It amazed Grace how modern-minded the women were here in Pine Creek. They were not judging her for showing up with a child and no husband. They were, however, feeling sorry for her, and Grace didn’t want that.
“Sometimes a woman is better off without one, instead of living a lifetime with her mistakes,” she said as way of explanation.
Ellen nodded. The kettle started to boil, and Grace welcomed the excuse to jump up and fix the tea.
“Where did John and Michael go?” she asked.
“They’re up in the twelve-acre field, checking on the new trees Michael set in last spring. This ice is raising havoc with them. The older, established trees can handle it, if it doesn’t get much worse, but the young ones aren’t strong enough yet. Michael could lose the entire crop.”
“What can they do about it? They can’t very well shake the ice off every tree on twelve acres.”
“John mentioned maybe setting up a system of smudge pots to keep the temperature just above freezing around them. Like they do with the orange trees in Florida when they get a freeze.”
Grace set the tea on the stove to steep and looked back at Ellen. “Will that work?”
The worried woman shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know. And neither does John. And we don’t even know if we can scrape together enough equipment to try.”
Grace pictured the young trees in her mind and what it would take to save them. They needed support to carry them through the ice storm. She knew the twelve-acre field. The west winds often blew the snow right off it most winters.
She suddenly had an idea.
“How tall are the trees, Ellen? One foot? Two feet?”
“They’re about a foot and a half, I would say,” she told her, her eyes narrowed on Grace’s excited expression. “Why?”
“Instead of heating the air to protect them, what if we…”
Loud footsteps suddenly sounded on the porch, and the door opened. John Bigelow and Michael MacBain came into the kitchen, stamping their feet on the rug.
When they saw Grace, both men stopped and stared at her. John smiled, and Michael gave her first a surprised look and then a guilty frown. Grace smiled back at both of them.
“John,” Ellen said, obviously having caught some of Grace’s excitement. “Grace has an idea to save the trees.”
Both John and Michael looked from Ellen to Grace.
Grace flushed slightly. “I…it’s just an idea. And I’m not even sure it will work,” she admitted to them.
“What?” John asked, sighing deeply and rubbing his forehead. “At this point, I’ll entertain anything.”
“Well,” she said, still formulating her thoughts from before. “What if, instead of trying to thaw the trees, you bury them?”
“Bury them?” Michael asked. “With what?”
“Snow,” she said succinctly. “The snow would surround the young trees and support their weight, and if the snow was deep enough, it would protect them from being damaged by any more ice.”
Michael turned and looked out the window, frowning when he looked back at her. “It’s raining, not snowing.”
“But we can make snow. Maybe. It would be wet snow, but it still might be possible in these temperatures.”
Michael was looking at her as if she’d lost her mind. John was shaking his head. “That takes specialized equipment, Grace,” John said. “And there’s nothing like that around here.”
“Yes, there is,” she countered. “On TarStone Mountain. I saw it two days ago, when I came down the mountain in the snowcat. There was enough piping and guns to do your twelve-acre field.”
A very colorful, very blue curse suddenly scorched the air in the kitchen. Grace looked at Michael and saw his entire face redden and his eyes narrow to pinpricks.
“We’re better off with the smudge pots,” he said through his teeth, his jaw clenched so tightly Grace thought he was in danger of hurting himself. “That equipment on TarStone will never lie in my fields.”
Grace set her hands on her hips. “And why not?”
“MacKeage will never agree, and if he does, I won’t allow it. I have no wish to be beholden to the bastard.”
Grace ignored Michael’s anger and spoke to John. “Will it work?” she asked. “If we can make snow and cover the trees, will it protect them?”
John was scratching his two-day growth of peppered white whiskers. “It might,” he said, nodding his head. “It really might work. The snow would support them.”
“Dammit. MacKeage won’t do it,” Michael said, pulling off his jacket and boots, stomping, sock-footed out of the kitchen, and disappearing up the stairs. All three of the adults and even Baby flinched when a door suddenly slammed shut over their heads with enough force to rattle the windows.
Grace looked at Ellen. “Can you keep Baby for me for a few hours?” she asked. “I want to go to TarStone.”
But it wasn’t until she was halfway to the ski resort that Grace remembered she’d just left a twelve-toed child in the same house as his father.
Chapter Eleven
Grace turned onto the well-marked road that led to TarStone Mountain Resort and drove down it a mile before she came to a stop at the far corner of the massive parking lot. She had seen a bit of the resort on her ride back to her home two days ago, but that was nothing compared with what was in front of her now.
The resort was huge. There was one massive structure just to the left that was obviously the ski lodge. Its three-story-high floor-to-ceiling windows faced the mountain. There were several more outbuildings and a long, two-story hotel on the right. And everything, right down to the ski-lift shed, was built from granite and black stone and large hand-hewn logs.
If she had to describe it, Grace would say that the lodge and hotel looked like a cross between a Scottish castle and a Swiss chalet. The roofs were bulged out like medieval barns and covered with cedar shingles that had been left to weather to a natural gray. Eaves overshot the buildings by a good three feet and swept into a graceful arch just at the ends, further amplifying the architecture of the roofline.
The MacKeages hadn’t skimped on the glass. Windows running from floor to ceiling marked every room of the hotel, and a large carport had been added to the front, held up by massive pillars that looked to be whole trees.
Black stone formed the foundations and lower walls of both the lodge and the hotel, topped by rows of rough-hewed horizontal logs. Only the trim had been painted a deep forest green, while the logs had been left to weather naturally.
It was beautiful. A fairy-tale world. And every square inch of it was covered with ice, which added to its magical aura.
She was very impressed. When the MacKeages did things, they obviously did them well.
She couldn’t see their home, though, which Grey had called Gu Bràth. She remembered he had mentioned that it was several hundred yards away, probably tucked up the mountain a bit, back in the woods. She looked around for a driveway leading out of the parking lot but saw none. She did see a light coming from the ski-lift shed. She drove her truck up to it and shut off the ignition.
Morgan popped his head out the door of the shed. Grace got out of her truck and slipped and slid her way toward him.
“Take a care, lass, before you break your beautiful neck,” Morgan said, holding the door open for her and grabbing her arm as she stumbled inside.
“Thank you. I’ve got to find Dad’s old ice creepers.”
“Grace,” Grey said, surprise in his voice. She looked up to see him smiling as he came toward her. His hair was soaked, with little icicles hanging from the ends of it.
“Didn’t you get enough weather two nights ago?” she asked, reaching up and brushing some of the melting ice off his shoulder.
“What are you doing here?” He looked out the door toward her truck, then took her by the shoulders.