Mortal Danger

wherever she was. Kate and her dad headed north in the first week of August 1999. She figured that Orcas Island far up in Washington State might be a place where she could start over. John wouldn’t be likely to look for her there; they’d decided not to move there because of the restrictions imposed by ferry commuting. It would be one of the last places he would choose to live himself.
    She talked to a deputy sheriff on Orcas Island, and he told her that no one had ever been murdered there. She took that as a “good sign,” and somehow that made her feel safer, although she knew that was no guarantee for the future.
    If she could fly out of Sea-Tac Airport in Seattle, she could live in insular obscurity and earn a living, too. They found a little house, which was basically a summer cottage. It wasn’t fancy, but it would do. Kate loved the ambiance of Orcas Island, the serenity of it, and the woods and acres of fields, bounded on all sides by water. Knowing it was too expensive, she rented it anyway, and planned to be living there before winter storms closed in.
    She signed her “new” name on the lease: Chris White. That seemed suitably common, and it could be either a man or a woman.
     
    Back in Gold Beach, Kate packed up those possessions that were mementoes of her family—her grandmother’s antique secretary and small items that predated John. She held a yard sale for the rest.
    The cottage was still full of John’s things. She wanted to put them in storage, but her father stopped her. “Put them in a pile down in the garage,” he said. “You don’t owe him anything. He can arrange to have them picked up if he wants them.”
    As they cleared out the cottage room by room, they searched for John’s gun collection. Finally, Harold Jewell opened a wardrobe box in the camper of John’s old truck and found the cache of weapons. It gave them both a chill to see the handguns, shotguns, and rifles there. There were Smith & Wesson .38s, Colt .45s, an Israeli gun, and the AK-47. Why had John found it necessary to own so many guns?
    (Eventually, Bill Turner heard from Tamara’s fiancé, Dan, who said he and a friend would be coming up to get John’s stuff, asking Bill to put it in storage in Brookings, Oregon. The old Ford truck also went to Brookings, a small town five miles from the California border.)
    As they hurried to leave Gold Beach, Kate’s dad was burning trash, and Kate made a number of trips with papers and other things she didn’t intend to take. She was carrying a high stack of papers when she stepped in a hole and broke her leg. Her father heard the snap of the bone breaking and saw her fall. He thought it was a gunshot; he panicked, because he’d left his gun in the house.
    “He thought John had come back and he’d shot me, and he didn’t have a gun to shoot back. That’s how jumpy we both were.”
    Now Kate had to hobble up and down the many stairs on crutches. This was not the luckiest summer of her life.She felt like one of the walking wounded. Although her bruises and cuts had healed, her dentist still believed the nerves to her front teeth had been severed when she’d been hit in the mouth.
    John had left so precipitously that he’d failed to take many of the documents and papers he’d hidden from Kate. The court records on the suit brought by the Lakhvirs were among them. For the first time, she learned about the charges that the Middle Eastern couple had brought against John. They were far more serious than he’d told her.
    On September 3, three months after Kate barely escaped with her life, she found another letter from John in her post office box. It had been postmarked two days earlier in San Francisco. She stared at it, feeling the heft of it. It was quite thick.
    She hadn’t wanted to hear from him ever again. She didn’t want to read it. But she felt compelled to, knowing that he had had time to land on his feet by now, and that his rhetoric would be choreographed to entrap her. What could he possibly have to say to her?
    It was nine pages long, printed in the same dark Sharpie ink as his first letter, his capital letters large and flamboyant, the t ’s and l ’s crossed with his familiar downward-curved umbrella shape.
    Kate,
    I can feel you so strongly this morning as I can so many mornings…I can feel you sending me messages (so you can go inside your heart and know I am alive and okay).
    It’s hard for me not to just find a phone and callyou (to know how