Mortal Danger

stairs and a very steep driveway, and her leg took a while to heal. Her plans to return to American Airlines and fly out of Seattle didn’t work out at first, because she couldn’t fly with a broken leg. Moreover, her “hardship transfer” request to Seattle hadn’t yet been approved. Since the postmark on John’s last letter in September read “San Francisco,” she didn’t feel safe flying regularly out of there.
    When her leg finally was strong enough, Kate was granted her transfer to Sea-Tac Airport in Seattle as a home base.
    She was Kris White now to most people on Orcas. A woman living alone with her cat, someone who worked off-island much of the time. She kept in touch with her family, but very carefully. She didn’t want to place them in any danger. When she flew, it meant a long ferry ride and a one-hundred-mile drive to the airport, but she was gainfully employed again.
    Sometimes, at night, Kate woke from a sound sleep, frightened by some noise she couldn’t immediately identify. A tree limb cracking in a high wind. Footsteps in the leaves, or just deer looking for food? Something scratching at her door? Her phone ringing, but when she answered, nobody was there. That would be John’s style.
    Like a fox, he had gone to earth somewhere. He could be far, far away—or he could be creeping around outside her cottage.
    In the daylight, she was quite sure he had no idea where she was. If he did, he would have come forward, sure that he could convince her he was a changed man.
    Despite all her rationalizations, Kate Jewell/Kris White still lived in fear.
    Weeks passed.
    Then months, and finally, a year.
    She made new friends, and she sometimes worked with people who wanted to know more about healthy eating.
    But she always heard silent footsteps walking just behind her.
    Kate still didn’t think that John Branden was dead. Hewas alive—somewhere. And she was just as sure that he would be a threat to the next woman who came into his life. Her one regret about disappearing from Gold Beach—and from his life—was that she wouldn’t be able to warn the next woman. Sometimes she had nightmares about that. She felt that John was living in a protected environment, and that his daughter Tamara was helping him, but Kate couldn’t risk calling her. She just prayed that Tamara would do the right thing and turn him in once she accepted how hazardous he was to women.
    Buddhists were nonviolent. Maybe that would make the difference, and Tamara would understand that her father had gone beyond normal behavior. He needed to be locked up.
    For two years, John’s movements could not be traced, and there was simply an empty spot in the masquerade that was his life when no one seemed to know where he was hiding.

Chapter Nine
    Turid Lee Bentley was born in Stavanger, Norway, on January 28, 1941, as war was brewing in Europe. She came to America with her mother and father—Liv and Magnus Lee—and her sister, Bodil, and lived her whole life in the Tacoma–Gig Harbor area. She attended Mason Junior High School, and the castlelike Stadium High in Tacoma, and then the brand-new Woodrow Wilson High School, also in Tacoma. She stayed close to friends she made when they were all teenagers. She was a true Scandinavian beauty, slender, with green eyes and thick brown hair, which turned white as she passed middle age.
    Almost always called “Turi,” she resembled Kate Jewell in that they both had fine bone structure with similar facial features, although Kate’s coloring was darker. They had other things in common: Both Turi and Kate had a passion for helping others achieve optimum health, and they wanted to change lives for the better as much as they could. Turi and her husband, Lorne Bentley, married when they were quite young. After decades in a marriage and living in a circumscribed region in Washington State, Turi was far more naïve than Kate, who had traveled the world, but shehad a good business head, and she worked as the office manager/bookkeeper in her husband’s building contractor business. In the early days of her marriage, Turi also worked for the Tacoma News-Tribune typing classified ads. She was a lightning-fast typist, who typed her children’s school papers.
    Turi always worked. Like Kate, she sold Mannatech products. She was also a sales associate for Shaklee products. Money itself meant very little to Turi, but it allowed her to support numerous charities that she believed in—in many diverse