Mortal Danger

alive, he would have to have a woman to depend on, to blame for all his failures, and to ensure he wasn’t alone.
    And, of course, she was right. Where before it had been Kate who’d sat at a typewriter or computer writing and typing John’s projects, now it was Turi Bentley. He had found another woman who was a caretaker, who was kind and considerate, and, sadly, who had asked herself for a long time if it was she who was making his life so difficult. Like Kate, Turi had kept trying to please John, thinking there was a magic key to making him happy and serene, only to begin to believe that there wasn’t.
    Kate would be financially independent, if not wealthy, with her pension from American Airlines. She enjoyed her garden, and the jewelry she designed and made drew lots of customers. She thought about moving off-island. She missed the Oregon coast but feared it wouldn’t be a safe place for her to live, and now she had new friends she hated to leave behind.
    Her mother would have liked to have Kate move back to the San Diego area, but Kate didn’t want to go back there. There were too many ghosts. And, indeed, she couldn’t really move anywhere until she knew where John Branden was.
    She kept waiting for something to happen.
     
    By 2006, John had grown more erratic. Turi called Randall Nozawa often to come over and visit, just to lessen the tension a little. The three of them were still trying to get the Isagenix program off the ground, and they did fairly well when they discussed that—and the property in Idaho. John did leave Turi alone occasionally when they were visiting the Priest River property—which he now considered his—in Idaho, but that was because she had no place to go, didn’t have access to a car, and was stuck in the middle of forty acres, thirty miles from the nearest town.
    There was no telephone service until John and Andrew, a young contractor he’d hired, rigged an antenna; even then it still wasn’t dependable. Turi could only use her wireless phone if the weather was cooperating and she found a spot on the property where the signal was strong enough.
    John had started digging water and sewer lines, attempting to make the Idaho property self-sufficient. He was over sixty now, and even a man forty years younger in perfect physical condition wouldn’t have been able to accomplish the task John had set for himself. He had never been talented at building, and he found that skilled workers wanted more money than he was prepared to pay. He kept querying Andrew about how many services he could put in the PVC pipes he planned to lay. Could he put electrical conduits inside? It was painfully clear he was in way over his head in terms of knowledge and experience. Andrew pointed out to him that even with a crew of men, it would take fifty years to install what John wanted, in order to change the wild land and harness power for easy living.
    John was tackling it almost by himself, although he recruited Randall Nozawa as “slave labor” to work alongside him. Often the former dentist went along with Turi and John to the isolated Idaho property. Good-naturedly, Nozawa grabbed a shovel and dug ditches alongside John.
    “He mentioned that I could have a little house up there,” Randall told friends. “Not for my family—just for me, because he said men needed a private place of their own.”
    Nozawa wasn’t interested, and he wondered how they were going to manage their Isagenix business from this wilderness in Idaho, where even their phones didn’t work most of the time.
    Turi again confided in Nozawa: “I’d be perfectly happy to stay in Gig Harbor, but John wants to live here, and I want him to be happy.”
    And there were times when John Williams seemed to be happy—or at least content—in Idaho. He would walk around the property with Randall Nozawa, pointing out the beauty of nature and the animals who lived on their forty acres. Despite setbacks and unrealistic expectations, John was convinced that this raw land would soon be the ideal place to live.
     
    Priest River was about fifty-five miles northeast of Spokane, Washington, and forty miles north of Hayden Lake, Idaho,where Richard Butler had set up his Aryan Nations compound, a Nazi-like stronghold that drew racists. The area was also home to survivalists, aging hippies, those who wanted only to live a simple life in a paradisiacal setting, and just plain people. Former names from the headlines lived there, too: Bo Gritz