by Cindy Gerard
“I can’t help it.” She pinched her eyes tight, gave her head a sharp shake and tried to blink them back.
She opened the book and through a blur of tears, focused on a handwritten page. “It’s...French?”
He nodded. “She was the daughter of a war chief. A Frenchman from Quebec fell in love with her and her people. He loved the stories they told, recorded them in this bound volume and gave it to her as a wedding gift.”
The sweetest ache filled her chest as she held the book to her breast. “I wish I could read them.”
“I’ll read them to you. And we’ll discover the legends together.”
The tree lights reflected in his eyes as he watched her.
“Do you think Manabozho is in here?”
“I know he is,” he whispered, then gave her the most precious gift of all. “Just as I know that I love you.”
It was a record night for tears. And for revelations.
“I have one last thing for you,” she said, getting herself together. She reached around him and produced an envelope from under the tree skirt.
He looked at it and frowned. A slow smile crept across his face when he recognized his own handwriting and it dawned on him that the letter inside was the one he’d written calling the arrangement off.
“I thought you didn’t receive this.”
“Guess I was mistaken,” she said, watching his face carefully.
He didn’t say a word. He merely rose, with her still wrapped around him, and walked to the hearth.
“Merry Christmas, wife,” he murmured and tossed the letter into the fire.
“Merry Christmas, husband,” she whispered against his mouth, as he drew her into a kiss that told her everything she needed to know about his love.
Trouble always found paradise. It was like an unwritten law. But as the days after Christmas passed, and her relationship with Abel solidified and settled, Mackenzie was beginning to think maybe someone else’s paradise was going to be invaded this time.
The changes in Mark were heartwarming. She had Abel to thank for that. While Mark insisted he was enjoying himself—and it was obvious that he was—Abel took special care to make time for him. They got the snowmobile running and spent a good part of each day scouting the snowmobile trails that wound their way around Legend Lake. He introduced Mark to ice fishing and they brought home a walleyed pike, a delicacy Mackenzie wondered how she’d lived this long without.
But most of all, what he gave to her brother was his trust. He trusted him to go out on the snowmobile alone. He trusted him with the care of his horses and to help him at the logging site.
Those might have been small matters to some. But to a boy who had never been given the opportunity to trust in himself, they were life altering.
When Scarlett pulled in the morning after New Year’s Day to pick Mark up and take him to school with Casey, Mackenzie was full of hope that his last transition would go as smoothly as the past few days they’d all spent together. And it did. The first day was eventful for its lack of events.
It was on the second day that all hell broke loose.
Abel was at the logging site when she got a call from the school a little after noon asking her to come and get Mark. There’d been an incident. She didn’t think past her concern for Mark. She didn’t try to reach Abel on the cellular. She snagged the keys to Abel’s truck and headed for Bordertown.
The town was small—less then ten thousand people. It didn’t take her long to get to the high school. She bolted through the double metal entrance doors, got her bearings and headed down the hall toward the door marked Principal’s Office.
She introduced herself to a pinch-faced secretary who looked her up and down then picked up the phone.
“Mackenzie Greene is here, Dr. Chipman. Right through that door,” she said stiffly when she hung up the phone.
Mackenzie had decided long ago that all principals’ offices came equipped with austere, vinyl side chairs, yellowed venetian blinds and a wooden chair in the corner reserved exclusively for the troublemakers.
Her heart sank when she saw Mark occupying that designated space. His shirt was torn, his lip was bloody, his knuckles swollen. And his face was a mask of cold indifference. She knew better. He was seething beneath that “nothing can get to me” glare.
“Are you all right?” she asked, going to him.
He gave a defiant sniff and looked away.
“Your brother was involved in a bit of a scuffle after lunch today.”
This from Dr. Chipman, whom she’d met and liked when she’d enrolled Mark in school over the holidays. A small man, he sat quietly behind his scarred walnut desk, his eyes magnified behind a pair of thick glasses, his receding hairline combed back unapologetically.
“The last I knew,” Mackenzie said, working hard at keeping calm, “a scuffle generally requires more than one participant. Why is it, then, that Mark is the only one waiting in your office?”
Dr. Chipman smiled kindly. “It’s a little rule of mine. Divide and conquer. The other boy is waiting for his parents in the superintendent’s office.”
Immediately she felt sheepish. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have jumped to conclusions.”
“Apology accepted. In the meantime I think it would be wise if you took Mark home with you today. A new school is always an adjustment—but this is not the way to settle in.”
“What happened?” she asked, turning to Mark.
He was as silent as stone.
“That’s about as much as we’ve gotten out of either him or the Grunewald boy,” Dr. Chipman said. “Maybe he’ll feel more like talking to you.”
The blood drained from Mackenzie’s face at the mention of Grunewald’s name.
“John Grunewald’s son?” she asked, praying the answer would be no. It came as no surprise when it wasn’t.
“What happened?” she asked again, after she’d hustled Mark out of the building and into the pickup.
He stared sullenly out the window.
“Mark. You’ve got to tell me.”
“I’ve got to tell you nothing. I hate this place. We never should have left California. There’s nothing but snow and ice and hicks.”
She felt heartsick. It was back. All of it. The anger. The stubborn chip that occupied a prize spot on his shoulder.
He wouldn’t talk to her. He wouldn’t let her in. Casey talked, though. When Scarlett picked her up after school, Casey told her the whole story. Scarlett retold Casey’s account of the events over a cup of coffee at the Greenes’ kitchen table, while Casey sought out Mark in his room.
“According to Casey, the trouble started early in the day but came to a head in the lunchroom. Mark and Casey were eating together—Ryan Grunewald evidently took exception.
“It sounds like he’d been taunting Mark all day—about everything from the length of his hair to the fact that he’d been set back a grade because of all the classes he’d missed in L.A.”
Mackenzie studied Scarlett’s tense expression. “Let’s have the rest of it.”
Reluctantly Scarlett told her. “Ryan made an off-color remark about you and Abel.”
She heard the rest of it through a nauseous blur. Mark had offered the boy an opportunity to take it back. When Ryan told him in crude, graphic detail what Mark could do with his offer, Mark had flown across the table and torn into him. It had taken four teachers to pull them apart.
Mackenzie didn’t have a clue how they were ever going to set things right. Abel would be so angry. She thought of his dark past, of the violence that had ruled his life, and she feared for both him and John Grunewald.
“Abel can’t find out about this.”
“I think it’s going to be a little hard to keep it from him, don’t you? According to Casey, Mark’s lip is split pretty badly.”
“I know. And I’ll tell him about the fight. What I don’t want him to know is that it was John Grunewald’s son who provoked Mark. There are bad feelings between Grunewal
d and Abel.”
Scarlett gave her a sympathetic look. “I know. Maggie told me.”
“Maggie? How much does Maggie know?”
“All of it. She knows it was John who knifed Abel all those years ago. The moves John’s wife put on Abel when he came back to the lake. The problems at the logging site that Abel suspects Grunewald is behind.” Scarlett stopped, reacting to the stunned look Mackenzie hadn’t been able to hide. “Oh. Oh, dear. You didn’t know about that, did you?”
Mackenzie swallowed back a thickening lump of dread. “What problems at the logging site?” she asked, slipping deeper into a desperation too, too reminiscent of the panic that had sent her running from California.
“Tell me, Scarlett. If you’re my friend, you’ll tell me.”
With a pained look and a reluctant sigh, Scarlett told her about the sabotage on Abel’s machinery, then about the fire.
Mackenzie propped her elbows on the table and lowered her head in her hands. It was worse than she thought. Abel had said Grunewald wanted his timber. He’d even suggested Grunewald was the kind of man who would go to ugly lengths to get what he wanted. Evidently, he was also the kind of man who would pass his hatred on to his son to perpetuate. It wasn’t right. And it wasn’t fair. And she felt helpless to stop what was happening.
Snow had begun to fall by the time Scarlett and Casey left the cabin. Mackenzie waited for them to drive out of sight before she made up her mind to confront Grunewald herself. It was the only way to avoid more violence and keep the war between Abel and Grunewald from escalating.
Abel wouldn’t like it, but she couldn’t just sit back and watch while her family was pulled apart by the vindictiveness of one man.
She tried not to think about the promise she’d made Abel to stay away from Grunewald. She thought, instead, of setting things right.
Snagging the keys to the truck, she flew outside, rushing in her urgency to get to Grunewald before Abel came home and took matters into his own hands. The roar of Abel’s snowmobile, followed by the sight of it cresting the rise behind the cabin, however, kept her from firing up the engine.
Swamped by a crushing weight of fear, guilt and dread, she dropped her forehead to the back of her hands where they gripped the steering wheel.
She was still sitting that way when Abel rapped a knuckle on the driver’s side window.
Slowly she raised her head. Wearily she met the concerned question in his dark eyes. Then she discarded all the cover stories she’d considered telling him.
When he opened the truck door, she took his hand. In a silence that rang with a foreshadowing of what was to come, she walked with him to the cabin.
She delivered the news with a calmness she was far from feeling, carefully watching his face as they sat opposite each other at the kitchen table. The tight set of his jaw was telling. The flinty look in his eyes warned of the danger she’d hoped to avoid.
“I should have seen this coming,” he said after a long moment. “I should have known Grunewald would pass his poison on to his son.”
Mackenzie felt physically ill. It was so unfair. The two people she loved most in her life were being hurt by pettiness and small-minded vindictiveness.
“You have to feel sorry for the boy,” she said, reaching deep for perspective, even as she thought of Mark’s battered face and the way he’d reverted to hiding behind his protective shell of indifference and anger.
“I do. But I don’t have to feel sorry for his father.”
Without another word Abel rose from the table and shrugged back into his jacket.
Mackenzie shot to her feet at the same time her heart dove to her stomach. “Abel, no. Please...stay away from Grunewald. Please,” she insisted, clamping a hand on his arm as he reached for the door. “Don’t go. We’ll think of some other way to handle this.”
“You were going.” His eyes accused. “That’s what you were doing when I found you. You were going to confront him, weren’t you? If I hadn’t come home when I did, that’s exactly what you’d have done—even though you promised me you’d stay away from him.”
“I would never betray you, Abel.” She closed her eyes. “But I wanted to help.”
“I fight my own battles, Mackenzie.”
“Exactly what I was trying to avoid,” she countered, trying to reason with him through her plea. “A battle. There’s been enough fighting. There’s been enough hate. I don’t want you or anyone else getting hurt because of Mark or me.”
He shook his head wearily. “If you think this is about Mark or you, you’re only fooling yourself.”
The resolve clouding his eyes was so cold it made her shiver as he shrugged off her hand and strode out the door.
Only the snowfall, which had picked up in intensity, made the Grunewald residence difficult to find. Once Abel spotted the three sprawling stories of opulently constructed brick, towering like a monument to Grunewald’s wealth at the far end of town, he pulled into the drive.
The man himself answered the door.
Abel faced his nemesis with a grim scowl. “Grunewald.”
John Grunewald’s eyes narrowed in surprise before his mouth twisted into an ugly facsimile of a smile.
“Well, well. Let me guess. You take a wrong turn? I guess it’s understandable in this storm. You’d be wanting the other side of the tracks.”
Abel clenched his jaw against the acid in Grunewald’s tone, but forced himself to ignore the insult.
“We need to talk.”
“Talk?” While he looked doubtful, Grunewald stepped aside, and like a king offering an audience to a serf, motioned Abel into a foyer consisting of space, a high, vaulted ceiling and a glittering cut glass chandelier.
“I’d think you’d have better—more pleasurable things to do,” he added with an oily, ugly smile, “than talking with me. I heard that new wife of yours is a real sweet little piece. Congratulations must be in order—for you, anyway,” he said, shutting the door behind him. “And condolences for her.”
It was only the picture of Mackenzie, of the fear in her eyes as he’d left her, of her plea for no more fighting, that kept his fists doubled in his pockets instead of connecting with Grunewald’s teeth.
“Look, Grunewald,” he began, biting back the urge, “there’s bad blood between us—”
“There is no blood between us, Greene,” he said, cutting him off. “And the only bad blood, as you put it, is confined to your veins.”
Abel realized in that moment that coming here had been a mistake. Grunewald wouldn’t be reasoned with. He made his own reason.
Disgusted by his error in judgment, he fought back with a verbal blow of his own. “I understand you can’t help being a bastard, but isn’t the bigot role about played out? A man of your wealth and ‘breeding’ has to recognize what a social blunder that is in this day and age.”
Grunewald’s face hardened into a semblance of controlled anger as the barb struck home. “Did you come here to trade insults, or was there another purpose to your visit?”
Yeah. There was a purpose, Abel thought, barely holding back the anger that was determined to take center stage. I came here to rearrange your face you sorry sonofabitch. And as he stood there, itching to do just that, Mackenzie’s words edged through again and altered his course. “There’s been enough fighting,” she’d said.
She was right. There had been enough. No matter how much personal satisfaction he’d feel busting Grunewald in the chops, it would only exacerbate the situation. Gathering strength from Mackenzie’s conviction and making it his own, he settled himself down.
“Look...I came here to appeal to you as a parent,” he said, cutting to the heart of the matter. “Your son and my wife’s brother got into a fight today at school.”
“So I heard,” Grunewald said with an ingratiating smirk.
“It didn’t have to happen. And there is no reason for it to happen again.”
“Boys will be boys,” Grunewald said with a shrug.
> “This has nothing to do with those boys. It has to do with us, and you know it. Your quarrel is with me. What happened between us happened a long time ago. You want to keep it alive, fine. I can handle it. What I can’t handle is that you’ve extended your anger to children.”
Grunewald snorted. “That stringy-haired outlaw is hardly a child.”
Abel bit down hard on his temper. “They’re both children. Your son. Mackenzie’s brother,” he said, refusing to give Grunewald the pleasure of riling him. “And it’s up to us to give them a chance to stay that way.
“They’ll both grow up soon enough,” he continued, when Grunewald only narrowed his eyes. “And then they’ll have the opportunity to decide how to deal with attitudes like yours. I don’t expect you to do anything for Mark, but I’d ask you to look deep and do something for your own son. He deserves better than the antagonism you’re breeding in him.”
His eyes burning with outrage, Grunewald stormed to the door and opened it wide. “I don’t have to listen to this from you. And I sure as hell don’t have to listen to it in my own home. Get the hell out of here.”
Abel held his ground. “If you care about your son,” he said, when Grunewald’s stone face showed no change of emotion, “You’ll think about what I said. He deserves better.”
A movement in the hallway caught Abel’s eye just then. A young man, his features clearly declaring that he was John Grunewald’s son, stepped out of the shadows. The pensive look on the boy’s face told Abel he’d heard every word.
Grunewald glanced in the direction Abel’s gaze had taken and spotted his son standing there.
“Think about what I said, Grunewald.” Abel walked slowly toward the door. “And remember that what we give our children reflects both the best and the worst of us. You have a chance to give him the best of you. Don’t blow it.”
“Get out,” Grunewald repeated forcefully.
Abel shook his head. “I’m going. You and your conscience have a real nice evening together.”
Mackenzie was pacing the floor like a caged tiger by the time Abel’s headlights sliced through the thick drift of falling snow and building wind.