Desert Son Trilogy: Desert Son, Wayward Soul, Spiritual Intervention (Books 1-3)

by Glenn Maynard

  Carter gasped as he continued to shine the light on the portrait. Evan never mentioned that he had a son, he thought. But if he had a son, where was the son now? All this time that Evan went on and on about his wife being murdered, and he never even hinted that he had a son. Unless it wasn’t his son. But it had to be his son. That was clearly a family portrait. Where was the son? Where was the boy in that portrait? Perhaps he’s now an adult, and has moved on, but Evan never spoke of him. It was a portrait of a slightly younger Evan, but Carter had no doubt it was Evan. All of these thoughts passed through Carter’s mind, making it hard for him to think, much less process what had just happened.

  All Carter wanted to do was verify that Evan did have a home and find where that home was located. He wanted to get a little peek inside, because Evan had so many peeks inside his house when Carter was there, and even when he wasn’t. Evan owed him that much. But Carter did not in any way expect to see what he saw. He didn’t expect to see a family portrait with a child matching the description of his own child, and he realized there was so much more that needed to be uncovered in the life of Evan Markey. There was so much more.

  Carter wanted to get out of there as soon as he could. He was more than satisfied with what he discovered, or uncovered. Evan flat out told him that he secretly killed the man who killed his wife, and he got away with murder. Carter figured Evan was a straight shooter, and what you saw is what you got. He believed that Evan had laid all of his cards on the table. The only thing he did not expose was his residence, but now there was more, and Carter now needed to know why. What he did know was that Evan was one of the first volunteers of the search crew who came out to search for Adam. What he wanted to know was the real reason that he came out to help in this search.

  As Carter ran through the streets en route to his house, his mind was spinning with what he needed to do first. He knew that Brenda was going to be blown away by what he found, and he knew that over the next 24 hours, they both were going to be busy on their computer. Evan Markey was first on their list.

  CHAPTER 15

  When Carter made it back home, he pulled Brenda aside and told her about what he found, and he was right about her being blown away. She was so interested in researching Evan Markey that she decided Adam’s bedtime was going to be a little earlier.

  “You actually saw three people in the portrait?” asked Brenda. “Did you see other pictures in the house or was that it?”

  “That’s all that I had time for because when I first started shining my flashlight inside the house, I heard a noise and it was Evan. He came back after five minutes!”

  “Oh my God,” said Brenda. “What did you do?”

  “I just got down and hoped to hell that I wouldn’t be seen or smelled by the dog. Scared the living shit out of me.”

  “So how did you see the portrait? Was that before he came home?”

  “No. He must’ve forgotten something, so he was off again a few minutes later. That’s when I pounced, but I knew I had to abbreviate my search. I certainly got more than expected, especially being on the outside looking in from the dark.”

  “Wow,” said Brenda. “Let’s get moving on this guy. Who do you suppose that little boy is? Do you think it’s his son?”

  “He never once mentioned that he had a son,” said Carter, “and there were so many opportunities for him to do so. So strange. I’m dying to find out who he is.”

  Once Adam was put to bed, Carter and Brenda sat down at the computer to see if there was anything they could find on Evan Markey. For search terms, they started out with “Evan Markey,” but there were pages upon pages of them. They added “Massachusetts” to the equation, and narrowed it down to about 20 listings of that name. Carter thought about their meetings and conversations, and tried to narrow down the search. He typed in “dog Skippy” and that did a whole lot of nothing. He tried “police officer” and this is when he found the correct Evan Markey.

  Carter clicked on a link about retirement, and there was a story about Evan’s retirement and how he was taking his dog with him. There was a picture of Evan in uniform and he appeared to be the honoree. Okay, Carter thought. He checks out. The Retirement party was at the Surf ‘n Turf Restaurant in Boston. He had been an officer for 35 years and retired seven years ago from the canine division of the Boston Police Department.

  Carter and Brenda sighed in relief as they moved on to the next link. The rest of the links dealt with Officer Markey’s tragedy. There were headlines about how his family was killed by a hit-and-run driver. Some of the links described how he had lost his wife and son in the tragedy, and Carter could not click one particular link fast enough.

  Boston Police Officer Loses Wife, Child, in Hit-and-Run Accident

  Boston – A hit-and-run driver killed a Boston police officer’s wife and six-year-old son Tuesday afternoon at around 10:30 a.m. and witnesses described seeing an erratic light blue station wagon weaving through the streets moments before the accident.

  Boston police officer, Evan Markey, has been on the force for 35 years and he was one of the responding officers when the calls started coming in to 911. His wife, Leslie, 44 years old, and son, Lucas, 6, were pronounced dead at the scene. Although there were witnesses to the erratic driving, there were no witnesses who saw the woman and her son get hit. A store clerk did run out of his store when he heard screeching tires and saw a car speeding away, and the car matched the description of the car reported driving erratically moments prior to the accident.

  Anyone who may have any information about this accident is asked to call the Boston Police Department.

  “Oh my God!” said Brenda. “The poor thing, but I still wonder why he only talks about his wife dying in the accident. That is both sad and strange.”

  “I’ll say,” said Carter. “Not a word about him. If I didn’t go over there to his house, we probably would have never learned about his son. Why on earth would he do that? It doesn’t even make sense. Talks about his dead wife every chance he gets, and somehow omits the fact that he also lost a son in the accident.”

  They clicked on other links about how the Boston Police Department was still looking for a suspect. It had become a cold case. Carter and Brenda had inside information from Evan, and the case wasn’t cold. The only thing cold was the suspect. Evan took care of him, but at this point they didn’t know what was true, false, or embellished when it came out of the mouth of Evan Markey. He was a good guy at heart, and suffered through an unbearable tragedy, but what you see is not what you get. There was more to this man…a lot more to this man…than meets the eye.

  . . .

  The following day would allow Carter to take his mind off everything that he’d been going through because he had two tickets to a baseball game. What a fine spring day it was for a ballgame at Fenway Park between the Boston Red Sox and the Baltimore Orioles. They were only a month into the young season and still a slight springtime chill hung in the evening air. The big, bright lights around the park jumped the gun on darkness, however, these early lights prepared the players for when darkness did arrive.

  Josh Beckett was on the hill for the Boston Red Sox and he was going against Jeremy Guthrie of the Orioles. It was a nice crisp Tuesday night, but it was still a sellout as the players were just beginning to get their legs underneath them in preparation for a long summer.

  Carter had been waiting for this moment when he could take his young son, Adam to Fenway Park. He wanted to break him in early before he became more assimilated into society. He may get in with a bad crowd and come out routing for the Yankees. No son of Carter Spence would be caught dead wearing pinstripes.

  As Carter began his Red Sox training program with his son, he would tell him a lot about the game of baseball; rules, favorite players,
batting averages and rivalries. He explained that 1946 was the year that the baseball was held too long by Pesky, and 1978 was a forgettable year in Boston. He also explained that 1986 turned disastrous for Red Sox Nation.

  Carter and his son made it to Fenway Park via the T and walked in from Copley Square once the train transported them. Adam was running in circles with excitement as Carter made his way through the streets of Boston. There was a steady stream of fans heading in the same direction, but it wasn’t ridiculously crowded in a way that he could lose his son. Since that horrible evening, his eye or Brenda’s eye was always on him.

  As they made their way into Fenway Park, and into the light of the passageway to the field, Carter saw that the light was hitting Adam in the face. This forced him to squint his eyes as if he was walking the passageway into heaven. His eyes had been squinting from the sun, but when he got a glimpse of the field and the Green Monster, his eyes opened up to the size of baseballs. A big smile formed on his face as ushers tried politely to move them along so that a traffic jam didn’t form.

  The bleachers were where all the fun was manufactured, and their seats were just a few rows behind the visitor’s bullpen. They hoped to get lucky and be the recipient of a batting practice home run, but there were thousands of others who shared that same optimism, so the competition for each ball would be great. The only thing better than Adam getting a home run ball would be getting a home run ball off the bat of Big Papi. Adam had his glove, and he was ready.

  Although the game was close throughout, the Red Sox took a tough loss when the tying run was thrown out at the plate in the bottom of the ninth inning. It took a perfect throw, and the Orioles got that perfect throw from Adam Jones to gun down Pedroia at the plate. Baseball is a game of inches, but so is life. Adam was too young to get as pissed off as his father at the game results, but he’d get there in time. He was just a bloomin’ Sox fan. He’d get there probably before he’s old enough to pock the cah at Havid Yaud.

  Adam kept on drifting off even though his father continuously told him to watch the game. He kept looking at something in the bleachers. Following the game, they took the T away from Fenway Park, and were driving home when Carter asked his son a couple of questions.

  “What did you think of your first Boston Red Sox game?”

  “That was fun.”

  “Yeah, we’ll have to do it again sometime.”

  “Yeah, again sometime.”

  “Who’s your favorite player?”

  “Big Papi!” said Adam.

  “Adam, I kept seeing you looking at something during the game. Were you just looking around or were you looking at something in particular?”

  “Someone,” he replied.

  “You were looking at someone?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who? The hot dog man? The ushers? The crowd?”

  “No.”

  “Then who?”

  “Who what?”

  “Who were you looking at?”

  “The man.”

  “You were looking at the man?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can I ask you why you were looking at the man?”

  “Sure.”

  There was a pause, and then Carter chuckled when he realized that Adam was actually going to make his father provide the question. “Why were you looking at the man?”

  “He was the one who did it.”

  “He was the one who did what?”

  “Drove the car.”

  “Okay, Adam. I don’t wanna play this game all night, but you win. I’ll take the bait. Drove what car?”

  “The one that killed Evan’s family.”

  Carter looked at Adam a bit too long in the rearview mirror and had to jerk the car away from the guardrail at the last second. The darkness of the night was almost as dark as what he had just heard his young son say, making it difficult to read Adam’s facial expressions. However, the moon and the streetlights did provide broken lighting that seemed to change with each revolution of the tire.

  From what he could see, Adam seemed to be a little tired and certainly not up for playing games. That was not his intent. He was just answering a couple of questions from his dad. That’s all there was to it. He was asked a question and he provided an answer. Carter could not read any smiles or smirks on Adam’s face. His boy just happened to be staring at the man who killed Evan’s wife and six-year-old son in a hit-and-run accident. That’s all that Adam was doing during the Red Sox game. No need to report it. Adam didn’t know why he was drawn to bad people. All that he knew was that he was drawn to them.

  Once home, Adam went right to bed. When Carter told Brenda about what Adam had said coming home from the baseball game, she became scared for many reasons. First of all, if it was true, then Evan was lying again. He claimed to have “taken care of” the man who killed his family. Chalk up another questionable story from Evan. Secondly, how on earth did Adam identify the man at the baseball game as the killer of Evan’s family? Thirdly, Evan never told them about his young son, not to mention that the man who killed Evan’s family is out there in public enjoying baseball games. Carter wondered if there was some sort of cover-up.

  Carter wished that Adam had at least told him about the man he knew as the killer of Evan’s family. Actually, the real issue was not that he noticed the man. The issue was how on earth Adam even knew about the hit-and-run accident and how he knew that man was the one responsible. The accident occurred before Adam was born, so there was no way he could possess such knowledge. Evan would not have told him. The police called it a cold case, yet Evan was claiming to have taken care of the suspect. The only thing that added up was the number of incidents regarding Evan Markey that did not add up.

  CHAPTER 16

  When Carter was at work, Brenda thought that it would be a good chance for her and Adam to reach out to the new neighbors for the first time. The neighbors had done their duty with initial introductions, so Brenda felt that they owed them one. When she looked out the back window and saw Victoria Oldman with her son, she and Adam stepped out into the back yard as well.

  Victoria enthusiastically greeted them as soon as they stepped out. Within minutes, she had them over and sitting at their back yard patio, preparing the two boys for playtime. The boys hit it off immediately and ran around the overgrowth in the yard. The two mothers smiled as they watched, knowing that the boys would have a next door companion for their childhood and that the initial meeting was more of an anomaly. That was very important in a child’s life. The Oldmans were only in the house for a couple of days, but the amount of work necessary in the yard after years of abandonment was immeasurable.

  As Victoria was talking to Brenda about her family and their new home and how much work they had ahead of them in this fixer upper, Brenda was overwhelmed just looking at how much work the back yard needed. Mr. Jenkins had a green thumb, so when that thumb passed away, the house and yard went to pot. The yard had been kept up nicely, but the house was left in shambles, making it difficult for the bank to get it off their books.

  The back yard once had manicured gardens throughout with a lawn made up of pathways. The briar patches and rose bushes were now tangled up in weeds and vines that consumed the entire yard. The plants and weeds of each garden grew so high that it was difficult to see over them. It would be best to tackle this project before the first snow fell, because the leaves would not be on the branches, making for easier pruning.

  Victoria asked how Adam was doing, and Brenda thought about it for a moment, unsure if she really wanted to get into it with Victoria so early in their relationship. She didn’t exactly wish to scare the daylights out of her new neighbor upon introduction, so she didn
’t get into much of anything more than was necessary for such a question. She did, however, get that first visit to the new neighbors under her belt.

  . . .

  The following morning after Carter went off to work, Brenda went to check on Adam and saw that he was stirring. It was 10:00 a.m. and she was surprised that it took him that long to stir. He had slept two hours later than normal, so he must have been very tired from playing in the neighbor’s yard, or perhaps had a rough night’s sleep. She wouldn’t be surprised if it was the result of a rough night’s sleep because of the number of nights he’d claimed to have had a conversation with the darkness.

  “Get up sleepyhead,” she said, lifting the blankets up and then down to his waist. When she did that, she gasped at what she saw. Adam was covered in dirt from his shoulders to his toes. “Adam Spence!” Brenda exclaimed. “What have you done? You need to tell me what you’ve done, and you need to tell me now!”

  Brenda was fuming. Dirt covered his body, sheets, pillows, mattress and carpet. She looked over at the wall by the bedroom door and saw that he was kind enough to kick off his sneakers when he entered the room. They were covered with a thick coat of dirt, caked on from what looked like hours of off-road hiking through mud. Even his face had a layer of dust on it.

  He wasn’t really responding to her, so she began calling out his name in an attempt to wake him up, and it took some time for him to snap into the real world.