one of the movies for sale or rent in his video store, and, just like when he was a kid, they still had the power to sweep him away into another world, where people were better looking, danger was an aphrodisiac, and problems could be solved in a two-hour running time.
    His own problems were more intractable. As he methodically reshelved the returns and straightened racks jumbled by the usual Friday evening rush of renters, he considered where he was going after closing up shop. Supposing, that is, he didn’t just crawl home and collapse in front of the tube. There was a little hole-in-the-wall bar in Hudson Falls, but he knew every guy who would be there on a Friday night, and he couldn’t stomach the thought of the same complaints and conversations he had heard a hundred times before. There was a bigger, more open place in Saratoga, where he might see some new faces, but that meant a forty-minute drive each way, an awfully late night when he had to be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed the next morning for Trisha’s wedding. And to be perfectly honest with himself, he had never yet come up lucky there. The guys who paired off there were lean and tan and knew how to wear sweaters tied around their shoulders, if they looked rich, or military gear, if they looked sexy. Todd’s wardrobe consisted of jeans that bagged in the wrong way and T-shirts sporting old movie posters and film festival schedules.
    He wiped a dusty copy of
The Green Berets
on his jeans and reshelved it in the John Wayne section. His best friend, Janine, had moved to New York City four years ago, after getting an associate’s degree at Adirondack Community College. Now she was working as a gofer in Rockefeller Center, hanging lights for Off-Off-Broadway productions, and taking the occasional film class at NYU. Every weekend, she called and ordered him to get the hell out of Millers Kill and come share an apartment with her. They had both been teens from another planet in high school, completely unable to fit in with the kids around them. They’d been alternately tormented and ignored because if it. But now Janine had a whole circle of friends and was dating some aspiring playwright, while he was still a geek—a celibate geek.
    He picked up a copy of
Truly Madly Deeply
off the floor and examined Alan Rickman’s face. He thought he sort of resembled Alan Rickman, younger, of course, and with longer hair. Those snotty Saratoga summer boys just never got close enough to notice. He tossed the video in his hand. Maybe he wouldn’t go out anywhere. Maybe he’d stay a little late and put together an Alan Rickman display on his film festival shelf.
    The bell over the door tinkled, and he heard blended voices, yelping laughter. Sounded like Nintendo customers, here to pick up a weekend’s worth of bloody shoot-outs and pneumatically breasted women. That was the crux of his problem, the store. He had sunk so much time and money into it, and it was starting to do good business. Better than good. He had turned a profit the last two years. The loan officer at his bank loved him. How was he supposed to chuck it all on the chance that he might find something better in the city? What if he never found anything better? What if this was as good as it got?
    “Hey, man, you got any Jujubes?”
    Todd shelved
Truly Madly Deeply
under
T
and slid through the narrow aisle to the checkout counter.