Mortal Danger

guilty because John was working so hard and she was being lazy. When he walked in, she sensed he was annoyed with her, probably because she had taken a break from weeding. She changed the subject and unwittingly picked the wrong topic. She told him that she planned to volunteer at Oasis, and he was instantly angry. Of course he would be, she understood too late. That was where she had gone for help in January after he’d threatened her life. She had been put off her guard because John had been so understanding and reasonable for several days.
    She apologized for not helping him more in the yard, and he nodded. They were back to having a pleasant conversation, and she breathed an inward sigh of relief.
    Kate started outside to help with the yard work. Grabbing a machete from the garage on the lower level of the cabin, she headed down below the garden path to trim back the salmonberries. She concentrated on the task before her, and they didn’t talk for most of the afternoon. John was cutting a path to the beach with a weed whacker, and it made so much noise they would have had to shout. After along while, Kate heard the machine’s engine cut off. Now there was only the sound of the waves far below and the last buzzing of insects and chirping of birds as the sun lowered on the western horizon.
    At sunset, Kate headed uphill toward the garden, and she stopped at the faucet there to water the drooping vegetables. John yelled down at her, “Oh—I thought you’d been killed.”
    Maybe he was making a sick joke, but it was the second time he’d talked about her dying violently in a week.
    Kate watered their garden, turned off the hose, and climbed up the sandy trail to where John was sitting in a lawn chair near their huge pink rhododendron. She saw smoke rising from the fire he’d built in the pit there.
    It was a lovely evening, and she was tired. At this point, Kate had no sense of foreboding at all. But then John leaned back in his chair, and it tipped completely over backwards. She looked at his face and the clumsy way he was trying to get to his feet and right the blue plastic chair, and she felt a chill. Now Kate saw there was a one-and-a-half-liter bottle of Chardonnay, three-quarters empty, sitting on the picnic table next to their cabin. She’d seen John drink two large cans of beer during the afternoon. He was very drunk.
    She walked over to the basement garage to put her machete down, and to pour cat food out for Mittens. She was dusty and soaked with sweat from her yard work, and she wanted a shower. She headed toward the stairs but he called her over, asking if she wanted to sit with him. Kate knew this mood he was in all too well, and she didn’t think he meant it; even though their lawn chairs had been stucktogether, he had obviously disentangled them and only carried one chair down from the deck.
    “No,” Kate said. “I think I need to head for the shower. I don’t want to sit down right now.”
    “That figures,” he said sarcastically.
    Kate knew better than to argue with him when he was like this. She took care of Mittens, then walked over to John and stood beside him.
    Suddenly, John’s hand reached out and held hers fast. He looked her directly in the eyes, and she saw someone she didn’t know, someone so cold that she wondered if he even recognized her.
    “You’re going to die tonight.”
    And she knew he meant it this time. “His eyes were always safe until that night—and then they weren’t….”

Chapter Six
    John explained quite calmly that with his training in karate, he could kill her with his bare hands. He could do it with a “chicken chop” to her neck and break it instantly. “You can scream,” he warned, “but it won’t do any good. No one will hear you.”
    He began to muse about the way she would die, and how easy it would be for him to explain her death. He mentioned the barbecue they had planned for the next day with friends, and said he would tell them that he and Kate had gone hiking up Cape Sebastian and that she had slipped and fallen to her death in the ocean. John kept up a hissing, guttural stream of ugly words, telling her that he would, of course, throw her off Cape Sebastian. No, he decided, he would chop up her body and throw it off in pieces.
    There it was again. For the third or fourth time. He had dreamed of her death and obviously thought of ways to kill her, most of them grisly. There was no question; John had been intent on totally