Mortal Danger

was mid-June, and no one had reported seeing John for more than two weeks. Joe Crichton answered the door. When he saw the uniformed officers, he turned aside and said something quietly to one of his children.
    “He told him to warn John,” Kate recalled. “And he did, and John took off running out a back door.”
    The dogs the deputies had with them weren’t search dogs; they were trained to follow a moving target at their master’s commands. John had a good head start on them. They circled the yard, looking for a scent. When they finally had it, they stopped in confusion at a fire road, surrounded on all sides by acres of grapevines.
    John Branden was gone, just as surely as if a spaceship had dropped down to pick him up. The California officers kept searching, continuing their tracking on more than a dozen properties that Bonnie Crichton’s family owned.
    They never found him. Either he was dead or he’d found a secure hiding place where law enforcement officers couldn’t locate him. The Crichtons insisted that they knew nothing about any attack on Kate; they’d only been giving a good friend a place to stay. Maybe the authorities believed them, maybe they couldn’t prove otherwise, or maybe the Crichton extended family’s clout in the community stood them in good stead. Bonnie and Joe weren’t charged with harboring a fugitive.
    Kate wondered if he had managed to come back into Oregon and was nearer to her than she knew. If a car followed her for more than a few turns, or the phone rang, only to have no one there, or she heard a noise she didn’t recognize at night, her pulse beat rapidly and she felt a familiar fear.

Chapter Eight
    As the summer passed, Kate tied up the ends of her life in Gold Beach—her life with John Branden. They had been renting their cottage from Bill and Doris with an option to buy, but Kate never wanted to live there again, and heaven only knew where John was. He wasn’t dead; she was sure of that now. Through some third parties—whoever they were—John was communicating with his daughters, his therapist, and his attorney.
    It was a hot summer. The garden below the cabin became choked with weeds and went to seed. In the fall, Kate executed a deed in lieu of foreclosure back to Bill and Doris, releasing all her interest in the cottage property. Their attorney drew up a summons in Curry County, addressed to John, asking him to appear and pay the balance of the house contract: $150,000. Legally, it had to appear in the Public Notices section of the local paper four times.
    There was only silence from John. The perfect cottage, with its trees, flowers, and a view of the ocean would be returned to Bill and Doris.
    In mid-July, the FBI entered the case, and the search expanded. America’s Most Wanted producers received letters from Dave Gardiner and Kate asking that information on John be broadcast on John Walsh’s show. The producers promised to consider their request.
    “But I got the feeling,” she said with some bitterness, “that America’s Most Wanted wasn’t very interested in my story because I didn’t die. It would have made for better true-crime television.”
    The sense that John was hovering in the background, sending directives to those he still manipulated, often washed over Kate. But she thought that might only be her imagination.
    Her father pulled her through. He vowed to stay with her until he was sure she had relocated to the safest possible place, and he carried a gun with him wherever they went. She felt very lucky to have him with her.
    Kate realized that John expected her to stay in Gold Beach; he would be shocked when he heard that she wasn’t there any longer. He was undoubtedly planning to return, smooth things over as always, and then convince her to help him get the charges against him reduced.
    Kate hadn’t yet decided where she would go, but she knew it had to be someplace isolated for her own safety, and near water for her serenity. She would be leaving dear friends behind and starting over. That is the fate of women who live in fear. She would probably have to change her name when she got to wherever she was going. The first part of her life seemed to lie on the floor like ropes cut off without being tethered to anything.
    She believed John was probably someplace in California, but she had no idea where. It was a big state, but even so, she was afraid to move there. She didn’t feel safe inOregon. John was so good at tracking her,