Welcome to Paradise (14 page)

But Gabe was watching Danny pan slowly over those damning black holes in the cabin wall, just below the window where Mira had been standing. Sometimes, close counted. And this was going to be one of those times.

“Well, since we’re done with fencing,” Stanley decided when the men were alone again, “guess we’d better get started on that haying. We’re low on feed, and I’ve got a suspicion that something
like
that’s going to come up in a challenge at some point. Might as well get working on it, get some practice.”

“But, Martin,” he said, struck by a sudden thought, “if you wouldn’t mind, it’d be good to get some more wood chopped before we head out. Running low there too, and nobody’s going to feel like doing that tonight.”

“Right,” Martin said, clearly relieved that the discussion of his actions of the night before was over. “I’ll do that.”

“Don’t want him out there with a scythe,” Stanley said to the others as they walked out toward the tall grass. “Chop someone’s leg right off.”

 
Mira was returning from the creek with yet another bucket of water when she heard the scream. Nothing like Melody dropping her iPhone down the hole. This was louder, truly agonized. Before she had fully registered the blood-chilling sound, she had dropped her bucket with a splash and was running toward it, Maria-Elena following belatedly behind.

Mira got there first. Martin was on the ground, on his back behind the chopping block. The first thing Mira saw was his contorted face. And the second was the axe handle, sticking straight up into the air above the hands desperately clasping his leg.
Because the axe was in his foot.

She turned back to Maria-Elena, running up behind her. “Run get Gabe!” she ordered. “Right now!”

“Oh, my God.” Maria-Elena stood stock-still and stared at Martin, her face going white.

Mira turned her bodily.
“Run!”
she demanded fiercely. Shoved her hard.
“Run!”

She turned back to Martin.
Registered Zara running along the path from the outhouse.
And that Martin was still screaming. She scrambled around to his feet just as Zara came up. Should she pull the axe out?
she
wondered desperately. Or would that make it bleed more? The dilemma was solved for her as Martin jerked his leg skyward and the axe clattered to earth, narrowly missing her.

“What?” It was Zara, panting to a stop.

“The axe was in his foot,” Mira shouted over Martin’s screams. She picked up the foot in question by the ankle. Elevate it to slow the bleeding. She knew that.
Hurry, Gabe,
she prayed.

Zara dropped to the ground next to Martin, held his arms, began talking to him urgently. “Help’s coming. We’ve got you. You’re going to be all right.” Over and over, as Mira held Martin’s booted foot in the air.

Mira wondered for a brief moment if she should try to get the boot off. But it was all she could do to hold his leg up, the blood flowing down, running red over his leg, her hands. At least his screams had subsided to a steady, anguished moaning under Zara’s calming influence.

It seemed she’d been holding on forever, her arms aching, mind whirling, but it couldn’t have been more than five minutes before Gabe was running toward them, the rest of the men, and Danny with his camera, close behind.

“Good,” Gabe said sharply, coming up next to her. “Come around the side, hold his calf from underneath.” He began unlacing the heavy boot, his fingers fast and sure. Loosened the laces and pulled the boot off, revealing the once-green wool sock, dark and wet with blood. He pulled the sock quickly off in its turn, revealing the long gash, the flesh split cleanly open almost all the way through, the edges of bone showing white.
And all the blood.
Mira swallowed and looked away quickly.
 

“Apron,” Gabe snapped, taking over holding Martin’s foot in the air. “Get it off and give it to me.”

She hastily untied it and pulled it off, fleetingly grateful that she’d put it on clean this morning in preparation for the challenge. Handed it to Gabe and then, without his prompting, grabbed Martin’s calf again, allowing him to fold the cotton into a pad and set it against the wound. He pressed both hands to it.

“How long did they say?” he asked Danny.

“Less than ten minutes.” Danny looked a little pale himself, but kept his camera trained steadily on the scene.

“A few minutes ago,” Gabe calculated. “OK. Kevin, get over here and help me elevate this leg, give Mira a break.” He glanced at Maria-Elena, sobbing in Stanley’s arms, and seemed to dismiss her. “Mira,” he said. “Go get me kitchen towels. As many clean ones as we have. And a blanket to cover him.”

She nodded and ran. Came back with them, realizing belatedly that her hands were wet and red with Martin’s blood. Gave the blanket to Zara, who covered Martin with it. Then went back to stand by Gabe, handing the towels to him one at a time as he continued to apply firm pressure to the wound.

Zara continued to talk reassuringly to Martin.
A string of words, always the same meaning.
“We’ve got you. You’re going to be all right. Help’s coming.”

And at last, the welcome sight of the ambulance, jolting over the track into the yard.
The doctor and paramedic running to them with the gurney, loading Martin onto it and into the back of the vehicle.

“OK,” Gabe said with a sigh of relief as they watched the ambulance disappear again. “That was a little more excitement than we were expecting today.”

Mira laughed, heard the edge of hysteria in her voice,
stopped
herself abruptly. Looked down at her hands and swallowed hard.

“Let’s get you sitting down,” Gabe said, his attention shifting abruptly back to her. “All of you. Let’s go.” He put a steadying arm around Mira, walked her into the cabin and sat her down on a chair.

“Feeling faint?” he asked her.

“No. Just a little shaken,” she assured him. She was trembling with reaction, he saw, the vestiges of adrenaline.
The second time in less than twelve hours.
Too much.
And her hands, her dress were covered in blood.

“Zara. You OK?” Gabe asked.

“Yeah,” she said soberly. “I’m good.”

“Then take Mira, get her cleaned up. She’ll feel better once she gets that blood off her. Maria-Elena,” he snapped at the still-sniffling girl, “make some coffee.” She nodded and moved automatically to obey. The familiar activity would calm her, he knew.

“And Kevin,” he decided, “get everyone some water in the meantime. Everyone sit a bit. I’m going to go clean up too.” He looked down at himself, as soaked with blood as Mira. The difference was, he was used to it.

“It’s been quite the week, hasn’t it?”

Cliff’s wry comment prompted some subdued laughter. The Paradise homestead had been surprised to get the summons to the Clearing after the previous day’s challenge had been canceled.

“We’re not going to have to get rid of somebody after all, are we?” Maria-Elena had asked nervously over breakfast. “Which homestead would even, like, vote?”

“No,” Kevin said positively. “It’s not that. They don’t want to get rid of more than one team a week. That’d mess their season right up. They just want to talk to us, get some reaction shots across the aisle. Have us see what’s going on over in Arcadia, them see what’s happening here. Let everyone at home analyze the homestead bonding versus the original team connections, how those stack up after a couple weeks of this.”

“Good to know we’ve got you to explain it to us,” Zara said. “It’s like we’ve got a spy in the production camp.”

“My talents may be meager,” Kevin proclaimed, “but the lessons learned from a life wasted watching reality TV cannot be denied.”

“What do you think
has
been going on over there? At Arcadia?” Mira asked him, getting up for the coffeepot where it was keeping warm on the stove and pouring second cups all around.

“Well,” he began judiciously, “based on what we saw last week, and what Rachel said then, we’re a whole lot more functional than they are. Who did we have who wasn’t really meshing with the group? Melody and Martin, and they’re both gone.”

“And they’ve lost Chelsea and Arlene now,” Zara pointed out. “So there may only be two women left, which would be a whole lot of work, but I’ll bet there’s zero conflict in that kitchen now.”

“But on the men’s side . . .” Kevin pointed out, with a meaningful glance at Gabe.

“Yeah,” he said. “That’ll be interesting to see, won’t it?”

And it was, he thought now with yet another stab of worry for Mira. Scott was seated next to Lupe at the end of the front row of benches opposite. Rachel rounded out the row, with the rest of the men on the bench behind them. Scott was still on the outside, obviously. Literally. Well, Gabe hadn’t expected anything else. Alec had hated the man from the first moment, and Hank and Calvin were no fools. Stripped of his lawyer clothes and the black BMW, what was Scott? Not anyone Gabe would have wanted on any kind of team. Out for
himself
, first and last.
 

“Most importantly,” Cliff began, “let me assure all of you that Martin’s going to be all right. His Olympic sprinting career is probably a thing of the past, but the doctors tell me that everything should heal up just fine, and he’s already doing much better. Thanks to some pretty good first aid, they say,” he added with a nod at Gabe. “Which kept him from losing any more blood than he did.”

“I just took over from Mira,” Gabe said. “She was the hero of the hour. Kept her head and did exactly the right things.” He looked across at her and smiled, saw her glow at his praise, even as she looked a bit flustered at the scrutiny from the opposite homestead, the knowledge that the camera was on her.

He saw Scott’s obvious discomfiture and felt even better. Looked the challenge straight across at him.
Going to take her away from you.
And saw that the message was received, loud and clear.
 

“I hear it wasn’t the only adventure you had yesterday, Mira,” Cliff said. “Talk about what happened earlier.”

“Gabe can really say more,” Mira demurred. “He was there. I guess it was a close call, but that’s all.”

“Take us through it, then, Gabe,” Cliff suggested.

“We’ve had a little bit of everything,” Gabe said wryly. “Comedy to tragedy. Though it could’ve been a whole lot worse, in all cases.” As he described their garden fiasco, then the episode with the shotgun, he watched Scott’s expression grow ever darker, and his satisfaction changed to something a little less comfortable.

“There’s been some excitement with the shotgun at Arcadia too, hasn’t there?” Cliff asked innocently as Gabe finished his recital. “Scott, what happened over there?”

“Nothing,” Scott said shortly. “I chased off some deer, that’s all. Trying to get in the garden.”

“Which isn’t fenced yet, I hear,” Cliff persisted. “Hank?”

“Well . . .” Hank shot a glance at Alec, then down at Scott on the bench below him. “No. We haven’t got it fenced yet. We had a little . . . difference of opinion on a couple matters, ended up with some variation in the depth of our
post holes
. Turns out that they weren’t dug quite deep enough after all.”

“So what happened?” Cliff asked.

“The fence fell down, that’s what,” Calvin said bluntly. “Had to pull every . . . blessed post out of the ground and dig the holes deeper, and now we’re going to have to put the whole thing up again.”

He glared across at Scott, who looked back at him defiantly. “It should have worked,” Scott snapped. “I was just trying to get the job done as efficiently as possible.”

“Well, yeah,” Hank drawled. “Except it didn’t work, did it? So needless to say, we’re still sleeping out there, guarding our vegetables. And some of us guard more . . . enthusiastically than others.”

“I was scaring the deer off,” Scott argued, his face flushing. “That’s why we have the gun.”

“Duke was doing a pretty good job already,” Hank pointed out.

“But I’m sure you’ve frightened them into the next county now,” Alec added with patently false sincerity. “Letting off both barrels at once like that. Good job.” He looked across at his brother and grinned, and Gabe got the message.
Double team.

“How did that happen?” Cliff pressed.

Scott gave a quick, angry shrug of his shoulders. “I pulled both triggers. Which is way too easy to do. If you’d given us a modern shotgun like you should have, instead of some antique model, that couldn’t have happened.”

“And what did that do?” Cliff asked.

“Knocked him on his ass, is what it did,” Alec responded promptly. “And gave him the mother of all bruises too. You should see his shoulder. Want to have Gabe take a look, Scott? He’s a pretty good doctor, you know. Ask Mira. Sounds like she knows.”

The look Scott shot him was pure poison. “We’ve all faced challenges out here,” he snarled. “Nobody’s been all that impressed with your performance either.”

“You think I should be worried?” Alec asked in mock alarm. “I’d better do some quick scrambling this week, I guess. Work on my
alliances.”

“I understand you practiced a little gender role reversal over there too, since the last time we were here, when we had our discussion about that,” Cliff said after a moment.

“Yeah, we tried that too,”
Alec
agreed. “Since everything else was going so great. It didn’t work too well either. Surprise.”

Gabe saw Chelsea and Melody look at each other on the jury bench. Arlene wasn’t with them. Staying with Martin, he guessed. But the blondes seemed to know what Alec was talking about.

“I thought she had a point,” Rachel put in. “I mean,” she went on, “Arlene was right that in 1885, single women, widows, they homesteaded too. And they would have had to do everything themselves. We’ve already all figured out,” she said with a wry glance at Lupe, who nodded agreement, “that they had to be pretty tough in the first place. So when Arlene wanted to see what that was like, I kind of admired that.”

“But you didn’t want to join her,” Cliff suggested.

Rachel laughed. “Well, no. Pulling up all that water, taking care of the garden is bad enough. Not to mention the horror of the laundry. Isn’t that the worst?” She looked across at the other homestead, received nods and smiles of recognition. “I don’t need to be digging holes too. And I’m pretty sure that cooking breakfast is more fun than shoveling . . . manure.”

“How long did that last?” Cliff asked.

“One day,” Alec grinned. “Give her credit, she worked hard, but by dinner . . . What was it she said?” he asked Calvin.

“Said, ‘I think we’ve all learned a lot from this experiment,’” Calvin said, clearly keeping his face straight with an effort, “‘but I’m satisfied that I’ve proved my point.’”

“I’m not saying a woman couldn’t do the physical work out here,” he added with a hasty glance at his father, “and props to Arlene for trying it. But I think you’d have to be in shape, 1885 style. Growing up doing all that, you’d be talking some upper-body strength. But Arlene—not so much.”

After the session, they were given a bit of time to talk to their teammates on the other side. With the cameras still trained on them, of course. Kevin had been right, clearly. This get-together was all about furthering the storyline: the strength of the original teams, the pull of the new homesteads.

“Coming on a little strong, aren’t you, with Scott?” Gabe asked Alec after performing their ritual handshake and giving his brother a quick hug. Damn, it was good to see him.

Alec shrugged. “Why not? Not like he’s got any friends out here. Lupe’s the only one who’s even civil to him at this point. Well, Hank. But he just says he’s known so many assholes after forty years in the music business, one more doesn’t even register.”

“What you said at the beginning, though,” Gabe persisted. “About him imploding. He looks on the verge right now.”

“So? What’s he going to do? And who are you to talk? You did everything but lay a big wet one on Mira right in front of him.”

“That was before I saw how far he was down the road,” Gabe said slowly. “You need to back off. His ego can’t take much more.”

“His ego got supersized a long time ago. He’s got plenty to spare.”

“It’s big,” Gabe agreed. “But it’s fragile as hell. Quit baiting him so much. I mean it. I don’t have a good feeling.”

Alec sighed. “If you say so. You’re the one with the X-ray vision.
You sure, though?
I keep pushing
him,
he’s bound to do something outrageous enough to make even the lovely Mira give him the boot. And you can’t tell me that isn’t what you’re aiming for.”

“I’ll take care of things with Mira,” Gabe said. “You just take care of yourself. And that means backing off.”

“What else is happening over there?” he asked after a minute. “You doing all right with Hank and Calvin?”

“Yeah. They’re both cool.”

“Close, though?” Gabe pressed.

Alec sighed. “Yes. Close. And yes, we have a plan.”

“How about Rachel and Lupe? Where do they fit into it?”

“A little tougher,” Alec acknowledged. “I’ve been working on Rachel. And no,” he put up a hand to forestall the next question, “I’m not going to be the poster boy for
America Alive
sluttiness
this season. We’ve talked about adventure sports. She’s really into them, and so is Calvin. That’s all the bonding I’m doing with her. I’d be scared anyway. That woman knows a
lot
of knots.”

“And Lupe?”

“Surprisingly tricky. She likes Hank a lot, but she likes the rest of us too.”

“So how is that tricky?”

“She’s probably the swing vote, if Rachel gets sneaky and pulls Hank in. Hank’s a great guy, but a big threat to win. He’s been singing over there. That’s just way too endearing. And Lupe’s close to Rachel too. Scott’s a non-factor, but if the other three get together, and as popular as Hank is . . .”

“The celebrity factor’s a tough one to beat,” Gabe agreed. “Same story over here on the allies. I’m tight with Stanley, pretty good with Zara and Kevin, though he’s a tricky bastard. He and Rachel have the best shot at making it further in the game, but we can win against them—if they don’t maneuver us out first, like you say.”

“And all that’s important,” he finished, “but don’t forget what we started out with. Don’t push Scott to breaking point. He’s way too close already.”

Mira watched Scott approach, dreading the coming minutes. He was still looking thunderous after the needling remarks from the other homesteaders. She knew how important appearances were to him, and nobody could say that he’d made a good impression just now. The knowledge that whatever he was about to say would be recorded made her cringe a bit inside.
 

“Sorry to hear about your shoulder,” she said as he joined her. “Is it all right?”

He brushed her question aside. “I’m fine. We don’t have much time, so listen.
I’m having
to rework alliances, now that Arlene and Chelsea are gone. Why did Martin have to go and chop his foot? That’s screwed things up royally.”

“He was badly hurt,” Mira protested. “He was so lucky it wasn’t worse, and it was serious enough as it was. He could even have died, Gabe said, if he’d hit an artery or something. I was so glad when Gabe told me I did the right thing. It seemed like forever until he got there. The whole thing was terrifying,” she said with a shudder of remembered horror. “And it made me realize that there are things a whole lot more important than a million dollars. Or winning a game.”

Surely Scott would say something about what she’d done. She didn’t think she’d been a hero, but she
had
kept her head. And it hadn’t been easy.

“You hadn’t worked the alliance with Martin anyway, though, had you?” he accused instead.
 

“No.” She refused to feel bad about that. “He almost
shot
me, for heaven’s sake! Nobody was going to keep him after that, even if he hadn’t left the gate open.”

“He
didn’t
shoot you, though, did he?” Scott pressed. “I don’t want to hurt your feelings, because I know you’re doing your best, but I need to tell you that it isn’t coming across well, the way you’ve presented all this. It’s looking like you have to be the center of every story. Because what I was hearing back there was:
I
was almost shot.
I
had to save the day when Martin got hurt. When actually, nothing at all happened when Martin let off the shotgun, did it?”

“No,” she agreed, “but . . .”

“Sweetie. Nothing
happened,”
he said patiently. “No more than it did when I shot at the
deer.
Both Martin and I did what we were trained to do out here, scare off some animals. And Gabe’s the one who did the important stuff for Martin when he got hurt, not you, isn’t he?”