Magic Mansion (20 page)

Gold Team responded by more of their enthusiastic back-clapping and high-fives.

“And Gold Team? Who are you sending into the Zig-Zag Cabinet?”

Sue squared her shoulders. She was wringing her hands—John wondered if she was conscious of the fact, or if she was just perpetuating the goody-two-shoes image of her team. And then he wondered how his brief tenure on the Red Team had encouraged him to become so cynical.

“Monty, we’d like the Red Team to be represented by Fabian Swan.”

While Red Team had been expecting it, the decision felt like a blow, all the same.

Adding insult to injury, Sue gave a little, self-conscious shrug, and mouthed the word, “Sorry.”

“Magicians,” Monty said, “step up to your cabinets.”

John approached the box. The secret catches he’d had installed seemed to glow through the plywood, accusing him of stooping to Kevin Kazan’s level for the sake of winning.

Which begged the question: if John wasn’t expected to win, then why did Jia’s assertion that he hadn’t even been trying bother him so much…enough to make him begin plotting and scheming with the rest of the Red Team.
 

Fabian stepped into the box. John murmured the locations of the secret catches, though of course Fabian knew. He’d overseen the cabinet’s construction himself. While Kevin looked on, arms crossed, expression blank, Jia slipped the blades in…or tried to. The side of the upper blade caught on something. John focused on it harder. Fabian’s stomach. “Just breathe,” John said gently. “Relax. In. Out. And now, pull your stomach in.”
 

A grunt, a slide, and the dull blade slid home. It was nothing dangerous, though it probably felt like he was getting stabbed by a cookie sheet.

“Slide it,” Jia said, and John gave the center of the cabinet a push. It slid sideways—but not all the way.

“Keep going,” Fabian whispered. “Push hard. I can take it.”

John glanced over at the Gold Team’s cabinet, where the carpenters were already taking their tape measures to the device. Muriel Broom’s face smiled placidly out of the head cutout, eyebrows raised high, while her fingers and toes wiggled in their respective holes. The cabinet was spread open so wide that even accounting for the optical illusion, she did indeed look like her middle had been severed and completely displaced.

Fabian’s box would need to slide over another half a foot to even approach it. And a man could only squash himself so flat.

Still, since he could see that trying meant something to Fabian, at least, John gave the cabinet one final shove. In the uppermost cutout, Fabian’s face grimaced. “We’re ready,” John said, and the carpenters came and recorded their measurements. When Fabian was allowed to step out of the cabinet, his forehead was gleaming with sweat. John looked at him harder, deeper, seized with the worry that maybe the pressure had ruptured something inside him: a weak gall bladder. An inflamed appendix. A hernia. But thankfully, no, Fabian was still whole and sound. Only profoundly disappointed in himself.

As the scoreboard was readied and the cabinets, now open and empty, were arranged behind the two teams, John decided that if he did end up voted off at the end of this loss, at least he knew that he actually had tried. And that once the competition was over, he would see Ricardo soon enough.

Hopefully.

Unless Ricardo was too busy making appearances. Because whether or not Ricardo ultimately won, there was no way he would need to go back to working bachelorette parties now that America had seen him in all his handsome, perfectly-poised glory.

John almost looked up and sought Ricardo’s eye—almost—but at the last moment he changed his mind, unable to bear an apologetic look like the one the Red Team had elicited from Sue. He found his teammate Jia’s eyes on him instead. She looked angry enough to scream. He could only imagine how badly she wanted a cigarette. Or ten.

When Monty announced the Red Team’s final score, 38-1/4 inches, John presumed (solely by the fact that their score had been announced first) that they’d been completely trounced.

“And now, Gold Team, you’ll need to come in at thirty-eight and a half inches or more…”

Bev was nodding and whispering to her team, who were all hanging on her every word.

“…and your final score is…wow, a whopping forty-three and a half inches. Gold Team won with room to spare.”

The Gold Team clasped hands all around and jumped up and down, whooping and hugging, with Bev at the center. John couldn’t exactly begrudge them their win. They’d come by it fair and square. But even more than this single battle’s victory, John envied the spirit of the Gold Team, the
closeness
they’d spoken of at dinner earlier that week.

And then he realized that one of his team members was probably feeling even worse than he was.

He slipped his arm around Fabian, gave him a very un-magicianly squeeze, and said, “You did your best. We all did. And that’s something nobody can take away from us.”

Iain called a five-minute break while he whispered heatedly into his cell phone, and Monty strolled over and peered into the Red Team’s cabinet, saying, “Tough break, yeah? She’s a beaut.”

The Red Team members were spared from coming up with any sort of a reply when Iain signaled Monty over and began whispering to him with great enthusiasm. “I don’t like it,” Jia said. “He’s looking way too intense.”

“Nothing we can do about it now,” Fabian said.

A script supervisor handed Monty a sheet of lines, which he glanced over, and Iain called for the cameras, crew and magicians to take their places again. John stood at the back of his group, fixed his eyes on Monty and waited.

Iain said, “Take it from the last line.”

Monty nodded, composed himself with a few breaths, then lit with sudden excitement and said, “Gold Team won with room to spare! Unfortunately for you, Red Team, that means that one of you…will be eliminated.”

Fabian made a very quiet noise in his throat that plainly conveyed, “See? What’d I tell you?”

“And that player is the one who cost the Red Team their victory tonight: Fabian Swan.”

No vote?
 

John felt as if his heart had stopped. As if he’d surely not heard what he
thought
he’d just heard. But then Fabian’s head sagged down as he absorbed the words himself, and he shook it slowly side to side, and he made not a sound.

“I’m sorry, Fabian,” Monty said sadly. “It’s time for you to bid your team goodbye.”

Fabian gathered himself, bent and gave Jia a polite kiss on the cheek, then turned and shook John’s hand without meeting his eyes. John couldn’t say whether or not the departing magician wanted to even shake Kevin’s hand, but what happened next must have surprised Fabian as much as it did John.
 

It started with a handshake…but then Kevin hauled on Fabian’s arm and dragged him into a solid embrace. And he held him there, patting his back, and rocking side to side. And then, after long seconds, he spoke. “I didn’t know, swear to God. If I knew, man, I never would’ve…I just didn’t know.” When he let Fabian go,
tears
were coursing down Kevin’s cheeks. He swiped at them angrily, defiantly, and said, “It was an honor to be on your team, Fabian Swan.”

___

Marlene rewound the dailies from cameras three and seven. One caught the light reflecting off Kevin Kazan’s tears just right. In the other, it was obvious how red his eyes were, how his eyelashes had glommed together into shiny wet points.

Great footage.

She sorted through a few more angles even as the trailer door opened, and Iain collapsed into the chair beside her. It must have been past midnight. He’d thrown himself down with such force he nearly split the chair in half.

“It’s a damn good weeper shot,” he finally said, “I’ll admit that. But I still think you owe me an explanation.”

“Oh, really?” Marlene reversed in slow-mo and a tear crept up Kevin’s cheek and disappeared into the corner of his eye.

“If you played it my way and switched the boxes, you would’ve had that big payoff when the Red Team’s cabinet trapped one of the girls inside and wouldn’t budge. It would’ve been great.”

It would have—and it would have made Professor Topaz out to be the big hero. But he’d come as far as he had by flying under the radar and avoiding making enemies, and to draw attention to him like that would be as effective as painting a big target on his forehead. Marlene had no intention of telling Iain that she was secretly hoping to get Topaz into the Final Four, despite what the executive producers wanted. She couldn’t have explained precisely why she’d developed a fondness for the old man herself.

“Here’s the thing, Iain. If we really did use that cabinet-switching idea as our twist, the audience wouldn’t have thought we were watching their footage and then decided it actually was a pretty cool idea. They would have assumed we leaked our plan to the Red Team somehow—and if there’s one thing that pisses off a viewer, it’s cheating.”

Iain shrugged sullenly. Once he’d heard that the Red Team had rigged their own cabinet, he’d been dying to see the sabotage in action.

“Even better,” Marlene told him, “audiences love a good comeuppance. The way we worked it tonight—instant karma. Kevin Kazan acts like an idiot and ends up getting his own idol thrown off the show. Satisfying, or what?”

“Yeah. That did work out okay. I guess.”

Way better than okay. Who knew Kazan had that kind of waterworks in him?

Iain stretched and said, “If that’s all you need….”

“One last thing.” Marlene sent a document from her PDA to the printer, and handed him the printout. “I had Monty and a couple of cameras stop off in the library. Give this to him, then go grab Sue and have her meet him there for one quick shot.”

Iain perked up. “Are they gonna, y’know…go at it?”

“What? What do you…? No. Of course not. That’s crazy.”

Chagrined, Iain pried himself from his chair and slunk toward the door.

Before he left, Marlene added, “I’d never stage an affair with an amateur like Sue. You’d be able to spot the lack of chemistry a million miles away.”

___

“What is it?” Sue whispered as Iain pulled her into the hallway. “Is everything okay? Is my family okay?”

Man oh man. These contestants were wound up tight. Normally, Iain would have enjoyed being as ambiguous as he could and watching Sue work herself into a tizzy by the time she got to the location—but his eyes were full of grit, he was dying for a shower, and the sooner they got the damn shot, the sooner he could go home and go to bed. “It’s nothing like that. You’re fine. Team leader stuff. That’s all.”

“Oh…okay, then. I guess that’s to be expecte—”

“And here we are. You stand in the doorway. Monty’s going to read something to you. You give him an answer.”

“But why—?”

“Was there some part of those instructions you didn’t understand?”

“No,” Sue said quietly. “I understand.”

Iain turned to the ornately carved wooden desk. It was one of the few original pieces left in the mansion, and likely Marlene had nixed his cabinet-switch idea just to get a chance to showcase it. Monty, for all his blond surfer-babe charm, looked very official, even imposing, sitting behind that desk in his charcoal pinstripe suit, with the lighting low, and a crystal glass at his elbow… “Is that scotch?” Iain sputtered. “Drinking on the job—are you insane? Who do you think you are, Ken Fucking Barron? I’m giving you exactly one take—”

“No worries, mate. I won’t touch it ’til you say it’s a wrap.”

Iain’s head throbbed. He pinched his temples, then turned and backed out of camera range. “Okay, fine. Just…go on. Go.”

Tape rolled, and Monty said, “Hi, Sue, come on in and have a seat.”

Sue did as she was told. She looked good and nervous.

Monty continued. “Congratulations on Gold Team’s victory tonight. Kevin was on to something when he said a team was nothing without a good leader. Unfortunately for him, that good leader is you.”

“Thanks, Monty,” Sue said hesitantly.

“Which is why we’re giving you a little heads-up on the next vote.”

“Another elimination? But how…?”

“Not an elimination, but a vote that will affect you, all the same. You’ll need to say goodbye to one member of the Gold Team, but that magician won’t be voted off the show. They’ll join your competitors instead.”

Sue looked thoroughly aghast at the mere thought.

“Since you won tonight’s challenge,” Monty said, “I’m able to give you a little perk. While I can’t let you choose the magician who gets switched…I can allow you to select one teammate you’d like to keep on your team.”

Sue groaned and put her face in her hands.

“Choose wisely, Sue. You’ve got a diverse and talented bunch—and you’ve made friends with them all. Which of them do you need by your side to keep winning challenges?” Monty leaned forward and steepled his fingers. “Which of them would turn around Red Team’s losing streak if they were to switch sides?”

Sue twisted the edge of her nightgown and blinked back tears—she was a pretty good weeper herself, though Kevin’s outburst was better, since you’d expect plenty of crying from someone like Sue.
 

“Who’s it going to be, Sue? Who will you grant immunity from getting voted off your team?”

Sue took a few deep breaths to compose herself, then said, “I choose Ricardo, Monty. I want to keep Ricardo.”

___

“The Gold Team leader has spoken. She’s decided she wants to keep Ricardo the Magnificent by her side. And so, one of her other talented teammates will join the ranks of the enemy. Who’s it going to be? That’s up to you, the audience.

“Will it be the oldest female contestant in the game, the spirited spiritualist Muriel Broom?

“Will it be the beautiful and talented assistant-turned-magician, Amazing Faye?

“Or will it be the Gold Team’s MVP from tonight’s challenge, the clever Math Wizard, Bev Austin?

“I’m your host, Monty Shaw, bidding you happy voting. Remember,
your
vote will decide who dons the Red, next time…on Magic Mansion.”

Chapter 20

UNEVEN TEAMS