SHE DANCES ALONE IN FRONT OF THE DINER.
She is dancing, swirling in a dark flowered dress, hearing the music that isn't there. Then again, she could just be pacing. Who can tell with all that sun glare? We're just trying to get a parking space. Sherilyn Fenn, toxic beauty, waits outside the Beachwood Café, in Beachwood Canyon. She waits below her eyebrows, for which there must have been a building permit. Sherilyn Fenn's eyebrows soar to nosebleed strata; they have apexes. Nestled beneath the left is that beauty mark, her sex punctuation. She is twenty-five, and her voices comes from her sinuses, as though the weather were cold even when the weather is not. She is short. As a child in Michigan, she could walk atop snow without leaving her imprint. She has been ethereal ever since, but drives a Jeep anyway.

SHE LETS US TASTE HER TURKEY.
"I don't know about the pie here," she says (the coffee shop was her choice), "but I'm sure they have a damned good cup of coffee." She wants a hot sandwich. "I haven't had turkey for a long time," she says, ordering herself just that: an open-faced affair replete with mashed potatoes and gravy. "I want lots of gravy," she says, and we know exactly what she means. Later, she urges us to try some of hers. "Isn't it great?" she asks.

THIS IS WHY BAD GIRLS WEAR SADDLE SHOES.
Audrey Horne, as played by Fenn, is a spooky rich girl whose father is scum. She nevertheless yearns for his affections, as well as those of Special Agent Cooper, in whose bed she turned up nude. Ripe in her sweaters and saddle shoes, Audrey frolics amid peepholes and hidden passages, culling evil secrets. "She dresses like Dad's little girl," says Sherilyn. "Saddle shoes are his idea all the way." Shockingly, when we last saw her, Audrey was corsetted up as an undercover working girl in her father's brothel, One-Eyed Jacks, with Dad unwittingly about to enter her boudoir. The outcome? "She's just gonna have to think fast," says Sherilyn, cagily, "which she usually does. I wish I could tell you! All I can say is that David [Lynch] was frustrated by that corset outfit. He said, 'I want you back in the skirts and saddle shoes, and out of One-Eyed Jacks!' "

WHOSE TWIN PEAKS ARE THEY, ANYWAY?
"On the set of the pilot," Sherilyn says, trying to clear up one mystery, "the makeup artists always called me Miss Twin Peaks. 'C'mere, Miss Twin Peaks!' But there's lots of twin peaks on the show. And there were these two beautiful mountains where we shot."

WE PULL OUT A JAR OF CHERRIES.
"Oh, no!" she moans. "Don't pull out a cherry stem! Please don't!" It is too late. We have placed a full jar of maraschino cherries before her and beg her to do what Audrey did to impress management and secure employment at One-Eyed Jacks. We beg her to do the stem trick. "It's too intimate," she says, in demure protest. Then she lowers the boom: "You know what? You're gonna be the first person I've told the truth to.... I can't do it. I'm telling everyone I can do it, because they're just so disappointed if I can't." Sensing our own woe, she adds, "Well, I did get drunk one night and did it in a New York hotel bar."

Then we ask this: What does it mean when a girl knows how to knot a cherry stem in her mouth? "It means she's a great kisser?" she says, knowing we both know better.

PIE ARRIVES AND, BRIEFLY, SO DOES BOBBY BRIGGS.
The Beachwood pie repertoire encompasses apple, peach and cherry, and we order samples of each. "Can we have them hot, with whipped cream?" she asks, full of expectancy. Moments later, she is banging on the window beside us and hollering, "It's Bobby!" By a quirk of fate, strolling by on the street is her cast mate Dana Ashbrook, who plays Shelly's lover boy, Bobby Briggs. Sherilyn dictates the following into our tape recorder, à la Agent Cooper: "Bobby Briggs from Twin Peaks has just passed us, and it is a shock, Diane, I have to tell you." (Diane, of course, is who takes Cooper's dictation.) Ashbrook joins us long enough to groan at our pies. "Oh, my God," he says, looking sick. "I've had so much pie in the last year." Then he leaves to go to work on a car.

SHE REVEALS AUDREY'S GREATEST SECRET. "Secrets are dangerous things, Audrey." So said Agent Cooper on the night he found Audrey between his sheets. The secret Audrey has never told: Her virtue is intact. "Absolutely and completely," declares Sherilyn. "It's like big talk. She absolutely hasn't been with anybody. She acts like she has. She wants to. That is her secret." As for Cooper's libido: "We're at a loss," she says, baffled. "I mean, I thought if I'm in his bed, you know, that should be cut and dried. But he didn't go for it. I think he needs to loosen up."

JOHNNY DEPP'S ARROWHEAD TURNS UP.
We ask for her own secrets, and she says, "Hah!" Then we ask about her former fiancé, Johnny Depp, onetime star on 21 Jump Street. "Not a big secret," she says of their fateful relationship. "Johnny and I got engaged because we loved each other very much and it was our way of saying, 'What's the next step to prove that we love each other more than that?' It's never fun to get your heart broken. I will always love him." From her coin purse, she plucks out a crude Indian arrowhead. "Johnny gave me this," she says, fingering the artifact. "And I don't know why, but I've just kept it with me ever since."

PRINCE IS LIKE A HOUSEPLANT.
Once, long ago, when she was new to Hollywood, she kept company with Prince, her friend to this day. "He's like an African violet," she says, as though we will understand. "I will be attracted to him for the rest of my life. I can't explain it, but it's like he's always there in spirit. I can feel him." We really don't want to know any more.

SOON SHE WILL NOT BE WEARING CLOTHES.
Other secrets: She often dreams that sharks are chasing her through her grandparents' living room. "I think it symbolizes something," she says. "Maybe the lack of feeling safe." She is afraid of the dark: "I have a really vivid imagination about people busting in and trying to rape me or knife me or shoot me." She has planned out escape routes from her apartment for just such occurrences. Like Audrey, she likes to dance when she is alone. "I do very strange dances." She spent two months as a Playboy Bunny when she was eighteen: "All the girls stuffed underneath to make their breasts big on top," she says, including herself. "Otherwise, I'd look like I had nothing." In the film Two-Moon Junction, she was frequently naked and also a blonde. In the December issue of Playboy, she will be naked again, in artsy photographs taken by her boyfriend, whose name is actually Barry Hollywood. "The pictures look like paintings," she says proudly and adds, "They offered me a great sum of money."

MYSTERIES OF DAVID LYNCH, DIRECTOR, PART THREE.
In the new Lynch film, Wild at Heart, Sherilyn appears briefly as a girl injured in a car wreck. Before dying, she babbles about the contents of her purse. Sherilyn says, "David's direction was 'Only think this: bobby pins, lipstick, wallet, comb, that's it.' It's very abstract."

Lynch says of the death scene, "I just pictured her being able to do this. She is like a broken china doll." About Audrey, he says this: "Uh, well, she has trouble at home. Audrey is kind of abstract."

SHE ATE NO PEACH AND KILLED NO HOMECOMING QUEEN, PROBABLY.
In the end, she would have preferred the banana cream at the House of Pies, where she is no stranger. She attempted no peach pie and little cherry. "I like the apple," she says. In point of fact, she killed off the apple but not Laura Palmer. "I don't think Audrey would kill anybody," she says. "Unless it's in self-defense. People say to me, 'You killed Laura Palmer,' and I say, 'You're crazy! I'm not that bad!' "