return statement in recursive function

I am trying to write a recursive function for linear search in an array which also returns the first index at which the element is found.

int linearSearch(int *A, int size, int val)
{
    if(size>0)
    {
        if(*A==val)
        {
            cout<<val<<" is found in the array!";
            return i;
        }
        else
        {
            linearSearch(A+1,size-1,val);
            i++;
        }
    }
    else
    {
        cout<<val<<" is not there in the array!";
        return -1;
    }
}

However, when I am trying to catch the valued returned in the main function, value of size is returned instead of -1 in the case when the element is not present in the array. I am not able to figure out why is that happening.