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Now when he looked into the angry face of the mayor, he wondered what secret they had shared before he left Main-field. He felt as if a noose were tightening around his neck. Each day brought only more questions and suspicions about who he was. He found himself pulling Linese closer to his body. He wanted her near him so he could protect her. But from whom? Himself?
Chapter Four (#ulink_b4476bff-af1d-56f8-aa71-dea63b6e9cec)
Chase limped off the porch and into the hot dusky evening. The mayor’s words rattled around inside his head like a stone in an empty bucket. His temples throbbed and his stomach twisted from trying to bring forth hard facts, when nothing but smoke and doubt filled his mind.
The Texas thicket was alive with night sounds. Chase found his eyes traveling toward an overgrown path that disappeared into the tangled overgrown foliage. Something about the almost invisible path beckoned to him. He walked to it and stared while a strange feeling of déjà vu sluiced over him. Without knowing quite why, he pushed his way through the plants and went onward, stopping occasionally to let his instinct take him on a journey his mind had forgotten but his gut still knew. He had to move branches out of his way, yet some forgotten part of his brain knew that a path did indeed lie beneath the thick growth, whether he could see it or not.
The verdant foliage trapped the heat beneath a canopy of leaves. Chase unbuttoned his shirt and pulled the long tail from his trousers in the hope it would be cooler. The farther he went into the unknown thicket, the darker the night became, but still some feral intuition showed him the way. He neither stumbled nor faltered while he pushed on.
He stopped and looked back. The glow from Cordel-lane’s lamps was far behind him now. He was alone, with vague sensations of having traveled the path before.
The pain radiating from his hip forced him to halt sometime later. Flying insects fed on every exposed inch of his skin, but it was too sticky to consider rebuttoning the shirt that hung open and loose. He slapped a mosquito on his neck and saw a flicker of light through hanging vines clinging to the willow and hickory.
“Will-o’-the-wisp,” he muttered, but he found himself watching the uneven trail of illumination dancing through the trees with keen interest. Some buried part of him knew those flickering lights were his destination and not some mystical trick of swamp gas or flitting winged critter.
Chase walked, slower and more deliberately now, toward the source of the flame. When he was no more than a stone’s toss away, he saw a group of men in ribald discussion. They turned and recognition flooded him, along with a large measure of dread.
“It’s about time, Chase, we were beginning to think you weren’t going to show up,” The mayor’s voice boomed out. “But I was pretty sure you would after our talk today.”
Chase stepped into the circle of orange torchlight and found himself in the company of the same men who had come to see him at the Gazette. He now realized what the man’s exaggerated wink signified. The splintered recollection he had at the Gazette, of the mayor’s face in the same eerie glow of light, came back to haunt Chase.
He had met with them here—before he went to war.
The certainty of that past deed sent chills trailing down Chase’s spine. He knew if he did not tread carefully these men would learn his secret.
“I wasn’t sure I remembered how to get here.” Chase told them a sliver of truth and watched their reactions.
“Sure, Chase, whatever you say.” The mayor chuckled at what he thought was a joke. “Now tell us what you’re up to.”
Chase focused on the faces of the men. A dim memory appeared in his mind. For a brief flash, he saw them as he had seen the mayor in his forgotten past. And as he remembered them, a feeling of shame wended through him. The men were dark spectres of past sins. A sick feeling of guilt, or something much like it, twined its way through his belly.
At first there was Ira Goten’s mysterious pistol and the gold that Chase was sure was stained with blood. Now there were meetings in the woods with men whose politics he could not stomach.
What kind of man was I? Chase’s voice screamed inside his head. What horrible things did I do?
“Listen, Chase, Hershner has had too much leeway since you’ve been gone. The Gazette has been printing things we don’t like. When do you intend to take over and get it back on track?” The man who had been introduced today as Mr. Wallace, from the local merchants bank, stepped forward.
“What exactly is it you want me to do?” Chase felt his anger rising each minute he spent in the men’s presence. He didn’t like the way they acted or how they looked. Chase didn’t know if it was a memory or a premonition, but he knew these men were capable of his ruin.
“We want you to start printing the kind of information we want the people of Mainfield to have,” Wallace said.
There was a hint in those words that Chase could not ignore.
“You mean the kind of information you wanted printed before I left?” Chase bluffed again and prayed he had not said too much.
“Exactly. We’ve kept our word about your little secret and we wouldn’t want to think that you’ve changed your mind about our arrangement. There are dirty secrets, things that have happened you wouldn’t want people to know, especially that sweet little bride you brought home and surprised everybody with.” Wallace grinned.
Chase’s instinct for survival made him hold his fists at his side. He wanted to pummel them until all the murky suspicions they raised about his missing past were gone. But he could not. Whatever he had done in the past, it was his responsibility, his burden. He drew in a resolute breath and forced himself to stay calm. Chase acknowledged that he was faced with this situation because he had no idea what they held over him. He needed to pry information from them, he needed time to dig into his past.
“Mayor, I’ve just returned from war. Give me a little time to recover from my wounds before I undertake these heavy responsibilities.” Chase tried to relax, but it was a hollow attempt. He prayed the anger he felt was not mirrored in his face. The men looked at one another as if weighing Chase’s argument.
Finally Mr. Wallace turned toward Kerney. “I told you it would be fine. Chase Cordell is a man who stands by his word. He’s a man who’s true to his politics and his friends. We can count on him.”
Chase swallowed the bitter taste in his mouth. If these men counted him as a friend, then he certainly hoped he didn’t run into any of his enemies.
Linese was sitting in the window seat of her new bed-room, staring at the silver-ringed moon overhead, when Chase suddenly appeared like a shadowy phantom at the edge of the thicket. She watched while he slid one of his hands through his thick hair. He only did that when he was stiff with anger, it was one of the little things she had learned about him before he left. She wondered where he had been, how he could have materialized at the edge of the woods, and why he seemed to be bristling with suppressed fury.
Chase leaned one palm against a gnarled mountain laurel and tipped his head up toward the night sky. His shirt was open and the long loose tail fluttered in an unseen breeze. Spring moonlight and the soft glow from the windows of Cordellane turned his hard, muscular chest into a work of art.
One strand of his tousled hair was touched by the breeze and he turned his head slightly. She saw the glint of violence in his eyes. He was dangerous, wild, and a bit improper. Memory flooded through her.
“Just like the night I met him,” Linese muttered.
Chase Cordell had come uninvited like so many other young men to the Ferrin County Presbyterian church. He had smelled of brandy and gunpowder, with a fresh wound on one hand. He had been a handsome, mysterious stranger that made the women, both married and unattached, whisper behind their fans while their pulses quickened at the very sight of him.
Linese had been one of those women. She had stood frozen to the floor as he came into the church. She had watched, mesmerized by his hard gray eyes, while he searched the room, as if he had been looking for someone. As if he had been looking for her.
When he pinned her with eyes as hard as rain-slicked granite, she had nearly swooned on the spot. He had continued to shock her by defying propriety and the codes they lived by. He had walked straight up to her and spoken boldly, without a proper introduction, without a care for the consequences. Linese’s heart had nearly hammered its way through her chest.
She had felt every eye in the room fasten on the tall man who none dared to question or oppose. He had been Lucifer fallen to earth, a beautiful archangel whose ember-hot attention had been focused on her alone.
It was the most stimulating experience Linese ever had, and it had not stopped there.
She unconsciously rubbed her ink-stained fingers against her throat and remembered the way his voice had rippled over her like a lover’s intimate caress. In those first shattering moments she had fallen completely under his spell.
But then what woman wouldn’t have? Any man with the confidence to stride across a crowded room and tell a perfect stranger she was going to be his wife was a man that few women could resist.
“Lord knows I couldn’t,” Linese whispered to herself.
She sighed and thought about it while she watched him below. Chase had simply told her that he had chosen her. He had never asked her what she wanted, he had simply told her how it would be, and she hadn’t been able to resist his will.
In the feverish two weeks that followed that meeting, as when they stood in front of the same Presbyterian minister, Linese had given her heart to him without asking for anything in return. Then, in a blur of activity, he had packed her up and moved her from Ferrin County. He had swept into her life like a blue norther.
She had waited, expecting him to tell her he felt the same way before he rode off to war. But he did not. Then she waited at her new home, Cordellane, for letters he would write home, expecting some declaration of affection, but it never came. Now as she stared down at the man who had given her his name, she began to wonder. Did Chase Cor-dell care for her at all? Had he ever, or had he simply chosen her for his wife for other reasons entirely?
She wrapped her arms around her ankles and rested her chin in the space between her knees. The fact that she was sitting in a bedroom all alone instead of sharing one with Chase, while she watched him through a cold pane of glass, was a hard truth to ignore.
While she swallowed the burning lump that constricted her throat, Chase leaned away from the tree and strode toward Cordellane. Linese listened for each of his uneven footfalls while he limped stiffly across the veranda and through the house. She heard him begin to climb the stairs, heard him pause on the landing.
Her heart quickened with hope. Maybe, just maybe, he was going to fling open the door to her room.
Maybe Chase would open the door and stride in with the same bold confidence he had displayed that night in Ferrin County. Maybe he would envelop her in his strong arms, hold her close to that glistening expanse of chest and make sweet love to her. How she yearned to have him pour his heart out, to tell her how much he had missed her while he was gone, to reveal his inner feelings to her.
But he didn’t.
She heard his steps carry him one door farther down the hall, and into the room that had been hers for the past two years. A few moments after the bedroom door shut with a heavy thud, the uneven tempo of his footsteps began again. Her aching heart matched its lonely beat to the uneven stride of his limp.
Major Chase Cordell sounded like a caged animal and Linese wondered if she had become his reluctant jailer.
Chase watched Hezikiah Hershner from under his lashes. It was damnably hard trying to observe and learn, all the while acting as though he knew everything there was to know about the complicated process of setting print and running the big awkward press.
Frustration rolled over him. Chase had only managed to remain idle today by using his recent wound as an excuse. Hershner was eager for Chase to resume his duty of getting the weekly newspaper out, almost as eager as the mayor and his cronies, but he suspected for entirely different reasons.
After the meeting in the woods, after nearly wearing the polish off the hardwood floors in his bedroom, Chase had reached a decision. He had to find out what those men were threatening him with. Bile rose in his mouth each time he thought about the secret they held over him, and the gun and gold.
Were they somehow connected? Or was he such a rogue that he’d left many terrible deeds behind when he went to war?
Chase sighed and wondered which secret would undo him first: his lost memory or the grim and unrecollected act the mayor was holding over his head. He had to find a way of learning about the Gazette and his past, and he needed to do it before the mayor and his friends grew impatient and forced him into a corner.
He got up and stretched. His hip ached from sitting, but he had hoped that just being in the newspaper office would jar some part of his mind. He had prayed that he might blink and find the last hellish weeks were no more than a nightmare.
While he massaged his leg, he moved near untidy stacks of papers in the corner. He scanned them quickly and saw random dates scattered among the unordered piles.
“These are back issues of the Gazette, yes?” he asked Hezikiah.
The older man looked up and frowned. “Oh, yes. I’ve been meaning to put them in some kind of order, but I never have the time.”
Chase picked up the top paper and read the headlines. It contained news of the skirmish that had ultimately led to his wounded hip and return home. Could reading the old papers shed some light on his own personal history? Hope sprang up inside his chest at the thought.
“I’ll take them home.” Chase heard his own voice. “I’ll bring them back when I have them in order.”
Hezikiah’s head snapped up. “Well, not that I’m turn ing down the offer to clean up the office, but I thought you might be anxious to start. The Gazette was your pride and joy before you left….”
“Two years have changed me. I need a little time to get to know myself again.” Chase felt the irony and poignant truth of his own words slice through him.
Hezikiah nodded. “I understand, Major. Must be difficult coming back when the conflict is still unsettled. You were so determined when you left….” Hezikiah’s words trailed off.
Chase looked at Hezikiah and blinked. If only he could understand what kind of person he had been, what drove him and why he had left Linese to go fight. It might help him uncover the truth.
* * *
Linese stood on the steps of Cordellane and watched Chase unload string-tied bundles of newspapers from the buggy. She wanted to ask what he was doing, but his dark brows were furrowed into the distinctive slash above his eyes. If he was even aware of her there, he hid it well. Each trip he made from the buggy to the library was done in total silence. He walked past her like a man in a dream. Finally, when the last haphazard stack was removed, he walked into the library and closed the door behind him. The cold sting of once again being shut out of his life bit deeply into the raw wound of her pride. Linese sighed and stared at the library door. She had to find some way of finding her husband beneath the cold exterior of the man who had returned.
But how?
Chase stared up at the portrait on the library wall and felt a hard knot form in his belly. Vague, disjointed images floated through his mind. His pulse quickened its tempo at the notion that he might remember something.
The face he stared at in the painting was his father’s, yet it was a face so like the unfamiliar one he found staring back each morning when he shaved, it sent a shiver through him. The same dark hair and serious gray eyes stared down dispassionately from the old canvas.
Chase turned around and looked at the other paintings lining the walls between the shelves of books. A pale woman with soft brown eyes smiled at him.
It was his mother. He knew it, even though he couldn’t dredge up a single recollection of her. He. also knew, from some deep spring of hidden information, that she had died in childbirth when he was very small.
The irony of feeling some happiness, or relief, at such a melancholy memory did not escape Chase. He sighed and concentrated on each portrait.
Above the fireplace was the likeness of a young girl with raven locks and porcelain skin. Her eyes were similar to those of his father, with a youthful promise of great beauty in the childish face. Her name suddenly popped into Chase’s head as if conjured up by a magician in a snake-oil act.
Marjorie, his aunt, the apple of his grandfather’s eye. Chase had an obscure remembrance of her funeral and the madness that took his grandfather’s mind away following the somber occasion.
“Am I the next Cordell to lose his mind?” he muttered while he stared at the young girl’s gray eyes. A conflict of emotion ripped through him and a strange high-pitched ringing filled his ears. Was his grandfather’s affliction somehow responsible, or was it something else that took his memory?
He tore his gaze from the painting and slouched into a tall-backed chair in front of the cold fireplace. The sound in his ears had taken on a lower tone, but it was still evident. With a slight unsteadiness of his hand, he poured himself a large brandy from the glass decanter on the side table. The liquor blazed a hot trail down his throat toward his empty belly.
Maybe the alcohol would silence the buzz in his ears or numb the ache in his hip. He prayed it would at least dull the raw need he perceived each time he thought about Linese and how much she had lost during the past two years.
Chase returned the glass to the table and picked up the first issue of the Gazette from the mound at his feet. With a little luck, perhaps he could find a part of his missing self in the words. If nothing else, maybe he would stumble upon some clue that would unearth the mystery of what he had done before he went to war. Then, even if he was doomed to follow in his grandfather’s footsteps, he would have some tiny bit of himself, a shadow of the man he used to be. Maybe it would be enough.
Linese sat in the rocker beside Captain Cordell and watched the moon rise above the treetops just as she had done for the past two years. Funny, Chase’s return had made little difference in the day-to-day existence at Cordel-lane. Her reality was nothing like the dreams she had spun in Chase’s absence. She was still sleeping alone, still sitting with Captain Cordell in the evenings, watching the moon and the stars, while she longed for the company of her husband.
“I’ll be taking some food over to Doralee’s sporting house,” Captain Cordell said suddenly. He never looked at Linese. He just continued to stare up at the twinkling array of stars overhead.
She turned to him in amazement. It had never occurred to her that the Captain went to the local bordello. She knew that almost every other able-bodied man left in Mainfield did, but she had never even thought of the Captain that way. In truth she had never given much thought to the fact he was still a healthy man who probably had physical desires. She caught herself blushing with the thought.
When she first arrived at Cordellane, in the first lonely weeks, she had wondered if he was as out of touch as people believed. Slowly she had come to realize his condition was changeable. His mind seemed to ebb and flow like the tides. There were times, like now, when he blurted out the most outlandish statements, for instance, about going to Doralee’s house of ill repute.
“Now why would you do a thing like that, Captain?” If it had been anyone else but the dotty old Captain she was speaking to, she couldn’t have continued this conversation. The very notion was so improper her cheeks burned with embarrassment. But he was not right in the head and had no way of knowing it, poor dear, so she smiled pleasantly and waited for his answer as if they were talking about the crops or the weather.
“Melissa, one of the girls, is going to have a baby in a few weeks.” The old man squirmed a bit but he continued speaking without hesitation. “She can’t work. I never could abide seeing someone go hungry if I could prevent it.”
Linese blinked back her amazement. Only someone like Captain Cordell, who was so far removed from the re-straints of proper behavior, could get away with such an opinion. For a moment she almost envied him the freedom his mental infirmity allowed him. He could say things, do things other people would never be allowed to do.
“You’re a kind and generous man, Captain. We have a bit to spare. Is there anything else she might need?” Linese knew there were many worse off than she and the old Captain—and Chase, she reminded herself.
Captain Cordell’s face pinched into a series of wrinkles. It seemed he was putting a considerable effort into his answer. “There is some old furniture stored in the attic. might take some of it over.”
Linese’s breath froze in her chest. She stared out into the dappled shadows of the thicket and tried to blink back the hot sting behind her eyes. Chase’s cradle and his old baby clothes were in that attic. She had hoped her own children would use the treasured Cordell heirlooms.
She sat in stunned silence and argued with herself. It was selfish to deny anyone the use of anything when so many had so little. It was small and petty of her to repudiate any kindness the Captain wanted to give the unfortunate woman.
Linese swallowed hard. It hurt, but she made herself face the real reason for her distress. Linese finally formed the idea that had been taking shape in her mind for days. It was likely she was in a loveless marriage, one that would never provide her with the children she wanted so much. She feared she would never have need of the baby furniture.
She told herself it was as much her fault as it was Chase’s. She should find a way to bridge the rift between them, but when she thought about it, she felt ill-equipped to win her husband’s affection. She had been a green girl when he had married her, and even though she had grown and matured in every other aspect, when it came to matters of the heart she was still hopelessly out of her depth.
The Captain cleared his throat beside her and Linese was wrenched from her thoughts. Part of her rankled at the self-pity she was wallowing in. She leaned over and planted a kiss on the side of the Captain’s face. His long silver mustache, his only vanity, tickled her chin.
“My mama once told me a pretty girl could get anything she wanted from a man with a kiss or two.” He winked and patted Linese’s hand.
For a sobering moment Linese wondered if he were as addled as everyone believed. Then she wiped the notion from her mind. Why on earth would any man want people to think he was crazy. Still, his easily offered words made her think. Perhaps there was a way to win her husband back. Perhaps Providence had dropped the solution into her lap like a fat, ripe plum.
“If you need any help gathering up the food and such, just let me know.” She rose from the rocker and entered the house. A glimmer of hope sparked inside her chest while she walked across the entryway.
A shaft of light shone from under the library door and drew her like a moth to a candle. Linese itched to know what Chase was doing in the room all alone. She stepped up to the door and listened.
It was quiet as a tomb on the other side. She nearly knocked on the closed door, but a flare of stubborn pride prevented her from doing so. Cordellane had been her home for two years. She resented suddenly being made to feel as if certain rooms were no longer open to her. First her bedroom and now the library had been shuttered and locked in her face. She felt a small spark of emotion—not anger, but perhaps resolve. Linese opened the door and walked in without warning.
Chase was sprawled in a chair with the litter of Gazette pages scattered all around him. His long legs and booted feet were stretched out in front of him on the old hooked wool rug. He was rubbing his temples with his fingers. A half-full glass of amber liquid sat on the table beside him and the brandy decanter was three-quarters empty.
“Chase?” Linese wondered if he was too drunk to move from the chair. Could it be he had returned to her so shattered by war that he was trying to drown his memories in drink?
