A Scandalous Melody (5 page)

Chase reached for the bottle, poured another shot and downed the bourbon without ever tasting a thing past his own desolation.

“Trying to outdrink your old man, Severin?”

Looking up and focusing on the ancient bartender for the first time, Chase plastered a furious scowl across his face and narrowed his eyes. “Robert Guidry? I thought you'd be dead and buried by now. Leave me alone.”

“Yeah,” the old Cajun chuckled. “That'd be just exactly what Charles Severin would've said. How y'all are?”

“Go away.”

The bartender studied him for a moment. “You got the look, boy. Sure enough. Lost love, same as Charles. It's bad medicine, you coming back here just to become a drunk.”

“That's not why I'm here,” Chase mumbled. But something the old bartender said got him to thinking. “You knew my father when he was young, didn't you?”

The bartender swiped a cloth across the sleek wood and nodded. “All of us raised up in the same parish. You included.”

“Did my father always drink too much? What was he like when he went to school? Was he a hell-raiser?”

“Charles Severin was smart as a whip, he was,” the older man said through a half smile. “His mother was widowed young and Charles became the man of the family as a boy. Never knew him to touch a drop of the liquid madness. He worked. Went to school. Most everybody liked him.”

“Then what happened? Why did he start drinking?”

Shaking his head sadly, the bartender lowered his voice to a rasp. “I remember the day Charles came home from college, toting along his pretty young wife. Never saw any man so crazy in love. He worshiped that woman. They planned on building a good life here in Bayou City.”

“So what changed?”

“Your momma died. She wasn't strong enough for childbirth like the other women round here. From that day forward…well…Charles, he just couldn't seem to face the days—or the nights without her.”

Of course that was it, Chase thought. His father had loved his mother. And then when she'd died, he'd ended up wishing the child they'd created had died in her place.

It hurt, but it made sense. His father had never been a cruel man, but sometimes it'd felt like he couldn't bear to look at his only son without a few drinks under his belt.

Chase reached for the bottle again, but stilled his hand before he could pour the shot. Drinking had nev
er solved his father's problems in all those years and it wasn't likely to do much for Chase's now, either.

Dammit.

He stood up and pulled a few bills from his pocket. “Thanks for the history lesson, Guidry. I'll be going now.”

“Oh, I got lots more lessons to tell, boy. You stick around and I'll be glad to learn you.”

Shaking his head, Chase grinned at the old man. “Not tonight, thanks. Maybe some other time.” He threw the money on the bar and turned to leave.

The old bartender waylaid him with a hand on his arm. “You in trouble, son? You've got the witching about you. I see it plain as day.”

“The witching?” A sudden chill ran up Chase's spine. But he cursed himself as an idiot for letting his imagination go. “What are you talking about?”

“The magic,” Guidry hissed. “The minute you touched your pocket, a golden mist came down over you. Some witch is stirring with your soul, boy. Better watch out.”

Nonsense. But Chase's first reflex was to reach into his pocket for the gypsy's gift. He palmed the jewel-covered egg. There was nothing unusual about the warm metallic feel of the gold.

See there. The old Cajun was just letting his superstitions run away with him. Chase had lived in these parts long enough to know that magic couldn't touch you unless you believed. And he didn't.

He bade the bartender a good night and headed back toward the B&B. It had been one hell of a day, and moving into Live Oak Hall tomorrow was going to take every last bit of his attention and resolve.

Gritting his teeth, Chase fisted his hands and swallowed the sickening feeling that he had just stepped into shifting sands that would pull him in far over his head. “What in hell have I gotten myself into?”

 

The old gypsy woman pushed back from the table and spit out a curse. “So you don't believe in the magic, young Severin? How foolhardy.”

Passionata waved a hand over the crystal and crossed her arms over her chest. She had a good mind to let him stew forever with his own ghosts.

The minute she'd thought it, however, the gypsy king's voice, bidding her to keep his deathbed legacy, came back to haunt her. If she didn't spend the extra time on Chase Severin's inheritance, her father would never rest—would never let her rest.

“Bah!” She had a feeling that delivering this magic to such a nonbeliever might just be the death of her.

Wearily she rose up and sighed. There was nothing to do but to go there.

She slid the crystal into a deep pocket and prepared to face the stifling musk of the hidden marshes once again. The stealthy swamp was her old friend. She would make her way back to the jungles, black waters and mosquitoes.

Moonlight and cypress knees awaited her arrival with promise. Young Severin had met his match.

“I am what you have gotten into, boy,” she whispered to him on the winds. “And I am prepared to be the winner of this game.”

C
hase drove his Jag down the sun-dappled road that skirted Blackwater Bayou on his way to Live Oak Hall. When the car came out from under the clouds of tree branches with their dripping Spanish moss, he found himself roaring down the blacktop that ran parallel to the mill.

He grimaced at his first clear view of that monstrous ghost. The old rice mill was a pure eyesore. He slowed the car and pulled off on the shoulder to study it a little better from this distance.

He remembered thinking as a kid that the mill resembled a giant beehive, always busy with activity and noisy with people making a living. It was the center of commerce for the whole town, sometimes for the whole parish.

In his memory he saw lines of trucks hauling in raw
rice twenty-four hours a day, and seagoing barges leaving from the deep-water port to take the milled rice all over the world. But today, on a sunny Saturday morning, it looked deserted and forlorn.

The people of this town and the surrounding countryside once had employment and prosperity—way back when Kate's grandfather ran things. But the old man had died when Chase was a teen and Kate's father had taken over. Now, thanks to years of mismanagement, the citizens had nothing but layoffs and a huge rusting derelict of a building.

Chase had originally come home ready to destroy the mill, thinking that because it had once been run by Kate's despicable father and represented his incompetent power, it deserved to go up in smoke. But Henry Beltrane was dead and buried. And Chase's anger at the town for turning their backs on him when he needed them the most seemed like an ancient bad dream.

The childhood hometown he had hated and loved was now twisting in the wind, left to rot away all by itself. And the thought of that gave him absolutely no pleasure. It only made him sad.

His attitude toward Kate was much more conflicted. Sometimes when Chase looked at her, ice water ran through his veins, freezing his heart to her predicament. At other times, just one glimpse flamed his blood and burned a path right through his hardened soul.

Somehow when she was near, old half-remembered dreams assailed him with soft sighs and warm waves of staggering desires. He didn't know what to do about the weakness she brought to him. But destroying a whole town just to hear her beg would make him ev
ery bit as contemptible as old Henry Beltrane had ever been.

Chase shook off both the anger and the desire. There were no easy solutions here.

Looking back at the rotting hulk of the mill, he still had to wonder if it was worth trying to save. Or if he had the expertise to even try. He was a well-known turnaround magician when it came to bringing casinos and resorts back to life. But he wasn't sure at all that he could be a miracle worker for a dying rice mill.

Slowly Chase pulled the Jag back onto the blacktop road and headed toward Live Oak Hall. For today he would not think of the mill. He would not consider his narrow choices on that account.

For today he would take the step that had always seemed so unimaginable when he'd been the boy from the wrong side of town. Today was the day when he would move into Live Oak Hall and make his mark as the richest man in town.

Deep down, somewhere in the very dark recesses of his mind, Chase knew that just the change of address would not really give him the social standing and admiration he so craved. But he brushed the knowledge aside along with the rest of the cobwebs in his dusty memory. Today was his day. There could be no room for second guesses or self-examinations.

 

A few minutes later he guided the Jag down the oak allée toward the portico of the plantation. With a deep breath of early-spring air, Chase pulled up at the front door and climbed out of the car.

He was home.

Dragging his luggage from the narrow backseat, Chase let his mind go blank, allowing himself to just feel. Being here felt right. Though, he remembered a time when he would have been arrested for trespassing if Kate's father had caught him anywhere on the property. Getting to see Kate back then had been tricky, full of secrets and sneaking around behind her father's back.

Chase shook out the remnants of memories and walked toward the house. The veranda was bathed in comforting shade as he moved up the front steps. Sun had warmed the air, birds chirped, bees stayed busy at the flowers.

But when he set his bags down to knock at the front door, Chase noticed some of the floorboards were hanging loose from their joints and bits of paint had begun to peel off of decades-old exterior walls. He looked closer and found cobwebs lurking in dark, dingy corners of the veranda.

Apparently the maintenance had been ignored for quite some time. A flash of anger at Kate for letting things slide came—and quickly went. This much deterioration had to have begun with her father. Princess Kate would know no better. No sense blaming her for things she hadn't done. There were plenty of other things for which she deserved the blame.

“Welcome, Chase.” The alto voice was feminine but not Kate's.

He turned to see a slight woman in her midtwenties with ash-blond hair and soft-gray eyes, standing at the open door with a toddler in her arms. It was the quiet look in the woman's eyes that made the schoolday memories reel forward in his mind.

“Hello, Shelby,” he murmured. “It's been a while.”

She stood aside and let him move through the doorway. “Ten years. This is my daughter, Madeleine. We've been expecting you this morning.”

“How do you do, Madeleine,” Chase said to the serious baby with the big blue eyes, before he returned his attention to her mother. “Kate tells me you and your daughter are living in one of the guest cottages, Shelby. You divorced?”

Shelby chuckled, turned and headed toward the sweeping, main staircase. “You get right to the basics, don't you, Severin? No, I am not divorced. Maddie's father was a marine. Went off and got himself killed before he even knew he had a child on the way. And no, I'm not his widow, either. We weren't married.”

Chase followed Shelby up the wide, carpeted stairs. He could easily see now why Kate had wanted to help this woman and her child. Her story had disturbed him a great deal, and he barely knew her.

“Kate didn't mention which room you'd be wanting to occupy,” Shelby said when she reached the top of the staircase. “I try to keep up with the cleaning, but I didn't know you were moving in until this morning. If you want one of the rooms that isn't made up, it'll only take me twenty minutes or so to…”

“Would you mind giving me a short tour of the house first?” He still did not know what his own intentions were. “Where's Kate?”

Shelby moved the baby to her hip and gestured to the faded carpet. “Leave your luggage here on the landing. I'll show you around. Kate is outside doing Saturday chores.”

“Kate? Doing chores? You're kidding.”

“Hold it, Severin,” Shelby said as she stopped and poked a finger at his chest. “You've been gone a long time. Maybe before you just jump to conclusions, you might want to take the time to really see the way things are now.”

He dropped his luggage and smiled at the irate woman and her child. “Point taken.” Chase wasn't sure he would be able to stand spending enough time here to see anything though, not with all the unwanted feelings that kept getting dredged up whenever he was around Kate. “Lead on with the tour.”

For the next half hour Shelby showed him through the ten upstairs bedrooms, the kitchen, dining room, library and four parlors. Everything was clean but shabby. It made him melancholy to think of a grand historical house like this one falling into such disrepair.

Finally they arrived back at the base of the main staircase. “You won't need to make up a room for me,” he said before they could climb the front stairs again. “I'll store my luggage for today and Kate and I will work out the sleeping arrangements later. Thanks.”

Shelby released the baby on the marble floor, letting her crawl free. “No problem. Do you mind if I ask you a personal question? Something's been bothering me for ages.”

He figured the way she'd hesitated that she wasn't curious about his plans for either the house or the mill. Good thing. Because Chase had no clue as to what he had in his own mind to do about them.

“Ask whatever you want,” he said with a chuckle. “I reserve the right not to give you an answer.”

She nodded thoughtfully. “Will you tell me what really happened that night ten years ago when you left town? I've heard tons of gossip about it over the years, but I'd like to know the true story.”

“You haven't gotten the real story from Kate?”

Shelby folded her arms over her chest. “She won't talk about it. I was gone for the whole summer and part of that fall. By the time I came back, Kate…well…Kate was a different person from when I left.”

“Different how?”

Shelby shrugged a shoulder. “I dunno. More serious, maybe. Certainly less fun loving and less popular with the other kids. She had stopped going to parties and worked much harder at getting good grades.”

That didn't sound like the young Princess Kate he had left behind. But it did sound a little like the ice-princess rumors he'd heard since he'd been home.

“What about boyfriends? Dates?” he inquired.

“Not so much. In fact, none at all that last year in high school. But there have been a few guys since then. One, the good-looking tractor distributor from New Iberia, was real serious about Kate for a while. But she…she just never got into him.

“Then the word went around that Kate was, uh, frigid,” Shelby continued hesitantly. “I actually think Kate believes that one herself.”

Chase didn't buy it for a minute. He remembered the sizzle the two of them had created ten years ago. Kate had been the furthest thing from frigid then. And he'd seen the heat still there in her eyes just last night.

No. Kate was definitely not a cold fish. Not then. Certainly not now.

Shelby scooted over to her baby daughter and made sure the little girl hadn't put anything into her mouth, then she turned back to Chase. “So what happened to make you leave and to make Kate change so much?”

Chase wasn't sure talking about that night would be a good thing. But he hadn't ever told his side of the nightmare. Maybe it was past time.

“I have no idea what could have changed Kate,” he said quietly. “But then, I left without knowing much of anything. I left in a hurry, before I could be run out of town bodily or locked up in the parish jail for good.”

“Why?”

He shook his head. “Recently I've managed to piece together some of the puzzle about that night. But at the time, I was just as confused about why as anyone.” He patted the breast pocket of his chambray shirt before he remembered that he'd quit smoking.

“It was the night of the prom,” he began. “But Kate and I didn't go. We had a favorite place down by the river where we liked to…be together. We'd dream of the future and talk about what we wanted to do with our lives.”

The years melted away in his mind, and through the mists of time he saw the young couple he and Kate had been—so desperately in love. With a start he amended that thought.
One
of them had been in love. The other was apparently a good liar.

He came back to the present with a thud. “Out of nowhere, four of the rougher guys we went to school with showed up and picked a fight for no reason. They weren't enemies of ours, but they were drunk and wouldn't talk—just started swinging.

“At first, I wasn't too concerned about taking them all on, they were pretty drunk…but then one of them grabbed Kate and ripped her shirt off. I guess I lost it. The next thing I knew the sheriff showed up and stopped me from killing the guy.”

“You whipped all four boys?”

He tipped his chin. “They were drunk.” It was still not something he was terribly proud of. “The one that had grabbed Kate ended up having to be taken to the hospital, and the sheriff said it was touch-and-go with him for a while.”

“But why would the sheriff put you in jail?” Shelby asked. “They attacked you and Kate first.”

“The other three boys gave a statement to the sheriff saying they'd seen me attacking Kate. They claimed they had been the ones to come to her rescue.”

“What? Everyone in town knew you and Kate were a couple. Why would anyone believe such a thing?”

Chase drove his hand through his hair, wishing that he'd never started this trip down memory lane. Shelby was not going to like hearing what he had to say next.

“Kate told the sheriff it was true,” Chase said in a low but clear voice. “She swore I'd been drinking and had dragged her out of the car and was attacking her when those boys came along and tried to save her.”

Shelby's mouth dropped open, and for a minute she just stared at him. “I can't believe that.”

Chase shook his head and gave her a wry smile. “I had some trouble with the concept at the time, too, but her old man turned up right then and offered me a deal. Henry Beltrane told me that because my father's family had been in the area for generations he would give
me a break. If I'd leave town for good, he would see to it that no one pressed charges against me. I'd be in the clear, but I could never come home.”

Shelby was still shaking her head. “There's something wrong with that story. I don't buy the part about Kate.”

“It took me a few years to accept it myself. About six weeks ago I finally located the grown man that once was the boy I had put in the hospital. I never could understand why those kids were out there by the river that night. Nobody but Kate and I ever went to that place.

“Anyway, I found him working as a night security guard in New Orleans,” Chase continued. “He confessed that Henry Beltrane had paid those four boys to find us and to beat me up…run me out of town. The rest of the story is that their fathers had been recently laid off from the mill and their families needed the money bad. But still…they had to get stone drunk to have the nerve to do such a thing.”