Mortal Danger

returned to Seascape Hills.
    “They would talk about her property settlement when I was there,” Randall said. “I was somewhat embarrassed,as it was none of my business, but it didn’t seem to bother John.”
    Saying grace before meals was extremely important to Turi Bentley; it was an essential part of her Christian life. It annoyed John, and he kept telling her to shorten her prayers. It finally came to a point where Turi was allowed only to say rapidly, “Thank you for this food,” before John cut her off and started eating. Turi rarely got to have lunch with her daughter Susan as she had in the past. There was a natural food restaurant in tiny Ruston, Washington, a midpoint between Tacoma and Gig Harbor, where Turi and Susan had once loved to eat, then browse through antiques. Now John discouraged these visits so much that Turi felt it wasn’t worth risking his anger to go.
    Her world steadily grew smaller.
    Soon, John had plans to take her hundreds of miles away from her daughters and grandchildren. Convinced that the world was going to come to an end, he wanted to move to their property in northern Idaho as soon as possible.

Chapter Eleven
    Ironically, Kate Jewell had once considered moving to Gig Harbor. It had been on the short list of her choices as she’d prepared to leave Gold Beach, Oregon, in the fall of 1999. In the end, of course, she moved to Orcas Island. Heading due north from Gig Harbor—by sea and land—she was less than a hundred miles away from John and Turi.
    In 2006, Kate was almost ready to retire from American Airlines. She had carved a good life for herself on Orcas, made friends, bought a little house. American’s base in Seattle had closed in 2002, so she commuted to Los Angeles to fly the Tokyo routes. She stayed at her parents’ house and drove to LAX. By flying three Tokyo legs, with four of them back-to-back, she only had to fly two weeks at a stretch. Then she could go back to Orcas and have a week to catch up with her life there, before she started all over again.
    Her father was having major health problems, so she tried to help her parents during her twenty-four-hour layovers in California. Sadly, her father died on March 30,2006, while Kate was in Guatemala on an airline ambassador’s mission.
    She still had Mittens, and she adopted a few more homeless cats. Mittens had been through so much with Kate that he demanded special treatment. When she traveled by car, Kate often let Mittens ride shotgun.
    Was she still afraid? Yes—but not to the degree of terror she’d felt seven years before. Sometimes she felt that John knew where she was, those times when the phone rang in the night and no one spoke. She still scanned faces on the ferries to Anacortes and back, and she occasionally did computer searches to see if his name had appeared in news stories. But John Branden seemed to have vanished from the face of the earth.
    Maybe he was dead, but she thought she would know somehow if that were true. She had long since stopped trying to correspond with his daughters or his friends for fear they would have clues to where she was and possibly tell John. He could be so persuasive and convincing that Kate was positive he could talk almost anyone into giving him information about where she was.
    Kate dated some, but she had lost much of her ability to trust that men were who they purported to be. She couldn’t reveal her past, and she didn’t want to lie. She also had a subconscious fear that if she was having coffee or lunch—or whatever—with someone, and if that was the day that John found her, she and her friend would both be dead, especially if she was with a man. Kate had expected to die at John’s hand for so long that she could never really visualize a safe way out.
    Any woman in hiding could identify with her; those who’d never felt that they’d been in mortal danger from a man they’d once loved probably couldn’t understand.
    As much as she worried for her own safety, Kate was still concerned for a woman who might have followed her as John Branden’s obsessive “love” object, and she wanted desperately to warn her. Sometimes Kate thought about the conversation she could have with the nameless woman who might be in terrible trouble living with John, and she planned what she might say that would convince her to get out in time. But it could be any woman, anywhere, and Kate had no way of knowing who she was, although she was positive that, if John was