Mortal Danger

somehow darker and craggier. Nevertheless, the two lovers explored some of the tiny islands off the northwest Washington coast. Both of them loved the sea, and they were sure that wherever they settled down, it would be somewhere near the coast.
    It was a carefree journey; they didn’t have to be any special place at any given time, and they were together, finally without problems or hopes that seemed impossible to achieve.
    Listening to John expound on his concepts and his solutions to any challenge was enthralling for Kate. The temper tantrums she had sometimes seen in him were easy to bury in her memory. She knew he was a good man and he had been through a lot in the past few years. With the pressure off him, she believed the angry scenes would diminish. And they did—for a while.
    Kate was thankful that she had waited until she was almost forty to find the companion and lover who was well-nigh perfect for her, and she hoped she was the same for him. She wasn’t naïve enough to think they wouldn’t have some detours and disappointments along the way, but she didn’t worry about them.
    Together, they could take on the world.

Chapter Two
    Occasionally, Kate came across photographs of John in which he didn’t look at all like the confident and charismatic doctor she had first been so attracted to. He was nothing like the man in the photographs, who, with hunched shoulders, appeared to shrink into himself, that almost timid man who ducked his head in a way that diminished his image. John preferred not to have his picture taken, but he occasionally obliged when his photograph was needed for a business brochure, or when she begged him to pose.
    Now that they were together all the time, she realized even more that there were basic things she didn’t know about John. She knew he’d grown up on Long Island, and that he’d lived in Florida in the years before he’d moved to San Diego, but the details were murky, and there were many almost secret aspects of his life before California. She knew his birthday was February 24, 1945, which made him a Pisces, a Pisces on the cusp of Aquarius. Either zodiac sign fit him in many ways.
    John continued his education in 1994 and earned another diploma from Clayton College in Birmingham, Alabama. The document read “The Clayton School of Natural Healing, in Recognition of the Successful Completion of the Requisite Course of Study, Has Confirmed Upon John W. Branden the Degree of Doctor of Naturopathy With All the Rights and Privileges Thereto Pertaining.”
    Clayton wasn’t a typical college; it had no sprawling campus where students attended classes. Indeed, it had been in existence for little more than a decade. There were no classes as such—it was a “distance-learning” institution that allowed students to take classes at their own pace online or through the mail. The actual physical “college” was a small building in Birmingham. Somewhat ironically, Alabama statutes banned distance-learning institutions for its residents, so all of Clayton’s students came from out of state.
     
    John spoke of how he’d learned a great deal about his chosen field at Clayton, and he would suggest later that it might be good for Kate to take some courses from the Alabama college, too. She agreed that she would do so if he thought it would make her more valuable in furthering their future plans.
    Kate, too, became a naturopathic doctor with a degree from Clayton and a diploma that was identical to John’s. Added to her bachelor’s degree and with years of personal study on nutrition, she had far more formal education than he did, yet he never acknowledged that. She saw, however, that John did indeed have an encyclopedic knowledge of nutrition, and quite probably knew more than she did.
    Slowly, as John began to trust her more, Kate learnedmore about John’s boyhood in Long Island and his family. His father had been a wealthy real estate investor in Long Island, taking advantage of the housing boom that followed the Second World War. Their family name had originally been Brandenburg, after the city in Germany, but John’s grandfather changed it when he came to America. John’s father was mostly absent from their Long Island home.
    “I only saw him on weekends,” John confided. “He was always gone, making deals.”
    She could see that this lack of interest on his father’s part hurt John; he often commented that he’d never really had a father. He grew up in a mostly