No part of this book may be published or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or information storage and retrieval systems without the express written permission of the publisher.
This work is a novel and any similarity to actual persons or events is purely coincidental.
Dedication
The Tarizon Trilogy is dedicated to my grandchildren, Joshua, Alex, Isabella, and Andrew.
PRELUDE
It’s strange how a few people are born with natural charisma and are loved and adored by the majority of people they encounter in life. I say the majority because a charismatic person will also have those who are jealous or feel threatened and will feel hate rather than love. Logically you would think charisma was the result of being born into an ideal environment–loving, happy parents living in a secure, stress-free environment. But this wasn’t the case with Peter Turner. He couldn’t have been dropped into Stan and Rebekah’s life at a worse time. They had just been through Stan’s court martial, the family was broke and struggling to survive, and the future looked anything but bright.
When Stan finally got back home to Portland, Oregon he couldn’t find a decent job, so he took what temporary work he could find. Rebekah worked too, the night shift at the local hospital emergency room, because they couldn’t afford a babysitter during the day. Then the family was uprooted and moved to Texas so they could be close to Rebekah’s parents. If that wasn’t enough stress on the family Rebekah soon found out she was pregnant again. Yet, despite all this stress and upheaval, Peter Turner couldn’t have been a happier baby and a delight to his parents and grandparents.
Even his siblings loved him and the only sibling rivalry Stan and Rebekah had to deal with was their fighting for Peter’s attention. All the Turner children were smart but Peter, along with his sister, Marcia, were brilliant. That became apparent very early on and Peter’s teachers often commented to Stan and Rebekah about it. But brilliance had its drawbacks. School came so easy for Peter that he tended to be lazy and lacked focus. Rebekah had a particularly hard time getting him to do his homework and turn in assignments on time. Even so, Peter still managed to get almost straight A’s with very little effort.
Peter was very popular at school too, particularly with the girls who were always hanging around him. Besides being handsome and intelligent, he was a good listener and anyone talking to him felt like he really cared about them. In high school he was on the swim team which kept him strong and fit but it was the debate team where he really stood out. It was a combination of brilliance, charisma and humility that undid his opponents. Although he was constantly barraged with compliments and accolades he never took himself too seriously and somehow managed to remain humble. The only explanation for this was his position in the family. As the third child of four he wasn’t given any special treatment. Stan and Rebekah went to great lengths to treat their children equally, no matter how the rest of the world perceived them.
When Peter was in middle school he joined the Boy Scouts. He loved camping and the outdoors so scouting was very attractive to him. Stan had been an Eagle scout himself, so he encouraged Peter in this direction and occasionally went with the troop on camp outs. It was about this time that Peter began to wonder about his father’s work. He knew his father was an attorney and often read about his cases in the newspaper. He and his partner, Paula Waters, were often involved in high profile murder cases and were even interviewed on TV on occasion. But he also knew there were secrets about his father’s work that his mother and father kept from him. He knew this because they would often whisper things that they didn’t want him to overhear. And then there was the time his father was shot and another time his car blew up. Peter wasn’t stupid, he knew his father was involved in something other than practicing law and he wanted to know what it was.
So Peter began to pay close attention to what his father was doing, listening to what was said between his mother and father, asking questions, and snooping around when the opportunity presented itself. Nobody realized he was doing this except his older brother, Reggie, who warned him he was going to get in trouble if he persisted, but Peter rarely listened to advice from his siblings.
At the time Stan and Paula were working on a case for a man named Mo. There client was Cheryl Windsor and Peter knew Mo had referred her because he heard his mother and father whispering about Mo, the man who never answered his phone. You had to call him and then he’d call you back. It was all very mysterious to Peter which made him more determined to figure out what was going on. Even so, Peter may never have figured out what his father was involved in had it not been for the Jeep accident. One of the older scouts in Peter’s troop, Steven Caldwell, the Jr. Assistant Scoutmaster, had brought his Jeep to Camp Comfort at Possum Kingdom Lake. So, when Steven ran the Jeep off the highway, leading into Camp Comfort, killing his passenger, Steven found himself charged with murder and in need of representation. Since Steven knew Stan from scouting he naturally asked him to represent him. But Stan was reluctant to take the case because Steven adamantly maintained that the accident wasn’t his fault because he’d been distracted by a spaceship suddenly appearing overhead!
Peter later became a witness in the trial which gave him an excuse for asking a lot of questions of his mother and father about the trial and Steven’s defense. Stan may not have realized it, but he soon was telling Peter things he shouldn’t have known and even asking for his advise on several issues. Throughout the trial Stan refused to accept Steven’s spaceship story and finally was able to convince the jury that the spaceship was actually an experimental aircraft being developed for the Air Force and flown by a test pilot over Possum Kingdom Lake. But even though Stan had convinced the jury that what Steven had seen wasn’t a spaceship, he hadn’t convinced himself and made the mistake of expressing his misgivings to Peter. So, it was only natural that Stan took Peter to Possum Kingdom Lake in search of proof that aliens had, in fact, landed at Cactus Island, a small island one mile west of Camp Comfort on Possum Kingdom Lake. But neither Stan nor Peter expected what they ultimately found–not just evidence of an alien landing, but the alien spaceship itself!
Peter also was intrigued by Paula’s case. She was defending Cheryl Windsor. It started out as a divorce case but then turned to criminal defense when the woman’s husband disappeared. What intrigued Peter about this case were the bizarre things that he overheard his father talking about with Paula and his legal assistant, Jodie. Peter got very good at picking up the phone at the exact moment his father picked it up and then listening to the conversation. He didn’t understand a lot of what they were talking about but several things got his attention like: talk about the CIA, people following Stan and Paula, a disappearing man, and a memory gun that erased people’s memory. It was at the conclusion of the Cheryl Windsor trial that Peter’s life changed forever.