Mortal Danger

touch often, it wasn’t the same. Traia had never lived all alone in her life.
    Traia had managed to cope with those changes. She adjusted to life as a single woman, and the pain that had been as sharp as glass shards a few years earlier slowly softened. She was an attractive woman who appeared to be in her early forties, not her late fifties. After a while she started to date, and she had many invitations.
    Her home was a neat bungalow on Third Street in Marysville, Washington. Marysville is a small town just five miles north of Everett, the Snohomish County seat. Traia’s hometown was adjacent to I-5, the interstate freeway that runs from California to Vancouver. Most travelers know it as a good place to stop for lunch or supper, butthey know little else about Marysville: a workingman’s town where ostentation is rare. Most homes are like Traia’s, with wood siding or shingles. You don’t find mansions in Marysville.
    From the freeway, those who bother to look out their windows at the landscape from Everett to Marysville can see rivers and ponds—wider and deeper in the rainy months—lumber mills, and sprawling commercial farms growing trees, pumpkins, and all manner of produce. There are mountains and forests and Indian reservations near Marysville. Sometimes the area seems engaged in a tug-of-war between burgeoning civilization and what Snohomish County once was when its only residents were Native Americans.
    Traia Carr tended to a large yard full of mature fruit trees, a vegetable garden, and bright flowers. She found a job as a clerk in a small bakery, a job she truly enjoyed. She wasn’t worried about finances, though. She had a regular income from payments on the sale of a tavern she and her ex-husband had owned and operated for decades, and she also received Social Security checks, her share of her former husband’s benefits.
    She had numerous friends and as active a social life as she chose to participate in. Yet Traia had had her share of heartache. She found one man she truly cared for, and they dated almost daily for a year after he separated from his wife. And then one day, he simply stopped calling her. She eventually learned that he had gone back to his wife to try to make their marriage work. He hadn’t had the nerve to tell Traia, so she waited for the phone to ring, agonizing, wondering what had happened to him.
    Traia was inconsolable for a long time. She wondered how he could move out of his apartment and disappear without telling her what was wrong, or explaining his plans to her. She shed the tears that all women suffering from unrequited love do, but gradually she regained her sense of proportion and began to date other men—but only casually.
    In the spring of 1978, it looked as though Traia was going to have her happy ending after all. Her lover told her that his reconciliation with his wife hadn’t succeeded. He wanted to come back to Traia, and she welcomed him with open arms.
    Disappointments in love may cut cruelly for young women who have never had their hearts broken before, but a woman approaching sixty has the added sense that romance might never come again for her. Traia felt that way, and she’d loved Tom Scott* more than any other man she’d ever known. And now he was back in her life.
    Her ex-husband, grown children, friends, and coworkers at the bakery noticed a profound change in Traia. She smiled a lot, and she hummed softly as she worked. She knew that she and Tom might have only ten or twenty years left to be together, but that didn’t matter; Traia would cherish every day of that time.
    And yet Traia had a niggling premonition. It had nothing to do with Tom. It was more a sense of doom that she couldn’t put into words. Finally, she told a close friend, “I don’t know why—and it probably sounds silly—but I just have this terrible feeling that something is going to happen to me—”
    “What do you mean?” her friend asked. “What could happen?”
    “I really don’t know. It seems to me as if my children are spending so much more time with me, and they’re being so good to me—almost as if I won’t be around much longer.”
    “Traia, shame on you,” her friend said. “I don’t think you can accept being happy. You’re looking for something to be worried about, and you don’t need to. You’re healthy, Tom loves you, and you have all the time in the world.”
    Traia Carr nodded nervously. The only other worry she had was a direct