Mortal Danger

female family with his mother and sister, and during those sporadic times when his father was home, he was a demanding parent who apparently expected more of his son than John could deliver. The bar was always held too high for him to reach; it probably would have been for any male child. John also came to resent his father because he interrupted his time with his mother.
    The family was wealthy; it wasn’t that the elder Branden didn’t provide well for them, at least financially. As their fortunes grew, they spent half of each year in Florida, where real estate continued to sell briskly. John’s father was a tall, well-built man who dwarfed his son in size. He apparently dwarfed John with his personality, too. The skinny boy would never reach his father’s height, or compete favorably with his business acumen. He often felt like a failure, but he also privately thought that his father was a failure as a parent. Although he knew he had a biological father, he would never feel he had a “real” father. He hadonly a man who came home when he had nothing better to do.
    John told Kate proudly that he started his own business when he was a teenager, albeit on a much smaller scale than his father’s sweeping real estate deals—he mowed lawns. It wasn’t a job with much prestige, but he did it remarkably well. Even then, he was a perfectionist, and he bragged to Kate years later that many of his customers assumed he was a landscape architect. For the first time in his life, he was a success at something. By the time he was in his late teens, he was earning far more than most young men did cutting grass or doing other jobs. But he got only grudging respect from his father, who saw no future in his son’s mowing lawns, even if John had made an art of it.
    John graduated from high school on Long Island and said he started college in Florida at the University of South Florida in Tampa–St. Petersburg, or it could have been at a newer campus near Miami. He was vague about that. Kate wasn’t sure how long he attended USF or if he graduated, but she assumed that he had. He told her he hadn’t joined the Peace Corps, as many graduates were doing in that era, but he said he’d been active in Head Start programs both in New Hampshire and in Florida.
    After college, John entered a fifteen-year period in his life when it was difficult to trace exactly where he was or what jobs he might have held. Kate knew that John married Sue when they were both very young—she was in her teens and he was in his early twenties—but he glossed over many other aspects of his life in Florida when Kate questioned him about them. He and Sue had their two daughters, and for a time John was working at a job that he foundstultifying. He was a tax assessor for the county, and he sometimes dabbled in politics on a very low level.
    Years later, when Kate did her best to learn everything about John that she could—especially in the Florida years—that job as an assessor was one of the few facts she could verify; she located fingerprints in the county assessor’s office employee records that matched John’s.
    But he had another life, too. Because he always felt he had no father, he was probably vulnerable to some of the charismatic movers and shakers he met in Florida. John was searching for someone to emulate and follow, and there were many candidates for that in the sixties and seventies. It was the Age of Aquarius in the sixties, and America abounded with gurus, messiahs, and even cult leaders of so many new movements that it was hard to keep track of them.
    Timothy Leary was espousing LSD “trips” in California, young people flocked to communes, cults were springing up all over, and even the Beatles were making soul-searching visits in 1968 to practice transcendental meditation with their guru, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.
    Two of the outstanding purveyors of far-out self-help were Werner Erhard (born Jack Rosenberg in 1935) and Bill Thaw, both the same age. Erhard and Thaw grew up together in Philadelphia and were mightily impressed with A. J. Silva of Silva Mind Control. According to him, Erhard had a sudden moment of revelation while he was driving along a California beach road. It became the basis for his movement, which swept America: Erhard Seminars Training, known as est. Bill Thaw jumped on board enthusiastically.
    Erhard’s program basically held that everyone is responsible for what happens to them, and it urged followers to