Linda Castle (6 page)

Linese watched the mayor’s flabby jowls quiver. Anger flashed in his small round eyes. “You can’t do this, Chase. We’ve been counting on you. We’ve had certain expectations. We had an agreement….”

Something in the man’s tone sent a warning through Chase’s mind. A flash of memory hit him like a cold rush of water.

He remembered the mayor’s smiling face reflected in the glow of torchlight. It was a time long ago, perhaps two years ago.

“Don’t you worry, Chase, we’ll keep your secret.”

The memory flashed brilliant like a strike of lightning, then it was gone. The fading image and the sound of the man’s voice remained lodged in Chase’s mind. He tried to remember more, but it was useless. Only that one small fragment had crystallized.

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?

C
hase 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.