Spoiler alert! This article reveals what happened to Audrey Horne between the Twin Peaks Season 2 finale and The Return -- and after.

David Lynch is a maddening genius, always one to leave the most beautiful and frustrating cliffhangers. Luckily, his Twin Peaks partner Mark Frost isn't quite as oblique, and is helping fans out with Twin Peaks: The Final Dossier, a novel that is considered canon to the Twin Peaks franchise he and Lynch created over 20 years ago.

One of the strangest parts of Twin Peaks: The Return, the 18-part revival Lynch and Frost recently wrapped for Showtime, is what happened to Audrey Horne, played by actress Sherilyn Fenn. In the original series, the teenage vixen liked to play the bad girl, but she was really just a troubled high school student whose flirtations with Agent Dale Cooper were ultimately innocent. At the end of Season 2, Audrey was caught in an explosion at the bank, with her fate never revealed.

Even though Sherilyn Fenn was cast in The Return, that doesn't mean Audrey survived the explosion. When she finally appeared more than halfway through, answers weren't forthcoming. She was married, unfaithfully, to a short, bald accountant named Charlie, and never left the house. The last scene we get of Audrey is of her, waking up with a scream, in a white medical room. Was she just now waking from the explosion at the end of Season 2? Was it something more sinister?

(Image: MacMillian USA)

According to The Final Dossier, Audrey woke from her explosion coma three and a half weeks later. Frost confirms that Richard, her abusive, criminal child, was the product of Audrey being raped by Doppelganger Cooper while she was comatose. Because of the pregnancy, she dropped out of school, but eventually got her GED and opened a beauty parlor.

She kept to herself until Richard turned 10, at which point, "without warning," she married her accountant, likely out of convenience, and was followed by "troubling accounts of public scenes, heavy drinking, verbal abuse, and sexual infidelity" on Audrey's part -- all of which were evidenced in The Return.

According to the novel, Audrey closed her salon four years ago, and hasn't been seen or heard from since. “[S]he seemed to vanish from public life, into agoraphobic seclusion, or, one troubling rumor suggests, a private care facility. The Horne family spokesperson has refused to respond to all inquiries regarding her whereabouts.”

This would make sense, because in The Return, Audrey is never seen outside, and never seen with anyone besides Charlie. In fact, when watching her scenes with Charlie, they are almost never in the same frame together, leading me to think that their scenes had been filmed separately. I initially thought it was because of scheduling issues, but now I am thinking it may have been another way to indicate they weren't together physically. What do you think?

Twin Peaks: The Final Dossier was released today in print and for Kindle.

(via Vulture)