Chapter 18
EIGHTEEN
Will shares this thought with Selma, who laughs, looking quite pleased by it, and then says, “Tawdry Hepburn should be your drag name, you know.”
“Please,” Will says, rolling his eyes. “First of all, I would be terrible at drag; I can’t sing, I can’t dance, and I have no rhythm to such a horrific degree that I can barely clap along to a beat. Remember when you tried to teach me to do the Electric Slide? At that wedding? ”
Selma grimaces dramatically out at the road. “Who could forget?”
“Well, exactly.” Will shakes his head, adding, “And that means if I was going to do drag, I’d have to lean into the camp thing, be as over the top as possible, which isn’t exactly my vibe.
I’d have to base it on someone, and the campiest person I can think of is—” Will glances out at the road, considering, and then catches the single eye of one of Catherine Rose’s large billboards and shudders. “God. Her .”
Selma glances at the billboard, the fourth or fifth they’ve passed, with an unimpressed expression. “You know, this is starting to get grating. Is it just going to be like this the whole way? Signs with her eyeballs?”
“More or less,” Will admits, with a sigh.
“Tacky,” is Selma’s verdict; her mouth twists in distaste. “It’s not that it doesn’t work , you understand—if I put up eight thousand billboards along the side of the highway that said, ‘Think you got screwed? Call Selma Mahmoud,’ I would get hundreds of calls a day?—”
“That’s actually a good slogan,” Will says, turning in his seat slightly to grin incredulously at her. “Oh my God, have you thought about this?”
“Of course I’ve thought about it, William, everyone thinks about it,” Selma snaps, glancing away from the highway for an unsettlingly long time to roll her eyes at him dramatically. “You clean up, generally, if you do it. It’s just, you know, not tasteful.”
“Yeah, well. I wouldn’t call Catherine super tasteful in general, to be honest,” Will mutters.
As they pass a billboard with her full headshot on it, it makes cheerful and unpleasantly direct eye contact with him, her frozen gaze following him briefly up the road before, thankfully, the car pulls out of its range.
Still, it makes the look on her face the other day swim before his eyes again, and that seems to follow him up the road every inch as much as the billboards. He shudders .
“God,” Selma says, eyeing him. “You’re really freaked out by this woman, aren’t you?
She’s just a consultant , Will. She can’t do anything, you know?
And honestly, like I said at brunch yesterday, I’m sure she has a personal stake in it.
Or, at least, she’s certainly acting the way I know people to act when they’ve overpromised something to a corporation like this: panicky.
Sloppy. But that’s what you get when you bite off more than you can chew, at least with any company that classes in the ‘ruthlessly evil’ category?—”
“And you’re sure,” Will says, not wanting there to be an inch of room for doubt, “you’re sure Nimbletainment falls into that category?
” He’d said the same thing yesterday at brunch, when Selma had pulled out a manila envelope marked, Why Will Should Never Again Stop Taking My Calls for Two Weeks When Dealing With Any Legal Matter and started laying out her case against Nimbletainment.
Or, well, okay. First there had been several foldable brochures, of a type Will recognized from Selma’s office; typically when he’s seen them before, they’ve said things like, Property Taxes and You or Copyright Law: What’s All The Fuss About?
These were not like that. Selma had clearly made someone in her office print them up special, as they said things like, Things Your Friends Will Convince Themselves Have Happened to You and Letting Your Pals Microchip You Like a Dog: It’s More Legal Than You Think!
“It’s not, actually,” Selma had told him, stabbing a potato, when Will asked about that last one.
“But I wasn’t going to do it anyway; I was just really mad at you that afternoon, and there’s good gossip in the copy room if you’re careful about where you stand.
” Then she’d passed him a beautifully spiral-bound presentation entitled Guilt Gifts You Sent Me, Rated By How Much I Enjoyed Them , which she explains she had made the same afternoon, and suggests he file away to refer to at Christmas.
Those essentials settled, she’d gone on to explain about the company’s long history of doing more or less exactly what Casey had said they’d do, not to mention leaving behind them a string of lawsuits, ruined lives, bitterly unhappy ex-employees, and evidence of deeply questionable business practices.
Still, even now: “I mean, they’ve got the whole town behind them,” Will says, the wind whipping his hair back as Selma speeds recklessly down the road. “Wouldn’t someone have noticed if they were evil? And made sure they didn’t get away with it?”
Selma stares at him incredulously for so long that Will starts to genuinely get nervous she’s forgotten she is driving and they’re both going to die.
Then, turning her head back to the road and shaking it slightly, she says, “Christ, Will. Sometimes you’re so smart and sometimes…
sometimes I forget that you’re basically a science hermit, and you don’t know anything about the real world.
Need someone to tell you the protein structure of a molecule, you’re the guy, but—companies do stuff like this all the time.
If there isn’t someone like Casey to put their foot in things, it mostly…
goes ahead, honestly. Even with someone like him, it tends to go ahead. ”
“Oh,” Will says. He considers this for a moment. “But surely some intrepid local journalist?—”
“Nope,” Selma says, shaking her head. “That only happens in the movies, at least these days. Local papers are mostly dead, and anyway, even if someone does run a story, things usually go ahead . There also isn’t going to be a last-minute vote by the town council, or a moment where the CEO of Nimbletainment has a change of heart due to being overcome by the Christmas spirit?—”
“It’s October. ”
“Well, exactly,” Selma snaps. “ Exactly my point. It’s October, it’s Monday morning, Nimbletainment knows what they’re doing—this is all business as usual.
The only way it ever isn’t business as usual is if one person, or ideally several people, take a look at the opportunity to be given a big pile of money in exchange for signing something they don’t totally understand, and instead say, ‘You know what? I’m good.
You keep the big pile of money; I’m all set.
’” Selma casts a sidelong glance at him, and sighs.
“You’re still worried about people being mad at you, aren’t you?
For getting between them and their big piles of money? ”
“Yeah,” Will admits, with an uncomfortable little shrug.
“It’s not that I don’t think it’s the right thing; I mean, your case was very convincing.
The stuff on the other towns…” Will grimaces.
“I don’t think anyone will want to think of us husked out like some of those places looked, and the stories about ruined business and people getting bankrupted by legal fees were. Grim.”
“You know, some of that,” Selma says, very casually, “may just have found its way to distribution amongst the townspeople of the good village of Glenriver yesterday. Who could say how that happened? Maybe there was some random email address that, if anyone bothered to trace it, would route to a remote village in Switzerland; maybe that email address happened to pass some information along to the maintainer of a certain town message board. Hard to know what goes on, you know, in these tiny Midwestern towns.”
“You didn’t!” Will says, after a beat.
“Of course I didn’t,” Selma says calmly. “That would have been in violation of the Prime Directive.”
Will furrows his brow, but not seeing any way around it, asks: “Uh. Isn’t that ‘Don’t interfere with the natural development of alien civilizations,’ more or less?”
“Not for lawyers,” Selma says cheerfully. “For lawyers, it’s just ‘Don’t interfere.’ People are going to do what they’re going to do; we’re just here to clean it up and get paid.”
“Hmm,” says Will, who has, over the years, determined that while Selma talks a big game, the vast majority of her work is fighting for the rights of the little guy. “Well, I’d be grateful to anyone who did do that. If someone had. Would make the whole thing feel a little less daunting.”
“Duly noted,” Selma says, “though irrelevant,” and flips on the radio.
They drive in comfortable silence for a while, Will staring out the window and gnawing at his lip as they pass through Cleveland, wincing away from every Catherine Rose billboard they see.
He’s nervous about the town hating him, sure, and about regretting the choice he’s made—about to make—whatever.
He’s nervous about Catherine Rose murdering him in cold blood, and also about her then making a billboard out of the crime scene photos as a warning to other potential obstacles to her closing process; whatever Selma says about how she’s bound to be more bark than bite, Will is reasonably sure that’s a real concern for him here, at least if the voicemails of the last few days are anything to go by.