Mortal Danger

nice at all. He became a know-it-all, a man who monopolized every conversation—so much so that it was difficult to get a word in edgewise. He paused only to draw a breath, then continued talking before anyone could respond to his pontifications.
    They thought he was a boor and a bore. Turi’s daughterscould see that their mother’s hopes were already being severely blunted. John didn’t let her offer an opinion any more than he let anyone else speak.
    He was an intellectual snob, too. John Williams looked down his nose at most people, whom he found less intelligent than he was.
    Susan only heard her mother voice apprehension once—shortly after she’d “married” John. They were visiting Liv Lee, Turi’s mother and Susan’s grandmother. “I don’t know what I’ve gotten myself into,” Turi told Liv, with anxiety shimmering in her voice.
    After that, Turi didn’t express concern. She might have been embarrassed by her faulty judgment about John. She had never wanted to worry her family, but she had reasons to regret moving in with John. One was the worst of all: When the first blush of romance in their relationship wore off, he wasn’t always kind to her. Following the classic pattern of abusers, he began isolating her from her friends and made her family feel uncomfortable if they visited too often—too often by his calculations. For a woman whose whole life had revolved around her family and her friends, this was unthinkable. Turi had always reached out to people. She was, in every sense of the word, a Christian woman who lived her religion.
    John resented time spent on anyone but him, and he liked his privacy. It was against his nature to make friends with anyone unless he had something to gain from it. Although he boasted of wanting to help others, he didn’t mean it, and he could not for the life of him understand why Turi bothered with some people when she didn’t get favors or business in return.
    It would have been increasingly difficult for him to keep up his friendly, “Mr. Wonderful” façade. Kate had seen that he could read people very well and was quite willing to dazzle them for as long as it took, but he could only pretend to be magnanimous for a limited time.
    Once he felt secure with Turi Bentley and had her pledge of complete devotion, it would have been safer and more convenient to have her all to himself, outside of any sphere of influence from others. Despite his lies about owning the cabin on Mount Shasta, John really had no property at all—but Turi did. And, though he denied it, that certainly appealed to him; he needed a woman to stand between him and difficulties he didn’t care to deal with, but he also required a sound financial base so he could be free to be the entrepreneur he’d always aspired to be. His mind worked feverishly now—even more than before, consumed with what he believed were brilliant and innovative ideas.
    Turi had some investments gathering interest from her divorce settlement. John soon told her of his dreams for retirement—to have a homestead in a virtual wilderness where they could live in privacy and peace. And, in case of war or a natural disaster, they would always have some place to run to. Turi thought he meant they would have a stress-free vacation property, and she agreed to look for land with him. They drove 650 miles to Montana to view acreage for sale, but there was nothing there that seemed right to John.
    He was enthusiastic about a compound of homes near Priest River, Idaho. It was planned for four families, with twenty-two to forty acres of land apiece. At the time they made an offer, there was only one family living there full-time. It was very isolated, and there were few road signs. Locals learned to find their way by looking for landmarks like general stores, taverns, barns, and particular clumps of trees.
    A long driveway led into the area of land parcels for sale, with the brush and trees growing thicker as it wound into the wilderness. The first spread they came to was owned by a female park ranger, who kept a number of horses on her land. Two more unoccupied, ranchlike homes were next, and then—at the very end of the road—they came to exactly what John was looking for.
    The price was something Turi could afford, particularly when they were offered forty acres instead of twenty. This land in northern Idaho, long the bastion for survivalists in America, fascinated John Williams, who had always wanted to find