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

by Glenn Maynard

  “Thank you for that,” said the officer. “I need you to tell me everything you know about the events leading up to this accident. Start from the beginning.”

  Brenda began to speak. “Officer, we were only coming here for… ”

  “Ut!” Officer Barney wasn’t having it. Carter began to feel as if they were more than suspects with the way the officer was approaching them, and the last thing he wanted was to make themselves more suspect, but Brenda wasn’t having it either. After all, they were only witnesses.

  “What is your badge number?” Brenda asked the officer, who looked stunned by her brashness and loose-cannon attitude.

  “Young lady,” he said, “you need to sit tight and await your turn. When I’m ready to speak with you… then and only then will you have a receptive audience.”

  Carter looked over at Brenda, and her mouth was agape as she peered back at Carter. “First of all, I know what my rights are, and I have every right to ask and receive your badge number, and I’m appalled at the way you are treating us… as if we’re criminals… as if we chased Angie out of her own house and into the street so she would get hit by the cars!”

  “Is that how this all went down?” asked the officer.

  Carter cringed when the officer said this. Over the years, he had gotten to know Brenda very well, and nobody was going to bully her, especially in an accusatory way, if she did nothing wrong. He looked around, and although the noise level had calmed a bit, it was still a very active crime scene. He could only pray that she was smart enough to watch her tongue and bite it. He counted seven police officers outside, but more were inside the house. He knew that he did not want to wait around for Brenda to blow, so he took the initiative to begin telling the officer his version of what had happened.

  “We were walking around the Pearl Street Mall,” Carter began, “when we came upon a flyer about psychic readings. Brenda here talked me into giving it a try.”

  “Gimme the guts,” said the officer. “I don’t need the whole backstory just yet. There’ll be time for that later. Just tell me from the time you got to this house.”

  “Okay,” said Carter as he looked over to see Brenda rolling her eyes. He hoped to hell that she was rolling her eyes because a speck of dirt had gotten into them, just in case the officer had witnessed that potential act of defiance. “Angie invited us in. She sat us down and began to do a reading on us. All of the sudden, she rose to her feet, backed out the door, and ran away into the street. We heard a loud screech, and then heard loud thumps. The rest is history.”

  There was an incredibly long silence even after Officer Barney finished writing the minutes in his little notepad. He was holding the notepad in his left hand and the pen in his right, and continued to hold them up throughout this uncomfortable lull. He took a couple steps over to Brenda and asked her to tell him what had happened from the time they got to the house to the time he asked her this question.

  Brenda pointed to herself with both hands as if to say, Are you talking to me? Carter looked at her and could only hope that she began to speak before the officer was onto her sarcasm.

  “It happened just like he said. We merely came here for a reading and she just up and ran into the street and got hit by the cars. Did your witness say that we chased her or something?”

  “Don’t worry about what the witnesses said. That’s not your concern. That’s my concern. Your concern is to tell your side of the story and corroborate his side of the story.” Officer Barney clipped his pen back onto the notepad, pulled the lapel of his coat forward, and buried the statements in his jacket.

  “Wait here,” he said with pursed lips, and walked away.

  “What a total asshole,” said Brenda. “He’s making it out as if it’s all our fault that she got hit by those cars… as if we literally chased her into the street at gunpoint. That’s bullshit!”

  Carter sighed. “Brenda, he is being kind of a dick, but he’s also just doing his job. Everybody is a suspect until they have sufficient evidence to determine otherwise.”

  “Carter, you’re innocent until proven guilty.”

  “Brenda, he’s just doing his job. He doesn’t know anything until he asks. He has to recreate the scene. Yeah… he could be a little kinder, but maybe he was dropped on his head as a kid and now he’s pissed off at the world. Just forget about him and we’ll be on our way soon. Besides, I’d like to get to the hospital to check on Angie. God, I hope she makes it. Why on earth would she do that? What the hell happened?”

  “Let’s just get outta here and get to the hospital.” Brenda got to her feet as she said this. “We need to see if Angie makes it, and if so, we need to get some answers without scaring her to death a second time.”

  As Carter got to his feet, he looked up into the air where Angie had taken up temporary residence, and saw only that the ship had sailed. The location of Angie’s physical body was the only thing he could be sure about. Where Angie was spiritually, well, that was a whole different ballgame. She could be anywhere, but he had to make sure he did not lose contact with potential answers. As they began the next leg of their journey, Officer Barney had other ideas, and their hasty departure was not part of them.

  “Not so fast,” he began. “I told you two to stay put until I’m satisfied to release you. Now both of you sit on that curb until I give you permission to leave. Stay put!”

  Carter watched as the officer continued to point his beat stick at the curb, smack dab in front of Angie’s house. “Come on Brenda,” he said, acting in accordance with Barney’s instructions. Brenda followed Carter’s lead, doing her best to remain tight-lipped.

  Once their orders were completed without incident, the fine officer began the second part of his interrogation. “Tell me again, Brenda, how you guys got to this location and met Angie, and lead us to this particular point in time.”

  Brenda put her head down so that her long, silky, shiny, black hair hung over her face. She then scooped it up in the front with both hands and snapped it back until she faced the sky. It had already been a long day, the aroma of Angie’s coffee palace continued to escape through the opened front door, and Brenda exhaled deeply as she began to repeat her side of this tale.

  “We saw a flyer at the Pearl Street Mall for a psychic and that’s how we met Angie.” She placed both of her hands to the curb on either side of her body and lifted herself up, and then back down again into a more comfortable spot. “We just wanted a reading, and Angie had a good deal going. She invited us in and began to do a reading. Then she freaked out, backed away from us, and ran out the front door and into the street, where she was hit by the cars.”

  “Did you say anything to Angie?” Barney asked, staring down at Brenda while clutching his dear notepad in his grip, refusing to break his optical connection to the subject before him. He cleared his throat again, then reached into his overcoat pocket and extracted a menthol cough drop. With his fingers he unshielded the drop and popped it into the opening below his salt and pepper moustache, then swirled it around a couple of times as he prepared to pen her reply.

  “Nothing,” Brenda said. “She wouldn’t let us speak much. Much like you.”

  “Watch yourself now, princess.”

  Carter broke in to try to salvage their name, but Barney would have none of that either. “Ut!”

  There was no doubt as to who was in charge here, and it was a tight ship that he ran. Carter knew that there was no sense in trying to steer the ship in the right direction, because Officer Barney was at the helm. It was best if he and Brenda kept their thoughts and opinions to themselves. He sensed that Brenda was starting to get it too.

  There was a rawhide shoelace that passed through the small hole in the handle of his baton, and Carter watche
d as the officer swung the baton around in circles as he reinforced his role in this discussion. This is when Brenda switched gears, finally aware that her usual sass would only detain them longer.

  “Officer, what I mean is Angie never let us speak, and when we tried, she would shush us. Then when she began to do her reading, she grabbed our hands, and well… that’s when she freaked out on us and ran out the door.”

  “How does one freak out?” he asked.

  “One freaks out by losing their mind, screaming, shaking, and running into the street… in this case.”

  “You better watch yourself, girl,” Barney said, turning to Carter as he shifted gears. “Everything she said is exactly how you saw it?”

  “Exactly.”

  “There’s nothing else that you can add to this version… something you said… something she said?”

  “Nothing, and we were not here long at all… just a few minutes, really.”

  “Gimme your names, addresses and phone numbers, and you two are free to go,” said Officer Barney.

  “If you give me your pad, I can write the information down for you,” Carter said.

  “If you give me your names, addresses and phone numbers like I asked, you wouldn’t have to.”

  Carter looked over at Brenda, who appeared to be seething, so Carter obeyed. “Carter Spence and Brenda Raycroft… 417 Arapahoe Ave… here in Boulder.” Carter paused, then provided him with their phone number.

  “Hmm,” said Barney. “Isn’t that the old, white house in the country?”

  “Uhh, yeah, I guess it is.” Carter replied. “There’s a lot of them.”

  “Seems there’s been a history over there, or in that general area. I dunno, I just remember being called to that area a couple times over the years. Morty… Marty… oh I dunno. Years are wearin’ me down. You guys aren’t helpin’, but you’re free to go.”

  Brenda grabbed Carter by the wrist, and yanked him away from Barney as quickly as she could. She wanted out. Carter wanted out as well. In rapid fashion, they extracted themselves from the crime scene that they had somehow become entangled in, and they soon detangled themselves out.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Upon arriving back home, they went inside the house for just a brief moment before they were off to the hospital. They needed to first see if Angie had somehow survived, hoping to hell that she had, since she held many answers that matched up to their questions.

  “What do you think that was all about… Angie’s reaction?” Carter asked.

  “Whatever it was… I hope we had nothing to do with it,” Brenda replied.

  “Nothing to do with it? Of Course we had something to do with it. She was reading us, and then she obviously got some information about our past or future that was bad enough to send her for the hills. My God, Brenda! We really need to get that information! But what if she’s dead?”

  Brenda looked at Carter as she pushed her hair back, holding her hands at the top of her head as she thought about where Carter was going with this. “Well, we can’t do anything about it if she doesn’t make it, and by the looks of things, we need to be prepared for that becoming a reality. They were working pretty hard on her, and to my knowledge, they were not making any headway.”

  “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” said Carter. “We’re almost at the hospital. Oh, and another thing… my friend Charlie did this trick when I was in the ER. We need to pretend that we are Angie’s family or else they won’t let us in.”

  “That trick is not new. She’s my aunt,” said Brenda.

  Carter smirked. “You got it.”

  They arrived at Boulder Hospital, parked their car, and quickly rushed into the ER and up to the front desk.

  “We’re here to see Angie,” Carter said, and just then he stopped and realized that he never did get her last name.

  “What’s Angie’s last name?” asked the woman at the front desk.

  “She was hit by a car and just arrived by ambulance,” Brenda interjected.

  “Oh yes… are you family?” asked the woman at the front desk.

  “She’s… she’s my aunt,” Brenda replied, and then put her face down in her hands, acting distraught.

  “Well,” the woman replied with a little more concern, “the ambulance did just get here with a woman named Angie Anderson, and she was hit by a car. She’s in the ICU. Is Anderson the name, dear?”

  “That’s her, alright,” Brenda replied, wiping her dry eyes.

  The woman summoned an assistant in green scrubs to usher Carter and Brenda in to see Aunt Angie, whose last name was hopefully Anderson. En route to the ICU, Carter turned to Brenda and said, “Great job, but with our luck, there were two Angie’s hit by a car tonight.”

  Brenda air-swatted him away and followed the green scrubs through hallways to where doctors were fervently working on Angie in an attempt to save her life.

  “You can’t go beyond this point for now,” said the assistant in green scrubs, “but if they can get better results, then there might be a five minute visit in your future.” She smiled, and then she was gone.

  It just so happened that there was a five minute visit in their future. One of the doctors passed through the doors and asked for relatives of Angie Anderson. That was when Brenda jumped up and said, “Is my Aunt Angie going to make it?” She appeared so distraught that nobody was going to ask her for verification of relationship. She really played it well.

  The doctor moved over to Brenda as Carter appeared at her side.

  “We’re watching for swelling of the brain and numerous internal injuries,” said the doctor in a soft voice, as he finished peeling off his facemask. We can only hope that she returns to us, but I want to caution you that there are no guarantees. I would have to say that at this point she has a 50-50 chance. Nothing more… nothing less. Now you may go in to see her for a few minutes only, but I’d appreciate it if you not touch her. I can’t take the chance of knocking a wire or jarring a tube, especially in this condition.”

  “You got it,” said Carter.

  “May we go now?” Brenda asked.

  “Yes, you may. She may know you’re here even though she’s not awake,” said the doctor.

  Carter and Brenda passed through those same doors that the doctor had emerged from after being advised of her exact location, tucked into door number three on the right, and behind a white curtain.

  They looked at the poor lady with tubes through every orifice. If she had looked tired to Carter upon their arrival to her house, then this was exhaustion in its purest form. Her face had taken a beating as her cheeks and even forehead appeared swollen, and there were streaks of dried blood at the corners of both sides of her mouth. Dark bruises had formed on her cheeks, and she had one arm bandaged.

  Brenda pushed Angie’s hair out of her face and wiped her eyes. “Oh my God,” she mumbled. Carter held up his hand to her in an attempt to have Brenda refrain from making such comments since Angie could very well be aware not only that they were in the room, but what they were saying. They also had to be careful that she does not get spooked again. In this condition, another jolt to the system could put her right over the edge. Just one false move and the information they needed from Angie would be heaped with piles of dirt some six feet high.

  “Angie,” Brenda called out, but the only sound came from the intermittent beeps coming from the very machine keeping her alive. There were also background noises from other activities going on in other rooms in the ICU, where other patients were clinging to a thin string connecting them to this world.

  “Angie,” Carter called out, but again to no avail. Angie appeared dead to the world. “Angie,
if you can hear me… raise a hand… or raise a finger if that would be easier.”

  Nothing.

  “We need something from her,” said Brenda. “Anything as to why she did that. I mean… who just jumps up and runs into the street? There had to be a very good reason for her doing that. If it’s that traumatic a picture of our lives… whether it’s you, me, or us… then we can’t let this go.”

  “True, Brenda,” Carter replied, “but it may not happen today, or tomorrow, or even into next week. Sometimes a coma can last for months, and sometimes even years. There are no guarantees with comas. You heard the doctor.” Carter then pointed his thumb into his chest. “I know.” He turned back to Angie and said, “Angie, if you can hear me… we just want to know what you learned about us, and if it had anything to do with you running out of the house the way you did.”

  Suddenly, Angie began to move as if she was jostled, but her eyes remained closed. Then she convulsed sharply. Her whole body shook, then stopped.

  Brenda pulled Carter back. “Maybe this is not the best time,” she said. “I know the information could be critical for us, but maybe we need her to be somewhat stable before we ask, especially with the way she responded to us initially. She could be afraid still.”

  “It’s a fine line,” Carter replied. “If she doesn’t make it, then this may be our only chance.”

  Suddenly the machine flatlined, and the intermittent tone became a steady tone. Doctors rushed into the room. “Get them out of here,” screamed one of the doctors to the nurse, who took Carter and Brenda by the arm and ushered them back into the waiting area where they came from.

  It wasn’t long before they learned that Angie was stable again, but they were advised not to return to her bedside for another 24 hours, because Angie needed to rest.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Martin’s old white house was the place where Carter and Brenda called home. Four years had passed, and they were able to reconnect and even strengthen their relationship during this time. They believed that they belonged together and their bond could never be broken… not in a million years. They did have normal relationship fights, but nothing severe enough to loosen their bond. They really felt connected and at home in Boulder, Colorado, and felt that they belonged until some unforeseen circumstances changed that.