Mortal Danger

himself too soon into the air and flitting on to the next perch.
    Kate only knew him from his San Diego days. It was almost as if he’d had no life before then. What had happened to him earlier remained a mystery. Every so often she wondered about the real reasons he and his family had fled from Florida. He didn’t want to talk about it, so she let it go. The only time he referred to that last night, evenobliquely, was when he’d been drinking. Even then, he never gave specific details.
    “There were times,” she mused, “when I thought he might even have been involved in some kind of crime. But that seemed ridiculous, and I blamed my own imagination.”
    There were things about John that were odd, beginning with the story he had told her about meeting with CIA agents when he’d only been buying a convertible top, and on to the midnineties, when he occasionally behaved as if he’d been in a spy movie. There was the time he had donned a disguise to avoid being served with the suit for improper sexual advances. He also had a kind of code he used when he wrote letters, apparently for no particular reason. He used Kate’s last name—Jewell—intermittently. He sometimes alluded to being involved with important political figures in Florida, but, again, gave her no names or details.
    “Every night,” Kate recalled, “John had to lock the door and then rattle the doorknob exactly seven times to make sure it was really locked. That drove me nuts.”
    Maybe he was a frustrated secret agent, she thought. No, it was just one of John’s idiosyncrasies. Kate was far more disturbed when John hit her for the first time, after they’d had an almost innocuous argument in a campground on one of their trips. Later, he berated himself. He swore he’d never meant to hurt her, to leave marks and bruises on her.
    And she forgave him.
    John seemed more horrified than she herself was that he’d hit her.
    But it happened several times, usually when he’d had too much to drink.
     
    Their lives were far from the idyllic match that John had once painted for her. Kate accepted the fact that John would probably never be happy unless he was recognized and financially rewarded for his “intellectual capacity,” and all the “wonderful ideas” he came up with. John believed that his intelligence was far superior to most people’s, and he assumed others should be grateful to bask in his presence. It wasn’t a stance that endeared him to others. John had told her as much about his idol, Bill Thaw, and she recognized that John was identifying with his dead hero more all the time.
    “It seemed that every time we reached a solid jumping-off place for one of John’s grand ideas, he changed his mind—and he was off on something else,” Kate said. “We lasted the longest with Mannatech.”
    Always investigating many possibilities, John chose one new career after another. One of his ideas was to teach other doctors and dentists how to build their practices. He and Kate could continue to work side by side, utilizing the strong points each possessed. He’d made a success of his San Diego clinic in less than a year, and he was positive he had the know-how to point out mistakes doctors were making without realizing it.
    Resurrecting flagging clinics was challenging enough for John for a while. When he took on a new client, he spent hours talking and questioning what it was the doctor hoped to achieve. Again, it was Kate’s job to write andtype—to whip the client’s expectations and John’s advice into a cohesive portfolio. She was an excellent writer, far more talented than John was.
    Occasionally John told her he couldn’t succeed without her, but he would obliterate that compliment the next day by saying he could hire a two-dollar-an-hour typist to do what she did. (She often wondered where he could find anyone who would actually accept such meager pay.)
    Sometimes, she grew weary, and a little resentful. “It would be two a.m. and I’d be typing away, and John and the clinic owner would be shooting the bull. Sometimes, I thought I was doing all the work.”
    And, in truth, she was. John enjoyed pontificating and playing the expert, and sometimes he tended to view Kate as only his secretary. She, too, was good with people; any good flight attendant has to be. They were to have been almost-equal partners, and she would have enjoyed joining the conversations with their clients.
    Still, John could not stand to share the