Wimbledon, Kentucky

by H. Claire Taylor

  She stopped talking immediately and froze in place, the scissors stuck motionless in the air, midsnip.

  Mrs. Willeford froze, too, though only because she feared Georgina had finally gone off the deep end while wielding a sharp object.

  Georgina’s eyes shifted around the room for a bit, her sixth sense trying to pick up on the source of the signals, until she turned her head around to the television and immediately put the pieces together.

  Mrs. Willeford breathed a sigh of relief as Georgina began to move again.

  Haphazardly throwing the scissors onto the vanity, Georgina stomped her foot, crying, “Laurel! How could you!”

  She knew she only had a few minutes before the news crews would show up, so she shooed Mrs. Willeford out of the chair, promising to finish the cut “once things blow over.” Mrs. Willeford accepted graciously, but promptly made up her mind that Georgina really had gone off the deep end and that it would be best if the haircut were finished by someone less prone to mental illness.

  (It was no secret around town that Georgina’s family had committed her uncle Gabe after he went through a series of fugue states, whereupon he would return to lucidity claiming he had spoken to the spirit of Jack Kerouac. While most of his family members were somehow under the assumption that Jack Kerouac was a man who killed blonde women in the ’80s, it was actually those who were familiar with the real reputation of Kerouac that showed the most severe concern and took the necessary steps to force Uncle Gabe into the state hospital.)

  Georgina shared her salon with only one other hairdresser, and that was Laurel. Though one might not be able to tell by Georgina’s actions or words, she was quite fond of Laurel. For Georgina, it was more of an internal thing. “Words are just words,” she’d say, “but it’s what you feel on the inside that really matters.” Georgina said this often, and every time she did, Laurel would agree adamantly while thinking it might be the most inaccurate statement she’d ever heard.

  But as Georgina stared at the silent television screen, all she felt looking at her friend was betrayal. She never could have seen it coming. Laurel was turning the press on her instead of taking the hit like a true friend would. It was Laurel’s dinner party that started this whole mess, anyway.

  Why would she betray me like that? Why would she betray our friendship and jeopardize the success of the salon?

  The salon! She’s just trying to get more publicity for the salon, and at the cost of my reputation. What a bitch! I always knew I couldn’t trust that bitch.

  Georgina snatched the broom out of the closet and began sweeping furiously, trying to straighten up what little of the place she could before the media hurricane hit land.

  She hollered up to Gavin, the receptionist, at the front of the salon and told him to cancel the rest of the day’s appointments. Gavin, whom Georgina deeply loathed for his endless use of clichés and figures of speech, countered with, “You’re the boss! I’ll jump right on it!”

  His response made her skin crawl, and she answered back, “Thanks, Gavin.” She hated a lot of people, but the rudest thing she could think of was to give them any indication that she had nothing but the greatest of love for them. “And go ahead and cancel Laurel’s for the rest of the day, too. I have a feeling she won’t be able to make them.”

  Gavin smiled back at Georgina. He always smiled. “All righty then. Your wish is my command.”

  She wanted to choke him.

  She fixed her hair in one of the mirrors, or rather, she messed it up. She believed that there was no such thing as a perfect person, and that hair should reflect your personality; therefore, she tried to keep hers messy but appealing to reflect her lifestyle. She’d cut it herself, even added the random streaks of blonde. She tousled her hair one final time, until the messiness looked just the way she wanted it, and then headed to the front to wait for the camera crews.

  She didn’t have to wait long, or even at all, before she saw a News 6 van pulling into the lot. The van parked crookedly across three spaces, and as soon as the door slid open, a redheaded reporter was shoved out of the vehicle by his cameraman.

  Georgina recognized the reporter. He was the one that had no business being on television. She’s be damned if she could remember his name, though.

  She walked out of the salon, strategically positioning herself in front of the salon’s sign.

  Who knows, maybe Laurel was onto something with the old “no such thing as bad publicity” idea. If this all turns out well, it could mean big business. I knew Laurel always had a good head on her shoulders!

  “Are you Georgie Anus?” the reporter asked.

  Georgina’s composed camera presence faltered. “Uh, well, no, I’m not her, but I’m who you want.”

  “If you’re not Georgie Anus, then you’re not who we want,” he said.

  This was not the glorious camera-bulbs-flashing entrance she’d hoped to make.

  She leaned to the side to peer around the reporter. “Are there any other reporters coming?”

  He nodded. “They should be here any minute. I was hoping to speak with Georgie before they came, but—”

  “You idiot!” She stomped her foot, clenching her fists by her sides. “You’re looking for me. My name’s Georgina, not Georgie. Georgina Angus.” She took a deep breath and straightened out her shirt.

  The reporter looked puzzled for a moment. “So, are you married to Georgie or what?”

  “What’s your name?” she asked.

  “Malcolm Goldman.”

  “Well, listen here then, Malcolm. Your ignorance is preventing you from getting the story of a lifetime.”

  He eyed her skeptically. “You have the story of a lifetime?”

  Georgina smiled. She seemed to have hooked him, whether he thought she was the right person or not. “Oh yes, Malcolm. The story of a lifetime.”

  His eyes widened and he took a step closer to her, motioning for his cameraman to get a tighter shot. He held the microphone up to her. “And what’s you’re name again?”

  She was perturbed, but the camera was rolling, so she did her best not to show it.

  “Georgina Angus.”

  Malcolm Goldman gasped. “Wait! You are the one we were looking for! Why didn’t you say anything?”

  “But I…uh-oh, Mr. Goldman, you better hurry up with this interview. It looks like the rest of the vultures have arrived. You have time for maybe one question. Make it count.”

  She could have guessed the freezing effect this kind of pressure would have on the rookie reporter, which was half the reason she had said it.

  The cameraman was obviously the more seasoned of the two, and he fed Malcolm the question: “Dude, ask her about the dinner party, man.”

  Malcolm unfroze just in time to get out the question before the other vans pulled up.

  “Mrs. Anus, do you plan on attending Mrs. Sapphire’s dinner party tonight?”

  Of course Georgina had not yet heard of any such party, but she could have figured as much. Why else would she be named on the news?

  “Oh, Malcolm, I wouldn’t miss it for the world. And indeed, it is for the sake of the world that I will be attending. You see, I’m a very respected person here in Wimble—”

  But her sound bite was cut short as the News 12 van skidded on a patch of black ice, snipping the edge of the News 6 van’s bumper, resulting in a bang that maxed out the sound equipment. The cameraman yelped and swatted off his headphones like they’d suddenly turned to white-hot coals, and Malcolm Goldman immediately forgot about his interview and ran over to the News 12 van to curse them out.

  Meanwhile, another reporter and his cameraman snuck up on Georgina’s side, grabbed her by the arm, and carried her inside the salon, away from the competition.

  Georgina whipped around to see who had grabbed her and found herself facing a set of thick, dark eyebrows with a man attached. “I’m pretty sure dragging someone more than ten feet counts as kidnapping,” she protested, mostly put out by the fact
that her salon’s sign would no longer be visible in the shot.

  “Eugene Thornton, Channel 5 News,” the reporter replied, as if that somehow excused his aggressive approach.

  Once the door shut behind them, he turned to his cameraman. “Speed.”

  “Rolling,” said the cameraman.

  She wasn’t ready for the rapid fire that was aimed at her.

  “Tell me, Georgina, did you have any idea when you first went into business with Laurel Sapphire that she would be the one to start such a world crisis?”

  “Well, I—”

  “Any indication at all?”

  “What sort of things indicate that?”

  “My sources tell me that you and she have had a fair share of disagreements, can you elaborate?”

  “But we’ve never had a disagreement. I mean, sure, one time she wanted to switch cleaning fluids for our combs, and I just didn’t see the need.”

  Eugene’s thick eyebrows perked up. “So, would you say she’s a wasteful woman?”

  “A what? I don’t know, I mean, maybe, but—”

  “My sources also say that she’s been seen throwing out hair that could be reused for the wigs of cancer patients. Is this true?”

  “Well, yes, but we all do that. There are certain procedures that must be followed to be allowed to donate—“

  “According to one of my sources—”

  Georgina caught her footing. She wasn’t sure how, but she had. “Who exactly are these ‘sources’ you speak of, Mr. Thornton?”

  “I’m not at liberty to divulge any names.”

  “But are you at liberty to slander? I ask you that!”

  Her subtle accusation didn’t seem to faze him. He smirked. “Quoting sources is not slander, Ms. Angus.”

  “Don’t you act for one minute like I don’t understand the legalities of gossip! I am a hairdresser, you know. I doubt if you even have any sources at all. It all seems to me like a clever way of leading your witness. Am I getting close, Mr. Thornton?”

  The cameraman cut. Eugene heard the camera beep and whirled around, looking a bit like a coiled cobra being harassed with a pointy stick. “Did I say cut?”

  The cameraman shrunk back and quickly pressed the record button again.

  “Did I say to roll?” Eugene demanded. “No. I didn’t. You never roll unless I say so and you never cut unless I say cut.”

  The cameraman wasn’t sure what to do at this point, so the camera kept rolling.

  “Now you’re just wasting footage!” Eugene roared. “Goddamn amateur!”

  He turned back toward Georgina, with rage still welling up in his eyes, and resumed the interview, his tactics much less subtle than before.

  “Apparently, Ms. Angus, you’re known around town as the blabbermouth, the town gossip, Ms. Looselips.”

  Georgina gasped and clutched a hand to her heart. “Am I really?”

  “Yes, it’s such a well-known fact that I’m surprised you haven’t heard it before.”

  “Ms. Looselips? That’s just an awful nickname.”

  “Yes. Yes it is. Why, then, do you think Laurel Sapphire would want you at her dinner party? Or as it’s being called, the Dinner Summit. Is it because you can’t keep your mouth shut about anything anyone tells you?”

  Georgina wanted to respond yes and no at the same time. There was no winning at Eugene’s game of defamation, so she didn’t want to play.

  Luckily she no longer had to, because just then, Gavin made his way out of the back room and didn’t waste a moment before intercepting Eugene’s attack.

  He came strutting across the room and forced himself in the small space between Eugene and Georgina, putting a hand in the reporter’s face. “I know you didn’t just try to make my boss look bad. Whose side are you on, anyway?”

  Eugene was no rookie reporter. After years of preparing for interviews and examining his subject’s body language, he could tell a thing or two about a person just from seeing how they stood. He noticed Gavin’s hand bracing on his hip, the leg kicked out to one side, the slight lisp, the V-neck muscle shirt, the way his head bobbed side to side when he talked. Eugene also knew where his news station stood politically, and he knew that to mock, belittle, or do anything short of glamorizing a man like Gavin would not go over well.

  But Eugene was also an opportunist. “You’re absolutely right. What’s your name, sir?”

  Gavin cocked a brow skeptically. “Gavin Marcel McQueen.” Apparently, he wasn’t swayed by Eugene’s sudden agreeability.

  “Ahh, I see.” A greedy expression crept over Eugene’s face. “And how do you feel about this global crisis?”

  But while Eugene’s assumption about Gavin’s sexual preference was spot-on, every subsequent assumption he’d made proved to be dead wrong, and Georgina, who’d been listening to Gavin’s rants about the weather for the past week, knew exactly what was coming next. She would have warned Eugene had she not loathed him so damn much. But as it was, she could only smile and wait for the inevitable. She took a step back to give Gavin the appropriate space for the gesturing he was about to do.

  Gavin, on the other hand, had been preparing his response for some time in the off chance that he could get an opportunity such as this.

  “I think this ‘global crisis’ you talk about is God’s way of telling us that the slow but steady legalization of gay marriage around the world is a sin, and now we’re having to face His punishment.”

  Eugene spun frantically around to face his cameraman again. “Cut! I said cut, dammit!”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  BRET HAMMERSMITH WAS AWAKE WHEN Laurel rang him, but he knew better than to answer his phone the first time someone called. He heard the message she left echo from the machine in the kitchen to where he had been sleeping on the couch in the living room. He gave the dry skin under his dark beard a good scratch, propped himself up on his elbow, and tilted his ear toward the kitchen, trying to ignore the painful stiffness in his lower back that the cold weather stirred up. Once the message was finished, he flung his mother’s old Indian blanket back over his head and flopped down onto the firm couch cushions. If it was an emergency, Laurel would call back, but even if she did, he wasn’t sure he wanted to associate with any of the Sapphires, considering. They were, after all, the epicenter of this crisis. The media’s crosshairs were focused on them, making Bret particularly pleased with his policy of never accepting dinner party invitations.

  He also knew that it was now up to the Sapphires to fix what the leftist media was deeming a “global crisis,” and he knew what that sort of power did to people.

  The whole world thinks its fate rests in the hands of a few Kentucky bumpkins, and everyone seems okay with that. May God help us all.

  With absolutely no faith in the abilities of anyone in his town, Bret had long since begun stocking his underground bunker with enough supplies to last ten sunlight-free years, through whatever war, riots, or all-out ice age might ensue. He wasn’t so worried about the ice age, because he refused to buy into the hype. Sometimes winter just lasted longer; after six long decades, he ought to know that much. But the wars and riots, yes, he believed they would begin soon enough, which was why he’d bought all the guns. A man could never have too many. While mentally inventorying his collection, he drifted back to sleep.

  As soon as he heard a knock on the front door, he reached for his left-handed Remington pump-action shotgun, which had become his coffee table gun since his back had started acting up and he’d taken to sleeping on his firm couch. He knew whoever was at his front door couldn’t be someone from around town; no one from Wimbledon bothered to knock on his door anymore. Only an outsider would be ignorant enough to do that nowadays, and Bret was wary of outsiders.

  Because he’d long considered Wimbledon’s economy to be a dead end for all honest investors, the only reason he could imagine for someone to come to his town would be to conquer and exploit the human population.

  The barrel of Bret’s shotgun
came through the door first, and Eugene Thornton was forced to take a step back, so as not to have it jammed up his nose.

  Bret narrowed his eye at the gun sight, taking aim. “Who the hell are you?”

  “Eugene Thornton, reporter for News 5 in Lexington,” he replied, clearly trying to make himself sound too important to be shot in the face.

  “News 5, eh?” Bret didn’t lower the gun.

  “Yes, that’s it. You’ve heard of us?”

  Bret grunted. “More like I’ve heard enough from you. Who sent you?”

  “Laurel Sapphire told us you were coming to the Dinner Summit tonight.”

  “Laurel told you that? It’s a load of horseshit. What the hell is a Dinner Summit, anyway?”

  Eugene thought he saw the barrel of the gun lower slightly, and felt that it was marginally less likely that he would get shot in the face. This boosted his confidence quite a bit. “Well, that’s just a term I came up with,” he began proudly. “All it is, is—”

  Bret repositioned the gun right at Eugene’s nose again. “Nah, never mind. I don’t want to talk to you. Where’s that guy from Channel 6? The one that did that nice Fourth of July special last month about the troops. He doesn’t make me want to shoot him in the face like you do.”

  Eugene couldn’t help but laugh. It was a nervous laugh, but that was all he could manage for the moment. “You mean Malcolm Goldman? That ultra-conservative no-talent? Why would you want to talk to him?”

  “It’s like I told you,” Bret said. “I don’t want to shoot him in the face like I want to with you, and I figure if Laurel’s named me, I’m going to have to talk to some reporter whether I like it or not. Might as well be the one I don’t want to shoot in the face.”

  “Right.”

  Bret looked over Eugene’s shoulder and saw a small cluster of news vans and reporters, all waiting in the street, afraid to approach the doorway of Local Man With Rifle. The cameramen were all rolling, hoping to strike gold with live footage of Reporter Shot in Face by Local Man With Rifle.

  Bret spotted Malcolm in the crowd, or rather, he spotted Malcolm’s bright red hair bobbing through the sea of heads.