Mortal Danger

somehow we can make this work.”
    But she knew they couldn’t, and she wrote about her lost dreams. “I have always wanted to share my life with one special man. I have long sensed that my true soul mate died in Vietnam before I even had a chance to meet him. Ihave a tiny sense that if somehow I survive this with John, there may be someone to live the rest of my life with in PEACE and SAFETY…God willing.”
    Kate wrote out messages to the most important people in her life—family and friends. Good-bye messages. These were clearly not suicide notes but the desperate words of a woman who was quite sure she would soon be killed by the lover she had tried to trust.
    It was too late for her to realize her hopes to have children, but she begged Bill and Doris to take care of her beloved Mittens if she died.
    Her birthday passed without an overt fight with John, but something odd happened. They’d hiked to a secret place their landlord, Bill Turner, had shown them—some rocks that rested over a waterfall between the high spots of Cape Sebastian. It was very complicated to get to. They’d had to hike through the forest, hack through brush, and then wade through a creek.
    On this day, Kate had no energy at all, and her stomach felt queasy. She actually fell asleep on the trail while John was using the machete to cut brush. At the waterfall, Kate fell asleep again on the rocks.
    They were scheduled to meet Bill and Doris for a picnic at a place where Bill had carved an ocean view through the trees and placed a picnic table. Kate felt too ill to move, and John said he had to pick something up at their cottage and that she should wait for him. He never came back for her, but she finally felt well enough to drag herself to the picnic spot, where she found Bill and Doris, who were very worried about her.
    “I was afraid John did something to you when we sawhim coming up the trail without you, swinging that machete,” Doris said, with real relief in her voice. “He said he’d chopped you up with the machete and thrown you over the cliff.”
    John grinned, signifying it was only a joke. They all laughed, but weakly. After they ate, Bill offered to give Kate a ride to the cottage, and he put his arm around her to help her into the truck because she was too weak to step up.
    “I caught hell for that later,” Kate recalled. “John said Bill was coming on to me. But that was so absurd. Later, Doris told me that she thought John probably had poisoned me, but just didn’t use enough.”
    Kate had the same suspicions. They were all jumpy. Kate wondered if her own apprehension was catching, or if Bill and Doris could see John’s dangerousness.
    Kate had received a package for her landmark birthday from her best friend, Michelle. It arrived early, and she forced herself not to open it when John brought it home along with the other mail from their post office box. She found out later that Michelle had shopped very carefully, trying to find something that matched Kate’s taste.
    “But I never saw her gift,” Kate recalled. “The package was empty. Michelle sent me a sketch of it; it was a lovely amethyst and silver necklace, with matching earrings that she’d ordered from Bangkok. I was pretty sure I knew what had happened to it. John was always jealous of the time I spent talking to Michelle on the phone, and I think he just threw my present away, although he denied it, saying he had no idea what I was talking about.”
     
    Kate Jewell laughed when she said it, but even the most obtuse listener could have caught the tinge of anxiety in her voice as she described some of the “gaslighting” techniques John used to throw her off balance emotionally. “I got to the point where I either had to take a trip or sign up for a stay in the loony bin.”
    The tension between John and Kate grew. Her days were laced with trepidation about what he might do next. Even though he was in San Diego, eight hundred miles away, she felt his presence in the cottage and half-expected him to pull one of his surprise visits. Five months earlier, he’d been extremely upset that she’d filed domestic violence charges against him when he’d threatened to shoot her on her father’s birthday, and he was still angry over that. She’d thought she knew him completely, but she was no longer sure what he might do if his emotions tilted too far.
    Kate needed to get away, if only for a short time. Ironically, their lovely cottage, which had seemed