“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 Grunewald 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.
When he shouldered inside the kitchen, shaking snow from his jacket and hair, she stood like a shadow near the sink, afraid to look—afraid to ask.
Without a word Abel crossed the room and took her into his arms.
“You can relax, little bird.” He lowered his mouth to her hair. “I was a good boy.”
The knots in her shoulders and neck eased with her exhaled breath. “I love you,” she whispered against his shoulder.
He ran a hand up and down the length of her back. “I wanted to hit him. I wanted to pound the ever-loving life out of him for who he is and what he is—and what he’s making his son.”
“But you didn’t.”
“No.” He let out a deep breath of his own. “And I didn’t make a dent in his attitude, either. I’m afraid this might be just the beginning of Mark’s trouble.”
“We’ll figure out a way to deal with it,” she said. “Somehow we’ll figure out a way.”
The phone rang as she drew away to look in his eyes. He touched a finger to her jaw, gave her a weary smile, then reached for the phone.
“Greene,” he said, snagging the receiver from its cradle.
Mackenzie watched as he listened quietly, his face tightening into a frown as he dragged a hand through his hair. “Yeah. I’ll be right there.”
“What?” she asked, a sense of foreboding shivering down her spine.
“That was J.D. They’re organizing a search party.”
She cast a look outside. The snow was falling harder and heavier. The wind added a vicious chill and compounded the diminishing visibility.
“Someone’s lost in this?”