Linda Castle - The Return Of Chase Cordell

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.